A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Claudian’s example found imitators in the mid‐fifth century. Flavius Merobaudes, a literary and military figure active at the court of Valentinian III, composed a panegyric, now only partially preserved, for the consulship in 446 of Flavius Aetius, chief Roman general in the West, combining narrative and praise after the Claudianic manner (Schindler 2009, pp. 173–181). The poem innovates by including a dialogue between two divine agents of evil who plan to throw the world into disorder.

  Also in the tradition of Claudian are three panegyrics of Sidonius Apollinaris, the major Gallo‐Roman literary figure of the mid‐fifth century (Schindler 2009, pp. 181–215). He wrote poems for the consulships of his father‐in‐law Flavius Eparchius Avitus (456), elevated to the purple in the previous year, and of the emperor Anthemius (468); his panegyric for Majorian (458) also celebrated a recently elevated emperor. The poems combine passages of direct praise, often following the traditional schemata, with narrative, predominantly of military action. As in Claudian, divinities personifying cities, countries, and rivers play a large role, but typically divine action remains separated from the human sphere. The gods themselves may play the role of secondary narrator, recounting the actions of the subjects of the poems.

  A group of poems composed in Latin, but in the eastern half of the empire, while combining narrative and praise, deviates significantly from the model of Claudian. The grammarian Priscian wrote a poem on the emperor Anastasius in the early years of the sixth century, divided between praise of his achievements in war and peace, framing the work in a context of Christian devotion that finds no parallel in the earlier western tradition (Schindler 2009, pp. 215–226). In the middle of the century Flavius Cresconius Corippus, a grammaticus from North Africa, was the author of two poems: the Iohannis, in eight books, on the North African campaigns of the Byzantine general Johannes Troglita in 546–548, and the In laudem Iustini Augusti minoris, on the events surrounding the accession and consulship of Justin II (Zarini 2003; Schindler 2009, pp. 228–309). The first poem dates to 549/550, the second to 566/568. Already the length of the Iohannis points to its distinction from the western tradition, with a fuller development of the historical narrative, elaborated according to the compositional and thematic norms of ancient epic, especially Virgil and Lucan, and amounting to what has been called the first Christian historical epic. While the intent to praise remains present, the topical structure of the rhetorical panegyric plays, at most, a minimal role. The In laudem Iustini goes its own way again, giving a central role to description of court ceremonial as an index of the imperial majesty of its subject.

  14.2.2 Mythological Epic

  Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae (last years of the fourth century) is the sole representative of mythological epic from Latin late antiquity. It tells the familiar story of the abduction of Proserpine, from Pluto’s threat to throw the world into disorder if he does not receive a wife to Ceres’s setting out to search the world for her daughter. The poem is in three books, but incomplete. A fourth book recounting Ceres’s search and its outcome was never written. Despite the traditional subject matter and poetic idiom, the composition is quite untraditional in the predominance of speeches and description, with very little in the way of action (Fo 1982, pp. 97–115).

  Other late antique poets wrote on mythological subject matter, but rarely at any length. An exception may be made for the North African poet Blossius Aemilius Dracontius (late fifth century), whose Romulea, as his minor poems are conventionally titled, includes compositions on Hylas, the abduction of Helen, and Medea, ranging from 163 to 655 lines in length. His Orestis tragoedia, in 974 hexameters, separately transmitted, covers the subject matter of Aeschylus’s trilogy, though incorporating a variety of sources.

  14.2.3 Biblical Epic

  The first epic poem of late antiquity marked a profound break from its classical antecedents. The Evangelium libri quattuor (ELQ) of the Spanish priest Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus takes its subject from the Gospels, primarily following Matthew, but with supplements from the other Gospels, especially Luke and John (Roberts 1985, Green 2006, pp. 1–134). Composed in or around the year 329 and containing a dedication to the emperor Constantine, it recasts the biblical text, recounting “Christ’s life‐bringing actions” (Christi vitalia gesta, Pr, 19) in a Virgilian idiom designed to appeal to an educated readership. Juvencus follows closely the biblical narrative, employing the paraphrastic procedures of abbreviation, amplification, and occasionally transposition. The effect, in Reinhart Herzog’s formulation (1975, pp. 99–154), is to throw into relief those elements that promote Christian edification while downplaying or eliminating details alien to a Roman readership.

  Juvencus’s poem begins with a preface that formulates for the first time a Christian poetics. In it he makes clear that he understands his poem to be an epic by comparing his own work on the salvific actions of Christ with those of Homer and Virgil, whose subjects are the deeds of men. In language and turns of phrase the ELQ is strikingly Virgilian, and it maintains an epic elevation of tone. Thematic and compositional elements traditional to epic do not play a large role, however: Extended similes are rare –this is true of biblical epic generally – as are extended descriptive passages, with the exception of a storm description (a theme also found in the other New Testament poets, Sedulius and Arator). The history of biblical poetry in late antiquity involves the increasing incorporation of exegetical material, allegorical and spiritual interpretations, into the poetic text. In Juvencus such exegesis is rarely overt, though recent scholarship has detected evidence of familiarity with the biblical commentaries of Origen.

  In the third quarter of the fourth century the female poet Faltonia Betitia Proba turned again to biblical subject matter, this time in the form of a cento, narrating events from the Old Testament (especially the Creation and Fall) and the life of Christ in language derived entirely from Virgil (Herzog 1975, pp. 14–51; Schottenius Cullhed 2015). Despite arousing the disapproval of Jerome, her poem was to enjoy great popularity. Modern reception has similarly been divided. But critical distaste for the cento as a literary form has increasingly given way to a more nuanced understanding of the technical resourcefulness and interpretative subtleties of Proba’s poem.

  By the second quarter of the fifth century, when the Italian poet Caelius Sedulius wrote his New Testament epic, the five‐book Paschale carmen, Christian biblical exegesis had taken a firm hold in the West. His poem, also on the life and miracles of Christ, was more selective than Juvencus’s treatment, concentrating in its central books (3 and 4) on the miracle stories (Roberts 1985; Springer, 1988; Green 2006, pp. 135–250). (Book 1 is introductory, including Old Testament miracles.) Sedulius’s Christian involvement in the narrative leads him to frequently interject his own responses to it, eliciting its moral and spiritual content and using epigrammatic point to emphasize the miraculous in Christ’s actions. His poem intensifies a tendency, already evident in Juvencus, to break up the narrative into individual pericopes, thereby reflecting the nature of the biblical text but also conforming to the practices of late Latin poetry more generally.

  The final important poet of Latin New Testament epic in the period, Arator, wrote his Historia apostolica, on the Acts of the Apostles, in mid‐sixth‐century Rome (Deproost 1990; Green 2006, pp. 251–350). (It received a public reading there in 544.) His work, in two books, the first devoted to the apostle Peter and the second to Paul, both protectors of the city, struck a welcome chord at a time of great insecurity. Arator’s poem continues the trend toward incorporating exegetical material into the biblical subject matter; in structure the work alternates between narrative and interpretation, though often with the latter predominating. At times it has the nature of a versified commentary or sermon.

  The Latin New Testament poets were widely read and studied in the Middle Ages. Old Testament epic, however, lacked canonical status (Herzog 1975, pp. xix–xxxiii). The earliest poem, the pseudonymous Heptateuchos, from early in the fifth c
entury, recounts the events of the first seven books of the Bible, though there is some evidence that it was once more extensive (Herzog 1975, pp. 52–154; Roberts 1985). It generally sticks close to the biblical text, recasting it in a Virgilian idiom, though passages of sacred law are typically much abbreviated, and it shares a tendency with Juvencus to remove specifically Jewish references from the text.

  The Alethia (“Truth”) of Claudius Marius Victorius probably dates to the second quarter of the fifth century. It recounts in three books the events of Genesis from the Creation to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, though a fourth book may be lost (Martorelli 2008; Cutino 2009). Again there is a strong interpretative/exegetical element to Marius Victorius’s epic. He breaks new ground by introducing digressions with a pronounced Lucretian flavor on the evolution of human culture and society.

  The latest (last decade of the fifth century) and most important of the Old Testament epics is the Spiritual History (De spiritalis historiae gestis) of the bishop of Vienne, Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus. Avitus devotes three books to a continuous account of the Creation, Fall, and Expulsion from Paradise; book 4 tells the story of the Flood and book 5 the exodus from Egypt and crossing of the Red Sea (Roberts 1985). His poem traces the salvation history of humankind, from the Fall and its consequences to the figural promise of redemption embodied in the narratives of the Flood and Red Sea. Of all the biblical poets Avitus has most in common with the norms of traditional epic. Old Testament epic was always receptive to set‐piece descriptive passages, for instance of Paradise and the Flood. Avitus goes one better and also recasts the biblical account of the encounter of the Egyptians and Israelites at the Red Sea as a traditional battle narrative of the kind familiar from epic.

  14.2.4 Hagiographical Epic

  The life and miracles of Martin of Tours, as described by Sulpicius Severus in his Life of St. Martin and in books 2 and 3 of his Dialogues, form the subject of two hagiographical epics written a century apart (Labarre 1998; Roberts 2002). Both show the influence of Sedulius’s Paschale carmen, with its treatment of Christ’s life and miracles, and both serve in part to promote the interests of the church and the bishop of Tours. Paulinus of Périgueux, the author of the earlier poem, probably in the 460 s, follows Sulpicius’s narrative in his first five books, but includes a sixth based on a dossier of Martin’s posthumous miracles provided to him by the bishop, Perpetuus; Venantius Fortunatus dedicates to Gregory of Tours his Martin poem, in four books, dating to between 563 and 566. Despite their common subject matter and indebtedness to Sedulius, the two poems are different in nature; Paulinus’s poem often has something of the quality of a sermon, Fortunatus’s of a collection of epigrammatic meditations on Martin’s life. Both show the tendency to break up the narrative into distinct compositional units characteristic too of the New Testament epic.

  14.2.5 Allegorical Epic

  In the last years of the fourth and the first years of the fifth century the writer Aurelius Prudentius Clemens created a body of Christian poetry that marked him out as the supreme Christian poet of late antiquity. His most influential poem, the Psychomachia, “Battle of/in/for the Soul,” pits personified virtues and vices in epic‐style combat for the human soul (Gnilka 1963; Mastrangelo 2008). The poem culminates in the construction of the temple of the soul, now purged of vices. Prudentius combines the typical epic language of battle narratives with personifications as combatants, building on the prevalence of such figures in contemporary literature and art and their traditional use in epic. The account of the temple with which the poem ends has some features of the ekphrasis of a work of art, though in its elaborate architecture and rich decoration its main inspiration is the book of Revelation. As is characteristic of much of Prudentius’s poetry, and building on the multiple levels of Christian exegesis, Prudentius’s narrative is capable of a variety of senses, not just psychological but also at times ecclesiological and eschatological.

  14.2.6 Conclusion

  The epic poetry of Latin late antiquity is rich and varied; it encompasses, at a conservative estimate, 23 different poems. They represent the continued capacity of the classical, and more particularly Virgilian, epic tradition to inspire imitation but also constitute a spectrum of creative reworkings of the genre that in many cases struck a powerful chord with a medieval readership.

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