After Virgil and Ovid, the poetry of love begins to fade into the background of the literary scene. Many of the later Latin poets, like Claudian and Sidonius of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, follow Lucan rather than Ovid, in a poetic tradition that puts love aside entirely: “Lucan’s poem, programmatically, declares the absence of
‘love’ at the outset. The Bellum Civile has no ‘love’. It does not have an Iliadic part […] or an Odyssean part. It has only war”.1 Lucan’s epic The Civil War (or Pharsalia) is a lengthy account of the defeat of Pompey the Great by Julius Caesar, whose victory at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE put Rome on the path to the empire it would hold for centuries:
“in the Pharsalia [Lucan] universalized his personal grievance into all Rome’s, and therefore the world’s, loss of libertas […] to the whimsy of a Caesar”.2 Though Lucan was not politically sympathetic either to Pompey or to Caesar, being instead a great admirer of Cato (a staunch defender of the old Roman Republic), he looks back with an odd nostalgia to the saner despot of the previous century. Lucan’s poem is
1 Sergio Casali. “The Bellum Civile as an Anti-Aeneid”. In Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. by Paolo Asso (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 84.
2 Patrick McCloskey and Edward Phinney, Jr. “Ptolemaeus Tyrannus: The Typification of Nero in the Pharsalia”. Hermes, 96 (1968), 80.
© 2017 Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0117.03
one in which “two incompatible attitudes are presented […] at least as long as Lucan remained in Nero’s circle: not only does he praise him, he does so against his own political beliefs”.3
On the other hand, Lucan “did not object to monarchy, but to severe and despotic tyranny, as practiced in the Hellenized East and in Rome during Nero’s later years. In the Pharsalia, tyranny was exemplified by Caesar and Alexander. Its emblem was the sword”.4 Julius Caesar serves Lucan as “the prototype of the tyrant Nero [… though] Caesar had more virtues than Lucan cared or was able to attribute to Nero”.5 And yet, despite his oddly ambivalent attitude toward Nero, Lucan’s love for Rome, and his longing for the old days of the Republic, shine through the poem’s portrayal of a charismatic Cato, the last line of defence, protecting a freedom Lucan had never known:
Actum Romanis fuerat de rebus, et omnis Indiga servitii fervebat litore plebes:
Erupere ducis sacro de pectore voces:
“Ergo pari voto gessisti bella, iuventus, Tu quoque pro dominis, et Pompeiana fuisti, Non Romana manus? quod non in regna laboras, Quod tibi, non ducibus, vivis morerisque, quod orbem Adquiris nulli, quod iam tibi vincere tutum est, Bella fugis
[…]
nunc patriae iugulos ensesque negatis, Cum prope libertas?
[…]
O famuli turpes, domini post fata prioris Itis ad heredem.6
3 Nigel Holmes. “Nero and Caesar: Lucan 1.33–66”. Classical Philology, 94: 1 (January 1999), 80, https://doi.org/10.1086/449419
4 McCloskey and Phinney, 82.
5 Ibid., 83.
6 Lucan. The Civil War, 9.253–61, 264–65, 274–75, ed. by J. D. Duff (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1962), 522, 524.
The campaign for Rome was nearly ended, and the mob, on fire for servitude, swarmed across the beach.
Then from the leader’s sacred breast, these words burst forth:
“So did you young men go to war, fighting for the same vows, defending the masters—and were you the troops of Pompey, and not of Rome? Now that you no longer labor for a tyrant;
now that your lives and deaths, belong to you, not your leaders;
now that you fight for no one else but yourselves, now you fly from the war,
[…]
now you deny your country your swords and throats when freedom is near?
[…]
Cowardly slaves! Your former master has met his fate, and you go to serve his heir”.
Lucan, who was eventually drawn into a plot to assassinate Nero, established a pattern, with Pharsalia, of celebrating the greater glories of an unrecoverable Roman past, longing for a world he portrayed as more civilized than the present age. At the same time, he perversely praises the dictator Nero—whom modern historians call “a Caesar worse than Caesar, a tyrant whose vices were compounded by the petulant inhumanity of a childlike man who acted thirteen even when he was as old as thirty-two”7—by describing him as the glorious final goal toward which all Roman history had been striving:
Quod si non aliam uenturo fata Neroni […]
Multum Roma tamen debet ciuilibus armis Quod tibi res acta est. te, cum statione peracta Astra petes serus, praelati regia caeli
Excipiet gaudente polo: seu sceptra tenere Seu te flammigeros Phoebi conscendere currus Telluremque nihil mutato sole timentem Igne uago lustrare iuuet, tibi numine ab omni Cedetur, iurisque tui natura relinquet
Quis deus esse uelis, ubi regnum ponere mundi.8 7 McCloskey and Phinney, 87.
8 Lucan, 1.33, 44–52, 25, 27.
Yet, if fate could in no other way bring Nero, […]
much will Rome owe to these civil wars
because they were conducted for you. When your task is done, and you go to seek the stars, the palaces of heaven will be yours, heaven will be joyful: and whether you hold a sceptre
or choose to ride Phoebus’ fiery chariot
circling with moving fire the undisturbed earth, by the light of fire you will be given power, from all granted to you, and nature will leave you to decide what god to be, and where to put your universal throne.
We still see this combination of nostalgia and perversity nearly four centuries later in the work of Claudian, whose panegyrics to a failing Rome, and its forgettable (and essentially forgotten) ruler Honorius, show how far poets had declined into grateful subservience since the days of the banished Ovid:
Agnoscisne tuos, princeps venerande, penates?
haec sunt, quae primis olim miratus in annis patre pio monstrante puer
[…]
teque rudem vitae, quamvis diademate necdum cingebare comas, socium sumebat honorum purpureo fotum gremio, parvumque triumphis imbuit et magnis docuit praeludere fatis.
et linguis variae gentes missique rogatum foedera Persarum proceres cum patre sedentem hac quondam videre domo positoque tiaram summisere genu.9
Do you recognize your house, adored Prince?
It is the same that first you marveled at in the years of old When your pious Father, showed it to you as a child.
[…]
Though your life was yet rude, and the crown had not yet
9 Claudian. “Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius”. 28.53–
55, 65–76. Claudian: Vol. II, ed. by Maurice Platnauer (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 78.
enclosed your head, your father shared his honors,
his royal purple, fondling you in his lap, sharing his triumphs, teaching you, in your youth, the overture to your mighty destiny.
Peoples of different nations and languages sent requests, Persian nobles sought treaties while sitting with your father, but having once seen the crown on your head,
they also bent their knees to you.
One can imagine Ovid’s disdain for such flattery (even Virgil might find this level of obsequiousness embarrassing). For Claudian “no exaggeration, however gross, suggested to him that here he must, for the sake of decency, draw the line”.10 If it seems that the purpose of poetry in the Roman world of the early fifth century (404 CE) was the unseemly celebration of mediocrity in power, that is because of work like Claudian’s fawning poem to Honorius, the first Roman Emperor to see Rome sacked during his reign:
The ambitious Alaric comprehended Honorius’ feebleness and again invaded Italy, intending to march on Rome. At the time, Honorius presided over the imperial court from a town on the Adriatic coast, Ravenna, surrounded by great protective marshes […]. Alaric besieged Rome three times between 408 and 410, [and] in 410 venerable Rome finally fell.11
But later fifth-century poets would not fail to rise (or sink) to the challenge represented by Claudian’s flattery. Sidonius Appolinaris, the fifth-century Bishop of Auvergne, writes his Carmen II, or Panegyric on Anthemius to address the late-fifth century ruler (the Augustus) of a nearly-collapsed Western Roman Empire. F. J. E. Raby describes Sidonius as “the most distinguished literary figure of his day”, famous for “his panegyrics on successive emperors”, before noting that “the poems themselves are poor in content”, though they have an “ineffectual ingenuity”.12 It is not hard to tell why: Sidonius’s work, like Claudian’s, is pure propaganda designed to prop up a weak ruler:
10 F. J. E. Raby. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 90.
11 William E. Dunstan. Ancient Rome (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 515.
12 F. J. E. Raby. A History of Christian-Latin Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 80, 81.
Claudian’s panegyrics have been defined as propaganda, and Sidonius’
panegyrics certainly have a definite political purpose, but […] an important fact should always be borne in mind: Claudian wrote his imperial panegyrics for an apparently established dynasty, [while] Sidonius was writing half a century later and lived in a period of political chaos.13 By Sidonius’s time, Rome had long since begun its decline. But Sidonius was loyal to the bitter end, presenting “what remained of the empire as a model society that was worthy of unquestioning loyalty. To be loyal to Rome was to be loyal to civilization itself”.14 Yet Rome, and its civilization, had passed its peak long before Sidonius was born. Diocletian had split the Empire into western and eastern portions in 285 CE, while Constantine had transferred the center of real power from Rome to Constantinople sometime between 324 and 330 CE. Since the move east, the west had become increasingly vulnerable to northern invaders, such as Alaric in 410, and by the time of Sidonius, it was under foreign domination: “The years from 456 to 472 saw the Roman west under the virtual rule of a German named Flavius Ricimer, a Suevian general whose maternal grandfather had ruled as a Visigothic king. Ricimer made and unmade a series of puppet emperors occupying the Ravenna throne”,15 one of whom was Anthemius. But despite Anthemius’s status as Ricimer’s pawn, Sidonius addresses this inconsequential ruler as if he were the great Augustus Caesar himself:
Auspicio et numero fasces, Auguste, secundos erige et effulgens trabealis mole metalli annum pande novum consul vetus ac sine fastu scribere bis fastis; quamquam diademate crinem fastigatus eas umerosque ex more priorum includat Sarrana chlamys, te picta togarum purpura plus capiat, quia res est semper ab aevo rara frequens consul, tuque o cui laurea, lane, annua debetur, religa torpore soluto
13 Lynette Watson. “Representing the Past, Redefining the Future: Sidonius Appolinaris’ Panegyrics of Avitus and Anthemius”. In The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. by Mary Whitby (Boston: Brill, 1998), 181.
14 Peter Brown. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 404.
15 Dunstan, 518.
quavis fronde comas, subita nee luce pavescas principis aut rerum credas elementa moveri.
nil natura novat: sol hie quoque venit ab ortu.16
Your fortunes, Augustus, and your second fasces,
take up, and in your ceremonial robe gleaming with gold, open, as a veteran consul, the new year; without scorn
write your name again in the rolls; though the diadem in your hair, and your sloping shoulders, are like those of your predecessors who wore Tyrian robes, your consul’s togas painted
purple might please you more, for since Rome’s earliest years repeated consulships are rare; and you, Janus, whose laurel is due to you annually, bind up your weariness,
bind up your hair with leaves, do not give in to sudden fear, or imagine the elements are all in motion.
Nature is unchanged: the sun rises in the East, but also here.
There is something absurd in lauding a weak western Augustus in an era in which power has long since flowed east to Constantinople (where the sun of wealth and power really rises in Sidonius’ era).17 No one there likely knew or cared much about the rump emperors of the feeble and abandoned west. In all likelihood, no one outside an increasingly irrelevant Rome would ever have heard or read the propaganda produced by either Claudian or Sidonius: “whether or not Claudian found many readers in the East, his propaganda is not likely to have had much more effect there than communist propaganda in western capitals today”.18
After such unseemly adulation of past power in a perilously fragile present, the rest is silence. By 476, with the deposition of the western Emperor Romulus by Flavius Odoacer, who proceeded to call himself (and reign as) the first king of Italy, the west fell into irrelevance. The
16 Sidonius. “Panegyric on Anthemius”, 2.1–12. In Poems and Letters. 2 Vols, ed. by W.
B. Anderson (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1: 5, 7.
17 Sidonius seems to have known this, as “he dated his death by the reign of the eastern emperor, Zeno. Sidonius considered Zeno, as emperor at Constantinople, to be the sole surviving head of the legitimate Roman empire” (Brown, 406).
18 Alan Cameron. Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970), 246.
poems of praise written by a fifth-century bishop seem, in retrospect, like insincere love letters written to a dying world, as the age of secular civilization was about to begin its long struggle with the western Church Sidonius served. Theology would soon begin to dominate Latin writing, a development reflected in much of the new Christian poetry of the period. Christianity comes to have a transformative effect (and not often for the better) on both Latin and later vernacular poetry; its influence can be seen initially in the poetry of Prudentius, a Roman Christian of the fourth century. His Hymnus Ante Somnum (Hymn Before Sleep) is representative:
Fluxit labor diei, redit et quietis hora, blandus sopor vicissim fessos relaxat artus.
[…]
Corpus licet fatiscens iaceat recline paullum, Christum tamen sub ipso meditabimur sopore.19
The day’s labor has flowed past, and the quiet hours return, the charms of sleep, in turn, relax our weary limbs.
[…]
The weary body may recline a short while, yet in Christ himself
our sleeping thoughts will be.
Rather than the idea of human love being introduced after “the day’s labor has flowed past” (as one might expect in Ovid), the turn here is away from the human and toward the divine. This turn is even more prominent in the sixth-century poet Venantius Fortunatus, who may
19 Prudentius. “Hymnus Ante Somnum”. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. 59, ed.
by Jacques Paul Migne (Paris: Apud Garnier Fratres, 1855), cols. 831–41, ll. 9–12, 149–52, https://books.google.com/books?id=jnzYAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PT325
well represent the high point of artistic achievement in the Christian Latin poetry of the period. His hymn, Vexilla Regis, is “one of the first creations of purely medieval religious feeling”,20 a sentiment expressed in words of joy over a human sacrifice. There is no trace here of the spirit of Ovid, or the Song of Songs, as all emotion is directed toward the heavens:
Vexilla regis prodeunt, fulget crucis mysterium, quo carne carnis conditor suspensus est patíbulo.
[…]
Salve ara, salve victima de passionis gloria, qua vita mortem pertulit et morte vitam reddidit.21
The Royal banner advances, the mystical Cross glows,
where the maker of flesh, flesh was made, suspended on the gallows pole.
[…]
Hail the altar, hail the victim of the glorious passion, by which life suffered death, and life was delivered from death.
Here, poetry serves as a vehicle for worship, a means through which imagination and emotion can be “channeled, reformulated, and controlled” away from the here and toward the hereafter. At this point, poetry is approaching the condition Plato once envisioned, in which
“only hymns to the gods and poems to great men”22 can be written. Here
20 Raby, 89.
21 Venantius Fortunatus. Venanti Honori Clementiani Fortunati Presbyteri Italici Opera Poetica, ed. by Frederick Leo (Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1881), 34–35, ll. 1–4, 29–32, https://archive.org/stream/venantihonoricl00unkngoog#page/n68
22 “μόνον ὕμνους θεοῖς καὶ ἐγκώμια τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ποιήσεως” (Republic 607a. In Plato: Republic. Books 6–10, ed. by Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013], 436).
also we can see the way in which love poetry has often been redirected and repurposed, not only by such commentators and critics as Akiba and Origen, but by poets working in the spirit of their ideas (Dante will be one of the pre-eminent examples of this phenomenon). Christian-themed Latin poetry such as that of Prudentius and Fortunatus remained popular23 despite the failed attempts of Italian humanists like Pietro Bembo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to revive Latin as the dominant language of secular poetry.24 Throughout the Europe of Bembo’s time, and long before, many of the most talented writers of love poetry had shifted to the vernacular,25 in a creative and poetic mood that started with the eleventh-century poets of the area we now know as the South of France.
There are, however, some notable exceptions to the overall trend.
Among them is the fourth-century poet Ausonius (from Bordeaux), who wrote a wide variety of verse: descriptions of everyday life (the Ephemeris), epitaphs, idylls (the most famous of which is a loving description of the Mosel region in Germany, the Mosella), but perhaps the single most memorable piece he ever wrote was included among his epigrams, a poem called Ad Uxorem (To My Wife). Here, he celebrates love and the wife he would lose all too soon upon her death at the age of twenty-seven:
23 Vexilla Regis was “composed for the the solemn reception of [a] special relic of the Holy Cross sent by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justin II to Saint Radegund for a convent of nuns she had founded near Poitiers, and [it is] now [2010] used in the liturgy for Passiontide” (Gabriel Díaz Patri. “Poetry in the Latin Liturgy”. In The Genius of the Roman Rite: Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspectives on Catholic Liturgy, ed. by Uwe Michael Lang [Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2010], 45–82, 57) 24 Bembo’s poetry did not have the lasting appeal of the vernacular work of the time,
and in the estimate of a later scholar, it was at least partly because Bembo’s Latin poetry has “more elegance than vigour”, resulting in a verse that seems “polished and cold” (John Edwin Sandys. A History of Classical Scholarship Vol. II: From the Revival of Learning to the End of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, France, England and the Netherlands [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903], 114, 115, https://
archive.org/stream/historyofclassic02sandiala#page/114).
25 The theoretical justification for this move appears first in Dante: “[t]his concern first appears in La Vita Nuova, where Dante informs the reader that what drew him and Guido Cavalcanti together was their agreement that this work would be written entirely in the vernacular” (Richard J. Quinones. “Dante Alighieri”.
In Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz [New York:
Routledge, 2004], 281).
uxor, vivamus quod viximus et teneamus nomina quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo, nec ferat ulla dies, ut commutemur in aevo, quin tibi sim iuvenis tuque puella mihi.
Nestore sim quamvis provectior aemulaque annis vincas Cumanam tu quoque Deiphoben,
nos ignoremus quid sit matura senectus:
nos ignoremus quid sit matura senectus: