CHAPTER FIFTEEN Epigrams, Occasional Poetry, and Poetic Games Bret Mulligan We have cultivated a healthy skepticism toward talk of cultural renaissance and rejuvenation, terms that often reveal more about the vagaries of cultural transmission and the aesthetic priorities of the critic than about the reality of a past culture glimpsed through that ever‐hazy distant mirror. Yet when one surveys the breadth, multiplicity, and richness of poetic composition in late antiquity, one is hard pressed to resist those old categories. Greek and Latin, high and low, Christian and secular, reactionary and revolutionary, center and periphery, in East and West, on stone and vellum – everywhere one casts the eye, one spies poetry. A surge of creative interest and poetic capacity began in the early decades of the fourth century; crested in the first half of the fifth, and then ebbed until, by the mid‐seventh century, this moment had passed and something else had emerged. Here we will survey the broad vistas of short‐form poems, minor poetic genres, and occasional verse produced during later antiquity. Many of these are little poems about little things – artwork in baths, an epitaph for a pet bird, a silver dish. But small or minor need not make mean or trite: These were also significant works inscribed on monumental architecture and works of greater or lesser scale delivered to the temporal and spiritual masters of the world with keen pur- pose and real consequence. By necessity, our approach will be panoptic, and we will not spare a favorite device of late antique verse: the list. Strict chro- nology and the linguistic divide will often be deprioritized, not because these A Companion to Late Antique Literature, First Edition. Edited by Scott McGill and Edward Watts. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 0003394599.INDD 241 1/5/2018 9:01:15 AM 242 Bret Mulligan are unimportant (and indeed others have begun to tell these tales, e.g. Dihle 1994) but because it is better here to seek connections and commonalities, as there is so very much to discover. The Oxford Classical Dictionary would once say of late antique epigram that “to know their models is to despise them” (s.v. “Epigram”). But scholars in recent decades have exposed the crafty methods by which late antique poets selected, fragmented, epitomized, redacted, and supplanted prestig- ious texts. Nowhere is this clearer than with the cento (“patchwork”), in which phrases and whole lines extracted from Homer or Virgil were recom- bined into a new narrative whole (McGill 2005). Some centos aimed to delight. In the Cento nuptialis, Ausonius notoriously repurposed Virgil into a lurid account of a wedding night. Other centos possessed didactic purpose, refashioning secular texts in service of Christian truth. Pomponius’s Versus ad Gratiam Domini (early fifth century) draws on Virgilian phrases to Christianize Eclogue 1: This Tityrus is saved by the Christian God rather than by Octavian (cf. Endelechius’s Christian fantasy on Ecl. 1)! Jerome grumpily dismissed centos as “childish and like the scams of charlatans” (Epist. 53.7). But Faltonia Betitia Proba’s 694‐line mix of Old and New Testament stories was an instant and enduring hit in the mid‐fourth century. In the early sixteenth century it was still in the curriculum, alongside Juvencus, Lactantius, Prudentius, and Sedulius. The longest extant cento was composed in Greek by the Empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II. Her cento, which she claims was begun by another, is a biblical history from Genesis to the time of Christ, in 2344 Homeric lines. Centos could also serve the occasion. Eudocia was said to have included a centonic passage in her encomium of Antioch. Centos, although born from epic, could be miniaturized, as in a nine‐verse Christian epitaph or the Greek epigrams on Hero and Leander (AP 9.381) and Echo (9.832). Such texts demand that they be approached analytically, fragmented through the act of commentary, as its contextual implications are decoded as part of the reinterpretation of traditional texts and genres. They are quintessentially metaliterary works that draw attention to themselves as a textual, written, and (re‐)written objects (Formisano 2007). The acute awareness of textuality displayed by the centonists was one strand of a poetics focused on the intense, thoughtful manipulation of word and form (Charlet 1988). If figural poetry arose in the scholastic environ- ment of Hellenistic Alexandria, its late antique apogee was intensely political. Optatianus dedicated 20 intricate poems to Constantine on the anniversary of his succession in 325/326 CE, in the hope that the emperor would repeal his exile. Optatianus’s ingenious acrostic and figural poems – in which mean- dering, often polymetric versus intexti trace shapes, a palm tree, an altar, a ship – carried the day (Squire 2017). Politics dance behind Fortunatus’s 0003394599.INDD 242 1/5/2018 9:01:15 AM Epigrams, Occasional Poetry, and Poetic Games 243 most involuted figural composition, whose cruciform versus intexti form an embedded second poem in support of Radegund’s efforts to secure a piece of the true cross (5.6). Fortunatus also saw fit to publish a poetic “failure,” a figural poem whose complexity trumped Fortunatus’s ability – or patience (2.5; cf. the quasihexameter acrostic for the fourth‐century Numidian banker L. Praecilius Fortunatus, CLE 512). At a time when poetry was predomi- nantly sonic, sequential, and performative, figural poems gained their special currency from the private construction of visual meaning rooted in the multisequential reconfiguration of the minute building blocks of language into new forms. Figural poems may be the most intricate manifestation of late antiquity’s intense interest in the making and remaking of literary texts, but the same spirit (and audience preference) animates a slew of poems that work within strict patterns of meter, syllable, and letter. Textual play was an important motif for the Vandal epigrammatist Eugenius and his compatriot Flavius Felix, whose 12 rectilinear hexameters embed not only an acrostic but a mes- ostich and telestich (AL 393). Christians were especially invested in such acrostic play: Of 86 acrostic epitaphs, 13 are datable to the fourth century, of which all but one are Christian. The sarcophagus of Bassa preserves an exemplar of this type, in which an epitaph replaces one of the expected icon- ographic scenes (ICUR 5.14076). The acrostic, Bassae suae/Gaudentius, yokes the two hexametric columns: the first extolling Bassa’s virtues and her ascent to heaven; the second a consolation for Gaudentius in Bassa’s voice. The nun Taurina inscribed an epitaph for her four beloved aunts, in which the first letter of each competent hexameter line spells out the names of the deceased (CLE 1.748). In a lighter vein, we find echoing distichs (AL 25–68 SB) in which the first half of the hexameter repeats at the end of the pentam- eter, as well as longer versus echoici by the Constantinian poet Pentadius on fortune, spring, and Narcissus (AL 259). The Latin Anthology also includes several serpentine couplets on Virgilian characters (AL 33, 38, 36, 47, 65 SB). Ausonius composed a rhopalic prayer, in which the first word has one syllable, the second two, the third three, and so forth. Ausonius could com- pose simple epigrammatic riddles – for example, Technop. 13, which poses 15 questions and answers, each with a monosyllable at the end of the verse. But his Griphus on the number three, which began as a frivolity over dinner in Trier and was subsequently sent as an epistolary gift to Symmachus, is fiend- ishly obscure. Among more traditional riddlers of late antiquity, the best known is the Vandalic poet Symphosius, whose 100 riddles, each in hexam- etric tercets, influenced the tradition of the Medieval Latin verse riddle. Paraphrase was the most familiar form of textual manipulation. Although the mode had its origin in ethopoeia and school exercises, the urge to 0003394599.INDD 243 1/5/2018 9:01:15 AM 244 Bret Mulligan manipulate familiar texts continued into adulthood, manifestations of elite otium, in which poems known by heart were recast in amusing ways. There was a craft to condensing Virgilian Eclogues or books of the Georgics or Aeneid into tetrastichs (AL 2 SB; 653 R), in iteratively paraphrasing Virgil’s epitaph (AL 507–518 555–566 R), and in reworking a Virgilian kernel – whether in condensing Dido’s indictment of Aeneas (A. 4.365– 387) into a tetrastich (Ennodius Dictio 28) or expanding her speech to 150 lines with a helping of Ovid’s Heroides (AL 83), or in mashing up similar passages to destabilize the image of the Virgilian hero (AL 214 SB). Virgil was by far the most popular source and field for paraphrastic literary play. But other prestigious texts could so serve. The 89‐hexameter Verba Achillis in Parthenone (AL 198) draws on Statius for an ethopoeia in which Achilles justifies his decision to reject his feminine disguise on Scyros only to be confronted by an anonymous interlocutor who questions whether his glory is worth Thetis’s grief. The 106 epigrams of Prosper of Aquitaine, which paraphrase the teachings of Augustine in simple verse, reveal a different kind of textual manipulation, directed not toward sacred texts but toward Christian education. Letters of the alphabet provided a ready‐made structure for text‐focused poets and readers. Some of these are explicitly playful, such as Ausonius’s Epigr. 85, in which initial letters of Greek names spell out a lewd act, or the work of the anonymous seventh‐century Scottish poet who fancied hexam- eter riddles on the letters of the alphabet. But Christian hymnody, doubtless inspired by the Psalms, routinely favored alphabetic composition.