Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry

Prof. Philip Hardie

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520968424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

After centuries of near silence, Latin poetry underwent a renaissance in the late fourth and fifth centuries CE evidenced in the works ofkey figures such as Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola. This period of resurgence markeda milestone in the reception of the classics of late Republican and early imperial poetry. In Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry, Philip Hardie explores the ways in which poets writing on non-Christian and Christian subjects used the classical traditions of Latin poetry to constructtheir relationship with Rome's imperial past and present, and with the by now not-so-new belief system of the state religion, Christianity. The book pays particular attention to the themes of concord and discord, the "cosmic sense" of late antiquity, novelty and renouatio, paradox and miracle, and allegory. It is also a contribution to the ongoing discussion of whether there is an identifiably late antique poetics and a late antique practice of intertextuality. Not since Michael Robert's classic The Jeweled Style has a single book had so much to teach about the enduring power of Latin poetry in late antiquity.

1

Farewells and Returns

Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola

In A.D. 389 the wealthy senatorial Gallo-Roman landowner, and former consul, Meropius Pontius Paulinus left Gaul to live on his wife Therasia’s estates in Spain. On Christmas Day 394 Paulinus was ordained a priest in Barcelona and sold off his and his wife’s properties. In the following year he and Therasia moved from Spain to Campania, to the shrine of St. Felix in Cimitile, the necropolis of Nola. Here Paulinus (the future Saint Paulinus of Nola) spent the rest of his life, embellishing the shrine, developing the pilgrimage cult of the saint, and engaging in correspondence with leading figures in the late fourth- and early fifth-century church.

Between Paulinus’s departure to Spain and his ordination as a priest he continued a correspondence with his friend and former teacher Decimus Magnus Ausonius, forty years his senior. Ausonius was another leading Gallo-Roman grandee, a one-time consul, and a professor of grammar and rhetoric in Bordeaux who had been tutor to the future emperor Gratian. Ausonius is the author of a substantial surviving corpus of poetry, on a range of subjects, in which he self-consciously displays his learning and draws on the wealth of the classical tradition of Latin and Greek poetry. There survive four earlier letters to Paulinus, in a mixture of prose and verse, fragments of what will have been a more extensive series of exchanges between the two men, friendly but competitive performances of an elite late antique literary culture.¹ In one letter (Ep. 17 Green), for example, Ausonius registers his reactions to Paulinus’s versification of Suetonius’s lost work On Kings, and in another (Ep. 19) he thanks Paulinus for the gift of some gourmet fish sauce, acknowledges a poem sent for comment, and reciprocates with some playful iambics, dispatched as an earnest of some weightier heroic hexameters to follow.² The attention to form is typical of Ausonius’s poetic production as a whole, symptomatic of what is often seen as a late antique playfulness or worse—what Antonio La Penna, in a particularly jaundiced view, once labeled the “reign of futility” of post-Antonine Latin poetry.³

Very different, or so it would seem, are the verse letters exchanged between the two men in the early 390s A.D.⁴ Ausonius, in his three surviving letters (in hexameters), accuses Paulinus of neglecting the duties (officia) of friendship, of being forgetful, of lacking pietas, and of casting off the yoke (iugum) that had previously joined the figurative “father” and “son” in their shared life of a literary and cultural amicitia (friendship). Ausonius calls on Paulinus to return, return to the Muses and return to be with Ausonius in Aquitaine. Paulinus, in his two letters in response (in a variety of meters—elegiac, iambic, hexameter), rebuts the charges of forgetfulness and impietas, but is unbending in his dedication to his new life in Christ, in a more dedicated and austere practice of his Christianity. He rejects the Muses and Apollo, inspired as he now is by a greater god. He now has his heart set on a new, celestial, fatherland, and is absorbed with thoughts not of a journey to his native Bordeaux, but of the posthumous journey of his soul to the Christian heaven.

Paulinus’s renunciation of his wealthy lifestyle and his self-devotion to the service of Saint Felix represent a famous episode in what could be seen as a clash of cultures in late antiquity.⁵ Paulinus’s postconversion poetic correspondence with Ausonius has enjoyed a privileged status in scholarship on both Ausonius and Paulinus. It has every appearance of being an iconic moment in the history of the encounter of an uncompromising Christianity with the culture and values of classical antiquity. Furthermore, the two letters of Paulinus are, in the words of Catherine Conybeare, “one of the first extant literary accounts of personal conversion.”⁶ The correspondence is not, however, a record of a late antique clash between paganism and Christianity.⁷ There is no doubt that Ausonius was a Christian. If he was not, he would hardly have fooled Paulinus with an opportunistic prayer to God the Father and God the Son for his friend’s return in the last of his surviving letters to Paulinus (Ep. 24.104–6 Green). Paulinus would also have seen through Ausonius’s insertion of a crowded village church into his painting of an Aquitanian locus amoenus to which he hoped to lure back Paulinus (Ep. 24.86 Green).

Admittedly that is the only instance of the word ecclesia in Ausonius’s oeuvre. But what we are dealing with is a matter of cultural rather than ideological or theological choice, a self-conscious practice of literature within a classical tradition. This may also be true of other poets of the late fourth and early fifth centuries: the jury is still out in the case of Claudian, who, as successful panegyrist of Christian emperors, it is hard to believe was a committed anti-Christian; and the discovery of a new fragment of Rutilius Namatianus’s On His Return (a eulogy of the patrician Constantius, a devout Christian) has shaken the widely held view that he at least was unambiguously a pagan.⁸ The distinction in this respect between the poetry of Ausonius and of (postconversion) Paulinus is that between works written entirely, or almost entirely, within a pre-Christian classical tradition, works that are often self-consciously classicizing, in short what may be labeled “classical”—or “traditional”—poetry,⁹ and works on explicitly Christian themes, or, in short, “Christian poetry.” This is a distinction that may be generalized to much of the poetry that will concern me in this book. Many of the texts in the category of “Christian poetry” are explicit in their attacks on, or criticism of, pagan religion and pagan culture and literature. At the same time almost all of this body of poetry is deeply embedded within the non-Christian traditions of ancient literature; criticism of pagan culture is often constructed as imitation through opposition, or Kontrastimitation, of a kind that may be difficult to distinguish from the emulative and agonistic practices of pre-Christian poetry.¹⁰ Conversely, the question may be raised as to whether “traditional poetry” is open to the occasional inclusion of Christian subject-matter, or, more generally, shows the imprint of Christian patterns of thought or imagery.

The exchange of letters between Ausonius and Paulinus performs the self-positionings of their authors as they seek respectively to reinforce an identity as a cultivated man of letters, in the case of Ausonius, and, in the case of Paulinus, to set a distance between that identity, as previously performed in correspondence in prose and verse with Ausonius on literary and worldly matters, and a new self-definition.¹¹ In this chapter I will deploy a selective close reading of these letters with the aim of bringing out some of the larger issues and questions that will occupy me in this book. I will be attentive to both continuity and contrast. This is a dichotomy that is strategically built into Paulinus’s replies to Ausonius’s letters, as he attempts to give reassurances that the two men are as close friends as ever they were, at the same time as he reinforces his decision to draw a clear line between his former way of life and his new life in Christ. In the wider perspective, how different and how similar are the traditional poetry and the Christian poetry of late antiquity?

At the beginning of Epistle 21 Ausonius appeals to the notions of officium, “duty,” and pietas, untranslatable but meaning something like “dutiful respect,” in order to prompt Paulinus into a reply: “But no page repays my pious dutifulness” (21.3 officium sed nulla pium mihi pagina reddit). Ausonius returns to the charge of impietas at the end of the letter: “Who then has persuaded you to keep silent so long? May that impious person not be able to make any use of their voice” (62–63 quis tamen iste tibi tam longa silentia suasit? | impius ut nullos hic uocem uertat in usus).¹² These are traditional values of amicitia, “friendship,” in the Roman world; Ausonius has particularly in mind Ovid’s appeals to them in the complaints of his exilic poetry.¹³ They are terms that undergo a transvaluation in Paulinus’s new world, where secular friendship is replaced by a spiritalis amicitia, a spiritual friendship between humans that is based on a transcendent love of Christ, caritas Christi.¹⁴ This final, transcendental, transformation of the ideal of amicitia awaits the conclusion of Paulinus’s second letter (Poem 11). In the meantime, he will answer the charge of impietas by appealing to a different set of values. By definition, he says, to be a Christian is to be pious, and therefore Ausonius’s charge must drop away: “How can piety be lacking in a Christian? Being a Christian is the reciprocal guarantee of piety, and the mark of an impious man is to be not subject to Christ” (Poem 10.85–88 pietas abesse christiano qui potest? | namque argumentum mutuum est | pietatis esse christianum, et impii | non esse Christo subditum).¹⁵ Therefore it is God’s will that Paulinus should show pietas toward ...