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The Poems of Dracontius in Their Vandalic and Visigothic Contexts

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The Poems of Dracontius in Their Vandalic and Visigothic Contexts The Poems of Dracontius in their Vandalic and Visigothic Contexts Mark Lewis Tizzoni Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The University of Leeds, Institute for Medieval Studies September 2012 The candidate confinns that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2012 The University of Leeds and Mark Lewis Tizzoni The right of Mark Lewis Tizzoni to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgements: There are a great many people to whom I am indebted in the researching and writing of this thesis. Firstly I would like to thank my supervisors: Prof. Ian Wood for his invaluable advice throughout the course of this project and his help with all of the historical and Late Antique aspects of the study and Mr. Ian Moxon, who patiently helped me to work through Dracontius' Latin and prosody, kept me rooted in the Classics, and was always willing to lend an ear. Their encouragement, experience and advice have been not only a great help, but an inspiration. I would also like to thank my advising tutor, Dr. William Flynn for his help in the early stages of the thesis, especially for his advice on liturgy and Latin, and also for helping to secure me the Latin teaching job which allowed me to have a roof over my head. I would also like to thank the various administrators who have made my studies possible, especially Alison Martin, for all of her friendly help and support, and Daniel Lockley, for helping me through the US Student Loan process. And also I must thank good old Uncle Sam, for those same Student Loans. I would also like to thank my various friends and colleagues at Leeds and elsewhere who have given me guidance and support over the years. I must especially thank Nick Dupras for years of friendship and discussion. Special thanks also to Hrvoje Kekez, Ben Pohl and Lauren Moreau. I would also like to thank my students, especially those in the last year, who let me give them various pieces of Dracontius' and Eugenius' verse and reminded why I started doing this. Lastly, I thank my family and my friends back home in Pennsylvania. Without their help, love and support (both emotional and financial) I could never have dreamed of doing this PhD. My parents have been an immense aid; the least of their efforts has meant that at no point during this thesis have I gone hungry. Above all I must thank my fiancee, Sarah Lynch, for years of advice, support, love, coffee and, above all, patience. Special thanks must also be to those who helped to start me on this path, but did not live to see me complete it: especially my grandparents, Lloyd and Frances Lewis and my cousin Colonel Ralph "Bud" Clark, who first got me interested in the Middle Ages as a young boy. It is to them that I dedicate this work. Thesis Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to examine the cultural transformation of the Roman world as witnessed in the poetry and poetic traditions of the Latin-speaking West. In essence this thesis asks one fundamental question: when did the Late Antique world finally transform into the medieval? In order to answer this question, it will focus its investigation on one particular representative case-study. This case-study is provided by the poetry of the Late Antique North African poet Dracontius. After their initial composition in the final decades of the fifth century, part of Dracontius' corpus, the Saris/actio and Book I of the De Laudibus Dei, were redacted by Eugenius II of Toledo in mid-seventh-century Visigothic Spain. These poems, then, allow us to examine both Dracontius' own context in the Vandal kingdom of North Africa as well as Eugenius' context in late-Visigothic Iberia. This examination into Dracontius' Vandalic and Visigothic contexts will centre around one particular, and frequently undervalued, source of evidence: the use of loci similes. The investigation, split into two parts, will use these loci similes to examine and analyse the poetic methods employed by these two authors and the cultural mind sets behind them. Although the fundamental argument will be based on the shared texts, consideration will be taken both of the other works of these two authors and the wider literary landscape. After completing this investigation, the thesis will seek to explain its findings through a cultural historical analysis of their wider cultural and geographical contexts. After contextualising these works, the thesis will then give its own explanation, based on this new poetic evidence, as to why, and how, the final transformation of the Roman world came about. Table of Contents: Introduction 1 1. Literature and the Transformation of the Roman World: the Status of the Question 5 2. Who's Who: What we know about Dracontius and Eugenius in Brief 10 3. The Art of Latin Poetry, and its Place in Late Antique Literature 16 4. The Method: Cultural Mindset through Poetic Composition 28 Part I: The Vandalic Context 32 1. Dracontius and the Classics 32 i. The Overall Picture of the Classical Loci Similes 33 ii. The Classical Loci Similes in Detail: Two Case-Studies 40 iii. Through the Lens of the Redaction 48 iv. Conclusion 61 2. Dracontius' Opera and the World of Late Antique Poetry 62 i. Introduction 62 ii. Dracontius' Late Antique Sources 68 iii. What the Sources Tell Us 99 iv. Conclusion 103 3. The Use of the Bible in Dracontius' Opera 106 i. Dracontius' Knowledge of the Bible 107 ii. Dracontius' Use of and Engagement with the Bible 117 a. Dracontius and his Exegesis 118 b. The Bible as Lexicon 121 c. The Bible as a Source of Ideas 127 d. The Bible as Source Material 130 iii. Dracontius' Views regarding the Bible 133 iv. Conclusion 137 4. Dracontius in Conclusion: Appropriation or Continuity? 139 Part II: The Visigothic Context 147 1. Introduction 148 i. The Manuscript Tradition 158 ii. Navigating the Problematic Waters 167 2. Eugenius and his Redaction: Dracontius in Spain 173 i. Introduction 173 ii. Why?: the Historical Prose Answer 175 iii. How?: What the Text Itself can Tell Us 186 a. The Orthographical Differences 192 b. The Other Set of Differences 196 c. The Matter of Metre and Rhyme 217 d. How?: In Conclusion 226 iv. How and Why: the Implications of the Redaction 228 3. Eugenius and his Original Poetry: Between Originality and Classical Tradition 233 i. Eugenius' Poetic Method: the Evidence of the Loci Similes 236 ii. Eugenius' Ars Poetica: the Nature of the Original Poems 245 4. Conclusion: Between Tradition and Originality in the Redaction and the Independent Works 258 Conclusion: Dracontius and the Transformation of the Roman World 261 1. Dracontius' Poetry in its Vandalic and Visigothic Contexts: the Conclusion of the Case-Study 261 2. The Triumph of the Monastic Ideal and the Transfonnation of the Roman World 266 Appendix 280 Bibliography 299 1 Introduction The fifth century AD was a period of great struggle and great change. The period witnessed the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and by the Vandals in 455, the parcelling out of the Western Empire amongst the various successor states and the final deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476. These disasters sent shock-waves throughout the Roman world: thence the origin of St Augustine's City of God. Yet, the fifth century was not entirely one of despair as it witnessed great cultural achievements. Over the years, the events of this century have been the centre of one of the greatest of historical debates. Some scholars have indeed seen these as a collapse, as the 'Fall of the Roman Empire'.} Others have seen this period as one of transformation rather than one of collapse, during which the institutions of the Roman Empire were preserved and adapted.2 Much of this debate, historically, has been centred upon the traditional historical concerns of politics and economics. Yet, politics and the economy are not the sum of a civilization, and so the discussion shifted. I The most famous advocate of the Fall of Rome is most probably Edward Gibbon with his The History o/the Decline and Fall o/the Roman Empire. Although Gibbon has long been out of favour with most academic discourse, his thesis still dominates the popular conception of the period. For the modem scholarly argument for the 'Fall', see for example Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall 0/ Rome: and the End o/Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Peter Heather, The Fall o/the Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 2005). 2 This position dates back much farther in the historiography than is often thought. An important nineteenth-century example is A. Frederic Ozanam, History o/Civilization in the Fifth Century, trans. by Ashley C. Glyn, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1868). Among the most famous, and most read, proponents of this school is Henri Pirenne, with his Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. by Bernard Miall (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939). While the Pirenne Thesis has since been largely disproved, the essential ideas behind it remain important. There are many others who have supported the transformation paradigm both before and after Pirenne. Much progress was made in this field especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, which saw, for example, the work of the Transformation of the Roman World series.
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