Late Latin Christian epic, with the exception perhaps of Prudentius’ Psychomachia, remains one of antiquity’s better-kept secrets. Yet, Latin epics and epyllia, which virtually disappear from view in the second century, proliferated in later antiquity. Thereafter appeal and serviceability preserved their fortunes and encouraged imitation throughout (and beyond) the Middle Ages. Although some late antique epics, like Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae or the fifth-century epyllia of Dracontius (Bright 1987; Connor 1993; Chapter 39, by Barnes) creatively engaged with well-known mythological episodes, while others, like Claudian’s De bello Getico (‘‘The Gothic War’’) or Corippus’ sixth-century lohannis, restaged recent historical events (Cameron 1983), much of the Latin epic poetry surviving from the centuries separating Constantine (306-37) from Gregory the Great (590-604) more overtly proclaimed Christian content and aims. These latter efforts are the subject of this chapter, but even they, ranging from Juvencus’ early fourth-century Gospel epic to Venantius Fortunatus’ sixth-century Vita Martini, form a remarkably diverse lot. Such span and scope present interpretative challenges whose resolution must begin with recognition of the intimate connections between this poetry and the dynamic and occasionally confrontational times and circumstances in which they were composed.
The three centuries that followed Constantine’s conversion to Christianity witnessed the gradual eclipse of many old ways of thinking, the rise of new modes of political, social, and religious life, and a slow but commensurate re-forging of Roman identity around the tenets, precepts, and values of late ancient Christianity (Markus 1990). Initially the Christianization of society and the consolidation of religious authority within the institutions of an imperially sanctioned Church ran parallel to such phenomena as the decline of traditional civic cult, the evolution of an ideology of divine rulership, the expansion of the imperial bureaucracy, and the subtle renegotiation of the social hierarchy (MacMullen 1997; Garnsey and Humfress 2001; Swain and Edwards 2004). But eventually Roman rule in the West dissolved and a poet such as Venantius Fortunatus in sixth-century Gaul would find his patrons in the courts of Merovingian kings, the monasteries of their queens, and the churches of influential bishops (George 1992; Brown 2003). Inevitably, then, the epic poetry of this period, with its blend of Christian themes and classically derived forms, its manifold aesthetic and rhetorical aims, and its diverse audiences, must be viewed against this shifting background.
Similarly the literary qualities of the Christian epics cannot be isolated from trends more broadly evident in the artistic and intellectual history of the age. Poets, like architects, sculptors, and even philosophers, were all engaged to some extent in reconciling the legacy of the classical past with contemporary tastes and realities. Virgil, of course, remained the touchstone of late Latin poets, soundly seconded by Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius; but late Latin poetry is distinguished by innovation as well as imitation. The backward looking ‘‘neoclassicism’’ of much late Latin poetry, secular and Christian alike, lies in creative tension with a startling ‘‘neo-Alexandrian’’ mannerism (Charlet 1988). If late antique epicists echo and borrow from their classical predecessors, often adopting their ideology of imperial destiny as well as their rhetorical and literary principles, their works also reveal an accentuated taste for miniaturization and description, a preference for episodic structure at the expense of narrative flow, and a delight in sophisticated verbal patterning that yields dense textures of repetition and variation. Drawn to images of gems and flowers and to metaphors of color and light, for example, the late antique poet is, in Michael Roberts’ formulation, like a jeweler carefully setting individual words and phrases into endless arrangements of subtle variation (Roberts 1989). Though both the neoclassical and ‘‘baroque’’ qualities of this poetry have at times provoked charges of decadence and irrelevance, these features must rather be seen as the poetic expression of aesthetic values that also energize the sculptural program of the Arch of Constantine, late antique ivories, and sarcophagi (Cameron 2004).
So, too, the noteworthy generic realignments of this period of renaissance and reformation, of conservatism and Christianization, should be read as signs of cultural vitality. Literary genres are by nature unstable and late antiquity was a period of fertile mutations, especially in poetry’s melange desgenres (Fontaine 1975 and 1988). Thus readers who view late Latin epic from an early imperial perspective meet the unexpected as well as the familiar. Late antique epics still center their attention upon the gesta of‘‘heroes,’’ though these are now Christ, the patriarchs, apostles, and saints (or personified virtues). Moreover, they continue to employ such conventions as invocations, direct speech, epithets, and epic diction, preferring, for example, nuntius to angelus and styling God Tonans, the Thunderer. Yet, the boundaries that might distinguish epic fTom other discursive modes become increasingly blurry. In part, this is because poetic diction and style are now quite at home in such prose genres as historiography and panegyric. Yet at the same time epic also absorbs the proclivity of panegyric and, in the case of the Christian epics, hagiography, to subordinate narrative development to serialized tableaux and conventional scenes. Furthermore, the tendency of poets to sacrifice narrative thrust to episodic elaboration and exegetical commentary, especially in the case of the biblical epics, lends this poetry an epigrammatic feel as rhetorical and interpretive passages intrude more heavily upon the ‘‘story.’’ Late Latin epic, therefore, is the unruly heir not only of its classical forbears but also of such genres, often in their Christian guise, as the commentary and biography. One result of this hybridization is a taxonomic fluidity. Late Latin epics are routinely subcategorized, as they are below, but not always in the same manner (e. g., Kirsch 1989; Pollmann 2001a, 2001b). The following is a sample of Latin Christian epic and the reactions of its modern readers.
World History
