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Note
* M.W. is grateful to Gianfranco Agosti for corrections and additional bibliography. She regrets that it has not been possible to take systematic account of bibliography published after 2015.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Epigrams, Occasional Poetry, and Poetic Games
Bret Mulligan
We have cultivated a healthy skepticism toward talk of cultural renaissance and rejuvenation, terms that often reveal more about the vagaries of cultural transmission and the aesthetic priorities of the critic than about the reality of a past culture glimpsed through that ever‐hazy distant mirror. Yet when one surveys the breadth, multiplicity, and richness of poetic composition in late antiquity, one is hard pressed to resist those old categories. Greek and Latin, high and low, Christian and secular, reactionary and revolutionary, center and periphery, in East and West, on stone and vellum – wherever one casts the eye, one spies poetry. A surge of creative interest and poetic capacity began in the early decades of the fourth century; crested in the first half of the fifth, and then ebbed until, by the mid‐seventh century, this moment had passed and something else had emerged. Here we will survey the broad vistas of short‐form poems, minor poetic genres, and occasional verse produced during later antiquity. Many of these are little poems about little things – artwork in baths, an epitaph for a pet bird, a silver dish. But small or minor need not make mean or trite: These were also significant works inscribed on monumental architecture and works of greater or lesser scale delivered to the temporal and spiritual masters of the world with keen purpose and real consequence. By necessity, our approach will be p
anoptic, and we will not spare a favorite device of late antique verse: the list. Strict chronology and the linguistic divide will often be deprioritized, not because these are unimportant (and indeed others have begun to tell these tales, e.g. Dihle 1994) but because it is better here to seek connections and commonalities, as there is so very much to discover.
The Oxford Classical Dictionary would once say of late antique epigram that “to know their models is to despise them” (s.v. “Epigram”). But scholars in recent decades have exposed the crafty methods by which late antique poets selected, fragmented, epitomized, redacted, and supplanted prestigious texts. Nowhere is this clearer than with the cento (“patchwork”), in which phrases and whole lines extracted from Homer or Virgil were recombined into a new narrative whole (McGill 2005). Some centos aimed to delight. In the Cento nuptialis, Ausonius notoriously repurposed Virgil into a lurid account of a wedding night. Other centos possessed didactic purpose, refashioning secular texts in service of Christian truth. Pomponius’s Versus ad Gratiam Domini (early fifth century) draws on Virgilian phrases to Christianize Eclogue 1: This Tityrus is saved by the Christian God rather than by Octavian (cf. Endelechius’s Christian fantasy on Ecl. 1)! Jerome grumpily dismissed centos as “childish and like the scams of charlatans” (Epist. 53.7). But Faltonia Betitia Proba’s 694‐line mix of Old and New Testament stories was an instant hit in the mid‐fourth century. In the early sixteenth century it was still in the curriculum, alongside Juvencus, Lactantius, Prudentius, and Sedulius. The longest extant cento was composed in Greek by the Empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II. Her cento, which she claims was begun by another, is a biblical history from Genesis to the time of Christ, in 2344 Homeric lines. Centos could also serve the occasion. Eudocia was said to have included a centonic passage in her encomium of Antioch. Centos, although born from epic, could be miniaturized, as in a nine‐verse Christian epitaph from Anatolia or the Greek epigrams on Hero and Leander (AP 9.381) and Echo (9.832). Such texts demand that they be approached analytically, fragmented through the act of commentary, as their contextual implications are decoded as part of the reinterpretation of traditional texts and genres. They are quintessentially metaliterary works that draw attention to themselves as textual, written, and (re‐)written objects (Formisano 2007).