A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  14.1.1 Mythological Epic

  Following the massive works of Nestor of Laranda (lipogrammatic Iliad) and his son Pisander (Heroic Theogamies in 60 books) in the Severan period (Ma 2007), mythological epic continued vibrant. Under the tetrarchs, Soterichus of Oasis wrote works entitled Calydoniaca, Bassarica, and Ariadne (Miguélez Cavero 2013a, p. 80 n. 206), but they are entirely lost. Quintus of Smyrna, of whom nothing certain is known, wrote his 14‐book Posthomerica during the third century, after Oppian (176–180 CE), probably before Triphiodorus (ca. 300). It deals with events in the Trojan War between the Iliad and the Odyssey, material also treated in the poems of the so‐called Epic Cycle, which were probably lost about this time. Quintus ostentatiously identifies himself with Homer in the delayed proem of book 12 (306–313), but recent scholarship (Baumbach and Bär 2007; Carvounis 2008; Bär 2009; MacIver 2012a, 2012b) foregrounds his nuanced redefinition, for example, through engagement with Hesiod and the didactic tradition, Callimachus, and perhaps Virgil (hotly debated), as well as with tragedy and ancient scholia, and by imposing Stoic ethics.

  Two short poems by Egyptians that sit on either side of Nonnus also treat Trojan topics. Triphiodorus’s Capture of Troy (691 lines) belongs between the mid‐third and early fourth centuries (Miguélez Cavero 2013a, pp. 4–6, 72–74). The poet develops Demodocus’s song of the Wooden Horse (Odyssey 8.499–520), drawing on Homeric exegesis, Hesiod’s account of Pandora, and rhetorical techniques (ekphrasis of the horse, apostrophe), as well as on the language of Pindar, tragedy, and the Alexandrians, including Lycophron. His relationship to the Epic Cycle and Virgil’s Aeneid is more ambivalent (Miguélez Cavero 2013a). Colluthus’s Rape of Helen (394 lines) renegotiates traditional models and confronts late antique Christian and Neoplatonic culture and poetry (Claudian in particular), often undercutting audience expectations. A strong visual, even voyeuristic, element integrates him into performative contexts, quite possibly pantomime (Jeffreys 2006, Magnelli 2008, Paschalis 2008, Prauscello 2008, Cadau 2015). Musaeus grammatikos (scholar and teacher), writing before Colluthus, chose the tragic love of Hero and Leander as the theme of his 343–line epyllion, which is pervaded by imagery of light and darkness, perhaps a Neoplatonic allegory (Kost 1971; Gelzer 1975, pp. 316–322). Two hundred lines are devoted to the lovers’ first meeting and their dialogue, the latter uncharacteristic of Nonnus, with whom, however, Musaeus has linguistic affinities. Musaeus also explicitly alludes to the vicissitudes of Odysseus’s homecoming, as well as to Achilles Tatius (Hopkinson 1994, pp. 136–139) and to contemporary Christian poetry (Gelzer 1975, pp. 297–302).

  Of Claudian’s brief Greek Gigantomachy, composed perhaps 390–395 (Cameron 1970, pp. 6–18; Mulligan 2007) or 400–402 (Livrea 1998), only the prologue (1–17) and the last 60 lines survive: sixty‐eight lines are missing from the middle (Ludwich 1897, p. 166). The prologue indicates a performative, probably competitive, context before a crowd, in an extended navigational metaphor, arguably Neoplatonic, while the description of Aphrodite (43–54) and other vignettes have much that anticipates Nonnus (Whitby 1994, pp. 126–128), for whom, of course, Gigantomachy was also a theme (Dionysiaca 1–2, 48). The richness and diversity of Nonnus’s massive and multifaceted 48‐book “biography” of Dionysus, written in the mid‐fifth century, is only now emerging, thanks to new commentaries and unparalleled scholarly enthusiasm (e.g. Shorrock 2011; Spanoudakis 2014a, 2014b; Accorinti 2016). Not only did Nonnus perfect the technical refinement of the classical hexameter (Whitby 1994; Agosti and Gonnelli 1995; Magnelli 2016), but he plundered his literary predecessors so as to embed in his epic the full gamut of classical genres (epic, pastoral, didactic, novelistic) and modes (tragic, comic, satiric, rhetorical), while also capturing the animated intellectual Christian/Hellenic polemic of contemporary Alexandria.

  The Orphic Argonautica (1376 lines), plausibly dated to the later fifth century (Vian 1987, pp. 45–47), engages agonistically with Apollonius Rhodius, amplifying, rewriting, and foregrounding the figure of Orpheus, perhaps drawing on a pre‐Apollonian Orphic text (Nelis 2005). With unprecedented “generic consciousness” the narrator explicitly moves from didactic to epic, in a sophisticated negotiation of literary traditions (Hunter 2005). Written by a convinced pagan, it confronts the contemporary Christianization of pagan relics, but, like Musaeus’ poem, it is not necessarily allegorical (Agosti 2008a; Cecchetti 2013, contra Schelske 2011).

  14.1.2 Panegyrical Poetry

  By their very occasional context, panegyrical poems are prone to perish, as attested by many fragments on papyri (Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 33–79). We might single out, for example, from the beginning and end of our period, an encomium to Diocletian that has links with the prescriptions preserved in Menander Rhetor (Agosti 2002b; Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 44–45) and the much‐derided poems for local worthies by Dioscoros of Aphrodito (mid‐sixth century), who, however, owned an impressive library (Fournet 1999; Agosti 2008b; Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 225–226). A whole category, the verse patria celebrating individual cities, has all but disappeared, but there were many, often written by Egyptians – Claudian, Nonnus, Christodorus of Coptus and others (Cameron 2004, pp. 330–331 = 2016, pp. 165–166; Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 63–65); some were explicitly Christian (Fournet 2003; Whitby 2013, pp. 212–213). And both panegyrics and patria were written in iambics as well as hexameters (Cameron 2004, 336‐37 = 2016, pp. 170–171; Agosti 2012, p. 366).

  A papyrus dated around 400 preserves parts of 82 lines from three separate sections of a Blemmyomachy, a Homerizing poem celebrating the victorious campaign of Germanus. Its attribution to Olympiodorus of Thebes (Livrea 1978) is attractive but perhaps implausible (Whitby 1994, pp. 128–129; 2013, pp. 215–216; Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 59–61). Controversy about authorship has also surrounded the four distinct poems, two of them encomia, preserved in PVindob gr. 29788 A–C, (Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 72–74), but Livrea has recently reiterated his view (Livrea 1979, 2014) that all are the work of the pagan Pamprepius (440–484), whose colorful career ended when he was beheaded, following Illus’s failed revolt against Zeno (Cameron 2007, pp. 35–36 = 2016, pp. 155–157; Agosti 2012, pp. 368–369).

  From the next century, three ekphrastic poems describing works of art and architecture represent a different kind of celebratory poem. We do not know the occasion for which Christodorus of Coptus, who flourished under Anastasius (491–518), composed his description of the statues in the baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople, now preserved as the second book of the Palatine Anthology, but its length of around 400 lines, comparable with his contemporary Colluthus’s Rape of Helen (whose Trojan theme it shares), suggests that it was intended for a celebratory performance (Tissoni 2000; Jeffreys 2006; Kaldellis 2007; Bär 2012; Whitby 2018). Two iambic passages (A1–25, B1–4) show that John of Gaza’s ekphrasis of a cosmic painting in the winter baths at Gaza (or perhaps Antioch) was performed in two sections of similar length in a rhetorical presentation or competition (Renaut 2005). This poem, written before 526 and the only example from Gaza of an epic in the style of Nonnus, draws on Neoplatonic ideas of ascent to the divine (Gigli Piccardi 2005, 2014; Lauritzen 2011, 2014, 2015). Paul the Silentiary’s 1029‐line ekphrasis of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was presented, also in two sections, shortly after Christmas 562 as part of the celebration of Justinian’s restoration of his church following its partial collapse after an earthquake. Notes in the manuscript indicate a ceremonial setting, in which the audience moved from the imperial palace to the episcopal palace, with emperor and patriarch both presiding (Whitby 1985; Macrides and Magdalino 1988; Bell 2009); a 304‐line description of the ambo was subsequently presented separately.

  The last great imperial panegyrist was George of Pisidia, whose iambic poems celebrated Heraclius’s Persian campaigns that led to victory in 628. Some are brief exclamatory celebrations, such as the lines improvised on the occasion of Heraclius’s restoration of the True Cross to Jerusalem. Other longe
r narrative pieces, such as that on Heraclius’s first Persian campaign, were delivered in several sittings (Whitby 2002).

  14.1.3 Didactic

  After a dynamic period from Hadrian (Dionysius Periegetes: Lightfoot 2014) to Marcus Aurelius (Oppian of Cilicia: Kneebone 2008, forthcoming) and Caracalla (Pseudo‐Oppian: Whitby 2007a), secular didactic poetry veered toward the abstruse. Framed as a conversation in a Theocritean setting, the 774‐line Orphic Lithica (Giannakis 1982; Halleux and Schamp 1985) is a sophisticated exposition of the magical and therapeutic properties of 30 stones. Lines 68–74 probably refer to the death in 372 of Julian’s teacher, the Neoplatonic philosopher and theurgist Maximus of Ephesus (Hopkinson 1984; Livrea 1992; Zito 2012a, 2013, p. 173), while Maximus himself is almost certainly the author of the extant astrological poem On Undertakings (περɩ` καταρχω˜ν: Livrea 1992, 205; Zito 2012b), describing the influence of the moon on human initiatives. Parts of the poem on astrology Apotelesmatika (Influences), attributed to the Egyptian Manetho, may also date to this period (Livrea 1992, p. 206; Agosti 2012, p. 365; second or third century: Hopkinson 1994, p. 205). At any rate, [Manetho] was read by Gregory of Nazianzus (Simelidis 2009, p. 47) and George of Pisidia, who was attracted by the lexical rarities of book 4 and saw [Manetho] as representative of the didactic genre (Whitby 2014). Indeed, didactic took on a new role in Christian poetry, above all in the poems of Gregory of Nazianzus, discussed in the next section.

  14.1.4 Christian Poetry (see also chapter 16 in this volume)

  Our view of Christian poetry in this period has changed fundamentally since the publication (1984, 1999) of the fragmentary poems in the Bodmer papyrus, the so‐called Codex of Visions (P.Bodm. 29–37), a collection of nine mid fourth‐century poems (preserved in a codex dated ca. 400), eight in hexameters, one (To the Just) elegiac, totaling more than 700 lines. They include ethopoeic presentations of the sacrifice of Isaac and the episodes of Cain and Abel but are dominated by the initial 343‐line Vision of Dorotheus, which recounts the speaker’s vision of reckoning and redemption in the court of heaven, using the technical terminology of Byzantine officialdom. These texts, thematically and stylistically homogeneous but self‐consciously varied in form, were found near Panopolis in Egypt and were probably assembled for the edification of an ascetic Christian community (e.g. Agosti, 2002a, 2015; Miguélez Cavero 2008, pp. 61–63, 218–223; 2013b).

  The importance of Julian’s Schools Edict (362 CE) as a catalyst for Christian poetry such as the lost biblical paraphrases of Apollinarius (Kaster 1988, pp. 242–243; McLynn 2014) is now usually downplayed in favor of the view that educated Christians naturally adopted classical meters (Agosti 2001; contra Simelidis 2009, pp. 25–27). Certainly the most cogent witness is the 17 000 verses (Simelidis 2009, p. 7) of Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390). Gregory’s poems are highly original in numerous ways: they range over different genres, including didactic (on the Christian life), epistolary, and hymns, but also break new ground in handling theological and autobiographical material on an epic scale, the latter in a crafted self‐representation (McLynn 1998a, 1998b; Cameron 2007, pp. 30–31; Whitby 2008, p.80). Hexameters and iambics are used interchangeably for poems on similar topics: Gregory’s contemporary Amphilochius also wrote a 337‐line didactic iambic poem for young Christians, To Seleucus. The hexameters challenge contemporary metrical practices (Agosti and Gonnelli 1995; Cameron 2004, pp. 333–339 = 2016, pp. 168–172), yet are suffused with profound knowledge of rhetorical techniques and secular literary texts, subtly but pointedly redeployed, alongside lexical originality (Whitby 2008; Simelidis 2009). Gregory’s poetry was also much read, both in schools and by intellectuals, and hence highly influential (Demoen 2009). This corpus still awaits a full modern critical edition and, therefore, systematic evaluation. The religious poetry of George of Pisidia (early seventh century) primarily in iambics, but with one hexameter poem On Human Life (Whitby 2014), may be seen as following in Gregory’s footsteps. The major work is a Hexaemeron (1864lines) that explores the marvels of God’s creation, in particular mankind (Gonnelli 1998), while shorter poems inveigh against heresy (Contra Severum) and reflect on the difficulties of living a Christian life. George, too, is highly original, in particular in weaving complex recurring imagery as a vehicle for religious thought.

  The mid‐fifth century saw a remarkable explosion of biblical poetry in three roughly contemporary figures. A paraphrase of the Psalms, incorrectly attributed to Apollinarius, was dedicated to Marcian, probably oikonomos of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, by a poet of Egyptian origin. It follows its stichic model quite closely, but a recent evaluation argues that its author is subtler and more original than was hitherto believed (Faulkner 2014). The Empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II, composed (lost) verse paraphrases of the Octateuch, admired by Photius (Bibl. cods. 183–184), and surviving centos that redeploy Homeric lines and half‐lines to tell the Gospel story, contextualized in the Old Testament scheme of God’s plan for mankind. In addition, Eudocia composed a verse hagiography of St. Cyprian of Antioch, substantially extant, that utilized three independent prose texts from the fourth century. This work draws innovatively on Homer and later poets but, like Gregory, is metrically idiosyncratic (Sowers 2008, 2018; Whitby 2007b, 2013; Cameron 2016, 73–76). It should be set alongside the lost hexameter Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Soterichus of Oasis, and Marinus’s metrical version of his Life of Proclus (Agosti 2009). Finally, Nonnus’s Paraphrase of the Gospel of John enormously expands the biblical model, drawing on Cyril of Alexandria’s recent commentary and other exegesis (Simelidis 2016), as well as the synoptic gospels, to create a deeply original work, part of whose purpose was to highlight similarities between his two heroes, Dionysus and Christ (Spanoudakis 2007, 2013, 2014b).

  14.1.5 Conclusion

  Greek epic responded with vitality and flexibility to the shifting dynamics of this period, encompassing the impact of Neoplatonic and Christian ideologies (Hernández de la Fuente 2015), creating the space for an explicitly Christian didactic and accommodating to changing metrical needs, both through the stringency of the Nonnian hexameter and the use of iambics. Recurrent allusion to Hesiod is a further sign of didactic self‐consciousness. Christian and Hellenic, poetry and prose, engage in a dialogue that precludes exclusiveness. And the importance for poetry of Egypt – including Alexandria – long recognized, cannot be overstated (Cameron 1965 = 2016, pp. 1–35; 2007 = 2016, pp. 147–162; Agosti 2014).

  14.2 Latin Epic

  The generic landscape of late Latin poetry looks very different from that of classical antiquity. Love elegy, satire, and drama are barely represented, at least in surviving works; only the epigram and the epic, understood as extended narrative poetry in hexameters, continue to flourish. But in subject matter and compositional practices the epics produced in the period show striking innovations that distinguish them from their classical predecessors. The works of the period fall into five categories: on the secular side, panegyric and mythological epics; on the Christian side, biblical, hagiographical, and allegorical epics. Of these five categories only the mythological conforms broadly to classical models in its subject and treatment. Within late antiquity a number of these subgenres of epic established their own traditions, building on or playing off against earlier examples. In what follows I will consider each of these subgenres.

  14.2.1 Panegyrical Epic

  The Egyptian poet Claudian, active in Rome 394–404, is the first exponent of the Latin panegyrical epic whose work survives. His corpus includes six verse consular panegyrics, including poems for the emperor Honorius’s third, fourth, and sixth consulships and for the consulship of his patron Stilicho (in three books). He also wrote two historical epics, on the campaigns against the African warlord Gildo (De bello Gildonico) and, in 401–402, against the Visigothic leader Alaric (De bello Getico). Although the titles of these last two works indicate a desire to distinguish them from the overtly panegyrical consular poems, in practice,
as has often been observed, both categories of compositions show the same mixture of praise and narrative. The topical organization of panegyrics accommodates a large element of narrative, especially in the praise of a subject’s virtues, while Claudian’s narration in his historical epics serves to convey praise of his patron, i.e. of Stilicho. Both categories of poems combine accounts of contemporary events with praise and are frequently treated as functionally indistinguishable in respect of genre (Hofmann 1988; Kirsch 1989, pp. 51–92; Schindler 2009, pp. 59–172).

  The epic nature of Claudian’s poems derives from his use of the hexameter and of epic idiom, as well as from his frequent employment of formal and compositional features characteristic of the genre (e.g. developed similes, ekphrases, battle narratives). He forgoes, however, any divine machinery governing human events of the kind found in traditional classical epic. The gods and goddesses who appear in Claudian’s poems are largely personifications of geographical entities: rivers, cities, or countries. Their role is often to represent human interests and to appeal to human agents for relief. They serve to generalize and elevate to a higher level the perils that the subjects of the panegyrics will relieve or the wishes they will satisfy. Speeches in general play a large part in Claudian’s panegyrical epics, along with passages of description. The narrator in his poems, unlike the practice in traditional epics, is not an objective recorder of events, but is engaged as a partisan of the person praised. Claudian’s invectives, too, against the eastern ministers Rufinus and Eutropius (both in two books) combine epic elements and praise of Stilicho with disparagement and denunciation of their subjects.