by Scott McGill
The acute awareness of textuality displayed by the centonists was one strand of a poetics focused on the intense, thoughtful manipulation of word and form (Charlet 1988). If figural poetry arose in the scholastic environment of Hellenistic Alexandria, its late antique apogee was intensely political. Optatianus dedicated 20 intricate poems to Constantine on the anniversary of his succession in 325/326 CE, in the hope that the emperor would repeal his exile. Optatianus’s ingenious acrostic and figural poems – in which meandering, often polymetric versus intexti trace shapes: a palm tree, an altar, a ship – carried the day (Squire 2017). Politics dance behind Fortunatus’s most involuted figural composition, whose cruciform versus intexti form an embedded second poem in support of Radegund’s efforts to secure a piece of the true cross (5.6). Fortunatus also saw fit to publish a poetic “failure,” a figural poem whose complexity trumped Fortunatus’s ability – or patience (2.5; cf. the quasihexameter acrostic for the fourth‐century Numidian banker L. Praecilius Fortunatus, CLE 512). At a time when poetry was predominantly sonic, sequential, and performative, figural poems gained their special currency from the private construction of visual meaning rooted in the multisequential reconfiguration of the minute building blocks of language into new forms.
Figural poems may be the most intricate manifestation of late antiquity’s intense interest in the making and remaking of literary texts, but the same spirit (and audience preference) animates a slew of poems that work within strict patterns of meter, syllable, and letter. Textual play was an important motif for the Vandal epigrammatist Eugenius and his compatriot Flavius Felix, whose 12 rectilinear hexameters embed not only an acrostic but a mesostich and telestich (AL 205 SB). Christians were especially invested in such acrostic play: Of 86 acrostic epitaphs, 13 are datable to the fourth century, of which all but one are Christian. The sarcophagus of Bassa preserves an exemplar of this type, in which an epitaph replaces one of the expected iconographic scenes (ICUR 5.14076). The acrostic, Bassae suae/Gaudentius, yokes the two hexametric columns: the first extolling Bassa’s virtues and her ascent to heaven; the second a consolation for Gaudentius in Bassa’s voice. The nun Taurina inscribed an epitaph for her four beloved aunts, in which the first letter of each competent hexameter line spells out the names of the deceased (CLE 1.748). In a lighter vein, we find echoing distichs (AL 25–68) in which the first half of the hexameter repeats at the end of the pentameter, as well as longer versus echoici by the Constantinian poet Pentadius on fortune, spring, and Narcissus (AL 259). The Latin Anthology also includes several serpentine couplets on Virgilian characters (AL 33, 36, 38, 47, 65). Ausonius composed a rhopalic prayer, in which the first word has one syllable, the second two, the third three, and so forth. Ausonius could compose simple epigrammatic riddles – for example, Technop. 13, which poses 15 questions and answers, each with a monosyllable at the end of the verse. But his Griphus on the number three, which began as a frivolity over dinner in Trier and was subsequently sent as an epistolary gift to Symmachus, is fiendishly obscure. Among more traditional riddlers of late antiquity, the best known is the fifth‐century poet Symphosius, whose 100 riddles, each in hexametric tercets, influenced the tradition of the Medieval Latin verse riddle.
Paraphrase was the most familiar form of textual manipulation. Although the mode had its origin in ethopoeia and school exercises, the urge to manipulate familiar texts continued into adulthood, manifestations of elite otium, in which poems known by heart were recast in amusing ways. There was a craft to condensing Virgilian Eclogues or books of the Georgics or Aeneid into tetrastichs, pentastichs, hexastichs, or single lines (AL 2, 2a SB; 591–602, 653‐654, 634 R, 653 R), in iteratively paraphrasing Virgil’s epitaph (AL 507–518 555–566 R), and in reworking a Virgilian kernel – whether in condensing Dido’s indictment of Aeneas (A. 4.365–387) into a tetrastich (Ennodius Dictio 28) or expanding her speech to 150 lines with a helping of Ovid’s Heroides (AL 71 SB), or in mashing up similar passages to destabilize the image of the Virgilian hero (AL 214). Virgil was by far the most popular source and field for paraphrastic literary play. But other prestigious texts could so serve. The 89‐hexameter Verba Achillis in Parthenone (AL 189 SB) draws on Statius for an ethopoeia in which Achilles justifies his decision to reject his feminine disguise on Scyros only to be confronted by an anonymous interlocutor who questions whether his glory is worth Thetis’s grief. The 106 epigrams of Prosper of Aquitaine, which paraphrase the teachings of Augustine in simple verse, reveal a different kind of textual manipulation, directed not toward sacred texts but toward Christian education.
Letters of the alphabet provided a ready‐made structure for text‐focused poets and readers. Some of these are explicitly playful, such as Ausonius’s Epigr. 85, in which initial letters of Greek names spell out a lewd act, or the work of the anonymous seventh‐century Scottish poet who fancied hexameter riddles on the letters of the alphabet. But Christian hymnody, doubtless inspired by the Psalms, routinely favored alphabetic composition. An alphabetic acrostic spans the 24 strophe Maiden Song in loose, nonclassical iambs that the early fourth‐century Greek martyr Methodius appended to the end of his prose On Virginity. Augustine’s rare foray into verse also took the form of a plain‐spoken abecedarius, a “Psalm” against the Donatists that employs the end‐rhymed triads found in Semitic poetry (Bastiaensen 2007). A generation after Augustine, Sedulius brought the abecedarius into the fold of classical prosody with a celebrated hymn in iambic dimeters.
Ausonius had composed his pornographic cento as part of a playful, private literary competition with the emperor Valentinian. But many late antique poets were called to compose and perform public poetry for (and against) figures at the center of temporal and ecclesiastical power, often on a tight schedule. In the autumn of 399, Claudian stood before the grandees of the imperial court in Milan, set to renew his assault on his patron’s nemesis, Eutropius, in 602 savage hexameters. But recently news had arrived that the eunuch consul had been sacked. Thus Claudian used his elegiac preface to reframe his attack on the “unmanned tyrant” (2 pr. Eutr. 21) into a broader critique of the East’s inability to rule itself. Many public performances were more strictly celebratory. In 544 Arator recited his two‐book paraphrase of Acts in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli before an audience that included Pope Vigilius. Paulus Silentarius regaled the elite of Constantinople with his 887‐hexameter description of Hagia Sophia and a 275‐hexameter account of its singer’s pulpit during the reconsecration ceremony on 6 January 563. Such occasional poems, rooted in spectacular public ceremonies, created an audience in their moment and became a vehicle for the propagation of individual and collective memory.
Occasional poetry enabled successful poets to acquire wealth and other forms of social capital. Ausonius, the son of a country doctor, rode his intellectual talents to chairs of grammar and rhetoric in Bordeaux and from there to the imperial court and eventually the consulship (379 CE). The rivalrous cities of the East created a ready market for ambitious, professional poets – many from the thriving, literary communities of Upper Egypt – who traveled the eastern Mediterranean composing and performing learned accounts of cities, encomia for and invectives against local dignitaries, epithalamia for high officials, grander martial epics for victorious generals, and other occasional modes of poetry. Most of the “wandering poets” who plied their literary trade in the fourth and fifth centuries – Helladius of Antinupolis, Hermesias, Horapolon, Andronicus – are mere names to us: Their poems, which drew on the intense interest in local antiquities during this period, only rarely won readers outside the honored city.
The paltry remains of Greek occasional poems belie their abundance, reach, and importance, as poetry often served a practical purpose in the later empire. Since these poems are almost entirely lost, the literary scene must be reconstructed from passing references, the odd quotation, and later encyclopedic mentions. Epistolary collections offer a particularly insightful view of contemporary literary networks. When Libanius’
s friend Heraclianus seeks a recommendation, he suggests that Diphilus will sing his praises – for a price. Libanius warns another friend that Dorotheus will praise those who pay and lampoon those who don’t (Ep. 1517). Palladas inveighs against his rivals who work for pay (AP 11.291). But poets did not shy from saying that their Muse was for sale. Corippus mentions his salary in the preface to his encomium of Justin II. Diodorus of Aphrodito ends his encomium for John with a direct appeal for payment! But the best of these poets did not go begging for scraps from their patrons’ tables. John the Lydian was paid the going rate of one solidus per line for a panegyric on the praetorian prefect Zoticus. One assumes the emperor paid better. Victors of poetic competitions in Oxyrhynchus were granted exemption from taxes. Claudian and Pamprepius won brides in prominent and wealthy families. While some received rewards for specific poems – Icarius was appointed comes Orientis after delivering a panegyric to Theodosius – others leveraged their poetic service into political connections that led to wealth, titles (Claudian, Dioscorus), and even positions at court (Corippus), ambassadorships (Olympiodorus), and a place in the upper echelons of politics. Risks attended on fame and fortune. Cyrus of Panopolis leveraged the favor of Eudocia, the highly literate wife of Theodosius II, to the city and praetorian prefectures and, thence, the consulship in 441, only to be exiled by the jealous emperor.
This vibrant market attracted literary talent from the West. Corippus, after the success of his Iohannis (an eight‐book hexametric account of the Byzantine war against the Berbers), traveled to Constantinople, where he performed his Latin panegyric for Anastasius and Justin II (In laudem Iustini). Although the smaller market and Latinity of the less urbanized West limited the opportunities for Greek poets, a few did make the jump. Eunapius mentions a certain Eusebius, whose poetry was suited to flattering Roman aristocrats (Athenians had found him bothersome [VS 493]). The most successful of these wandering poets was Claudian, an Alexandrian who traveled to Italy ca. 395 CE. His reputation must have preceded him. His first commission was to commemorate the dual consulships of two scions of the powerful Anici family. First before the aristocrats of Rome and, then, before the courtiers of Milan, Claudian pioneered a new hybrid form of epicizing panegyric that fused the goals of encomium with the narrative integrity of epic (Ware 2012). Nearly all of Claudian’s occasional verse praised the child emperor Honorius or his regent, Stilicho – or attacked their rivals in the East. While Claudian wove a stable of imagery, personifications, and tropes into a coherent representation of the imperial court for an elite audience in the West, Constantinople doubtless waged its own poetic war. Eusebius Scholasticus and Ammonius wrote epics on the revolt of Gainas, who had been Stilicho’s proxy. Theotius composed verse panegyrics for Anthemius, the successor of Claudian’s reviled Eutropius, and Synesius of Cyrene observes that he was only one of many poets to support Anthemius’s successor, Aurelian.
Claudian’s example was much imitated in the following century. The Spanish poet and general Merobaudes won a statue in the Forum of Trajan for his praise of Aetius, the Stilicho‐figure at the court of Valentinian III. Merobaudes’s work survives only in a tattered palimpsest, but his adherence to the thematic and stylistic path set by Claudian is unmistakable. Like Claudian, he also composed minor poems for Aetius and his circle: ekphrastic epigrams (e.g. of imperial mosaics) and birthday and baptismal poems, including one in hendecasyllables for Aetius’s son. A generation later Sidonius Apollinaris continued the project of large and small poems devoted to political patrons and friends, although without Claudian’s luck: The objects of Sidonius’s praise – Anthemius, Majorian, Avitus – quickly fell. In addition to his eight panegyrics and 16 other significant poems, many smaller works are embedded within his letters. Well into the early sixth century poets continued to mix encomiastic and minor verse. Florentinus composed a brief eulogy for the Vandal king Thrasamund (d. 523) as well as mythological, erotic, satirical, and protreptic poems. Priscian joined two Greek authors, the poet Christodorus of Coptus and the orator Procopius of Gaza, in praising Anastasius’s campaigns against the Isaurians.
Claudian’s innovations also spurred the popularity of encomiastic wedding song. Thirteen (of 17 extant) epithalamia date from late antiquity, many by the period’s best‐known poets. In 398 Claudian had been tasked with securing public support for the marriage of the child emperor Honorius to Maria, the young daughter of his regent, Stilicho. Four lyric fescennine poems mingle praise of Stilicho with modest descriptions of conjugal sex. But it was Claudian’s epithalamium – 341 hexameters prefaced by 11 elegiac couplets – that established a new template for late antique wedding song. Drawing from Statius’s epithalamium for his friend Stella (Silv. 1.2), which augmented the style of the genre by bringing the mythological and human worlds into dialogue in sensuous praise of the newlyweds, Claudian turned his praise toward the families of the newlyweds and his patron (see also, carm. min. 25; app. 5). Although most late antique epithalamia reveal a mutual debt to Statius and Claudian, the occasional nature of the poems also yields important differences of tone, style, and purpose. Sidonius’s two epithalamia are devoted almost entirely to ekphrases set in the divine world with short codas devoted to the wedding. Luxorius leveraged Ausonius’s saucy praise of Gratian and Constantia for his centonic epithalamium for Frigus (perhaps the Fridamal addressed in two of his epigrams [AL 299–300 SB]). Dracontius composed two epithalamia after his imprisonment by King Gunthamund (Rom. 6–7). Fortunatus uncharacteristically incorporates a mythological apparatus in a lengthy epithalamium for Sigibert and Brunhild (6.1), illustrating how fixed and durable the expectations for the genre had become.
Composing epithalamia for devout Christians required further modifications. When Julian wed Titia, Paulinus of Nola, himself an ascetic convert to Christianity, rejected the genre’s mythological trappings (carm. 25.9–10) and converted personal encomium into a protreptic for a virtuous “chaste partnership” (191). Echoes of Paulinus’s poem appear in an early fifth‐century Gallic poem, the Carmen ad uxorem, in which a husband urges his wife to follow him in his devotion to a chaste marriage. In this fascinating poem, the author displays a deep knowledge of Christian and secular literature, as the 16‐verse opening in anacreontics that recalls Claudian’s fescennines leads to elegiac praise of the inner harmony of chaste marriage as a shield against the socioeconomic chaos of post‐invasion Gaul. Polymetry also plays a strategic role in Ennodius’s epithalamium for Maximus (388 V). Ennodius, while recognizing the higher virtue of chastity, had to encourage a reluctant Maximus to embrace the conjugal duties of his terrestrial marriage. Thus an opening invocation of spring’s bounty in elegiacs (cf. Gregory of Nazianzus) evolves into an invocation of the Muses (trochees), the appearance of Venus (appropriate Sapphics), and a call to action by her unnamed son (suitably protreptic hexameters; on late antique polymetry, see Consolino 2017). In the end Venus will claim her due, but only because the natural order and Ennodius’s good‐natured audience demand it (hendecasyllables). A different sort of wedding work deserves passing mention: the nine‐book, prosimetric allegory “On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury” by Martianus Cappella. In between the opening elegiac hymn to Hymnaeus that fuses the epithalamic with the philosophic and his concluding iambic lament that old age has attenuated his Muse, Martianus interlaces dense, metaphorical poetry into his Menippean encyclopedia.
The most enduring form of late antique encomiastic poetry is Christian hymn. The simple, engaging iambic dimeters set in four‐line stanzas that Ambrose composed to entertain the crowd during the occupation of Milan’s Arian church in 386 set the standard for subsequent Latin hymns. But Latin hymnody had its birth a generation before when Hilary of Poitiers, inspired by liturgical song during his banishment in the East, composed anti‐Arian hymns in classical forms. By late antiquity, Greek liturgical song had a long tradition that had emerged from the conventions of Semitic verse. Latin authors, in contrast, repurposed classical modes and meters (although we al
so encounter hymns in free psalmic prose by Marius Victorinus, Augustine, and the fourth‐century Psalmus Reponsorius). The Ambrosian tradition was advanced by notable authors like Sedulius, Ennodius, and especially Fortunatus, whose trochaic Pange lingua and iambic Vexilla regis continue to be sung during Holy Week. Latin hymnody in this mode flourished for centuries, long after other classicizing forms evanesced. In contrast, the withering of pagan festivals diminished and then occulted the need for traditional hymns, although Orphic and Neoplatonic hymns continued to be composed in the fifth century.
Many antique poets during this period composed in multiple genres, cultivating a literary eclecticism and appealing to divergent audiences. In the East Agathias (d. 582) is best known for the roughly 100 spirited, elegant epigrams that he published together in a Cycle of contemporary poets; it would become one of the building blocks of the Greek Anthology. Agathias also continued Procopius’s history (in prose) and composed a collection of erotic myths, the Daphniaca, in nine hexametric books (now lost). A similar eclecticism prevails among his contemporaries. Epigrams in Nonnian style by Christodorus of Coptus, describing 80 statues in Zeuxippus’s gymnasium, survive. Christodorus also composed patria, historical epic, and hexameter poems on the disciples of the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus. Although most of Claudian’s near 10 000 lines support the political program of Stilicho and Honorius, he began mythological epics on the gigantomachy and the abduction of Proserpina, and composed more than 50 short poems on a diverse range of subjects, including exotic animals, sexual deviants, literary criticism, friendship, scenic vistas, statues, Christ, tourist traps, royal gifts, scientific curiosities, and more (we also find a few poems in Greek by Claudian and spurious poems by less accomplished poets). Even more varied in scale and genre are the compositions by Ausonius. Alongside prose works – prefaces to poetic works, a panegyric for Gratian, and letters to friends, including Paulinus of Nola – we find commemoratory works for his family (Parentalia) and his predecessors in Bordeaux (Professores); an epigrammatic cycle for a comely German slave (Bissula); strange works like the Cupido cruciatus (a lengthy description of a painting); scholastic works on the calendar, myth, geography, and the most difficult questions a teacher could face; translations from Greek; a smattering of Christian poems (e.g. the Versus Paschales); and his longest work, the Mosella, an encomiastic description of the idyllic, florid Gallic river in 483 “divine” hexameters (according to Symmachus in a letter to the poet). Although the majority of his poems were composed in hexameters and elegiacs, Ausonius was equally dexterous in lyric meters: His Ephemeris, an account of the bureaucrat’s day, uses different meters for each of the day’s different tasks. Through Ausonius’s many poems there emerges a detailed picture of his career, town, teachers, students, friends, frenemies, and family – his wife was a poet too and wove her poems into tapestries (Epigr. 27–29).