Patristic Latin Poetry

In recent decades many valuable studies have been highlighting the cultural changes that deeply affected the Roman world between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. These changes mostly due to Christianization as well as reactions to it occurred in literary and cultural fields. In the past they have been explained through a well-defined pattern namely a twofold process adapting changing contents to unchanging formal structures. However this pattern may not be effective today given the new framework arising from the increasing amount of data and its close examination.

The papers herein collected deal with many specific texts or issues all included in the so-called literary area of ‘secularity’ (according to the definition by R. A. Markus). The aim of this case-studies gallery ranging from the fourth to seventh centuries AD is precisely to offer a multi-layered approach to the complex unclear-cut interweaving of continuity and discontinuity. Indeed this is at the heart of the transformation process of intellectual horizons in Latin Late Antiquity.

This volume consists of three sections devoted to investigating the transformation of cultural heritage in poetry and prose respectively and the key role of school education in shaping late ancient ‘secular’ culture.

About the mid-Fifties of 5th century AD the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and gifted poet Sidonius Apollinaris composed an epithalamium to celebrate the marriage of his noble friends Ruricius and Hiberia. Sidonius did not know that in less than two decades he would become the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand nor could Ruricius imagine that he would die the bishop of Limoges. Clinging to their profane models mostly represented by the epithalamia written by Statius and Claudian the poem (carm. 11) and its preface (carm. 10) depict a world where the overwhelming presence of myth helps to keep reality aside and the skilled devices of a sophisticated poetry try to revive the formal perfection of Roman classics and their values.

This volume provides a general introduction a critical text with Italian translation a punctual commentary (in fact the first one) to the epithalamium and its preface and a summary in English; it shows the original contribution of Sidonius to the literary tradition of late Latin Epithalamia; it illustrates the techniques of the poet; it deals with the many exegetic problems presented by both poems and it proposes new solutions for some of them.