A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  The late antique impulse to explain one’s poetic practices in prose preface and proemic verse is reflected in an abundance of autobiographical poetry. When Justinian summoned the African bishop Verecundus to Constantinople, Verecundus attempted to win favor by composing a verse apologia, a lamentabile carmen according to Isidore. Paulinus of Pella, a descendant of Ausonius, composed the remarkable, autobiographical Eucharisticos, which recounts in 616 hexameters how, after a good education in Bordeaux and an advantageous marriage in 396, he lost his worldly fortune and domestic tranquility to a series of personal and geopolitical disasters, a crucible that confirmed his faith. Ausonius’s contemporary, Gregory of Nazianzus, was remarkable not only for the diverse abundance of his Greek verse but also for the rich inner portrait of his poetic ambitions. Although eclipsed as a theologian, epistolographer, and orator by contemporaries, as a poet Gregory holds the field, composing 17 000 verses in nearly 400 poems, most in the last decade of his life after he resigned as Patriarch of Constantinople. He wrote theological poems on dogmatic and moral topics, epitaphs, epigrams, and poems on himself and his circle, all in classicizing hexameters, elegiacs, iambics, and lyrics. These poems testify to Gregory’s vast erudition and his confidence in his own innovations, both great (treating familiar topics in unexpected forms) and small (purposefully admitting unpoetic words and quantities). Gregory’s poems convey a nuanced portrait of his beliefs, affections, and moods. While delivering spiritual instruction, he repeatedly returns to the question of why he wrote poetry in lengthy poems in elegiacs (Laments on the Suffering of His Own Soul), hexameters (Things Concerning Himself), and iambics (On His Life, in 1949 iambic trimeters). For Gregory, poetry disciplined his thought and expression, while its sweetness would soften the bitterness of his instruction and soothe him in his old age. But Gregory also had a larger purpose in mind: the supplanting of the pagan canon with a new raft of poetry that extolled and defended the faith. The variety and immensity of his corpus were not incidental to this aim.

  Prudentius, a Spaniard who held administrative positions under Theodosius I, was the first Latin poet since Horace to craft a significant lyric corpus (nearly 10 000 lines). With deft virtuosity, Prudentius aimed to create a new canon of Christian Latin poetry that could stand alongside the pagan classics. Within the collected edition that Prudentius published in 405 were hymns for the daily round and Christians festivals (Cathemerinon) and gory accounts of martyrdom in Horatian lyrics (Peristephanon), a didactic meditation on original sin in iambics (Hamartigenia), and the first overtly Christian allegorical poem (Psychomachia), as well as polemic, didactic, and ekphrastic works in hexameters, including 49 tetrastichs describing the paintings in a church (cf. Paulinus’s description of a like‐decorated church [Carmen 27] and Rusticus Elpidius’s hexametric triplets). In Vandal Spain, Dracontius, a senator with legal training, produced a compendium of epithalamia, dedicatory poems, and mythological poetry. He also composed small paraphrastic poems: In laudibus Dei, a three‐book account of creation, sin, and salvation; the Satisfactio, a penitential poem in Ovidian elegiacs that sought forgiveness from God (and the Vandal king); and the Orestes, a sympotic dialogue in 974 hexameters.

  Nearly two centuries after Prudentius, Fortunatus self‐consciously sought to write himself into this emergent Christian canon (Roberts 2009). His 11 books of verse epistles, hymns, and various congratulatory and occasional poems (including panegryics for Merovingian kings and an account of a trip on Moselle) effortlessly fused classical and Christian modes of poetic expression in diverse forms and meters. Standing above these was Fortunatus’s masterwork, his four‐book hagiography of Saint Martin of Tours. Such confident, classicizing, Christian poetry had a bravura inception. Near the end of Constantine’s reign, the anonymous Gallic poet of the Laudes Domini visited his wife’s tomb. When the tomb burst opens, she beckoned him to the beyond. Over the next 114 stately hexameters – and with dashes of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Lucretius – the poet intertwines accounts of local miracles with biblical cosmology, building to a prayer that Christ protect Constantine, the greatest emperor by virtue of his conversion. Early on we also catch hints of Christian allegorical poetry, The Phoenix, whose 85 elegiac couplets have been ascribed (not without considerable debate) to the Constantinian author Lactantius (Roberts 2017). Although the poem lacks overt Christian references, it is often recognized as an early allegory of Man’s Fall and Redemption.

  The fourth and early fifth centuries experienced a dramatic renewal of epigram in both the Latin West and the Greek East. The aesthetic trends that animate late antique poetics would seem to make inevitable a turn to the epigrammatic: passion for ekphrastic and epideictic composition both in subject and style; preference for the commingling of genres and tones that accompany Alexandrian Kleinwerk; fondness for juxtaposition and paradox; and, especially, the fragmentation and subordination of narrative in favor of a refined focus on the individual episode. After the high imperial trio of Strato, Ammianus, and Lucian, Greek epigram found sporadic practitioners during the third century. But the fourth century witnessed poetic production and creativity of a greater magnitude. Gregory of Nazianzus repurposed traditional epigram into the service of Christian panegyric. Elegant erotic compositions by Rufinus and the barbed epigrams of Palladas – who in turn rejected erotic themes, insulted his fellow grammatici, complained about his students, and peevishly lamented paganism’s eclipse – serve as the vanguard of an epigrammatic revival that experienced its full flowering during the reigns Anastasius I and Justinian.

  Outstripping even this literary resurgence, Greek epigraphical poetry proliferated from the fourth century onwards. Often these inscribed epigrams were minor affairs, whether personal – e.g. a fragmentary epigram dedicating a dining couch to the martyr Trophimus (AP 1.18) – or commemorating moments of high social significance – e.g. the couplet that commemorates the removal of pagan imagery from Hagia Sophia (1.1). But verse inscriptions could also be monumental in every sense of the word. Among the modest Christian inscriptions of the first book of the Greek Anthology lurks a monster: 76 Nonnian hexameters commemorating Anicia Juliana’s renovation of the Church of St. Polyeuctus originally built by Eudocia (Whitby 2006). Because of its scale, the poem was long thought to be a literary epigram in praise of Juliana masquerading as a dedicatory inscription. But excavations in 1960 revealed that the poem, inscribed in letters 11 cm high, dominated over 250 square meters of the church’s nave and narthex. Eudocia, herself an ambitious poet, as we have seen, also commemorated buildings in verse. A 17‐verse hexameter fragment of her dedication is inscribed on the bath complex at Hammat Gader. This epigraphic habit continued well into the sixth century when 19 epigrams describing the bas‐relief scenes of filial love towards mothers were added to the Pergamene Temple of Apollonis in Cyzicus (AP 3). The faltering meter of these poems attests both to the enduring popularity of verse inscriptions and the accelerating breakdown of classical prosody during this period.

  In the mid‐sixth century, a circle of epigrammatists emerged in Constantinople: Agathias, Paulus Silentarius, Julian Aegyptus, Macedonius, and Leontinus, along with Christodorus, Marianus, Theaetetus, Damocharis, and others (Rapp 2005). These poets engaged hoary themes: eros, ekphrasis, courtesans, and freaks. They adored charioteers: 54 poems inscribed in the Hippodrome survive. They praised and blamed contemporaries: Julian on the usurper Hypatius (7.591–592) and the grammarian Theodorus (7.594); Agathias on Joanna the chanteuse (7.612). They commemorated the dead in poems poignant (e.g. 7.583, for a mother and infant who died during childbirth; 7.589, for Eustorgius, a 17‐year‐old law student) and jocose (7.204–205, Agathias sacrifices his cat à la Polyxena after it decapitated his pet partridge). They had their special interests: Julian added eight ekphrases to the corpus on Myron’s cow (67.738–739, 793–798); Paul composed the most sensuous erotics of the group; Leontius specialized in pithy poems on the paintings of dancers that lined the streets of Constantinople (16.283–288; cf. Agathias 5
.297). Some drew from the full tradition of epigram; others looked to the recent past (e.g. Agathias’s reworking of erotic epigrams by Rufinus and Fronto (5.218 and 220 ~ 5.41 and 43)). Still others favored particular veteres, like Macedonius’s imitations of Leonidas of Terentum or the dueling riffs on Posidippus by Agathias and Julian (9.359 ~ 5.302, 9.446). If the themes of these Justinianic epigrammatist were traditional, their language showed the irresistible urge to apply the grandiose linguistic, stylistic, and metrical features of Nonnus to minor poetry, occasionally even incorporating half‐lines from Nonnus into their poems (9.619 Agathias ~ D. 13.220). Their preference for Nonnian superabundance is evidenced by their fondness for neologisms, erudite detail, and, above all, a scale that is alien to traditional epigram. Only Leontinus shows a preference for the four‐verse standard, while Agathias was at ease offering a languid 20‐line account of Nicostratus’s philosophizing (11.354).

  Latin epigram had suffered a deep senescence after Martial. But as the fourth century unwound, epigram reemerged as a node of readerly interest and compositional energy. To the first half of this century, we might assign Pentadius’s echoing couplets and several poems by Tiberianus, the governor of Gaul in 355. But it was in the second half of the fourth and early fifth centuries that Latin epigram flourished with the work of Ausonius, Claudian, Probinus, Naucellius, and the other epigrammatists of the Epigrammata Bobiensia, an uneven farrago of 72 epigrams and short elegies. Enthusiasm for Latin epigram would proliferate in the fifth century, in Avianus’s 42 elegiac fables and Prosper’s distichic maxims, through Sidonius’s experimental longa, and eventually culminating in the eclectic epigrammatic collections of Luxorius, the most Martialian of late antique epigrammatists, and Ennodius, who composed short poems in a Claudianic mode and also embedded poems within prose à la Sidonius. In the sixth century, we encounter two peculiar elegists. Maximianus, a friend of the philosopher‐politician Boethius who interlaced his Consolatio with short poems, composed six lengthy, artful elegies in which love serves as a pivot to considerations about mortality and the hardships of senility. Around the same time, Eucheria, a Gallo‐Roman aristocrat from Provence and (perhaps) recipient of letters and poems from Fortunatus, cast her savage rejection of a low‐born man who dared court her in a long series of elegiac adynata – the longest such catalog in Latin poetry.

  Epigram, born in the memorialization of the dead, regained its role in commemoration, renovation, and ideological appropriation during late antiquity. Approximately one in five of the carmina epigraphica Latina date from this period, yielding a corpus of over 425 poems, three‐quarters of which are epitaphic. In 384, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, one of the beloved lions of the old Roman aristocracy, passed away on the eve of his consulship. On three sides of a marble statue base was carved a wonderful funerary poem in iambic senarii that appears to have been composed by Praetextatus and his wife, Fabia Aconia Paulina. Two sides preserve Praetextatus’s praise of his wife, a virtuous matrona and devotee of the old religion. On the third, Paulina praises her husband’s career, his character, and his literary achievements. Her 41‐line poem ends with a poignant (albeit expected) lament:

  Everything is gone now…

  But still blessed, because I am yours

  And was, and after death soon will be. (CIL 6.1779)

  Epigraphic poems are one of the few venues in which we can hear the voices of female poets. Around 355 “mournful Constantia” composed a brief, classicizing epitaph for her Christian husband (AL 660 B*). Anicia Fultonia Proba, granddaughter of the centonist, may have composed the verse epitaph in 24 elegiac couplets for her husband, Petronius Probus, who dedicated to Theodosius a collection of poems by himself, his father, and grandfather (his sons continued the family hobby). A remarkable example of joint composition is found on the Dalmatian estate of Pelagia and Licinianus, quaestor and friend of Sidonius. The couple takes turns praising a spring and its resident nymph in epigrams of 10 and six lines respectively (CIL 3.1894). We also find many poems by men in memory of their wives: a hexametric diptych for Agape (ILCV 2392); seven Lucretian and Virgilianizing lines for Julia Modesta (ca. 320; Ann. Epigr. 1948, 107); Laberius’s polymetric cycle of four epitaphs for his wife Bassa (CLE 1559; cf. CLE 2152, for M. Aurelius Timavius).

  Paulina and Praetextatus’s poem of mutual commemoration was erected by order of the Senate in the ancient epicenter of Roman political life, the Forum. The same year saw the passing of Pope Damasus, who during his papacy had created a new form of Christian commemoration by composing allusive, dynamic epigrams to accompany his restoration of Christian buildings on the periphery of the city. Jerome, who composed hexametric epitaphs for Paula, approved of his efforts – he was “elegant in composing verse” (Jer. De Vir. 103) – and his poems influenced the style and poetic programs of the most important Christian authors of the next generation: Paulinus and Prudentius. The richness of Christian epitaphic verse is on display in the Coemeterium of Saint Agnes on the Via Nomentana. The site was monumentalized in the 340 s by Constantia, who commemorated her patronage in 14 hexameters. Damasus added a 10‐verse epigram during his renovation of the site. But Agnes’s shrine contained no fewer that 22 other verse inscriptions, most of which are private epitaphs, including one for the fifth‐century senator and panegyricist Flavius Merobaudes (CIL 6.31983 ICUR 8.21048).

  Constantia’s inscription was just one component of a pro‐regime “public relations campaign waged through the inscription of Latin verse” that included epigrams in the Vatican Basilia, the 24‐hexameter poem carved into Constantius’s obelisk in the Circus Maximus that yoked his gestae with the the stone’s miraculous journey to Rome, and the epitaph inscribed on the magnificent sarcophagus of Junius Bassius (Trout 2015, p. 41). After this mid‐century imperial peak, Latin verse inscriptions became more a vehicle for upwardly mobile provincials than state propaganda. It is in this context that we can understand the verse commemorations of Claudian, Merobaudes, and Sidonius erected in the Forum of Trajan, as well as the numerous quasi‐epitaphic works of Ausonius and Ennodius (Kelly 2013). Commemoration in verse could also take a more grandiose form: e.g. the Life of Proclus by the late‐fifth‐century Neoplatonic philosopher Marinus or Eudocia’s fragmentary epyllion on the martyrdom of St. Cyprian; Avitus’s 666‐line poem lauding the virginity of his deceased sister, Fuscina (cf. Damascius’s encomium for the wife of Hermesias); and the hagiographies of Martin by Fortunatus and (the less‐gifted) Paulinus of Petricordia.

  In appreciating the different aesthetic principles that animated late antique authors and their audiences, we should not forget that practical concerns often motivated the composition of verse. The purpose may be slight: a memento shared between friends, as were many of the small poems by Ausonius or Claudian. But minor poetry was also yoked to didactic purpose. Stobaeus preserves 73 lines of a Greek didactic poem by Naumachius that counseled Christian women how best to behave in life and marriage. Poets might explicate the duality of Christ’s nature (the 137‐hexameter De Iesu Christo Deo et Homine) or embellish the story of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection through an account of his harrowing of hell in the 108 hexameters of the Triumphus Christi heroicus, whose Pluto attempts to rally his demonic troops, only to see them submit to Christ. Christian poets also sought to ease anxiety during the tumultuous fifth century. Orientius, Bishop of Auch, used just over 1000 classicizing elegiac lines to instruct the faithful how they could strive towards heaven in the deteriorating world of early‐fifth century Gaul. The De Providentia Divina tackles the question of why the faithful and sinful were alike afflicted by the barbarian invaders. Paulinus of Béziers crafts a hexametric dialogue in which an abbot and two monks, one of whom has recently traveled through a devastated Gaul, discuss moral decline, drawing heavily on satirical reproaches of women. The pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus was notoriously in a less‐forgiving mood recounting his sad departure from Rome ca. 417 and his journey through the ruined landscape of Italy and Gaul. We also fin
d a category of poems that straddle the line between hexameter didactic and polemic. Prosper documents and condemns the Semipelagians in his De ingratiis, a theological treatise in 1002 lines. The pseudo‐Tertullian Carmen adversus Marcionitas attacks heretical doctrines; the 122‐hexameter Carmen contra paganos takes aim at Praetextatus, anti‐Christian politician and translator of Greek philosophy and verse (Cameron 2011, p. 318). The plain style of these poems further suggests that their audience was not primarily among the cultural elite. In contrast, Prudentius’s Apotheosis infuses polemics against heresies into an elegant didactic poem on the Trinity, while his two books of his Contra Symmachum rehearse the long‐settled controversy over the Altar of Victory. The most‐read didactic work is also the shortest and least Christian: The Disticha Catonis, a pseudographic collection of ca. 130 hexametric couplets attributed to Cato Censorius (or Uticensis) but dating from the late third to fourth century, propounds a generally Stoic approach to life and its troubles.