by Scott McGill
Gregory also composed polemical poems (Agosti 2001b, pp. 221, 231–233), both the more general moral(izing) diatribe (I.2.10 On virtue; I.2.25 On wrath; I.2.27 On true nobility; I.2.35 On Philosophical Poverty) and invectives on individuals and groups (I.2.28 Against the Rich; II.1.12–13 against improper bishops; II.1.40–41 and II.1.11.750–1037 against Maximus).
Finally, Gregory is well known for his “autobiographical” poems (II.1.1–99), including On His Own Affairs (II.1.1), On His Own Life (II.1.12), and On His Own Verses (II.1.39). Gregory gives poetic voice to a wider literary trend of personal apology and philosophical reflection (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions), as a means to legitimize his position (McGuckin 2001; Elm 2015). As instances of authoritative recording of events, these poems are similar to historiographical writings, but for their focus on the divine they also seek to transform historiography into a form of devotion (Abrams Rebillard 2012).
16.1.5 Christian Epics
The fifth century saw the full emergence of epic poetry as a Christian genre (Agosti 2001a; Whitby 2007, 2016). Books of the Bible were redrafted in Homeric hexameters, either reusing the existing lines (cento, i.e. a “patchwork” of Homeric lines) or writing verses anew (paraphrase). These poets hoped to claim parity with the classical tradition by “conquering” the genre with the highest cultural prestige, and presenting the Bible in an attractive way to the learned. The adherence to both the Bible text and Homeric principles of composition is praised in programmatic passages, in a double take on religious and poetic orthodoxy (Nodes 1993, pp. 9–20; Agosti 2001a; Faulkner 2014).
In the East the cento is linked to the Empress Eudocia (ca. 400–460; Agosti 2001a, pp. 74–85; Sowers 2008). She says that she corrected and expanded for publication a first edition of the Homerocentones, composed by a certain bishop Patricius (Usher 1998). The two prefaces present the poem as aiming at the diffusion of the Christian message (AP 1.119.3–4) and at pleasing God (praef. line 1). The prefaces also show concern with the harmony of the lines (praef. 6, 14), fidelity to Homer (praef. 8–9), and attainment of fame (praef. 36–38).
Eudocia is the presumed author, too, of The Martyrdom of St. Cyprian, a paraphrase in verse of a prose hagiography on the conversion of Cyprian, a magician from Antioch (Sowers 2008, pp. 164–268). Regarding paraphrases of the Bible, the Paraphrase of the Psalms attributed to Apollinaris was composed between 450 and 470 (Agosti 2001a, pp. 85–92; De Stefani 2008). The Psalmic metaphrast opens his poem with a protheoria, in which he claims that his poetic version of the Psalms recovers the beauty of the meter lost in the prosaic Greek translation of the Hebraic poems (lines 18–23) and claims to do so “so that the others too will know that every language proclaims Christ King” (Met. Ps. Pro. 32–33). “Others” has been taken to refer to the pagans (Agosti 2001a, p. 89). The metaphrast then explains (52–104) how the Holy Spirit reestablishes one single world language accessible to all, as when it appeared as tongues of fire on the Apostles, whose words were then heard by all peoples (after Acts 2:2–11).
The Paraphrase of the Gospel of John (21 books, one per chapter of the gospel), was written in the central decades of the fifth century by Nonnus of Panopolis (Accorinti 2016, pp. 28–32). The Paraphrase follows strictly the sequence of events of the Gospel text and expands individual details with elements imported from theological exegesis, especially from the Commentary of the Gospel of St. John by Cyril of Alexandria (Franchi 2016; Simelidis 2016), and with different forms of literary embellishment in epic style (e.g. expressions of time, epic epithets, brief descriptions of places).
16.1.6 Buildings and Poetry
The construction of churches and other buildings by Christian patrons led to inscriptions in verse celebrating their achievement. Thus, the first book of the Palatine Anthology gathers 123 epigrams (Waltz 1928, pp. 3–47), mostly copied from inscriptions engraved on monuments to preserve the memory of their builders or restorers (1–18 from monuments of Constantinople and its outskirts; 21–30 from churches, on Christ the Savior) or to explain the subject matter of a painting (32–94 – including cycles on the Nativity, 37–42; and on passages of the Gospels, 44–56). One of the most celebrated is AP 1.10, praising Anicia Juliana for building the church of St. Polyeuktos in Constantinople in the 520 s (Whitby 2006; Agosti 2008b, pp. 689–692).
The celebration of the euergetic activities of the powerful was not restricted to inscriptions. Paul the Silentiary wrote the Description of St. Sophia, which was read aloud as part of the celebrations of the reopening of the church in the final days of 562 or the first days of 563. Paul addresses the Emperor Justinian and the patriarch Euthychius in two iambic proems and then focuses on the description itself. He also composed a supplementary Description of the Ambo of St. Sophia, and a number of mainly erotic epigrams. Paul’s language and descriptive techniques are similar to those found in other celebratory descriptions (Whitby 2003a).
John of Gaza (Lauritzen 2015–2016) wrote a poetic description, too, entitled Tabula Mundi, but in this case on a painting that supposedly adorned a bathhouse: The personifications of physical elements and principles are governed by the Cross and the Trinity and the Ether crowning the World for its victory over Nature. The Christian intellectuals active in Gaza in late antiquity had made a considerable effort to assimilate Neoplatonic traditions of the description of the cosmos (Champion 2014), and John gave them poetic form.
16.1.7 Coda
Late Antique Greek Christian poetry comes to an end with the transition from classical to Byzantine accentuated metrics: The last poem in classical metrics is the De vita humana written in the first decades of the seventh century by George of Pisidia (Whitby 2003b, 2014). Most of the sociocultural elements that enabled the production of the poems listed in this chapter disappear gradually in the sixth century. There are, however, surprising discoveries, such as Dioscorus. A notary from Aphrodito, a small village halfway between Lycopolis and Panopolis, in Upper Egypt, Dioscorus kept a library with copies of the Homeric poems and Menander and composed encomia on local dignitaries under the double inspiration of Christian faith and classical culture (Fournet 1999; Agosti 2008a). Dioscorus spoke Greek and Coptic, had enjoyed a classical education and traveled to Constantinople, and composed a number of poems in classical meters, including different types of encomia and epithalamia.
16.2 Latin Christian Poetry
While Latin Christian poetry stretches back to the idiosyncratic Instructiones and Carmen apologeticum of the probably third‐century CE Commodian, its history begins in earnest in the Age of Constantine with two poems. (I pass over Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, who incorporates Christian imagery and content into his collection of figure poems but works more with non‐Christian matter, including panegyric of Constantine.) One is the anonymous Laudes Domini, likely written between 317 and 324 (Salzano 2000, 2007, pp. 57–79; Schierl 2009). The 148‐line hexameter text tells the miraculous story of a dead woman in the land of the Aedui who moved her hand to welcome her newly deceased husband as he was placed beside her in their joint tomb. The miracle, related briefly (7–31), is attributed to Christ (34–35), whom the narrator praises for the bulk of the poem; the prevailing purpose is to promote belief in the Resurrection and Christ’s ability to grant eternal life. But the Laudes is not simply a Christian poem; it is also in fundamental ways a classicizing one. Meter, stylistic features (including rhetorical figures), and linguistic echoes all link the work to the classical tradition. Its project is to put the elements of classical verse in the service of communicating faith (Salzano 2000, p. 25). A concluding prayer to Christ (143–148) to grant Constantine victory and success and to reward him with children equal to him squarely places this transformational poem in a transformational time, when Christianity was no longer persecuted by an emperor, but was professed by him – and the prayer for Constantine’s children is a prayer that this may continue after him. The concluding lines claim legitimacy and authority for the faith and, thus, for the Christian Laudes by indicati
ng that Christianity was now the imperial religion and by establishing Jesus’s power as a source for the emperor’s.
The second Constantinian poem is Juvencus’s Evangeliorum libri IV (ca. 329), the first Christian epic poem in the Western tradition. Juvencus recast the Gospel story, with Matthew his main source, as a four‐book, roughly 3200‐line hexameter epic. Presumably aiming to appeal to educated cultural elites (McGill 2016, pp. 23–24), Juvencus discovered a way of bringing together the authority of ancient epic and Christian edification, while also transforming epic by using it to treat a new kind of heroism, new world‐historical events, and a new set of cultural values. Striking is the confidence of this vanguard figure. In the 27‐line preface to his poem, Juvencus casts himself as an epic inheritor of Homer and Virgil, but he sets himself apart from them and above them by proclaiming the truth of his poem, as opposed to the lies that they narrate (9–20). This is the first instance of the topos in Christian poetics in which authors contrasted Christian truth with pagan lies (Klopsch 1980, pp. 9–12; Mastrangelo 2016, p. 43). The topos enabled a Christian author to carve out new literary space for himself, even as he reused and updated classical genres, conventions, themes, and language. Juvencus hopes, moreover, that his truthful poem about “the life‐giving deeds of Christ” (Christi vitalia gesta; 19) will save him at the Second Coming and grant him eternal life (21–24). This is a variation on the classical theme that poetry grants immortality to an author; now, however, the prize is personal salvation as a Christian (Witke 1971, pp. 200–202). Juvencus gives new weight to the practice of writing poetry. His work is an expression of his faith – hence his call at the close of his preface to the Holy Spirit and the River Jordan for inspiration (25–27), an invocation that, like the truth/lies dichotomy, anticipates a later topos in Christian poetics (Mastrangelo 2016: p. 43). Yet it is also, he hopes, a way of receiving faith’s ultimate reward.
Later in the fourth century, a more eccentric narrative poem with biblical content appeared. This was the Cento Probae, likely written by Faltonia Betitia Proba in the middle of the century, perhaps in the early 360 s (Bazil 2009; Schottenius Cullhed 2015). The cento is a work made up of discrete lines and segments of lines taken from Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and recombined to produce a new narrative text. Proba’s is the first of four Christian Virgilian centos to survive from antiquity; there are, in addition, 12 centos on mythological and secular topics. After an introduction that combines original verses with centonic lines (1–55), Proba reuses Virgil to narrate parts of Genesis and Exodus (56–332) and the Gospel story of Christ (333–688) and, then, closes with a brief conclusion (689–694). In her introduction (23), the author programmatically states, “I will say that Virgil sang/prophesied the pious gifts of Christ” (Vergilium cecinisse loquar pia munera Christi). The verb cano not only echoes Aen. 1.1 but also appears to signal a peculiar form of allegory, in which Christian content is present in Virgil’s verses and just needs a centonist’s rearranging to bring it out; cano in the sense of “prophesy” – a meaning that Proba gives the word later in her work (343) – makes the point provocatively. This is in line with the patristic idea that Christian doctrine and the Christian view of the world extended into the past pagan world and its literature. Christianity was, in a sense, always there, and thus it has a claim to priority. In addition, because of the cento form she uses, Proba stakes a direct claim to the cultural authority enjoyed by Virgil even as she powerfully appropriates that authority by using his verses to relate Christian subject matter. This is to ground the text in the past and to invest it with the weight of literary history while also breaking from the classical tradition – a tension animating most ancient Christian poetry, including the fourth‐century Triumphus Christi heroicus (Salzano 2007, pp. 127–151), a kind of Christian epyllion in 108 hexameter lines on the Crucifixion and Resurrection, but with an account of Christ’s descent into hell that remakes the classical epic katabasis.
The Cento Probae is the ne plus ultra of linguistic reuse; as such, it exaggerates the very wide practice in Christian Latin poetry of recasting the language of classical models (Thraede 1962, 1034–1041; Herzog 1975, 185–211; Pelttari 2014; Mastrangelo 2016; Kaufmann 2017). Christian poetry differed from classical verse in its religious commitment and intent as well as its hermeneutic turn: Texts expounded Scripture and doctrine and also interpreted the world through a Christian lens (Herzog 1989, pp. 32–33). But it retained extensive verbal ties to the classics through intertextuality, in which Christian authors participated in the same linguistic and poetic codes as their classical predecessors, and through imitation/allusion. It is difficult to generalize about the topic, because of the very large number of examples. What is clear, however, is that imitation and allusion are productive and varied forces in Christian Latin verse. There is inevitably a gap between a Christian narrative and a classical/pagan one when Christian writers fit their source material to new religious content and commitments. But it is reductive to think only in terms of a conflict model. Kontrastimitation, in which the content of the imitating text is set in opposition to and, in a sense, “corrects” its antecedent (Thraede 1962, pp. 1039–1041), is widespread. Yet very many examples also exist of ornamental imitation, which demonstrates that Christian authors could freely adapt and assimilate classical material without a polemical edge, as well as of imitation where the subject matter of the source work complements and fills out Christian content.
Classical language is pervasive in fourth‐century Christian verse inscriptions that appeared in Rome. The earliest such inscription dates to the 340 s at the basilica of St. Agnes. Constantina, the daughter of Constantine, had funded the construction of the basilica, and a 14‐line dedicatory inscription in hexameters commemorates her deed. The poem contains classical phrasing (e.g. Tartaream [8], caeca nocte [11]) as well as debts to specific models (e.g. summi fastigia tecti [6], from Virgil, Aen. 2.302). Constantina’s is one of a handful of verse inscriptions in Rome connected to the Constantinian dynasty; the poems imply the appeal of monumental classicizing verse for imperial messaging (Trout 2016, pp. 81–88). But the epigraphic habit extended much wider in late antiquity among Christians and non‐Christians alike (see Chapter 15 in this volume; Trout 2016, pp. 90–95). Pride of place must go to Pope Damasus (ca. 305–384; papacy 366‐384). Damasus composed epigraphic epigrams, most inscribed in the script of Filocalus, for different spots around Rome and elsewhere, notably the tombs of martyrs (Trout 2015a). By definition, they helped to Christianize public space in the fourth century; at the same time, some inscriptions Christianized Roman identity by recalibrating traditional virtues of the ideal Roman citizen and soldier and assigning them to martyrs and, in one instance (Epig. Dam. 20), by seeming to replace the Dioscuri with Peter and Paul as divinities of the city of Rome (Curran 2012, pp. 341–43). Because the epigrams contain pervasive echoes of Virgil, especially the Aeneid, they Virgilianize Christian space as well. No matter how much individuals recognized the Virgilian material, extensive traces of his poetry were inscribed on stone for public viewing; accordingly, Virgil shaped the experience of the Christian sites, even for those members of the public who were unaware of his presence.
Damasus is possibly the author of another Christian poem, the Carmen contra paganos. Stylistic considerations, notably the absence of the word et from Damasus’s epigrams and the Carmen and similar phrasing in each, make the attribution of the Carmen to Damasus plausible, though far from certain (Cameron 2011, pp. 308–17; Trout 2015a, pp. 26–38). The poem is a 122‐line hexameter invective directed at an unnamed pagan prefect; Alan Cameron (2011, pp. 273–307, 318–319) convincingly argues that the prefect is Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, and that the poem was written soon after his death in 384 to counter the public grief occasioned by his death. The Carmen is one of four polemical hexameter works against paganism from around the same time; the others are Prudentius’s Contra Symmachum (see infra) and the anonymous Carmen ad quendam senatorem and Carme
n ad Antonium (Trout 2015b). The poems each give individual expression, with ample classical diction, to a satiric impulse to criticize and lampoon paganism. The satire defines Christians against the pagan Other and elevates them above it. This is not necessarily a reflection of a broad culture war between Christianity and paganism, whether experienced directly or remembered. Instead, Prudentius and the anonymous poets, like the author of the Carmen contra paganos, were likely responding to the actions of specific individuals and to specific events (Barnes 1976; Cameron 2011, pp. 325–326). The carmina also suggest a felt need to use satires of paganism to articulate what it was to be a Christian for the Christian elite and to work to establish an identity as an in‐group in contrast to pagans (Trout 2015b).
The fourth century also saw the emergence of Latin hymnody, represented especially by the bishops Hilary of Poitiers (?315‐367) and Ambrose of Milan (ca. 337–397). The two composed their hymns in classicizing quantitative meters (although Ambrose also has strong accentual patterns) for liturgical use (Palmer 1989, pp. 58–67; Fontaine et al. 1992; den Boeft 2007). Ambrose’s hymns, in eight stanzas of four lines and in the iambic dimeter acatalectic meter, have a brevity and rhythm particularly suitable to congregational performance. He appears to have introduced to western churches the practice of regular hymn‐singing by the whole congregation (Palmer 1989, p. 62; Richardson 2016, p. 7). Augustine (Conf. 9.7) states that the innovation began when Justina, the mother of the emperor Valentinian II and an adherent of Arianism, was persecuting Ambrose; his congregation kept guard for him in the church, and to keep them from succumbing to exhaustion or depression, the decision was made to have them sing hymns. The strongly anti‐Arian Ambrose later used hymns to put forward orthodox views on the Trinity as well as to present other Christian teaching.
