A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Likely as pervasive as Cassiodorus’s reach was Isidore’s (d. 636), whose Etymologies survives in almost 1000 manuscripts. Bede made use of the work in the early eighth century, and it was widely circulated in the Carolingian period. By the beginning of the ninth century it had been disseminated to all the cultural centers of Europe. The Etymologies was also important throughout the Middle Ages in the development of dictionaries and encyclopedias, which ensured its widespread use down to the Renaissance (Barney et al. 2006, pp. 24–26).

  Less obvious authors emerge from the shadows of these giants, however, in the context of the classroom. Alcuin provides a first witness to these writers in the Bishops, Kings and Saints of York (vv. 1541–1557), where, in addition to the auctores just examined, grammarians, classical authors, and even some Greek authors, he reports that he also read “what Sedulius and Juvencus sang,/and what Avitus, Prudentius, Prosper, Paulinus, Arator/and Fortunatus and Lactantius wrote” (vv. 1551–1553). We might ascribe Alcuin’s list to the tastes of a highly literate reader with access to an unusually excellent library, but, writing at roughly the same time, Theodulf of Orleans gathers a similar list in his accounting of “The Books I Used to Read,” noting that, in addition to the auctores, he read “Sedulius, Paulinus, Arator, Avitus,/…Fortunatus…Juvencus/and…Prudentius” (13–16). Like Alcuin’s list, Theodulf’s catalog reflects presumably his training, but the similarities of the lists, given the distance separating York, where Alcuin studied, and Spain (or perhaps Italy), where Theodulf gained his formation, seem hard to chalk up to coincidence.

  Instead, given their joint witness, it seems possible to see in the lists of Alcuin and of Theodulf a canon of late antique writers owed to the schools and in place by the early ninth century. Strengthening this view is the fact that many of the works of the authors mentioned by Alcuin are found in a number of composite manuscripts of the early ninth century that are themselves important witnesses to authors privileged in the schools (Godman 1982, p. lxxi;. Glauche 1970, pp. 11–12). That Theodulf represents a noninsular literary culture at a remove from Alcuin’s York further ballasts the case for the existence of a canon (Godman 1985, pp. 168–169). Using Theodulf’s list as a control on Alcuin’s catalog thus allows us to identify a stable group of nine late antique authors mentioned by Alcuin whose works were read widely in the Western Middle Ages.

  The attraction of these works is not difficult to fathom. Juvencus’s Four Books of the Evangelists (ca. 330 CE), a poetic rendering of the four Gospels into hexameters on the model of Virgil’s Aeneid, is a striking poem whose words explicate the history of Jesus’s ministry. Attractive pedagogically, too, is the way in which Juvencus parrots biblical stories allowing his readers to follow the narrative presentation of the Gospels preserved in them. To this appeal can be added Juvencus’s attention to prophetic activity, especially in the context of Christian figuration and the reading of history under the lens of Christian meaning (White 2000, p. 35).

  Sedulius’s Carmen paschale (ca. 425 CE) furthers the tradition of biblical epic on the model provided by Juvencus, and its popularity is witnessed by the 400‐plus manuscripts still extant (Springer 1995). One reason for this popularity is owed to the model the poem provides for morphological and syntactical instruction and for scriptural interpretation (Wieland 1985, pp. 153–173; Green 2006, pp. 359–361; Springer 2013, pp. xix–xxi). Another reason is Sedulius’s focus. Rather than cover the topics treated in the four Gospels, as Juvencus does, Sedulius concentrates on Old Testament miracles as exemplary of Christ’s ministry and, then, on Christ’s life, Jesus’s miracles, and the events of Christ’s death and resurrection. The poem was, therefore, more approachable as a source of Christian theological learning and insight, and in the Middle Ages it was more than once used to illustrate doctrinal points, especially those attending to issues of Christ’s humanity (Springer 2013, p. xx). Nor did medieval readers ignore Sedulius’s Paschale opus, which served as a model for the opus geminatum that became popular in Anglo‐Norman Latin writing, or his two hymns, which were influential enough that he is sometimes styled one of the four chief auctores hymnorum, along with Ambrose, Prudentius, and Gregory (Springer, 2013, p. xxi).

  The Historia apostolica (ca. 535) is rightly placed in the tradition of biblical epic established by Juvencus and Sedulius, but its author, Arator, stands on separate footing in his choice of materials, no doubt accounting for the work’s popularity. Arator’s project takes up the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles, and in this it can be understood to provide, albeit in verse, the first Latin commentary on this book of the New Testament. In addition, Arator’s poem, perhaps more than Juvencus’s or Sedulius’s, offers material well suited to teaching, including passages devoted to typological interpretations (White 2000, p. 159).

  Given his topic and the epic model he follows, Avitus (d. ca. 518) might be rightly included among the trio of biblical epicists just examined. No doubt more than a few of the qualities that attract Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator into the canon figure also in the appeal of his De spiritalis historiae gestis, which treats in five books the histories of Adam, Noah, and Moses as recorded in the Pentateuch, touching on the creation of the world and original sin, the judgment of God and the expulsion from Paradise, the Flood, and the passage through the Red Sea. Although Avitus engages his biblical material typologically, so that the relationship of his themes to Christian truth is never far from obvious, his exclusive focus on the Old Testament perhaps limited his appeal. He was read widely down through the Carolingian period and even beyond, but he lost ground by the twelfth century, when his status as a canonical author seems to have waned (Curtius 1953, pp. 466–467).

  A writer of some variety in both verse and prose, Prosper of Aquitaine (d. ca. 455) takes readers away from the epic and biblical spaces inhabited by Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus and situates them instead in the energies provided by the epigram, the basis for his inclusion in the canon. Written in elegiacs, Prosper’s poems narrate moral precepts whose content and diction are often owed to the writings of Augustine. His poetry thus couples formal control with insuperable content, offering models of elegiac composition and access to some of the thought of one of the key Christian auctores (White 2000, p. 114).

  One appeal of Prudentius’s (d. ca. 405) large body of poetry was undoubtedly its metrical virtuosity, for no poet of late antiquity is more metrically accomplished. Prudentius’s popularity is affirmed also by the 300‐plus extant manuscripts that record all or parts of the poet’s output (O’Daly 2012, p. 29). Prudentius appears in the medieval canon, however, mainly on the strength of the moralizing and allegorizing verses of the Psychomachia (Gnilka 1963). Adding to the appeal provided by allegory and moral exemplarism is the poet’s use of personification in bringing to real and vivid life the conflicts of the abstract vices and virtues, which are pitted against one another in scenes of gore and violence that rival, as they depend on, classical Latin epic (Bastiaensen 1993; O’Sullivan 2004, pp. 3–21). Prudentius’s other works were not ignored in the Western Middle Ages, to be sure, and the citations from across the poet’s large output that pepper the literary output of, especially, the twelfth century prove the point.

  Lactantius’s (d. ca. 325) large output is dominated by prose works, including, perhaps most famously, Divine Institutes and the Anger of God. Yet he appears in the medieval canon owing to the attractions of a 170‐line poem on the phoenix ascribed to him (Roberts 2017). Much like Prosper’s epigrams, the phoenix poem also keys into the elegiac tradition in the telling of the story of the mythical bird that, in a cycle repeated every several hundred years, causes its own death and rebirth. The poem thus celebrates a creature whose demise and regeneration allowed it easily to be seen as a Christ‐figure despite the fact that the poem is not explicitly Christian.

  Paulinus of Nola (d. 431) comes into the canon as a poet writing on a variety of topics. These include poems to friends, not least his teacher Ausonius, an epithalamium, and 16 poe
ms on St. Felix. While the pieces attending to St. Felix were perhaps most popular, owing to their Christian themes, Paulinus was not Ausonius’s most famous (and, we might surmise, best liked) student for no reason. His talents as a master of Latin poetic style are clearly in evidence throughout his large output, not least his mastery of the Latin hexameter, and provide a further reason for his medieval popularity.

  For much the same reason, Venantius Fortunatus (d. ca. 600) also appears in the medieval canon. Writing mostly in elegiacs, Fortunatus’s large collection includes epithalamia, epitaphs, epigrams, hymns, and a life of St. Martin of Tours, the variety of which proved appealing to medieval readers. Yet Fortunatus suffered a medieval fate similar to that of Paulinus of Nola: Neither of them seems to have held onto their audiences to the end the Middle Ages. Neither writer appears in lists of canonical writers drawn up in the twelfth century, and no manuscripts of Fortunatus survive from later than the end of the eleventh century (Roberts 2009, p. 325; Stella 2003).

  Other voices from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries allow glimpses of an altered and/or expanded canon of late antique authors that developed in the High Middle Ages. Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogus super Auctores, written ca. 1130, offers a somewhat diminished list of writers and works that includes Sedulius, Juvencus, Prosper, Arator, and Prudentius, but omits Avitus, Venantius Fortunatus, Lactantius, and Paulinus of Nola (Curtius 1953, pp. 48–49). A century later, however, in his Laborintus, Eberhard the German (fl. ca. 1250) expands on Conrad’s list by including Sedulius, Arator, Prudentius, and Prosper as earlier canonists had, but adding to them Boethius, Claudian, Martianus Capella, Maximianus, and Sidonius Apollinaris.

  Boethius is a logical addition and the presence of the Consolation of Philosophy in Eberhard’s list confirms the importance of a work that was read widely both in and out of the classroom (see above). Claudian’s (d. ca. 405) presence, on the other hand, reveals a complex medieval reception involving two identities: Claudian minor, the author of the De raptu Proserpinae, and Claudian maior, the author of the other poems of his collection. Given that there are no known manuscripts of his panegyrics dating to the Carolingian period, they seem early on to have lost their medieval audience (Cameron 1970, pp. 419–420). Claudian’s other poems, however, seem to have had a greater popularity. A catalog from the court library at Aix that dates to the eighth century, for example, lists the De raptu Prosperinae but also the In Rufinum, In Eutropium, the De bello Gothico, and the De bello Gildonico, while a manuscript from the same century contains a gathering of the carmina minora (Cameron 1970, p. 420). Nor should it be forgotten that Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, composed in the twelfth century, is based on and reacts to the In Rufinum, a century in which Claudian’s words also regularly appear in florilegia (Cameron 1970, p. 423).

  Claudian’s most widely read poem in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly the De raptu Proserpinae, whose popularity can be measured, in addition to the copy of it at Aix, by the copies found also at Reichenau and St. Gall that date from the ninth century (Hall 1969, pp. 67–68). A resurgence of interest in the poem in the twelfth century eventually led to the writing of a commentary on it by Gaufrid of Vitry and, in the thirteenth, to its inclusion in the so‐called Disticha Catonis, a school reader (Hall 1969, p. 71).

  The popularity of Martianus Capella’s (fl. 420) Marriage of Philology and Mercury is proven by the several hundred extant manuscripts of the work and by the commentary tradition that grew up around it beginning in the ninth century (Winterbottom 1983, p. 245). Used widely as a textbook in North Africa, Italy, Gaul, and Spain before the Carolingian period, the work received a new lease on life in the ninth century, thanks mostly to scholars including John the Scot (d. 877), Martin of Laon (d. 875), and Remigius of Auxerre (d. 908) (Stahl, Johnson, and Burge 1971, p. 63). Martianus’s work comes into its own, however, in the twelfth century, owing to a newfound interest in cosmography, Platonism, and poetry that the allegorizing and mixed styles of the work naturally satisfied (Stahl, Johnson, and Burge 1971, pp. 55–71; Shanzer 1986).

  Given their often prurient topics, a surprising addition to Eberhard’s canon is the elegies of Maximianus (fl. sixth century). There can be no doubting the emphasis in the poet’s output on obscenity, but the attraction of these poems seems to have been owed to their rhetorical flourishes and especially to the ways in which the topos of old age is carefully crafted in them (Curtius 1953, p. 50). Ironically, Maximianus’s distichs were sometimes culled in order to provide aphorisms intended to promote chastity.

  On the other hand, Sidonius Apollinaris’s (d. 489) inclusion in Eberhard’s list seems not unusual (he is also included in Alexander of Neckham’s [d. 1217] gathering of preferred authors), for, along with Claudian, he was esteemed by the twelfth century as a model author. His popularity is proven by the number of manuscripts that preserve his large output (Gioanni 2014), and more than a few medieval writers praise or make use of his diction, drawing especially from the letters. John of Salisbury (d. 1180), for example, recommends Sidonius as an important author to study as does Rahewin of Freising (d. ca. 1170). Other medieval authors who recommend Sidonius and/or cite him in their works include Burchard of Worms (d. 1025), Peter Abelard (d. 1142), William of Malemesbury (d. ca. 1143), Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Peter of Cluny (d. 1156), and Gerald of Wales (d. ca. 1223) (Manitius 1911–1931, vol 3, p. 1149).

  But a canon tells us only so much. What of the many late antique authors whose works seemingly were not canonical in the Western Middle Ages? Ausonius (d. ca. 395) presents an intriguing omission. That he was not read in the schools is presumably owed to some combination of the difficulty of his large output, his more than obvious nonchalance toward Christian topics, and, perhaps, to the vagaries of the manuscript tradition that continue to plague his modern editors. His reputation in late antiquity was high, as evidenced by the many authors who allude to, quote from, or otherwise mention him (Green 1991, pp xxxii–xxxiii), but that reputation seems to have diminished in subsequent centuries.

  An accounting of the geographical origins of the medieval manuscripts recording Ausonius’s works suggests that he was still available to those who wished to read him: France, England, Germany, and Italy are represented (Green 1991, p. xxxiv). But the poet’s words appear infrequently in quotations or allusions in the works of others. The exceptions prove the rule. Reginald of Canterbury (d. ca. 1109) and Hariulf of Saint‐Riquier (d. 1143), for example, wrote an imitation of the Technopaegnion (Manitius 1911–1931, vol 3, p. 542; Green 1991, p. xxxv), while the prayer that forms the third part of the Ephemeris, sometimes called the Oratio, is echoed by medieval writers such as Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1028), Hildebert of Lavardin (d. 1133), and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200), perhaps with more ease given its overt Christian content and the fact that it circulated in the Middle Ages apart from the Ephemeris collection. Nor are Ausonius’s works found in medieval florilegia. A resuscitation of interest in Ausonius required a fresh set of reading eyes provided by the Renaissance.

  Ennodius (d. 521) fares less well in the Middle Ages than his student, Arator, yet his omission from the canon is deceptive. Perhaps his penchant for complicated phrasing and rhetorical excesses made his inclusion difficult; yet the 100‐plus manuscripts that record his work speak to an enduring presence, if not a vast acceptance (Gioanni 2004, p. 14). Ennodius earned a semblance of popularity in the twelfth century, however, with the rise of the study of the art of letter writing, the so‐called ars dictaminis, in which his letters, for all their excesses, proved acceptable models. To the appeal of their formal qualities can be added the attractions of the letters’ topics, which explains why they were extensively excerpted and quoted in moralizing and proverbial collections, not least for gatherings intended for monastic use (Gioanni 2004).

  Dracontius’s (d. ca. 505) large poetic output, which includes the De laudibus Dei, the Satisfactio, the Orestes, and a collection called the Romulea, was for the most part neglected in the Western Middle Ages. T
his is perhaps due to the classicizing topics of the Orestes and the Romulea and the personal nature of the the Satisfactio, in which Dracontius seeks from Gunthamund, the Vandal king, pardon for an offense. Only the De laudibus Dei was read widely in the Middle Ages, though not in its entirety. The poem comprises 2327 hexameters in three books, but the first book proved the most popular, owing to a recension made by Eugenius of Toledo in the seventh century that circulated separately in the Middle Ages under the title Hexaemeron (White 2000, p. 144).

  The rich tradition of historical writing produced in late antiquity was variously received in the Western Middle Ages. Arnobius’s (c. 310) Adversus nationes might be considered a work of history, but, perhaps owing to some of its author’s questionable theological views, there remains only one extant medieval manuscript, reflecting no doubt a restricted interest in the work. Much the same textual fate befell Ammianus Marcellinus (d. ca. 400), whose history of Rome survives in fragments in two manuscripts: a ninth‐century copy produced in Fulda and in fragments found in a separate codex from the same century (Reynolds 1983, p. 6). A contemporary of Ammianus, Eutropius’s (fl. ca. 375) Breviarium was much more widely read in the Western Middle Ages, in part owing to a directness of exposition and a simple Latinity that made it a natural for the classroom. It was read beyond the schoolroom, too, and its popularity is affirmed not least by the fact that it was updated by Paul the Deacon (d. 799) in the eighth century and again by Landolf Sagax (fl. ca. 975) in the tenth. It was also translated into Greek in Eutropius’s lifetime and again in the sixth century, a signal mark of its popularity and utility.