Juvencus introduced biblical epic in the early fourth century but only in the fifth, amid the changed circumstances brought by Germanic settlement and the diffusion of monastic piety, did his successors step forward. Five major works composed between the early fifth and the mid-sixth century exemplify the genre, its diversity and its history (Roberts 1985: 76-106; cf. Fontaine 1981: 245-64; Witke 1971: 145-232). Two of these works represented New Testament material: Sedulius’ Paschale Carmen (second quarter of the fifth century), which begins with a prefatory book glossing select Old Testament episodes before treating the Gospels in four more books, and Arator’s two-book Acts of the Apostles (or Historia Apostolica), recited at Rome in the spring of 544. The other three take up Old Testament episodes: the so-called Heptateuchos, attributed to Cyprianus (Gallus), dating (probably) to the early fifth century and reworking material from the first seven books of the Bible; the three-book Alethia of the rhetor Claudius Marius Victorius, composed at Marseilles in the second quarter of the fifth century and devoted to Genesis 1-19; and Avitus of Vienne’s late-fifth-century De spiritalis historiae gestis in five (short) books, recasting Genesis 1-9 and the Exodus from Egypt. Though distinct in theme, style, and proportion of exegetical intrusion, these works are united by their hexametrical re-presentation of Christian scripture and their self-conscious allusions to their epic forebears.
Stylistic enhancement, audience appeal, educational aims, and moral edification are explicitly cited by biblical epicists as reasons for composition. Sedulius, for example, recorded his desire to offer his discerning readers a Gospel story ‘‘honeyed-up with the charm of verse’’ (CSEL 10, p. 5: versuum... blandimento mellitum) while Claudius Marius Victorius announced his aim to shape young minds and hearts to the true path of virtue (Precatio 104-5). How these poets conceived of their activity and how they worked, transforming scriptural texts into hexameter poetry, has provoked discussion. Some scholars have emphasized the paraphrastic aspects of these literary projects. The skills of rhetorical paraphrase had long been a part of every educated person’s repertoire and continued to be taught in the schools of late antiquity. The paraphrast was expected to abbreviate, expand, or reorder his model, changing its form without adulterating its content, perhaps to clarify meaning but more often to add ornament to a balder text. Thus poetic paraphrase, beyond application of the rules of meter, entailed the use of figures and tropes, lexical variation, and stylistic amplification through, for example, ecphrases and digressions.
All of this has now been amply demonstrated (Roberts 1985). So, too, the correlative engagement of these poets with the poetry of the epic tradition. The late antique biblical epicists signaled their epic pretensions not only by choosing to narrategesta, by celebrating heroes, by invoking sources of divine inspiration, or by deploying metaphor and allegory, but also by frequent direct recall and creative imitation of their classical predecessors, Ovid, Lucan, and others, but especially Virgil. Sedulius’ Paschale Carmen is so replete with Virgilian allusions and echoes, his Christ rendered in such rich Virgilian hues, his theme so bound up with notions ofpietasand destiny, that it has been (almost) possible to think of the poem as an ‘‘Eneide chretienne’’ (Springer 1988: 76-95; van der Laan 1993). In a similar vein, Ovid’s treatment of creation at the beginning of the Metamorphoses offered the Christian poet Victorius both language for enhancing and a foil for highlighting the biblical version of creation (Roberts 2002). Avitus’ De spiritalis historiaegestis displays his control and manipulation of Lucan, Lucretius, Ovid, Statius, and Virgil (as well as Christian poets), while his Adam, Noah, and Moses typologically adumbrate a Christ who resonates both in harmony and dissonance with Virgil’s Aeneas (Arweiler 1999: 221-346; Hecquet-Noti 1999: 38-47, 65-73). In Arator’s mid-sixth-century Acts of the Apostles God as Christ is Lucan’s rector Olympi (1.37; Luc. BC 2.4, cf. Aen. 2.799); Peter and Paul are, like Virgil’s Bacchus and Ceres, the ‘‘lights of the world’’ (2.1219; Geo. 1.5-6); and nearly every episode is reconstructed on a substratum of classical as well as scriptural allusions (Schrader et al. 1987 with McKinlay’s apparatus).
It seems undeniable, then, that both the practice ofrhetorical paraphrase and the abiding allure of classical epic, as the highest form of poetic expression, influenced the self-understanding and work habits of the biblical epicists. Yet, at the same time, the formal claims of paraphrase and the weight of the epic legacy were neither serious breaks upon creativity nor impediments to individual interpretive designs (Roberts 1985: 161-218). Sedulius, for example, organizing his material in respect to his soteriological interests, privileged Christ’s miracles (1.26: clara salutiferi miracula Christi) over his speeches and parables. Avitus, concerned in his De spiritalis historiae gestis to explicate salvation history, took considerable liberty in typologically and allegorically recasting Old Testament episodes so that they spoke to contemporary theological and ecclesiological debates. In fact, the independence of mind often shown by the biblical epicists challenges the boundary between ‘‘paraphrase’’ (even in the most generous sense) and ‘‘originality.’’ Some scholars, therefore, prefer to locate the more immediate impulses towards the composition and form of the biblical epics in the example set by Juvencus and, especially, in the models and inspiration provided by contemporary scriptural exegesis and commentary in prose, which often included paraphrase (Springer 1988: 9-22; Hillier 1993; Nodes 1993).
Indeed, as scholars identify more closely the particular didactic and polemic agenda that animated the biblical epics, their status as thoughtful and original works on multiple levels becomes ever clearer. Sedulius’ animosity towards the heretical doctrines he associated with Sabellianism and Arianism, for example, fundamentally shaped his Gospel narrative and set the tone and terms of his amplifications and exegetical intrusions (Springer 1988: 33-70). Arator’s Historia Apostolica alternates passages of literal and mystical interpretation of the Book of Acts while affirming papal primacy in Byzantine Italy and offering its audience baptismal catechesis (Fontaine 1981: 260-4; Hillier 1993).
Avitus’ arrangement and interpretations of his material from Genesis and Exodus in his De spiritalis historiae gestis, a virtual study in sin and redemption, are deeply indebted to his reading of Augustine and, in turn, further promoted Augustinian views on original sin, grace, and baptism, whose rigor had been openly resisted in fifth-century Gaul (Nodes 1985, 1993: 55-73; Weaver 1996; Wood 2001).
Like Virgh or Lucan, then, the biblical epicists engaged with issues of the day in narratives about the past but their manifest didactic aims also push these works towards a category of exegetical epic or verse commentary. This didactic or epigrammatic quality, as much as any respect it commanded as literature, for example, ensured that Sedulius’ Paschale Carmen was widely read in the Middle Ages. But the development of biblical epic also reveals something about the evolution of ancient epic more generally (and the future of medieval epic). By the time Avitus of Vienne composed his De spiritalis historiae gestis in the late 490s he could call upon not only an astoundingly wide range of classical authors but also some two centuries of Christian literature and poetry, summoning Lactantius, Ambrose, and Augustine as well as Juvencus, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, Sedulius, Marius Victor, and Sidonius (see, e. g., Hecquet-Noti 1999: 323-7). A half-century later Arator’s Historia Apostolica, referencing Virgil, Lucan, and Statius while unearthing the baptismal symbolism ofActs, and performed before an appreciative audience in the basilica of S. Pietro in Vincoli, defies our categories. Biblical epic has established itself as a vital and organic mode of expression notable on its own terms, creatively overrunning the boundaries of scriptural exegesis and Christian doctrine, of classical epic and rhetoric, capable of fulfilling didactic as well as pleasurable ends (Witke 1971; Malsbary 1985).
World History
