Conclusiones

In Claudian’s short epics – historical like the De bello Gildonico or mythological like the unfinished De raptu Proserpinae (late IV century) - the narrative momentum typical of the classical epics is outweighed by elaborate imagery, finely intricate ekphrastic passages, and set speeches shining with an abundance of rhetorical devices.⁶² Despite the lack of profundity attributed to Claudian, his shift of focus from action to speech, and from broad frescoes to miniature descriptions – raised the issue of the nature of epic itself: Does it need a strong narrative apparatus? To what extent can it subsume or mix with other genres without losing its generic identity and its affiliation with the tradition begun with Homer?

Though with different responses, the same questions underlie the revision of the epic code attempted by early Christian poets. Some of them entered the canon of medieval school education (e.g., Sedulius’ Paschale carmen and Juvencus’ Evangeliorum libri quattuor), though they were always held to be inferior, in literary and pedagogical terms, to classical auctores; in medieval curricula, the reading of Biblical epics came at earlier stage than that of Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Pharsalia, and Thebaid, the style and language of which was deemed more appropriate for advanced students.⁶³ Independently from its literary achievement, this Christianization of the epic tradition rooted in a pagan world raised once again a question that had driven the evolution of Western epic since its inception: how to bring a new intention into a tradition? How to employ forms and modes consolidated in the past in another context? How to express a new content, and how to

62 On Claudian’s style, see Barnes, 543-546. On the revival of miniature epic in late antiquity, see Toohey, Reading Epic, 212-215.

63 For an overview of early Christian epics see Trout, “Latin Christian Epics,” and Putter, “Prudentius.”

negotiate a relationship with the past so that a sense of continuity is kept even after the establishment of a most radical difference (the Christ-event)?

As argued by Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis, Christian Scripture was the example of a discourse hardly compatible, in ethics and structure, with the classical modes of representing reality;⁶⁴ with the Bible as a supreme alternative model, why should Christian poets try to articulate Christian matters through the forms and topoi of Virgilian epic? To be sure, the greater literary prestige of the Roman canon made a case for this hybridizing program, by which Biblical epicists had to dress Christian truth and history in literary clothes of the highest rank, no matter if that contradicted the purpose of sermo humilis. Another motivation, more profound and long-lasting, was the awareness that the reality of Christianity as a total experience, both individual and collective, might be adequately articulated through the secular code of that generic tradition which more than any other tried to articulate the totality of human experience (as did the Bible, in sacred terms) and the force of beginnings (as did the conversio to a new life made possible by Christ). A third reason had to do with the need to establish a continuity: the connection in form between the pagan and the Christian could entail a connection in history. The achievements of non-Christian culture were too important to be discarded; hence Christianity had to find ways in which the legacy of the past could be maintained and yet converted, so to speak, in the language of Christian truth. To use the epic code to rewrite episodes from the Bible from the lives of saints implied that, in Christian totality, room

64 Auerbach, Mimesis, 3-23. A passage from the Odyssey serves as a foil to the prophetic sermo humilis of the Scripture.

could be made for the history and culture of classical antiquity. Moreover, we must not forget that the Christian conversio of epic can also be associated with the dynamics of succession that characterized the Roman epic.⁶⁵Such questions will trouble the Middle Ages and reach the age of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, who further revised the relation between Christian and classical pagan culture. The Christian epics of late antiquity were naïve in their ways of negotiating the terms of such a complex cultural translatio (for instance by often reducing epic grandeur to a shallow bombastic style), and yet they show to what extent the epic code could evolve through variation in order to articulate a different epic matrix.⁶⁶

Variation, as already said, characterized Christian epics along lines of development already at work in non-Christian literature. At a micro-textual level, the key features were

“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”; at a macro-textual level, the incorporation and blurring of genres such as historiography, panegyric, hagiography, and commentary.⁶⁷ Another seminal feature is that Christian authors wrote exegetical epics or

65On which see Hardie, The Epic Successors.

66 See for example Lactantius’ foundational hermeneutic move in Divinae institutiones, I.5., where he discusses to what extent pagan poets and philosophers could be used to prove the truth of Christianity. They did not possess the truth, but nonetheless were exposed to truth: “ex his unum deum probemus necesse est, non quod illi habuerint cognitam ueritatem, sed quod ueritatis ipsius tanta uis est, ut nemo possit esse tam caecus, quin uideat ingerentem se oculis diuinam claritatem.” Poets sung of pagan gods, but some among them acknowledged that all things are governed by “spiritu uel mente una,” and that one god was

“fabricatorem mundi.” Orpheus, Virgil, and Ovid are the three poets that Lactantius mentioned as naturally driven toward the truth of Christian doctrine: “quodsi uel Orpheus uel hi nostri [Virgil and Ovid] quae natura ducente senserunt in perpetuum defendissent, eandem quam nos sequimur doctrinam conprehensa ueritate tenuissent,” Thus Lactantius articulated the notion that one truth can be understood and expressed in different modes and from different cultural premises.

67 Trout, “Latin Christian Epics,” 551.

verse commentaries, which explicitly took a primary text (the Scripture) as the layer on which they would compose a secondary text. What might appear as a derivative approach, reveals a practical knowledge of one of the most salient characteristics of epic: its multi-layered structure, where fabula and commentary, primary and secondary writing, interact in the construction of meaning.

In this context, Prudentius stands out with his Psychomachia, an hexametrical brief poem (915 lines) written between late IV and early V century, which does away with the fabulae or historiae of classical epic and narrates, instead, an allegorical war between Christian virtues and pagan vices. This shift in the nature of epic narrative, for two reasons:

first, it established a model for medieval allegorical poems, showing that the epic code was not limited to the examples of the auctores; second, it proved that epic individuation could be articulated directly within man’s soul, in which the totality of our experience must ultimately be subsumed. The human soul is the real, dominant stage of the epic, as is claimed by the very title of Prudentius’ poem, which means “battle of the soul”: external wars, like the ones narrated by Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius, are a reflection or derivation of the primal war waged in the souls of each and all of us. It is as if there were no longer heroes who were exceptional by origin, rank, or destiny; every human being constitutes the ideal site for the Psychomachia - this turn is implied by the absence of traditional male heroes, while the personifications of virtues fighting against their opposite

vices are female figures only, though they are not gendered along the lines of male/female dichotomies).⁶⁸

Allegorization goes hand in hand with the internalization of the epic. Such shift both broadens the range of possibilities of the epic code and reconfigures the code itself around a new center. Prudentius highlights the historical and literary novelty of this transformation in the progression from the 68-line proem to the narrative proper. The proem begins with a praise of Abraham, who counseled humankind to battle against pagan tribes with a fight sustained by the spiritus bellicosus of our hearts. The passage envisaged is from external to an internal war.

pugnare nosmet cum profanis gentibus suasit, suumque suasor exemplum dedit, nec ante prolem coniugalem gignere deo placentem, matre virtute editam, quam strage multa bellicosus spiritus

portenta cordis servientis vicerit. (Psych., praefatio, 9-14)

For 30 more lines, Prudentius goes on by narrating Abraham’s liberation of his nephew Lot as if it were a military expedition, with the language and style of martial epic. Once it is clear that the poet knows only too well his classical models, the text takes a different path:

Abraham’s biographical sketch ends in fact with a double departure from war narrative:

first, in lines 45-49, old Sara conceives a child and rejoices at that; then, until the end of the proem, Prudentius allegorically explains the life of Abraham as an example of how men should prepare their hearts for Christ and the Trinity. This is the ground on which the most important epic battle has to be perpetually fought, yet with the outer battles of Virgilian

68 Curtius, European Literature, 205, notes that since late antiquity “personified beings of a supersensual nature […] could become the principal personages of poetic creations.”

epic always in sight for the reader, as suggested by a number of echoes and allusions interspersed in the poem. Suffice it to mention here the final recontextualization plus internalization of a most renowned Virgilian phrase from Aeneid VI: “fervent horrida bella, fervent / ossibus inclusa, fremit et discordibus armis / non simplex natura hominis” (Psych.

902-904).⁶⁹ Internalization is tantamount to universalization of the epic, as it potentially speaks of every man’s battle; the allusions to Aeneas’ nekyia, in this respect, are meant to situate the inner battle of the Psychomachia at the very center of human experience, in a dimension that is at once metaphysical, historical, prophetical, and psychical. From there, Prudentius can implicitly claim to succeed, though not suppress, Virgil.⁷⁰

It must be noted also that the structure of the Psychomachia is partially indebted to the epic catalog of heroes, insofar as Prudentius has his virtues enter the stage and fight one after another in a strongly partitioned sequence that recalls the way in which catalogs present and describe individuals as parts of a collective subject. Prudentius’ revision of this topos is rigid and static if compared to the complexity, in form and content, of the catalogs at the end of Aeneid VII (641-813) or in Thebaid IV (32-344). What is most relevant here, in any case, is that Prudentius extracts from his classical model two presentational topoi (catalog and battle), strips them naked of all their stylistic and narrative nuances, and combines them against a sort of abstract background. The more decontextualized the topoi, the more abstract and universal the presentation of Christian heroic virtues: the totality of the world has been translated into the experience of a different totality.

69 The lines quoted are “bella, horrida bella / et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno” (Aen. VI.86-87).

70 On Prudentius’ dialogue with the Roman epic tradition, see Mastrangelo, Roman Self, especially 14-40 (the chapter “An epic successor? Prudentius, Aeneid 6, and Roman epic tradition”).