A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  With Hilary and Ambrose, a picture continues to emerge of the growth of Christian Latin poetry in the 300 s. The very end of that century through roughly the first half of the 400 s constitutes the late antique Golden Age for Latin Christian verse. A good deal of the corpus dates to this time. It includes the work of two of the most important and accomplished poets of late antiquity. The first is Paulinus of Nola (ca. 354–431), the Gallic aristocrat turned ascetic Christian. Verse epistles he exchanged with his teacher and friend Ausonius offer compelling glimpses into the disruptive effects of Paulinus’s conversion to a rigorous brand of Christianity (Amherdt 2004, Rücker 2012). Both men struggle to determine what Paulinus’s Christian turn means for their friendship, which was grounded in a shared commitment to classical culture. The second poet is Prudentius, mentioned above (348 to after 405). In an autobiographical preface to his poetry, Prudentius relates that he had a successful bureaucratic career but has devoted his old age to saving his soul by serving God, including by writing Christian poetry. Prudentius thus defines his poetry by his and its religious commitment and, similar to Juvencus, connects it to his personal salvation.

  Paulinus and Prudentius each illustrate a salient feature of the poetry of their age: the proliferation of poetic forms. In addition to his verse epistles, Paulinus wrote 13 natalicia for St. Felix, or poems celebrating the anniversary of Felix’s death in Nola; paraphrases of the Psalms; an epithalamium; a propemptikon; a consolation; protreptic pieces; and verse inscriptions (Green 1971; Trout 1999). Prudentius, meanwhile, composed six texts (seven if a short Epilogus is counted) along with the Contra Symmachum: two collections of hymns, one on martyrs (Peristephanon) and one of songs for the day, for fasting, for burial of the dead, and for Christmas and Epiphany (Cathermerinon; O’Daly 2012; Richardson 2016); two poems on doctrine (Apotheosis and Hamartigenia; Malamud 2011); an allegorical epic on the fight between the virtues and vices (Psychomachia; Gnilka 1963; Mastrangelo 2008); and 48 epigrams, each of four lines, on scenes from the Bible, possibly to accompany church paintings (Dittochaeon).

  Other works that appear in the period include biblical epics (both New Testament and Old Testament; see Chapter 14 in this volume) and a Christian bucolic, Endelechius’s De mortibus boum. (De Iesu Christo deo et homine, in 137 hexameters, probably dates as well to this time; it is a doctrinal poem, dealing with the double nature of Christ [Salzano 2007, pp. 103–125].) These texts join with the poetry of Paulinus and Prudentius to reveal a second widespread feature of this Golden Age of Christian verse: its generic fluidity, as exemplified by the “mixing” or “crossing” of genres. (On Prudentius, see Fontaine 1980, pp. 1–23.) Endelechius’s work is notable in this regard: It is partly a bucolic poem based on Virgil’s first Eclogue but contains a lyric meter (second asclepiads) and incorporates a plague narrative in the tradition of Virgil’s Georgics (Schierl 2016). In mixing, dissolving, and remaking inherited genres, poets of the period reflect a broader trait of late antique literature. Late antiquity on the whole was a time of significant generic innovation, as old forms were updated and hybridized and new forms were developed, often by crossing or eroding traditional categories (Pollmann 2001; Young 2004; Fuhrer 2013; Elsner and Hernández Lobato 2017, p. 15).

  Endelechius offers a striking example of Christian, and Christianizing, engagement with the classical literary tradition. In Endelechius’s poem, the cattle of Tityrus, a character taken from Virgil’s first Eclogue and, thus, representative of Latin bucolic, are saved from a plague because he made the sign of the cross over them. Another good example from the period is Prudentius’s Psychomachia. The poem transforms epic models of battle and widely imitates Virgil, but also presents an optimistic vision of triumphant Christianity, culminating in a concluding image of the temple of the soul. The temple illustrates the victory of virtue over vice and anticipates the eschatological glory that awaits believers (Roberts 2008, p. 634).

  Several poets of the age, including Prudentius, also address Roman history through the lens of Christian belief and thought. Thus Prudentius offers a teleological view of history in his Contra Symmachum, a work in two hexameter books (667 lines and 1132 lines, respectively) on the (resolved) controversy over the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman senate house in the early 380 s. In the poem, the Roman Empire is seen as a necessary condition for the spread of Christianity and for salvation history. A set of texts, meanwhile, responds to the unrest and devastation caused by the incursions of Germanic tribes into Gaul in the early fifth century (cf. McLynn 2009). Three are the Commonitorium, ascribed to Orientius, the Ad coniugem, and the Carmen de providentia Dei, attributed by some scholars to Prosper. The poems deal in different ways with how a Christian should respond to the parlous times, offering defenses of God’s guidance over the universe and advocating concern for the inner life rather than for the outer world (Fielding 2014, 569–585). In addition, a 110‐line hexameter dialogue entitled the Epigramma Paulini (attributed, probably mistakenly, to Paulinus of Béziers) features three speakers, one of whom (Salmon) tells another (Thesbon) that he has journeyed through Gaul after it was ravaged by the Alans, Vandals, and Sarmatians. The focus of the text, however, lies less upon that violence than upon the moral decline of the age among both men and women, which is lamented in satiric strains, and which is contrasted with Christian piety and, it seems, monastic life. Like Endelechius’s poem, the Epigramma Paulini is modeled on Virgil’s first Eclogue but transforms classical pastoral by adapting it to Christian content and concerns. The poem also remakes Eclogues 1 by prominently featuring acerbic satire and concomitant social criticism (including criticism of women’s preference for reading about Virgil’s Dido over reading the bible; 76–77) within its Virglian pastoral frame (Chiappiniello 2009).

  Later in the fifth century (in or around 460), Paulinus of Pella deals with the unrest in Gaul in the period and his personal losses on account of it in his Eucharisticos, a 616‐line hexameter poem ostensibly of Thanksgiving to God, but filled with bitter lament. Paulinus is one of a handful of significant Latin Christian poets active after the mid‐fifth century. Three others are Dracontius (ca. 455–ca. 505), from Vandal North Africa; Ennodius (473/474–521), bishop of Pavia; and Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530–ca. 600/609), from northern Italy and later living in Merovingian Gaul. (I bypass Arator and Avitus, treated in Chapter 14 of this volume.) The spread of the authors exemplifies the geographic diversity that marks all late antique verse. Dracontius wrote poetry on mythological and secular subjects and on Christian matter; his De laudibus Dei, in three books of hexameters, claims to provide knowledge of divine wrath and mercy (Arweiler 2007; Tommasi Moreschini 2010). (This is a fitting topic for the poet, who produced the poem when trying to secure release from imprisonment by the Vandal Gunthamund.) Ennodius likewise wrote non‐Christian and Christian verse. Among the latter are 13 hymns (at least one of which may be spurious); a cycle of poems on bishops of Milan; epigraphic and ekphrastic pieces on Christian topics; and a few scoptic epigrams on Christian figures (Kennell 2000; Urlacher‐Becht 2014). Venantius Fortunatus is the author of the famous hymns Pange lingua and Vexilla regis, as well as of a four‐book hagiographic epic on the life of Martin of Tours (Roberts 2009) – also the subject of a poem by Paulinus of Périgueux, probably from the 460 s. Venantius’s Vita sancti Martini is “the last epic of antiquity” (Roberts 2001), with epic scope, encoding, and coloring; with a focus on the heroic deeds of the Christian Saint; and with features (e.g. narrative fragmentation, a strong tendency toward the ekphrastic and epigrammatic) that, along with its Christian content, define it as a new‐model epic for late antiquity. Fortunatus himself offers a partial history of late antique Christian Latin poetry when, at the start of his epic (1.10–25), he lists his literary predecessors, all of whom are Christian, including Juvencus, Orientius, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and the biblical epicists Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  * Laura Miguélez‐Cavero should like t
o thank the editors of this volume and Mary Whitby for their help with her part of the chapter.

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