Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry

By Prof. Philip Hardie

After centuries of near silence, Latin poetry underwent a renaissance in the late fourth and fifth centuries CE evidenced in the works of key figures such as Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola. This period of resurgence marked a 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 construct their 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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780520968424

Prof. Philip Hardie

Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books and articles on Latin literature and its post-antique reception.

Book preview

Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry

In honor of beloved Virgil —

O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .

—Dante, Inferno

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature.

Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry

Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry

Philip Hardie

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2019 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hardie, Philip R., author.

Title: Classicism and Christianity in late antique Latin poetry / Philip Hardie.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018060158 (print) | LCCN 2019003058 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520968424 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520295773 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian poetry, Latin--History and criticism. | Political poetry, Latin--History and criticism. | Rome--In literature.

Classification: LCC PA6053 (ebook) | LCC PA6053 .H37 2019 (print) | DDC 871/.0109--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060158

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. Farewells and Returns: Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola

2. Virgilian Plots: Public Ideologies and Private Journeys

3. Cosmos: Classical and Christian Universes

4. Concord and Discord: Concordia Discors

5. Innovations of Late Antiquity: Novelty and Renouatio

6. Paradox, Mirabilia, Miracles

7. Allegory

8. Mosaics and Intertextuality

Notes

References

General Index

Index Locorum

PREFACE

This book is based on five of the six Sather lectures that I delivered in spring of 2016, with the addition of three further chapters (4, 5, and 7). Materials from the fourth lecture, Cowherds and Saints: Realism and Humour in Paulinus of Nola, have been published elsewhere.

My experience on first receiving the invitation in February 2012 to give the lectures as the 102nd Sather Professor—an experience perhaps shared by others—was one of a warm glow at the great honor of being invited to join the roll call of previous Sather Professors, quickly followed by trepidation at the thought of the distinction of my predecessors, and anxiety over the choice of a topic for my own series of lectures. At that time a couple of other projects were in their final stages, and I decided to venture into the, for me, relatively untried field of late antiquity. What emerged is in substantial part a study of reception, the reception in late antiquity of the poetic classics of the late Roman Republic and early empire. Within my own academic trajectory, this can be seen as a stepping back in time from my work in recent years on the reception of ancient Latin poetry in the early modern period.

During my semester in Berkeley I enjoyed the legendary hospitality and friendship of the Classics Department. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Susanna Elm, John Ferrari, Mark Griffith, Kathy McCarthy (who initiated us into the mysteries of newt spotting in the Berkeley Hills), Dylan Sailor, and, above all, Nelly Oliensis, chair of the department during my stay. Nancy Lichtenstein gave invaluable advice both on negotiating the complexities of the University of California bureaucracy and on swimming pools. I enjoyed the stimulation of the participants in my graduate seminar.

At the Press I thank my editor Eric Schmidt for his encouragement. I am also grateful to my copy editor, Marian Rogers, for her meticulous and sharp-eyed work on the volume.

Introduction

Looking back over the last fifty years or so of criticism and scholarship in the field of Latin poetry, one sees a progressive extension of interest forward in time from the canonical authors of the late Republic and earlier years of the reign of Augustus. First, Ovid was rescued from his modern demotion to the status of a late-coming and not very serious, albeit highly proficient, poet. The new aetas Ovidiana shows no sign of running out of steam. The same is true of the slightly more recent rediscovery of the claim to sustained critical attention on the part of poets of the Neronian and Flavian periods. And now no Latinist can fail to be aware of an upsurge of interest in the Latin poets of late antiquity, in particular of what is sometimes called the Theodosian renaissance of the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D., matched by a corresponding investment of energies in Greek poetry of the later empire. Yet literary scholars have been rather slow, compared to our colleagues in ancient history and art history, in coming to view late antiquity as equally deserving of attention as the earlier periods. When it comes to undergraduate and graduate syllabuses, late antique poetry is still for the most part invisible. I would like to hope that the present contribution might help to further the cause of late antique Latin poetry among a wider audience.

This book is primarily a literary study, with a recurrent focus on the reception in late antique Latin poetry of poetry of the late Republic and early empire, chiefly from Lucretius and Catullus through to the Flavian epic poets. I make no attempt to be comprehensive in charting this very important episode in the history of the reception of earlier Latin poetry: thus Roman comedy is mentioned only very occasionally, and Juvenal, whose satire enjoyed a revival in readership in the fourth century, is notable mostly by his absence.¹ Virgil has a privileged place, partly a reflection of my own long-term interests, but also an index of the quasi-divine status accorded to Virgil in late antiquity (as in later centuries). Ovid also looms large.²

What further unites the several chapters is an attention to two large questions. Firstly, how differently do texts on Christian subjects and texts on non-Christian subjects respond to the earlier tradition? And secondly, do late antique poets rework the tradition through what is an identifiably late antique poetics and aesthetic? In both inquiries I have ended up stressing continuities rather than discontinuities, a revisionist position that I was not aware of having consciously formulated when I first decided a few years ago to undertake a major project on late antique Latin poetry.

The relationship of Christian poetry to the omnipresent pagan models has naturally been much discussed, along a spectrum from accommodation and assimilation, through transformation, to contrast-imitation and finally to polemical supersession.³ Models of a radical disjunction between the purposes and practices of Christian poets, on the one hand, and, on the other, of poets writing within the pre-Christian tradition (many of whom were themselves Christian) have been developed in particular by German scholars: Reinhart Herzog, arguing for the heteronomy of biblical poetry,⁴ and Christian Gnilka, and his students, applying a model of chrēsis, the proper use of non-Christian texts and traditions by Christian writers and readers.⁵ While the radical difference in ideology between pre-Christian and Christian culture is something new in antiquity, and leads at an extreme to professions of the need for Christianity totally to reject the existing literary institutions, in practice Christian beliefs and pagan literary traditions coexist with various degrees of ease or unease. The resulting continuities and discontinuities between Christian and earlier non-Christian texts can in fact largely be considered using the terms that structure discussions of imitatio and aemulatio within the pre-Christian Greco-Roman literary tradition. The issue of how Christian doctrinal sincerity sits with the use of the resources of traditional poetry is perhaps not all that different from the long-standing debate over the relationship of poetry and philosophy in the De rerum natura of Lucretius, who proposes something like a model of the proper use of the charms of traditional poetry in order to inculcate his countercultural philosophical truths.

On the second large question, concerning periodization,⁶ there is a now well-established genre of books and essays that set out to define a late antique aesthetic or a late antique poetics. Michael Roberts’s 1989 The Jeweled Style remains the most influential single intervention. Its propositions of an attention to glittering detail, of a privileging of the part over the whole, of a rhetorical focus on ekphrastic vividness rather than larger structures, have not so much been superseded over the last thirty years as given new spins, reinvigorated by a postmodern privileging of the fragmentary.⁷ My own reading of these texts operates within a horizon of expectations that is for the most part not very different from that within which I read early imperial Latin poetry; I find that these texts respond adequately and interestingly when thus approached. There are certainly differences, not least of which is the introduction of Christian subject matter into the inherited forms. There are also new, or newly popular, forms: the cento, Optatian’s figured poems, Ausonius’s technopaegnia, but these do not form the bulk of the poetic output of late antiquity. The Theodosian renaissance is a modern label, but it serves usefully to point to the resumption, if that is historically correct, or continuity, if it is not, of the modes and practices of earlier Latin literature. Blanket definitions of a late antique aesthetic or poetics seem to me to be more of a hindrance than a help. Change there certainly is, transformation even, but not sufficient, in my view, to arrive at something qualitatively quite other. This is particularly the case with allusion and intertextuality, where I am not persuaded by various attempts to diagnose a quantum shift in writers’ and readers’ responses to earlier texts.⁸ Some useful perspective may be lent by reflection on the history of criticism of what was once called Silver Latin, but is now more often referred to, more neutrally, as post-Augustan or early imperial Latin poetry. Blanket labels such as mannerist, rhetorical, and episodic, which were applied to the productions of a period as a whole, are now for the most part a thing of the past. I venture to suggest that the persistence of attempts to define an overarching late antique poetics is a sign of the relative youth of studies of late antique Latin poetry.

Chapter 1, Farewells and Returns: Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola, is a detailed reading of a famous correspondence between Ausonius and his erstwhile pupil Paulinus of Nola, which I use to introduce major themes and questions that will occupy me in the rest of the book: the Christian appropriation and transformation of non-Christian values; the prominence of paradox in late antique discourse; an interest in figures of reflection and echo; the ideology and theology of novelty, renovation, and transformation; the question of what is (or is not) typically late antique, and typically Christian, in practices of allusion and intertextuality; late antique Virgilianism and Ovidianism. Chapter 1 serves as the longer introduction from which I refrain in these briefer opening remarks. In this exchange of letters Paulinus announces that he is renouncing the pagan Muses to devote himself to a more committed form of Christianity than he had hitherto pursued. Ausonius complains that his student and friend is turning his back on his duties to his father and attempts to recall him to their shared homeland of Gaul and to their shared pursuit of the life of cultivated men of letters. The correspondence is often taken as a charged moment in the conflict between Christianity and the lifestyle of an elite trained in a pre-Christian culture. It is not an episode in any standoff between Christianity and paganism: Ausonius was a Christian, and it is not of Paulinus’s religious beliefs per se that he complains, but rather of his desertion from a shared culture. However, Paulinus exploits that same literary culture in his poetic epistolary responses to Ausonius. A brief glance forward in time reveals that in his newly committed life as a Christian Paulinus continues to work within the framework of this allusive poetics; discussion of other poems by Paulinus in later chapters reinforces the point.

Chapter 2, Virgilian Plots: Public Ideologies and Private Journeys, examines the uses to which large-scale Virgilian narrative structures, primarily those of the Aeneid and the fourth Eclogue, are put in late antique poetry of empire and salvation. Virgil is also an important point of departure for the themes of the following three chapters. In chapter 3, Cosmos: Classical and Christian Universes, I return to matters that interested me in my first book, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, and focus on the projection of cosmic struggles between order and disorder onto history both secular and sacred. Here the important models are above all Virgil and the Virgilian tradition. Political and theological factors conspire to heighten what might be called the cosmic sense of late antiquity. That sense is acutely aware of the threat posed to harmony and concord on the political and spiritual levels by forces of disharmony and discord, an opposition that reflects cosmic concordia and discordia. Virgil and other Augustan poets, writing after the resolution of long years of civil war through the establishment of the principate, situate the eruptions of discord in Roman history within philosophical constructions of a dynamic of order and disorder, in particular the pre-Socratic Empedocles’s identification of Strife and Love as the principles that regulate the cosmic cycle. Late antiquity displays something of an obsession with concordia and discordia, fueled by both historical and, now, theological rather than philosophical considerations. This is the subject of chapter 4, "Concord and Discord: Concordia Discors," where I also develop Michael Roberts’s insightful identification of the variety-in-tension of concordia discors as a distinguishing feature of late antique poetics.

Virgil’s literary-historical position as a leading member of the second generation of the new poets of the first century B.C., and his contributions to the Augustan ideology of restoration and renewal, make of him an important representative of a poetry and poetics of the new. In the past, late antiquity has sometimes been viewed as the old age of classical antiquity, a period of decline and decadence. Chapter 5, "Innovations of Late Antiquity: Novelty and Renouatio, examines the period’s own investment in ideas of renewal and novelty, both in the ideology of empire and in the Christian theology of making new. One of the most potent symbols of renovation and rebirth is the phoenix, an old exhibit in the history of paradoxography that is burnished up for new purposes in late antiquity. A heightened interest in paradox has been identified as typical of many late antique writers. In chapter 6, Paradox, Mirabilia, Miracles," I ask the question of how justified is the enduring judgment that in non-Christian texts paradox is the mark of a frivolous playfulness, in contrast to Christian uses of paradox to express the deepest mysteries of the faith.

Chapter 7, Allegory, explores selected aspects of the vast topic of allegory in late antiquity. A key text in the history of personification allegory is Prudentius’s Psychomachia, a fervently Christian poem that is also one of the most Virgilian productions of the period. Christian allegory articulates specifically Christian constructions of history and meaning, but at the same time employs linguistic and figurative procedures that converge with, and, in some cases, derive from, allegorical practices in earlier and contemporary texts on non-Christian subjects.

Finally, in chapter 8, Mosaics and Intertextuality, I scrutinize and critique the frequent use of the metaphor and image of the mosaic in discussions of late antique poetry (and art), with reference both to an aesthetic and to a model of intertextuality. My conclusion is that the image obscures more than it clarifies.

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 his figurative father (90) Ausonius.

A few lines later Paulinus gently implies a forgiving criticism of a traditional model of a pietas that can coexist with, indeed be the source of, anger: But why do I absent myself from you for so long? This is your reproachful question, your angry reaction prompted by piety (Poem 10.97–98 sed cur remotus tamdiu degam arguis | pioque motu irasceris). The most famous example of pietas-fueled anger is the ending of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas’s sense of pietas toward the dead Pallas and Pallas’s father, Evander, moves him to kill Turnus in an uncontrollable fit of anger. For another epic ending, but one in which, through a Christian transvaluation of pagan models, pietas overcomes ira, take the account of the Crucifixion in Sedulius’s Carmen paschale (5.182–86), a biblical epic of the second quarter of the fifth century, on the miracles and passions of Christ:

protinus in patuli suspensus culmine ligni,

religione pia mutans discriminis iram,

pax crucis ipse fuit, uiolentaque robora membris

illustrans propriis poenam uestiuit honore¹⁶

suppliciumque dedit signum magis esse salutis.

Suspended forthwith from the top of the spreading wood, transforming with the piety of religion the anger that led to the moment of crisis, He himself was the peace of the cross, and adorning the violent timber with His own limbs He clothed his penalty with glory and turned His punishment rather into a sign of salvation.

Through the paradoxes of the cross, by the agency of religio pia anger is metamorphosed (mutans) into peace, humiliating poena is dressed up as glory, and the death penalty, supplicium, becomes the sign of salvation, salus. Christ on the cross asks the Father to forgive those who crucify him (for they know not what they do, Luke 23:34). Sedulius’s biblical epic stands near the beginning of a long tradition of correcting pagan epic values that will be summed up by Milton in the prologue to book 9 of Paradise Lost. Milton rejects the traditional arguments of the wrath | Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued | Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage | Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused (14–17), and prefers as subject for heroic song (25) the better fortitude | Of patience and heroic martyrdom (31–32). Paulinus, for his part, turns away Ausonius’s pious anger with a request for forgiveness for himself, whose love for Ausonius is constant (101 ignosce amanti).¹⁷

In the matter of officium and pietas, Paulinus’s strategy is to reconcile traditional with Christian values, and at the same time to transform them.¹⁸ He is more radical in the matter of salus, as he responds to Ausonius’s manipulation of the epistolary convention of conveying greetings, salus, salutation. Ausonius complains that he has received no letter (Ep. 21.4 Green) writing propitious words at the head of sheets that bring greeting (fausta salutigeris ascribens orsa libellis). Even enemies exchange greetings, he says: But foe from foe receives greeting in barbarous language, and ‘hail’ is heard in the midst of war (7–8 hostis ab hoste tamen per barbara uerba salutem | accipit et salue mediis interuenit armis).¹⁹ Ausonius alludes to Ovid, Heroides 4, where Phaedra complains to Hippolytus that even enemies receive and look at missives from enemies (6 inspicit acceptas hostis ab hoste notas). This is one of a number of allusions by both Ausonius and Paulinus to Ovid’s epistolary works, both the letters from exile and, as here, the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines.²⁰ Ausonius’s complaints (Ep. 21.1, questus; 22.1, querimonia) are tinged with the elegiac and the erotic.

Paulinus’s response to the complaint of the lack of a greeting is twofold. Firstly, in the elegiac preface to Poem 10 he fulfils his duty to offer greeting, but only after playing Ausonius’s own game of using the plaintive language of Ovidian epistolography: it has been four years since he received a letter from Ausonius, [four years] during which not a letter has reached me from your mouth, not a line have I seen written by your hand (3–4 ex quo nulla tuo mihi littera uenit ab ore, | nulla tua uidi scripta notata manu), echoing the language of the opening of Heroides 3 (1–2 quam legis, a rapta Briseide littera uenit | uix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu).²¹ The choice of elegiac couplets for the first part of this threefold letter may indeed be determined in part by a wish to write a specifically Ovidian kind of letter, acknowledging Ausonius’s own allusion to the Heroides. Here, at least, is a kind of responsion, or echoing, to answer Ausonius’s complaint (Ep. 21.9–25 Green) that the natural world and the world of pagan religious ritual are full of an echoing responsiveness, in which Paulinus alone refuses to participate: Even rocks respond to a man, and words return when they are struck back from caves, and the image of a voice returns from the woods (9–10 respondent et saxa homini, et percussus ab antris | sermo redit, redit et nemorum uocalis imago).²²

Echo, and Narcissus, figure in epigrams in Ausonius and the Anthologia Latina, obvious subjects for what is often seen as a late antique predilection for the paradoxical (see chapter 6), for which the revived genre of epigram provides a convenient vehicle. But figures of reflection and echo, of desiring reflection and desiring echo, may have a particular appeal for late antique poets as they contemplate the relations between their own productions and those of a classical past.²³

In Poem 10 Paulinus echoes Ausonius closely at line 5, salutifero . . . libello, letter bearing greetings, lightly varying Ausonius’s salutigeris . . . libellis (Ep. 21.4). Having done their duty, the elegiacs withdraw: The elegies now give their greeting, and having greeted you, now that they have made a beginning, a first step, for the others, they fall silent (17–18 nunc elegi saluere iubent, dictaque salute, | ut fecere aliis orsa gradumque, silent). This is a pregnant silence: what is left unspoken is that this is an end to this kind of poetic responsion, communication of the traditional kind, as shared by the two men in the past. The dialogue will continue, but it will not be business as usual—on that silence will fall.

One of the differences relates specifically to the word salus. Here we might suspect that Ausonius’s use of Ovidian allusion offers Paulinus an avenue that the former had not intended. Heroides 4, the letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus to which Ausonius had alluded, begins with a typically Ovidian play on words: With wishes for the welfare which she herself, unless you give it to her, will ever lack, the Cretan maid greets the hero whose mother was an Amazon (1–2 Quam nisi tu dederis, caritura est ipsa, salutem | mittit Amazonio Cressa puella uiro). Here salus is both greeting and literally, welfare, health. Paulinus takes the Ovidian licence of revalorizing the epistolary cliché, but the kind of salus he is interested in is that of the soul, not of the body—salvation. In the iambics Paulinus attacks the sophists, rhetors, and poets, who fill men’s hearts with false vanities and bring nothing that might bestow salvation (41 nihil ferentes, ut salutem conferant): only God is truly salutifer.

Other ideas and words that are given new Christian meanings or new applications by Paulinus include pater, patronus, patria, caelum (climate of a particular locality/heaven). This is echo in the mode of Ovid’s nymph Echo, repetition of the linguistic substance with difference of meaning.

Ausonius claims to be Paulinus’s father, in the sense of an older man to whom respect is due: Are you ashamed if you have a friend still alive who claims a father’s rights?; Do not disdain to address your father. I am your nourisher, the man who was your first teacher (Ep. 22.6–7 Green, anne pudet, si quis tibi iure paterno | uiuat amicus adhuc; 32–35, nec dedignare parentem . . . ego sum tuus altor et ille | praeceptor primus). Paulinus acknowledges his filial relationship to the older man (Poem 10.96, patrone, praeceptor, pater; 189, uenerande parens), but rejects the accusation of being forgetful of their shared geographical home made by Ausonius at Ep. 21.52 Green (nostri . . . obliuio caeli). Paulinus looks up to a greater father, our Father in heaven, which is the true fatherland, the caelum patrium, of a Christian: I am not forgetful of my native skies, as you would have it, when I am looking up at the highest Father, for he who worships the one Father is truly mindful of heaven. So reassure yourself, father, that I am not forgetful of the sky, I am not out of my mind (193–96 nec mihi nunc patrii est, ut uis, obliuio caeli, | qui summum suspecto Patrem, quem qui colit unum | hic uere memor est caeli. crede ergo, pater, nos | nec caeli immemores nec uiuere mentis egentes). Memory itself is subjected to a transvaluation (uere memor). The last word of the poetic correspondence, at the end of Paulinus’s second reply to Ausonius, is memor, referring to a memory that is validated by a Christian eschatology—I will return to this.

For Ausonius the patria is Aquitaine, but also Rome (or the traditions of Rome): he rebukes Paulinus for taking himself off to wild Spain, on which he calls down renewed devastation by Rome’s enemies, Hannibal and Sertorius: Is it here, Paulinus, that you establish your consular robe and Roman curule chair, and is it here that you will bury your ancestral honours? (Ep. 21.60–1 Green hic trabeam, Pauline, tuam Latiamque curulem | constituis, patriosque istic sepelibis honores?). A few lines earlier Ausonius addresses Paulinus as my pride and that of my country, and mainstay of the Senate (Ep. 21.56 Green meum patriaeque decus columenque senati). Ausonius uses the language of an address by Horace to his patron Maecenas, and invests it with a patriotic appeal to senate and country (Odes 2.17.3–4 mearum | grande decus columenque rerum).²⁴ It is, however, Ausonius who sees himself in Maecenas’s role of patronus to Paulinus, rather than the other way round. But Paulinus is moving away from the earthly patronus toward the heavenly patronus to whose service he will dedicate himself for the rest of his life, his patron Saint Felix.²⁵

Paulinus, however, protests against Ausonius’s tendentious picture of Spain as a barbarous and uncivilized land, thereby occluding the great Roman cities of Tarraconensis. By the same token the rhetoric of patria could be used to criticize Ausonius’s choice of residence in Gaul, were one to focus on the rough huts of the native peoples rather than on the sophisticated city of Bordeaux or on Ausonius’s own lofty villa, rivaling the palaces of Rome (Poem 10.239–59). It might with equal justice be said that you, the influential consul, spurn the proud walls of Rome, but do not scorn the sand-dwelling Vasatae [a Celtic tribe in Aquitania] (247–48). Paulinus goes on to raise the possibility of complaining that Ausonius allows his own consular trabea (251–55) to moulder in an ancient temple [in a small settlement in Gaul], when in fact it gleams in the august city of Roman Quirinus amidst the imperial triumphal tunics, sharing their fame, long venerated with its pristine gold, and preserving the flourishing glory of your undying services (ueteri sordescere fano, | quae tamen augusta Latiaris in urbe Quirini | caesareas inter parili titulo palmatas | fulget inattrito longum uenerabilis auro, | florentem retinens meriti uiuacis honorem).

The contrast between a grimy and decaying old age and a bright eternal youth, or a youth restored, here distinguishes a provincial torpor from the undiminished splendor of Rome. It is a contrast that more often characterizes late antique reflections on the city of Rome itself. The city of Rome is a recurrent theme of late antique poetry, a place of fantasy, memory, and nostalgia as much as a real place. The city’s symbolic value was only heightened by the fact that the real center of power in the West, the imperial court, was usually based elsewhere, at Trier, Milan, or Ravenna. Rome was precious as the location and embodiment of Roman foundation and Roman identity, and precious because threatened by decay and invasion. More than ever, Rome becomes the written city, transmuted into a marvelous work of art, in a series of glittering ekphrases, or into the verbal figure of personification.²⁶ Visions of Rome in Claudian, Rutilius Namatianus, and Prudentius dwell on the preternatural or supernatural brightness of the ancient and venerable city, sometimes as the result of renewal, through the topos of a miraculous rejuvenation of a personified Roma fallen into senility. That renewal may subscribe either to the pagan ideology of imperial renouatio or to a Christian making new, as in Prudentius’s vision of Theodosius’s Christian Rome in his poem Against Symmachus. I will return to visions of Rome, and to the theme of novelty, renouatio, and rejuvenation in chapter 5.²⁷

A key moment in Ausonius’s grilling of Paulinus comes at Epistle 21.50 Green: Dearest Paulinus, have you changed your character? (uertisti, Pauline, tuos, dulcissime, mores?).²⁸ This is another place where Ausonius seems to blunder in without realizing what he is doing. Here the answer is clear. For all that Paulinus asserts that his friendship with Ausonius is undying—if in a way that will turn out to exceed Ausonius’s traditional frame of reference—Paulinus has undergone a radical change, nothing less than a con-version, which Ausonius will be unable to re-verse (despite Ep. 22.2 Green, I had thought that [my letter of complaint] could change your mind [credideram quod te, Pauline, inflectere posset]).²⁹ One may ask whether Ausonius is aware of the irony of using the vocabulary of metamorphosis to a newly committed Christian, as one wonders whether in his use in Epistle 24 of the image of the yoke (iugum) of a this-worldly friendship he is aware of the yoke of Christ (Matt. 11:30 for my yoke is sweet and my burden light [iugum enim meum suaue est et onus meum leue est]), or whether this is just an own goal.

Paulinus’s answer, justifying and defending his conversion, is delivered in a key section of his letter in reply, at the point where the elegiac couplets fall silent and the meter changes to alternating iambic trimeters and dimeters. This metrical variation may in itself be seen as homage to Ausonius’s own practice of using a variety of meters,³⁰ just as the threefold division of Paulinus’s letter into sections in three, no more and no less, meters appears to respond, or correspond, playfully to the three letters that he says he had received in one go from Ausonius: The varied texture of three letters blossomed there, but rhythmically; the sheets of verses formed a triple poem (Poem 10.7–8 trina etenim uario florebat epistola textu, | sed numerosa: triplex pagina carmen erat).³¹ Paulinus may also remember one of Ausonius’s more playful poems, the Griphus ternarii numeri, Riddle of the Number Three (dedicated to Symmachus). Surprisingly, perhaps, in that poem Ausonius’s last example of the threefold, before concluding with the form of the poem itself that we have been reading, is the Christian Trinity: Drink thrice. The number three is above all, three persons and one God. And that this game should not run its course in an insignificant number, let it have verses thrice ten times three, or nine times ten (88–90 ter bibe. tris numerus super omnia, tris deus unus. | hic quoque ne ludus numero transcurrat inerti, | ter decies ternos habeat deciesque nouenos). Paulinus may hint at a riddle of his own: what might appear to be a ludic numerological exchange with his fellow poet is also a reflection of the Christian threefold God to whom he has now dedicated himself.³² Furthermore while Ausonius’s shifts in meter typically do not correspond to any more momentous kind of change, the change from elegiacs to iambics is precisely the point at which Paulinus starts to sing from a very different hymn sheet.³³ The change of meter becomes something more than formal variation, and is now the marker of a change of heart, a conversion.

The first fourteen lines of the iambics call for close attention (19–32):³⁴

Why, father, do you bid the deposed Muses return to my charge? Hearts dedicated to Christ reject the Latin Muses and exclude Apollo. Of old you and I shared common cause (our zeal was equal if our poetic resources were not) in summoning deaf Apollo from his cave at Delphi, invoking the Muses as deities, seeking from the groves or mountain ridges that gift of utterance bestowed by divine gift. But now another power, a greater God, inspires my mind and demands another way of life. He asks back from man His own gift, so that we may live for the Father of life.

Paulinus starts by replying to Ausonius’s closing prayer to the Muses to recall his friend from the exilic wilderness to which he has condemned himself: "This is my