'The self-conscious cento'

MARCO FORMISANO

THERESE FUHRER (ED.)

with the assistance of ANNA-LENA STOCK

Décadence

“Decline and Fall” or

“Other Antiquity”?

Universitätsverlag

WINTER

Heidelberg

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Contents PREFACE ............................................................................................................... 3 MARCO FORMISANO: Reading Décadence – Reception and the Subaltern Late Antiquity ..................................................................................... 7

I. Décadence in Antiquity THERESE FUHRER: Das Interesse am menschlichen Scheitern – Antike Konstruktionen des ‚Niedergangs‘ einer Kultur ................................ 19 GILLIAN CLARK: Fragile Brilliance – Augustine, decadence, and “other antiquity” ................................................................................................ 35

II. Imagining Late Antiquity: Décadence and Modernity HELMUT PFEIFFER: Flauberts Versuchung der Spätantike ................................ 55 CARLO SANTINI: „Aus einem Staat, der an einem Sprachfehler zugrundegegangen ist“ – Musil tardo-antico ...................................................... 77 KARIN SCHLAPBACH: “Under the full impact of a catastrophic end” – Augustine and the fall of Rome in Hannah Arendt’s reading ........................... 97

III. The Fertility of Décadence MICHAEL ROBERTS: Friedrich Mehmel, Pompatic Poetics, and Claudian’s Epithalamium for the Marriage of Honorius and Maria ............................... 115 HENRIETTE HARICH-SCHWARZBAUER: Die ‚Lust‘ der Poesie – ‚Décadence‘ in den spätantiken Epithalamien (Claudius Claudianus, c. m. 25 und Sidonius Apollinaris, cc. 10–11; 14–15) ....................................................................... 133 DANUTA SHANZER: Incest and Late Antiquity – Décadence? ......................... 149

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IV. Reception: Late Antique Poetics

STEPHEN HINDS: ‘The self-conscious cento’ ................................................... 171 SIGRID SCHOTTENIUS CULLHED: Proba and Jerome ........................................ 199 JAN STENGER: Der ‚barocke‘ Stil des Ammianus Marcellinus – Vom heuristischen Nutzen eines folgenreichen Verdikts ............................... 223 ÉTIENNE WOLFF: Quelques jalons dans l’histoire de la réception de Sidoine Apollinaire .................................................................................... 249

V. Décadence: Good to Think With? ILARIA L.E. RAMELLI: Décadence Denounced in the Controversy over Origen – Giving Up Direct Reading of Sources and Counteractions .............. 263 CHRISTOPH MARKSCHIES: Décadence? Christliche Theologen der Spätantike über den Verfall von Moral und Glauben seit Kaiser Konstantin ................... 285 ANDREAS T. ZANKER: Decline and Kunstprosa – Velleius Paterculus and Eduard Norden ......................................................................................... 299 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS .............................................................................. 325 INDEX LOCORUM ............................................................................................. 329

1.) Scripture ................................................................................... 329 2.) Ancient Literature .................................................................... 329 3.) Medieval and Early Modern Literature .................................... 339 4.) Modern Literature .................................................................... 340

INDEX NOMINUM ET RERUM ............................................................................. 341

Stephen Hinds

‘The self-conscious cento’

The cento: for a classical Latin interloper in a conversation about late antique literature, the choice of topic is almost inevitable. How better to exploit a position of otherness within such a conversation than by focussing attention upon a catego-ry of late antique texts which contains no late antique words whatsoever? A cynic may justly suspect an impulse on the critic’s part to stay within his textual comfort zone; but perhaps no genre is better equipped than the cento to thematize the mix of familiarity and strangeness involved in late antique encounters with classical poetry and poetics – and to offer one kind of limit-case for such encounters.1

An opportunistic paper, then, on the cento, a genre which will stand in no need of any introduction to most readers of this volume. As a quick reminder to others, this is the remarkable genre of poems, with their main vogue in late an-tiquity and a continued hangover into the Renaissance, in which the poet con-structs his (or, as we shall see, her) entire poem out of lines, half lines and one-and-a-half lines of Virgil – or in the Greek case of Homer –, ripped from their original contexts and newly repurposed, in a cut-and-paste process of extreme recycling.2 Virgil and Homer are the characteristic source-texts in the respective

1 I was first drawn to the cento by Scott McGill: Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological

and Secular Centos in Antiquity (American Classical Studies 48), Oxford/New York 2005; two groups of undergraduate students emboldened me through their enthusiasm for the form when we sampled it in a Latin 402 reading class on receptions of Virgil (Spring 2009 and 2011). Portions of cento material were incorporated into papers given at Buffalo, Brown and UC Irvine in 2010–2011, at the Classics Triennial in Cambridge in July 2011, and at Wisconsin in 2012; the paper was delivered in more or less its present form in October 2011 not only in Berlin but also at the Fondation Hardt, Gene-va. The final product has been improved by feedback at all these venues (not least from late antique specialists); in the context of this conference volume it is an especial pleas-ure to record my thanks for their hospitality to Marco Formisano, Therese Fuhrer and the Freie Universität. I am indebted to the generosity of the Lockwood Foundation, which has once again supported much of my research for this project.

2 For the Homeric biblical centos attributed to the Empress Eudocia (d. 460), not dis-cussed here, see Mark D. Usher: Homeric Stitchings: The Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia, Lanham MD 1998 and Homerocentones Eudociae Augustae, Stutt-gart/Leipzig 1999; André-Louis Rey (ed.): Patricius, Eudocie, Optimus, Côme de Jé-

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traditions by virtue of their canonicity: these are the texts, above all others, hard-wired into the ancient reader’s brain. In its application to literature the term cento means ‘patchwork-text’; in Latin, as in Greek, the metaphor is of ‘a garment made of old pieces of cloth stitched together’.3 One set of Virgilian centos samples the master poet to treat secular or mythological themes; another set samples him to treat sacred and Christian themes. My paper begins with the most famous and influential Christian cento, in which the fourth century female poet Proba retells key episodes from Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels in about 700 lines patched from the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid; it then moves on to the much shorter Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, the most celebrated (and most archly self-referential) of the secular centos; as a small novelty, I conclude the specifics by tentatively identifying an in-house acknowledgement of Proba’s poem by Ausonius.

I should start by acknowledging a current wave of work which makes it almost impertinent still to write of the Latin cento as an underappreciated genre. At the centre of this reappraisal stand two monographs, by Scott McGill on the mytholog-ical and secular centos in 2005 and by Martin Bažil on the Christian centos in 2009, which (along with a number of recent articles, several of them cited in the pages below) combine newly detailed readings of the poems with a sustained at-tempt to draw the cento from the margins towards the centre of critical discussion of poetic intertextuality.4 If proof be needed that such rescue and rehabilitation is needed, it can be found in the fact that each of these monographs includes as an appendix the entire corpus of centos, secular or Christian, with which it deals: evidently the classicist’s usual polite assumption that any literary text under discus-

rusalem: Centons homériques (Sources chrétiennes 437), Paris 1998; Mary Whitby: The Bible Hellenized: Nonnus’ Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel and “Eudocia’s” Homeric Centos, in: Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. by David Scourfield, Swansea 2007, pp. 195–231.

3 McGill (n. 1), xv n.1; Lewis & Short s.v. cento; cf. LSJ s.v. κέντρων. 4 McGill (n. 1); Martin Bažil: Centones Christiani: Métamorphoses d’une forme

intertextuelle dans la poésie latine chrétienne de l’Antiquité tardive (Collection des Études Augustiniennes: Série Moyen Âge et Temps Modernes 47), Paris 2009. The recent article literature has been to the fore in applying fresh methodological per-spectives to the cento, both late antique and more broadly theoretical: see (pro-grammatically) Marco Formisano/Cristiana Sogno: Petite poésie portable: The La-tin Cento in its Late Antique Context, in: Condensing Texts – Condensed Texts, ed. by Marietta Horster/Christine Reitz (Palingenesia 98), Stuttgart 2010, pp. 375–92, with bibl. Early reference points for this ‘new wave’ of work on the cento are Martha Malamud: A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mytholo-gy, Ithaca, NY 1989, pp. 35–9 and p. 41, and S.G. Nugent: Ausonius’ “Late-Antique” Poetics and “Post-Modern” Literary Theory, in: Ramus 19 (1990), pp. 26–50, here: pp. 37–41 (on Ausonius), and Jeffrey T. Schnapp: Reading Lessons: Augus-tine, Proba, and the Christian Détournement of Antiquity, in: Stanford Literature Re-view 9 (1992), pp. 99–123 (on Proba).

‘The self-conscious cento’ 173

sion has already been read (or at least is already in the reader’s library) cannot in the case of the cento be taken for granted. Perhaps, then, the fiction of a blind date with an unfamiliar genre may be maintained here just one more time.

The title of the present volume dictates some preliminary acknowledgement of the widespread disparagement visited upon the art of the centonist in modern criti-cism, until the current work just mentioned. If late antique poetry more broadly was to be condemned for its ‘senile degeneration’ (Herbert J. Rose on the circle of Ausonius),5 what then of the pathologically derivative cento? ‘An affront to litera-ture’: so D.R. Shackleton Bailey, explaining his exclusion of the cento from the new Teubner edition of the Anthologia Latina, replacing Riese, in 1982.6

Of course, late antique poetry at large is viewed more favourably nowadays than it was in Rose’s day, thanks in part to new readings which continue to liberate it from inherited prejudices about its derivative or secondary status vis à vis classical poetry – in some ways the same prejudices which used to be left uninterrogated for Roman poetry in general vis à vis Greek, and for Silver Latin poetry vis à vis Golden. With the cento, however, in which every single phrase is taken verbatim from the same canonical model, it is easy to see why any claim of originality within a traditional discourse may seem to require extra special pleading; why old prejudices about creative degeneration (where the poetry in question is not altogether ignored) should be harder to shake.

Perhaps the most distinctive contribution of the latest work on the cento is to reframe the challenge here as one of an excess rather than a dearth of interpreta-tive interest. If every phrase in such a poem has a counterpart in the same source text (a 100% hit rate), what does that do to our protocols for reading across texts? If some (perhaps the majority) of the recycled phrases reuse Virgilian language in ways that seem to have nothing to do with the original Virgilian context, does that mean that instances where there does seem to be a meaningful engagement with Virgilian context should be seen as mere chance occurrences, or, even if intended by the centonist, as unlikely to be picked up by the reader because of the heavy static coming from all the non-significant intertexts? And anyway, can we distinguish a reuse which pointedly reverses its Virgilian con-

5 Herbert J. Rose: A Handbook of Latin Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death

of St. Augustine, London 1936, p. 529: ‘The senile degeneration of literature in Auso-nius’ circle is shown not merely by the feebleness of most of his writings but by the obvious fact that he was admired for them’; after Gibbon; ‘The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age’: both passages cited by Michael Roberts: The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity, Ithaca 1989, p. 1, in his influen-tial call for a new critical beginning for late antique poetry and poetics.

6 D.R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.): Anthologia Latina 1.1, Stuttgart 1982, p. iii: ‘Centones Vergiliani (Riese 7–18), opprobria litterarum, neque ope critica multum indigent neque is sum qui vati reverendo denuo haec edendo contumeliam imponere sustineam’; cited at McGill (n. 1), p. xvii n. 21.

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text from a reuse which is simply oblivious to its Virgilian context? Such ques-tions help to explain the paralysis which the cento has often induced in tradition-al philologists; but, for a different kind of reader, increasingly to the fore in cento scholarship, they serve to open a path towards an agreeably postmodern sense of proliferating intertextual possibility.

In a memorable formulation Scott McGill captures the essence of this inter-textualist perspective: ‘Because each membrum can be identified as a secondary Virgilian segment, there is no such thing as an allusively inert verse unit in any cento’.7 Now, postmodern appeals to infinite intertextual play could easily be used to reinforce the old charge against the centonist of diminished authorial agency and control, while leaving the reader awash in interpretative overstimula-tion; the cento as ‘open text’.8 But postmodernism also brings new strategies for sharpening and refining a sense of poetic authority; and these will indirectly inform my emphases here. My tactic in what follows will be to tune into the centonists’ own built-in commentaries on their centos and, more generally, to be alert for cues in these texts which seem to redirect the reader’s attention from the literary to the metaliterary: in short, I shall seek in cento the voice of centonic self-consciousness.9

First, then, to Proba, probably (though not certainly) identifiable as Faltonia Betitia Proba, a member of one of the most aristocratic (and most Christian) families in late imperial Rome, the gens Anicia.10 Before we plunge into the detail of her cento, usually dated to the 350s or 360s, it is perhaps worth empha-sizing once more the strangeness of this moment in the history of authorship. 7 McGill (n. 1), p. 25. A footnote here (n. 140) cites Stephen Hinds: Allusion and Inter-

text: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Cambridge 1998, for ‘the idea that all allusions are interpretable’, adding the (true) remark, ‘Hinds does not discuss the centos, however’.

8 On the accommodation of critical practice to the cento’s ‘space’ of intertextual possi-bility cf. esp. Bažil (n. 4), pp. 64–5 (in a chapter which navigates intertextualist me-thodology with a very sure theoretical compass); cf. McGill (n. 1), pp. 27–9.

9 Bažil (n. 4), p. 68, though giving due notice to ‘la critère de “l’auto-réflexivité”’, may underestimate its interpretative usefulness for cento.

10 For a conspectus of the evidence for Proba’s life and work, see Jane Stevenson: Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, Oxford 2005, pp. 64–71 (quotation in my text from p. 69) and pp. 532–5, including coverage of the view which would give the cento to the granddaughter of the Proba to whom it is usually attributed, dating it to the 390s rather than the 350s or 360s. The champion of the later attribution is Danuta Shanzer: The Anonymous Carmen contra pa-ganos and the Date and Identity of the Centonist Proba, in: Revue des Études Augustini-ennes 32 (1986), pp. 232–48, whose arguments (whether her position be accepted or not) have had an invigorating effect on discussion of Proba and her family; for the most recent defence of the traditional attribution, see Alan Cameron: The Last Pagans of Rome, Oxford/New York 2011, pp. 327–37.


Proba’s Cento was extraordinarily widely read for centuries: according to Jane Stevenson in Women Latin Poets ‘there are more manuscripts and editions of the Cento than of any other single work by a pre-modern woman’. At the same time, since Proba’s Cento is her only extant work, none of her surviving words are her own … except for a brief prefatory passage (to be touched on later) in which she briefly describes her poetic and spiritual intent.

The case of Proba also illustrates the hazards of applying a single interpreta-tive lens to different kinds of cento. The inherent interest of this text as a late antique retelling of the Bible (better, an ‘extreme epitome’)11 and as an early document in the history of Christian Latin poetry has always guaranteed it a level of interest and engagement (and controversy) denied to its pagan counterparts.12 All sorts of entailments arise from the fact that Proba’s poem is constructed not from one but from two canonical texts: philologically, Proba explores the words of Virgil; theologically, she explores the word of God, in both the Old Testament and the New. In several ways, then (not least in the area of biblical typology),13

11 ‘Extreme epitome’: Formisano/Sogno (n. 4); in their hands a suggestive characterization

of cento form on many levels. 12 For seminal modern discussions of Proba as biblical epic and as, in other respects too,

an important text in the formation of Christian Latin literature, see Reinhart Herzog: Die Bibelepik der lateinischen Spätantike, Band I, München 1975, pp. xlix–li and pp. 3–51; Roger Green: Proba’s Cento: Its Date, Purpose and Reception, in: Classical Quarterly 45 (1995), pp. 551–63. On receptions of Proba in her own century, inclu-ding the famous attack on biblical centos in Jerome, Letter 53.7 (read by most modern scholars as an attack on Proba specifically), see Scott McGill: Virgil, Christianity and the Cento Probae, in: Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. by David Scourfield, Swansea 2007, pp. 173–93; for important caveats about the role of Jerome in the re-ception of Proba, see now Schottenius in this volume.

13 For strict typological correspondence within Proba’s Cento between events from the Old and New Testaments, see e.g. Elizabeth A. Clark/Diane F. Hatch: The Golden Bough, the Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, Chico CA 1981, pp. 161–9; Karla Pollmann: Sex and Salvation in the Vergilian Cento of the Fourth Century, in: Romane memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century, ed. by Roger Rees, London 2004, pp. 79–96, here: p. 89; for enlargement of the idea of ‘typology’ to describe correspondence between the cento and its Virgilian model, yielding (in effect) ‘biblical and non-biblical typological double-exposures’ see, suggestively, Sigrid Schottenius: Typology and the Cento of Proba, in: Quaderni Urbinati di Cultu-ra Classica 95 (2010), pp. 43–51, esp. pp. 45–6 and p. 50, picking up Pollmann (see above, n. 13), p. 88; cf. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer: Von Aeneas zu Camilla. In-tertextualität im Vergilcento der Faltonia Betitia Proba, in: Jeux de voix: énonciation, intertextualité et intentionnalité dans la littérature antique, ed. by Danielle van Mal-Maeder/Alexandre Burnier/Loreto Núñez, Bern 2009, pp. 331–46; also (indirectly) Stratis Kyriakidis: Eve and Mary: Proba’s Technique in the Creation of Two Different

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Proba’s cento is a programmatically serious work, while Ausonius’, by his own account, is a mere jeu. A temporary benefit of the present juxtaposition, however, may be to surprise us into a sharper sense of Proba’s philological wit; a more Au-sonian reading of Proba at play.

In this and the following quotations I follow modern convention by setting out Proba’s text with a line-by-line record below of the verbatim Virgilian source-texts (Cento Probae 139–44):14

vivite felices | interque nitentia culta fortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas. haec domus, haec patria est, | requies ea certa laborum. his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi, | multosque per annos non rastros patietur humus, non vinea falcem. 139] A. 3.493, G. 1.153. 140] A. 6.639. 141] A. 7.122 (hic domus), 3.393. 142] A.1.278. 143] A. 1.279, G. 4.208. 144] E. 4.40. Live happily amid the flourishing fields and blissful seats of prospering wooded glades. This is your home, this is your native land, a sure rest from toil. On this I put no finishing post, no limit of time: dominion without end have I bestowed. The ground will not endure the hoe for many a year, nor vineyard the hook.

About eighty lines into Proba’s treatment of Genesis, God is instructing Adam and Eve how to conduct themselves on the newly created Earth; let us use this part of the poem to consider Proba’s processes of centonic composition. How can a re-sourceful poet ‘patch’ together the Garden of Eden, before the Fall of Man, with lines and half-lines from Virgil? Well (line 140), on the principle that the closest Virgilian approach to the Christian paradise will be found in a pagan paradise, she should first select a segment of the Elysian fields from Aeneid 6. Then (line 141), to sustain the sense of an idealized God-given environment, she should add a vi-sionary glimpse of Italy as promised land, both in the achievement (Aeneid 7) and

Female Figures, in: Materiali e Discussioni 29 (1992), pp. 121–53 on Proba’s contrast-ing centonic treatments of Eve and Mary.

14 Text of the Cento Probae (incl. signalling of boundaries of Virgilian membra) follows Carl [Karl] Schenkl (ed.), Probae Cento, in: Poetae Christiani Minores I (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum XVI), Prague/Vienna/Leipzig 1888, pp. 511–609, as (with occasional abridgement) does the cento-apparatus, in which A, G and E abbreviate Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues; English translations lightly adapt either Clark/Hatch (n. 13) or I.M. Plant (ed.): Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology, Norman 2004. I cite the text of Ausonius, Cento Nuptialis from Roger Green (ed.): The Works of Ausonius, Oxford 1991. For translations of Ausonius and of Virgil I use or adapt the versions in the Loeb Classical Library.


in the promise (Aeneid 3); and she should follow up immediately (142–3) by taking over some words from the divine promise of Roma aeterna back in Aeneid 1.

Now, these analogies are not happening in cultural isolation. The idea that Virgil is already himself attuned to the Christian message is a familiar one in this period, and that idea is an important driver of Proba’s cento. So when in line 144 Proba adds to her description of Eden a glimpse of the classical world’s own myth of life before the fall, we should note not just the appropriation of the Golden Age topos of spontaneous vegetative bounty, but the fact that this instance of the topos comes from the poem in which Virgil had predicted the transformative conse-quences for the world of the birth of an anticipated and longed-for child, the so-called ‘Messianic’ Fourth Eclogue, read as a ‘proof’ of Virgil’s access to the Christian message by a host of readers from Lactantius on;15 Proba’s allusion to the Fourth Eclogue is obligatory and surely programmatic.

The reconstruction above is based upon the assumption that Proba’s work is more than a matter of just using Virgil as a repository of decontextualized phrases; and indeed Proba’s ‘patchwork’ does often appear to be sensitive to the original Virgilian context of her borrowings. But caution reminds us that this is a cento: if the goal is to find allusive sensitivity to original Virgilian context in every line or half-line of Proba’s almost-700-line cento, that way may lie mad-ness … or maybe not.

Continuing to take stock of the Garden of Eden, let us look at the construction of the Tree of Knowledge, the starting point for Sigrid Schottenius’ 2010 article, cited above (cento 148–52):

est in conspectu | ramis felicibus arbos, quam neque fas igni cuiquam nec sternere ferro, religione sacra | numquam concessa moveri. hac quicumque sacros | decerpseri t arbore fetus, morte luet merita: | nec me sententia vertit. 148] A. 2.21, G. 2.81. 149] A. 7.692 (quem). 150] A. 7.608 (sacrae), 3.700. 151] A. 11.591 (sacrum), 6.141. 152] A. 11.849, 1.260 (neque). There is, in view, a tree with fruitful boughs; to topple it with flame or blade is sacrilege. On sacred principle it must never be disturbed. Whoever plucks sacred fruit from this tree shall pay with death deserved: no argument changes my mind.

In a half-line at 151, on the awful consequences of plucking its fruit, the forbidden tree finds a worthy Virgilian analogue, the Golden Bough, different but compara-

15 Lactantius, inst. 7.24, quoting Ecl. 4.21–45: cf. Pollmann (n. 13), p. 89 and n. 81;

McGill (n. 12), p. 176 and n. 24.

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ble in its symbolic weight;16 but in a half-line at 148, as the description begins, the ‘tree with fruitful boughs’ is just a regular fruit-tree from Georgics 2. In terms of ‘allusive weight’ Schottenius scores this latter appropriation as ‘not very impor-tant’, just a convenient source of tree vocabulary for Proba. The emphasis in her reading falls elsewhere, on the implications of another post-Virgilian tree-moment a few lines later;17 but I would like to plant the suggestion (to which I shall return) that 148 itself deserves a second look; my interest lies in the fact that in the Geor-gics these ‘boughs’ are grafted.

It is almost time to meet the Serpent in the Garden; but, before moving on, let us briefly return to the opening words of the Creator’s speech (139, already quoted) to see what kinds of question can arise here if we press the idea of readerly sensi-tivity to the Virgilian contexts of Proba’s Virgilian citations:

vivite felices | interque nitentia culta

When Adam and Eve, within Proba’s Eden, are situated inter […] nitentia culta, should anything be made of the fact that in their original Georgic context these ‘flourishing fields’ are beset on all sides by weeds and thorns (Geo. 1.152–4)?

[…] subit aspera silva lappaeque tribolique, interque nitentia culta infelix lolium et steriles dominantur avenae. A prickly growth springs up of burs and thistles, and amid the flourishing fields luck-less darnel and barren oats hold sway.

Do these nitentia culta arrive in Eden context-free, or do they bring some of that encroaching wilderness with them in a subtextual foreshadowing of Man’s im-minent Fall? Compare the biblical sequel at Genesis 3.17–8 (God curses Adam): maledicta terra […] spinas et tribulos germinabit tibi.18

16 So too Proba 243 with Aen. 6.206; cf. Clark/Hatch (n. 13), pp. 148–9, who cite other

Proban passages too to press the case for Golden Bough symbolism. 17 Schottenius (n. 13), p. 46, on Proba 148 (taking the phrase ‘allusive weight’ from Philip

Hardie: Polyphony or Babel? Hosidius Geta’s Medea and the Poetics of the Cento, in: Severan Culture, ed. by Simon Swain/Stephen Harrison/Jaś Elsner, Cambridge 2007, pp. 168–76, here: p. 170); the discussion of Schottenius goes on (pp. 47–8) to treat Pro-ba 189 in relation to its Virgilian source in Aen. 3.32, the violation of the bleeding tree of Polydorus, and thence, antiphrastically, to the plucking of the Golden Bough.

18 (Identical) Latin phrasing in Vetus Latina and Latin Vulgate, picked out in italics in this quotation from the Revised Standard version of Gen 3.17–8: ‘[…] cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.’ As for Proba’s own ‘sequel’, when more than a hundred lines later she expands Gen 3.17–8


A tendentious reading might extend the centonic second-guessing to the first half of the line too. Do we bring too much Virgilian information to God’s com-mand to Adam and Eve to ‘live happily’ (vivite felices), if we recall that in its original context it is addressed by Aeneas in Aeneid 3 to some fellow-Trojans who have settled, in their mimic-Troy at Buthrotum, for something rather less than the (Edenic) promised land sought by Aeneas himself: is this context rele-vant or irrelevant to the Proban passage, interpretable or uninterpretable?

Twenty lines later the threat to Eden becomes fully manifest; and no less manifest is the general tenor of this passage’s inventory of Virgilian citation (cento 172–82):

iamque dies infanda aderat: | per florea rura ecce inimicus atrox | immensis orbibus anguis septem ingens gyros, septena volumina versans nec visu facilis nec dictu affabilis ulli obliqua invidia | ramo frondente pependit, vipeream spirans animam, | cui tristia bella iraeque insidiaeque et crimina noxia cordi. odit et ipse pater: | tot sese vertit in ora arrectisque horret squamis, et, | ne quid inausum aut intemptatum scelerisve dolive relinquat, sic prior adgreditur dictis | sese obtulit ultro. 172] A. 2.132, 1.430. 173] G. 1.407, A. 2.204 (angues). 174] A. 5.85 + 5.408. 175] A. 3.621. 176] A. 11.337, 7.67. 177] A. 7.351, 325. 178] A. 7.326. 179] A. 7.327, 328. 180] A. 11.754, 8.205. 181] A. 8.206, 4.415 (e.g.). 182] A. 6.387, 8.611. And now the unspeakable day was at hand: through the flowery fields, behold: a snake, abominable, hostile, with immeasurable coils, with seven spirals vast, twisting with seven rolls; not easily discerned, not courteous to anyone in speech, it hung with hate disguised from sprouting branch, breathing a viper’s breath, and in its heart were bitter wars, anger, plots and guilty crimes. The Father himself hated it: so many are the faces it assumed, and it bristled with its scales puffed out and, so as not to leave any wickedness or trickery undared or untried, it first approached with speech and showed itself of its own accord.

The Serpent in the Garden is a composite of Virgilian snakes, monsters and giants, including Laocoon’s twin serpents (173), the Cyclops (175), Cacus (180–1) and, with three adjacent citations, Allecto (177–9);19 plus a snake at a shrine (174), plus a snake in a simile (180). In this passage, then, the general appositeness of the

into cento 252–60, the lappaeque tribolique of Geo. 1.153 do indeed find a place in her text (257), along with three other ‘patches’ from Geo. 1.151–9.

19 On the especial emphasis here on Allecto, see Bažil (n. 4), pp. 183–5; Schottenius (n. 13), p. 48.

180 Stephen Hinds

Virgilian citations is not in doubt. However, a question about interpretative limits can still be posed, along the following lines: is Proba merely lumping together Virgilian passages which meet a minimum standard of snakiness or monstrous-ness, or is this a knowing synthesis of elements which distil the Aeneid’s own epic systematization of chthonic and gigantomachic imagery?20 Or something between the two?

A more oblique (or a more perverse) approach to the Serpent may be made via the passage which immediately precedes the onset of this threat to the per-fection of Paradise (cento 163–9):

hic ver purpureum atque alienibus mensibus aestas, hic liquidi fontes, | hic caeli tempore certo dulcia mella premunt, | hic candida populus antro imminet et lentae texunt umbracula vites. invitant croceis halantes floribus horti inter odoratum lauri nemus | ipsaque tellus omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat. 163] G. 2.149 (cf. E. 9.40). 164] G. 4.18 (at mut. in hic), 100 (hinc). 165] G. 4.101 (premes), E. 9.41. 166] E. 9.42. 167] G. 4.109 (invitent). 168] A. 6.658, G. 1.127. 169] G. 1.128. Here spring is rosy, and summer extends to months other than her own; here are flowing fountains; here at heaven’s determined time sweet honey’s press; here white poplar overhangs the cave, and supple vines weave together shady places. Breathing with saf-fron blooms, the gardens attract amid a scented grove of bay, and Earth of her own accord gave her gifts all the more freely when none demanded them.

In the first verse here (163, with emphases), ten lines before the Serpent enters the narrative, Proba describes the perfect seasons of Eden in the words used by Virgil in the Second Georgic to describe the perfect seasons of Italy. Compare now the original context of the citation (Geo. 2.149–54):

hic ver assiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas: bis gravidae pecudes, bis pomis utilis arbos.

20 In modern scholarly terms a Hardiesque systematization, see Philip Hardie: The Epic

Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition, Cambridge 1993, esp. pp. 57–87, for schemes of cosmic dualism (esp. Heaven v Hell) in Virgil and in post-Virgilian epic. For (Claudianic) examples of the persistence of such schemes in the fourth century cf. Stephen Hinds: Claudianism in the De Raptu Proserpinae, in: Ge-neric Interfaces in Latin Literature, ed. by Theodore D. Papanghelis/Stephen J. Harri-son/Stavros Frangoulidis (Trends in Classics suppl. vol. 20), Berlin 2013, esp. pp. 176–80; add now Catherine Ware: Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition, Cambridge 2012, pp. 124–34.


at rabidae tigres absunt et saeva leonum semina, nec miseros fallunt aconita legentis, nec rapit immensos orbis per humum neque tanto squameus in spiram tractu se colligit anguis. Here spring is perpetual, and summer extends to months other than her own; twice a year the cows calve, twice a year the tree serves us fruit. Here are no ravening tigers or savage brood of lion; no aconite deceives the wretch who picks it; nor indeed, sweeping huge coils along the ground, does the scaly snake with his vast train wind himself into a spiral.

In the laudes Italiae as in Eden, a classic Golden-Age topos: splendid spring, summer out of season. But here is the twist: in Virgil’s Italy this description of seasonal perfection leads into four lines on the equally perfect absence of savage and noxious beasts, culminating in an emphatic two-line exclusion of the snake, whereas in Proba’s Eden the snake is already in the Garden and will break into the narrative ten lines later. In other words, the Virgilian line is contextually inept, but in a way that strongly suggests an apt and deliberate use of intertextual irony.21

At the other end of the same cento passage (168–9, again emphasized), with the onset of the Serpent now just four lines away, Proba adds to Eden the last of several images of vegetative bounty drawn from the Georgics.22 Once again, there is no serpent to be found in the corresponding Virgilian landscape; but this time it turns out to be a pointed case of ‘no serpent … yet’ (Geo. 1.125–9):

ante Iovem nulli subigebant arva coloni: ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat. ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris. Before the reign of Jove no tillers subjugated the land: even to mark possession of the plain or apportion it by boundaries was sacrilege; man made gain for the common good, and Earth of her own accord gave her gifts all the more freely when none de-manded them. Jove it was who put the noxious venom into deadly snakes.

21 Proba’s adaptation acts interestingly, then, upon a Virgilian passage which has given

many readers since Servius pause for thought: on the surprise in the laudes Italiae of a snake-free Italy, see Richard F. Thomas (ed.): Virgil, Georgics, 2 vols., Cambridge 1988 on Geo. 2.153–4, with David O. Ross: Virgil’s Elements. Physics and Poetry in the Georgics, Princeton 1987, pp. 117–18.

22 The presence of the Georgics in Proba’s Cento is considered systematically at Bažil (n. 4), pp. 143–64.

182 Stephen Hinds

In the line (129) which immediately follows the Virgilian ‘original’ of Proba’s image of bounty (127–8), the Age of Saturn is over, the Age of Jove has begun, and the very first thing that marks this fall from grace is an infestation of … poisonous snakes. In other words, once again Proba is reading (and asking us to read) her ostensibly serpent-free citation in context, with the real allusive point lurking in the Virgilian words just after the ones cited. And in both cases the resultant subtextual tease yields a sense of Proban playfulness and literary wit.

At this point a caveat may be offered. A case can be made that readings such as those just offered give a misleading impression of tidiness; that, by highlighting some cento phrases over others, I am indulging a philological in-stinct to privilege coherence in Proba’s patterns of patching, and to assimilate her allusive practice to that of a ‘normal’ poet in the Latin hexameter tradition. Here is one consequence of the sheer intertextual overload faced by the reader of a Vir-gilian cento: the typical new-wave article or essay rehabilitating the cento tends to be selective rather than comprehensive in its reading, but that very selectivity may dodge the central interpretative challenge raised by the cento form. Does a paper like this one simply skip the less interpretable intertexts? Or can one argue that Virgil is such a canonical author, with his every line already in Proba’s time (and certainly in our time) carrying such a freight of interpretation, that there will always be some way to beat a path towards interpretability from any Virgilian line or half-line whatsoever? I pose this as an open question; but, given the current acceleration in close readings of the cento (both pagan and Christian), the bases for discussion are even now in flux.

One final foray into Proba’s intertextual Eden. ‘The Serpent beguiled me and I did eat’: here are the two closing lines of the Serpent’s speech of temptation, followed by Eve’s fateful tasting of the forbidden fruit (cento 195–202):

‘dux ego vester ero: | tua si mihi certa voluntas, extruimusque toros dapibusque epulamur opimis.’ sic ait, et dicto citius, | quod lege tenetur, subiciunt epulis | olim venerabile lignum instituuntque dapes | contactuque omnia foedant. praecipue infelix pesti devota futurae mirataque novas frondes et non sua poma, causa mali tanti, | summo tenus attigit ore. 195] E. 8.38 (eram), A. 4.125 (7.548). 196] A. 3.224. 197] A. 1.142, 12.819. 198] A. 7.110, 12.767. 199] A. 7.109, 3.227. 200] A. 1.712. 201] G. 2.82. 202] A. 6.93, 1.737. ‘I shall be your guide. If I can be sure of your good will, then we shall pile the couch-es high and dine on sumptuous feasts.’ It said this, and quicker than its speech, what was prohibited by law, the once hallowed tree they submitted to their banquets and began the meal, and defiled everything with their contact. She in particular, the hap-less woman, devoted to future ruin, admired the new leaves; the fruit (not hers), the cause of such great sin, she brought to her lips.


In 196 the serpent promises Eve a ‘sumptuous feast’; in 199 Proba tells us that this feast, once begun, brings the taint of universal corruption: but for an alert reader the biblical consequence was already encoded in the first Virgilian citation: 196 and 199 are ‘before’ and ‘after’ moments from the attack of the food-defiling Har-pies in Aeneid 3.

However, my focus is on the first line here quoted, Cento Probae 195, in which (as in 196, albeit less directly) the Virgilian terms of the serpent’s invita-tion may already offer some intimation of the imminent Fall. Here in context (Eclogue 8.37–41) is the original for the first half of 195:

saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala (dux ego vester eram) vidi cum matre legentem. alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus, iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error! Within our garden hedge I saw you (I was your guide), a little child with your mother, gathering dewy apples. My eleventh year ended, the next had just greeted me; from the ground I could now reach the frail boughs. In the moment I saw you I lost my heart, and a fatal error swept me away!

Line 195a dux ego vester ero; Ecl. 8.38 dux ego vester eram (Proba not in-frequently departs from centonic strictness to tweak an inflected form).23 In the immediate Virgilian context the girl thus guided, like Eve, is picking tree-fruit. More than that, the result (not for the picker, in this case, but for the speaker of the vignette) is utter ruin and specifically a malus error, with a pun in the Virgil between malus and māla; in the Eclogue as in Eden, the fall of (a) man caused by the picking of a tree-fruit. As often in Proba’s cento,24 alertness to adjacent Virgilian context is arguably confirmed by a later ‘patch’: at 242 Adam will cite Ecl. 8.41 (malus error etc.) as he replays this scene in his confession to God.

Now, in context (Aen. 4.124–8), the Virgilian original for the second half of the same line, cento 195b:

‘speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo; hic hymenaeus erit.’ non adversata petenti adnuit atque dolis risit Cytherea repertis.

23 Bažil (n. 4), pp. 187–8. 24 Cf. the arguably complementary quotations from Geo. 1.153 at Proba 139 and 257

(n. 18 above).

184 Stephen Hinds

‘To the same cave shall come Dido and the Trojan chief. I will be there and, if I can be sure of your good will, will link them in sure wedlock, sealing her for his own; this shall be their bridal!’ Yielding to her suit, the Cytherean gave assent and smiled at the guile discovered.

‘If your good will towards me is sure’, tua si mihi certa voluntas: a generic-sounding phrase; indeed (as the cento-apparatus indicates) a phrase found not once but twice in the Aeneid. But in the Aen. 4.125 original privileged by Schenkl (rightly so, in formal terms),25 the speaker is Juno, and these words seal a pact of supernatural bad faith whose purpose is to mislead a human couple into making a fatally bad choice (not Adam and Eve but Aeneas and Dido). If the cento phrase itself is thematically colourless, then, its Virgilian ‘back story’ accesses a(nother) cautionary tale of a man and woman derailed by supernatural misdirection. Effective corroboration of Proba’s interest in the context of her citation is again available, as close as line 200, ‘patched’ from an earlier descrip-tion of the divine manipulation of Dido’s will back in Aeneid 1; an association underwritten (on this argument) by a narrative arc across three books in the mod-el text.

So just how self-aware is Proba’s cento poetry? Well, Proba’s status as a woman, and the fact that her only surviving work is written entirely in the words of another, can lead a negative critic to label her, disparagingly, as a writer of diminished consciousness, a sort of real-life Ovidian Echo, with no independent power to initiate utterance; she can thus attract an extreme form of those broader critical anxieties (pertinent to the present volume) about the perceived derivativeness of late antique verse relative to its classical models. But perhaps the time is right to embrace the contrary position, namely that, in a culture in which literary consciousness is centrally defined by the dynamics of literary appropriation, the composition of a cento like Proba’s may presuppose an author with an especially highly developed consciousness.

To press that idea for a moment, let me take another look (as promised) at the opening verse of Proba’s description of the Tree of Knowledge (cento 148):

est in conspectu | ramis felicibus arbos

Back in my earlier quotation of this passage, I registered the consensus which reads a symbolic charge into Proba’s appropriation just below of a half-line from

25 Consider again cento 195 dux ego vester ero: | tua si mihi certa voluntas. When 195b is

traced to Aen. 4.125 devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas, the words immedia-tely preceding the ‘patch’ (adero et) offer a kind of formal overlap with 195a (ad-ero/ero), and even serve to mitigate Proba’s alteration of eram to ero in her citation of the Ecl. 8.38 original; Aen. 7.548 offers nothing comparable. For ‘mots communs’ between adjacent quotations in Proba’s Cento cf. Bažil (n. 4), p. 191.


the Golden Bough of Aeneid 6, while it has nothing to say about her appropria-tion here of a half-line from a grafted fruit-tree in Georgics 2 (80–2, at 81):

[…] nec longum tempus, et ingens exiit ad caelum ramis felicibus arbos, miratastque novas frondes et non sua poma. […] and in a little while a mighty tree with fruitful boughs shoots up skyward, and marvels at its strange new leafage and fruits not its own.

But what more suggestive programmatic image could there be for Proba’s post-Virgilian remake of the Tree of Knowledge than the image of an old Roman tree stock which by a process of cutting and slipping is made to bear a new and alien fruit? Itur in antiquam silvam, as Virgil himself might say.

Cento as the art of post-Virgilian grafting?26 Perhaps: such arch self-referentiality, not usually thought of as proper to Proba, would be an easy sell if we were considering (as we will shortly) the case of Ausonius.

Now, whereas Ausonius’ cento has come down to us introduced by a wide-ranging epistle from the author, in prose, on his literary aims and methods, Proba’s 55-line programmatic preface is in verse, and almost from the outset is itself drawn into the stylized utterance of the cento form. I observed earlier the striking fact that her preface offers the only surviving words by Proba which are not by Virgil;27 but an immediate qualification is necessary. Right from the first sentence of the pre-face on, some Virgil is folded in; and even as Proba explains her poetic principles, the density of Virgilian allusion grows, reaching near-cento in lines 24-8. The second half of the preface is in full Virgilian cento, well before Proba embarks at line 56 on the beginning of Genesis (principio […]).

Proba’s preface has been much discussed:28 I will focus here on just two details. Here first, with Schenkl’s Virgilian ‘apparatus’, are the opening verses (cento 1–8):

26 Something to add to Dunstan Lowe: The Symbolic Value of Grafting in Ancient Rome,

in: Transactions of the American Philological Association 140 (2010), pp. 461–88 (with a coda on tree-lore in the Vitae Vergilianae); esp. suggestive for a metapoetic approach is the case of Palladius, De insitione: Marco Formisano: Veredelte Bäume und kultivierte Texte: Lehrgedichte in technischen Prosawerken der Spätantike, in: Wissensvermittlung in dichterischer Gestalt, ed. by Marietta Horster/Christiane Reitz (Palingenesia 85), Stuttgart 2005, pp. 295–312. esp. pp. 300–2.

27 Note that the Cento Probae, as we have it, is preceded in many manuscripts by a later non-centonic verse preface evidently addressed to the Emperor Arcadius, not by Proba herself, probably belonging to the 390s: discussion in McGill (n. 12).

28 Seminal is Roger Green: Proba’s Introduction to her Cento, in: Classical Quarterly 47 (1997), pp. 548–59; extended treatment in Bažil (n. 4), pp. 115–41.

186 Stephen Hinds

iam dudum temerasse duces pia foedera pacis, regnandi miseros tenuit quos dira cupido, diversasque neces, regum crudelia bella cognatasque acies, pollutos caede parentum insignis clipeos nulloque ex hoste tropaea, sanguine conspersos tulerat quos fama triumphos, innumeris totiens viduatas civibus urbes, confiteor, scripsi: satis est meminisse malorum. 2] G. 1.37 regnandi … dira cupido. 5] G. 3.32 diverso ex hoste tropaea. 7] A. 8.571 tam multis viduasset civibus urbem. Long ago, I confess, I wrote of leaders who had violated sacred vows of peace – wretched men caught by a dread desire to rule – and various killings, kings’ cruel wars and families in battle-lines, illustrious shields stained by parents’ blood and tro-phies taken from no enemy, triumphs splattered with blood which fame had brought, cities widowed so often of countless citizens: it is enough to remember these evils.

Remember that, to put the matter starkly, we have fewer than 30 lines of ever-diminishing non-Virgilianism, before the cento closes in, in which to find out what other Latin poetic influences might be operative upon Proba.29 Before she found a better poetic path, it seems, Proba wrote epic verse about wars of kings, about relatives under arms. And, consonantly with this, the first half of the fourth line (see emphases) offers one possible answer to the question about influence: when Proba’s Latin is not by Virgil it is ... by Lucan. cognatasque acies: not just a verbatim Lucanian hemistich but, in Lucan’s epic too, the first half of the fourth line. The point has not escaped notice.30 Perhaps we may identify this as a case of what Llewelyn Morgan has called ‘stichometric inter-textuality’:31 such an effect seems right for the sensibility of a centonist.

29 Starkly put, but a little disingenuously. One of the most striking insights of new-wave

cento criticism has been Scott McGill’s demonstration that a poem consisting wholly of Virgilian words is still capable of giving access to a non-Virgilian model: McGill (n. 1), pp. 40–6, on the felt presence of Ovid and Seneca in Geta’s Virgilian cento Medea.

30 Adducing detailed parallels, including this one, Green (n. 28), p. 550, points out the ‘obvious general resemblance to Lucan’s Pharsalia, especially his proem, in lan-guage, style, and tone’, noting that even the seven-line structure of Lucan’s opening seems to have left its imprint on Proba’s; cf. already Shanzer (n. 10), p. 233 n. 5, sug-gesting also a secondary reference in line 4 to the incipit of Statius’ Thebaid (frater-nas acies […]). In the subsequent movement of the preface Bažil (n. 4), pp. 121–3, finds a foil to this pattern of Lucanian allusion in a Proban conversation with a more recent, and Christian, poetic predecessor, Iuvencus.

31 ‘Stichometric intertextuality’: Llewelyn Morgan: Patterns of Redemption in Virgil’s ‘Georgics’, Cambridge 1999, pp. 23–7 and pp. 223–6; cf. Hinds (n. 7), p. 92 and n. 80.


My second quotation from the preface includes the famous line (23) in which Proba sets out her relationship with Virgil, also notable as the last wholly non-Virgilian verse in the poem (cento 22–8):32

hinc canere incipiam. praesens, deus, erige mentem; Vergil ium cecinisse loquar pia munera Christ i: rem nulli obscuram | repetens ab origine pergam, si qua fides animo, si vera infusa per artus mens agitat molem et toto se corpore miscet spiritus et quantum non noxia corpora tardant terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra. 22] G. 1.5 hinc canere incipiam. 24] A. 11.343, 1.372. 25 sq.] A. 3.434 si qua fides, animum si veris implet Apollo, A. 6.726 sq. totamque infusa per artus mens agitat mo-lem et magno se corpore miscet. 27 sq.] A. 6.726 spiritus 731 sq. quantum non noxia corpora tardant terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra. Here I will begin to sing. God be present, lift up my mind: I shall tell that Virgil sang of the holy gifts of Christ: and repeating a theme obscure to no one I will proceed from the beginning, if there is any faith in my heart, if flowing through my joints the true mind moves my effort and the Spirit mixes itself with my whole body, and insofar as harmful elements do not impede, and no dullness come from earthbound joints and limbs imbued with death.

The exact phrasing of this line is very important to theologians, in the context of late antique Christian debate about the proper use of pagan literature (including most notably Jerome’s famous polemic against centos).33 What Proba writes is not ‘I shall make pagan Virgil sing the word of God’ but ‘I shall say that Virgil always already sang the word of God’. Proba is buying into the idea of proto-Christian Virgil: the goal of her cento is not to give a new intent to Virgil’s poetry, but, through an edit, to clarify the intent that was already immanent in Virgil’s poetry.

For my metapoetic take-away from this passage, however, I want to consider not line 23 but lines 25–8. In a near-cento of Anchises’ Pythagorean language in Aeneid 6 about the confinement of souls in flawed mortal bodies, Proba hopes that her own flawed earthly limbs, through the infusion of the Holy Spirit, can worthily proclaim the word of God. But I think there may be another way of reading of lines 25–8 too, triggered by the metapoetic suggestiveness of the word membra (line 28): Proba hopes not just that her own flawed earthly limbs but that 32 A point emphasized also by Bažil (n. 4), p. 119. In the quotation below I supplement

Schenkl’s Virgilian apparatus for lines 24 and 25, after Green (n. 28), pp. 556–7, and (again with Green) accept Schenkl’s si vera infusa as a repair for distorted MSS read-ings in line 25.

33 See again the references in n. 12. For the distinctive position taken by Proba in line 23 cf. Pollmann (n. 13), pp. 87–8.

188 Stephen Hinds

the flawed earthly ‘membra’ of Virgil’s hexameters can worthily proclaim the word of God.34 That is to say, the very words in which Proba christianizes An-chises’ pagan eschatology are made to express some worry about whether these Virgilian words are too spiritually compromised to get the job done. The subtext adds a note of quiet anxiety to the confident statement of Virgil’s Christian au-thority just above in line 23, and in more general terms evokes and complicates a world of imagery, first pagan but then urgently Christian, of book and body, word and flesh.

And so to Ausonius, playful poet and considerable politician of late antique Bordeaux and Trier, whose varied literary œuvre includes a cento of some 130 lines, written a few years after Proba’s (on the more usual dating for the latter). Ausonius evidently reacts to and plays with an existing tradition of cento; but Proba’s Christian poem is generally not seen as directly impinging upon Ausoni-us’ secular one.35

What the Gallic poet offers, famously, is a nuptial cento: this is a wedding poem – an epithalamium – cut and pasted (again) from lines and part-lines of Virgil. Ausonius tells us that he wrote the cento on a challenge from the emperor Valentinian (a dabbler in cento-composition himself, it seems); the occasion to be marked was evidently the wedding of the emperor’s son Gratian in or around 374 AD.36

A selective look, first, at the much-discussed framing epistle and apology ad-dressed (some years later) to Axius Paulus, in which Ausonius describes how he came to write the poem, and offers some overt discussion of his cento methodol-ogy:37

perlege hoc etiam, si operae est, frivolum et nullius pretii opusculum, quod nec la-bor excudit nec cura limavit, sine ingenii acumine et morae maturitate. centonem vocant qui primi hac concinnatione luserunt. solae memoriae negotium sparsa col-

34 OLD s.v. membrum 5c. The same general approach to 25–8 is already taken by Bažil

(n. 4), p. 121; the suggested word-play adds corroboration and point to his reading. The word membrum haunts the programmatics of the cento. For McGill (n. 1), p. 10, Ausonius’ description of the collecting and fitting together of Virgil’s ‘strewn and mangled’ verse units in the epistolary preface of the Cento Nuptialis (solae memoriae negotium sparsa colligere et integrare lacerata, quoted in my text below) is implicitly dependent upon the multivalence of this word, i.e. sparsa et lacerata [membra]; later in Ausonius’ preface lie analogies from mythological dismemberment and reconstitu-tion (also noticed below).

35 McGill (n. 1), p. 1 n. 3. For fruitful and suggestive juxtaposition of Proba and Auso-nius in modern criticism, see esp. Pollmann (n. 13). The idea of allusive gesturing to Proba in Ausonius is raised and rejected at ibid., pp. 92 and n. 102.

36 Green (n. 14), p. 518; McGill (n. 1), pp. 92–4. 37 Extended discussion in McGill (n. 1), pp. 1–30; cf. Pollmann (n. 13), pp. 80–3.


ligere et integrare lacerata, quod ridere magis quam laudare possis. pro quo, si per Sigillaria in auctione veniret, neque Afranius naucum daret neque ciccum suum Plautus offerret. piget equidem Vergiliani carminis dignitatem tam ioculari dehone-stasse materia. Read through this also, if it is worthwhile – a trifling and worthless little book, which no pains have shaped nor care polished, without a spark of wit and that ripeness which deliberation gives. Those who first sported with this form of compilation call it a ‘cento’. It is a task for the memory only, to collect what is scattered and to piece to-gether what is mangled, and is more likely to provoke your laughter than your praise. If it were put up for auction at the market of the Sigillaria, Afranius would not give his straw, nor Plautus bid his husk. Indeed it is vexing to have Virgil’s majestic verse degraded with such a comic theme.

Unlike Proba, whose attitude to Virgil seems as high-minded as the Christian pur-pose he is there to serve, Ausonius represents his cento as being in the business, however apologetically, of debasing or degrading his great model (dehonestasse, at the end of the quotation). From the outset, his epistle rolls out the time-honoured vocabulary of poetic self-depreciation: this opusculum is produced without labor, without cura, without the file’s fine finish; the history of cento is a history of lusus, mere trifling.

After some discussion of the imperial pressures which forbade Ausonius to steer clear of the enterprise, the epistle goes on to characterize the formal chal-lenges of cento, blending matter-of-fact technical discussion with some striking uses of analogy:

accipe igitur opusculum de inconexis continuum, de diversis unum, de seriis ludicrum, de alieno nostrum, ne in sacris et fabulis aut Thyonianum mireris aut Virbium, illum de Dionyso, hunc de Hippolyto reformatum. So accept a little work, continuous, though made of disjointed tags; one, though of di-verse pieces; absurd, though of grave materials; mine, though another’s; lest you should wonder at the accounts given by priests or poets of the Son of Thyone or of Virbius – the first reshaped out of Dionysus, the second out of Hippolytus.

Here is the work of cento construction: to connect the unconnected, to bring diverse elements together into oneness (cf. just below variis de locis sensi-busque diversis), to make a new body, or a new version of the same body, out of violently dispersed limbs38 – an image, perhaps, to set alongside those mori-bunda […] membra in the preface of Proba. Further on, the analogy shifts to

38 See Hardie (n. 17), p. 171, for a finely nuanced discussion of this analogy.

190 Stephen Hinds

invoke a kind of mathematical game which involves the fitting together, or in unsuccessful cases the misfitting, of geometric puzzle-pieces made of bone:39

harum verticularum variis coagmentis simulantur species mille formarum: elephantus belua aut aper bestia, anser volans et mirmillo in armis, subsidens venator et latrans canis […]. sed peritorum concinnatio miraculum est, imperitorum iunctura ridiculum. quo praedicto scies quod ego posteriorem imitatus sum. By fitting these pieces together in various ways, pictures of countless objects are pro-duced: a monstrous elephant or brutal boar, a goose in flight and a gladiator in ar-mour, a huntsman crouching down and a dog barking […] But while the harmonious arrangement of the skilful player is marvellous, the conjunction made by the unskilled is grotesque. This having been said, you will know that I am like the second kind of player.

And so to the nuptial cento itself; my main focus will be on a passage in the middle of the poem (lines 68–70). First, however, to establish the festive mood of the cento’s early sections, here (with minimal comment) is part of the scene subtitled Descriptio egredientis sponsae (c. Nupt. 33–40):

tandem progreditur | Veneris iustissima cura, iam matura viro, iam plenis nubilis annis, virginis os habitumque gerens, | cui plurimus ignem subiecit rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit, intentos volvens oculos, | uritque videndo. illam omnis tectis agrisque effusa iuventus turbaque miratur matrum. | vestigia primi alba pedis, | dederatque comam diffundere ventis. 33] A. 4.136, 10.132. 34] A. 7.53. 35] A. 1.315, 12.65. 36] A. 12.66. 37] A. 7.251, G. 3.215. 38] A. 7.812. 39] A. 7.813, 5.566. 40] A. 5.567, 1.319. At length comes forth Venus’ most lawful charge, now ripe for a husband, now of full age for marriage, wearing a maiden’s look and garb, over whose flushed cheeks a deep blush spreads, suffusing fire, while round she throws her eager eyes and inflames all with her gaze. At her the whole company of youths, gathered from house and field, and throng of matrons marvel. Her advancing foot as she trod showed white, her hair she had given to the winds to spread abroad.

39 Stomachion or ostomachion, a game associated with Archimedes: Green (n. 14), ad

loc., McGill (n. 1), pp. 8–9 and pp. 20–1. A forthcoming paper by Martha Malamud: Double double: two African Medeas (on Hosidius Geta and Dracontius), touches on the implications for Ausonius’ analogy of new mathematical findings about the game in the 10th century Archimedes Palimpsest.


Here comes the bride, with echoes in these lines of Dido, Lavinia, Venus disguised as a huntress, Lavinia (again), Camilla and (again) the disguised Venus: she is a composite of Virgilian goddesses, queens, mothers and maidens … and, oddly enough, enjambed across lines 39 and 40, one (male) horse with a very fine fore-leg.40

The whole cento is an epithalamium; but at line 67, more or less exactly at its halfway point, Ausonius proceeds to recount the singing of the epithalamium-proper by the wedding chorus. So this is in a real sense the core of the poem, the nuptial song within the nuptial song, addressed to the imperial bride and groom, and duly subtitled Epithalamium utrique (c. Nupt. 67–74):

tum studio effusae matres | ad limina ducunt. at chorus aequalis | pueri innuptaeque puellae versibus incomptis ludunt | et carmina dicunt: ‘o digno coniuncta viro, | gratissima coniunx, sis felix, | primos Lucinae experta labores, et mater. cape Maeonii carchesia Bacchi. sparge, marite, nuces, | cinge haec altaria vitta, flos veterum virtusque virum: | tibi ducitur uxor’ 67] A. 12.131, 10.117. 68] G. 4.460, A. 6.307. 69] G. 2.386, A. 6.644. 70] E. 8.32, A. 10.607. 71] A. 1.330, G. 4.340. 72] G. 4.380. 73] E. 8.30, 8.64. 74] A. 8.500, E. 8.29.

Then eagerly pressing forth, the matrons lead the pair to the threshold; but the company of their peers, boys and unwedded girls, disport in unkempt verses, and thus they sing: ‘O you that are joined with a worthy lord, bride most welcome, may you be blessed when you have felt Lucina’s first pangs and are a mother. Take goblets of Maeonian wine. Scatter the nuts, bridegroom! Wreathe round these altars with fillets, you flower and excellence of men of old: for you they bring the bride’

Consider the set-up for this ‘inner’ song (68–9 above, including the first of the two half-lines with emphases): ‘But the company of their peers, boys and un-wedded girls, playfully sing in unkempt verses (versibus incomptis ludunt)’. Who does this sound like? Like Ausonius, of course, who in the framing epistle (as quoted earlier) describes his own cento as a piece of lusus, and as lacking labor, cura and the polish of the file; the metaliterary ‘mirroring’ is well flagged by Karla Pollmann.41 But now let us take things a step further. 40 As a further antidote to the seductions of allusive tidiness, note that the composite

bride also takes traits in these lines from Ascanius and Latinus; and the femina who ‘inflames’ (urit) at Geo. 3.215, the source of line 37b, is of course a heifer, albeit a strongly anthropomorphized one (interesting thoughts on this line’s interpretability at McGill [n. 1], p. 98 n. 36).

41 Pollmann (n. 13), pp. 85–6: ‘The mirroring of the cento as a whole in the Epithalamium is also visible from the statement that the young men and women ‘sing playfully in un-

192 Stephen Hinds

In the original Virgilian context of the first half of line 69 (versibus incomptis ludunt), who are the singers who play in unkempt verses (Geo. 2.385–6)?

nec non Ausonii , Troia gens missa, coloni versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto. Even so Ausonia’s swains, a race sent from Troy, disport in unkempt verses and laughter unrestrained.

The answer, emphasized above: they are Ausonii […] it is the centonist’s poetic signature! More than that, they are Ausonii coloni, not just ‘cultivators’ but ‘colo-nists’ (and what is a cento but a ‘colony’ of resettled texts?). And these coloni are ‘a race sent from Troy’, just as most of the cento’s ‘resettled’ verses come from an epic about Troy (… and about Trojan resettlement).42

Not just cento, then, but Ausonian meta-cento: Virgil’s favourite name for the ancient Italians elicits, for his successor, nothing less than an encrypted sphragis.

Hardly less noteworthy in their intertextual suggestiveness, perhaps, are the opening words of the chorus’s ‘inner epithalamium’, now introduced (c. Nupt. 70 above, again with emphases): ‘o digno coniuncta viro […]’, an apt compliment for the young imperial groom and his bride.43 Compare the original Virgilian context in the Eighth Eclogue (26–32):

Mopso Nysa datur: quid non speremus amantes? iungentur iam grypes equis, aevoque sequenti cum canibus timidi venient ad pocula damnae. Mopse, novas incide faces: tibi ducitur uxor. sparge, marite, nuces: tibi deserit Hesperus Oetam. incipe Maenalios mecum, mea tibia, versus. o digno coniuncta viro, dum despicis omnes […] To Mopsus is Nysa given! For what may we lovers not look? Griffins now shall be joined with mares, and, in the age to come, the timid deer shall come with hounds to drink. Mopsus, cut the new torches! For you they bring the bride! Scatter the nuts, bridegroom! For you the evening star quits Oeta! Begin with me, my flute, a song of Maenalus! O you that are joined with a worthy lord, even while you scorn all men […]

polished verse’ […] echoing in a self-referential way Ausonius’ characterisation of the weakness of his cento’.

42 Note that while Ausonia and its cognates occur some 40 times in the Aeneid, Ausonius has ‘found’ here the sole instance of his namesake ethnic nomenclature in the Georgics.

43 An aptness underscored by a pun in the second half of the line: Constantia, the imperial bride, is gratissima coniunx, that is, right for Gratianus (in Virgil, the refe-rence is to Juno.).


Here too, the speech is (quasi-)epithalamial; but in this instance the half-line (end of passage, Ecl. 8.32, with emphases) is spoken with a bitterly ironic tone, in the mouth of an alienated observer who feels that the couple in his poem are any-thing but well-joined. Hence that stark adynaton five lines earlier, in 27: iungen-tur nunc grypes equis.

Received wisdom offers the following interpretative possibilities: (1) We are not supposed to think of the Virgilian context of the borrowed

half-line (but Ausonius uses two other half-lines from the same passage three and four lines later44).

(2) We should just tacitly admire Ausonius’ ability (as advertised in the fram-ing epistle) to redirect a Virgilian phrase into non-Virgilian meaning (variis de locis sensibusque diversis).

In this case, however, just adjacent to his hidden programmatic ‘signature’, I believe that Ausonius wants us to think a bit harder about the vocabulary of junc-ture itself. Are Virgil’s couple well-joined … or not? And, to press the recycled phrase into self-referentiality, does the citation of Virgil’s marital ‘conjunction’ yield in Ausonius an unworthy and ill-fitting centonic conjunction – because the match between Gratian and his bride is not, like the match between Virgil’s origi-nal couple, unworthy and ill-fitting?

And that can make us entertain an idea which would be available even with-out this moment of mise en abîme. Is there a similar form-and-content point to be made about the very choice of a marriage-song as the theme for a cento? A poem containing matches of one cento-phrase with another (which can turn out to be a good fit or a bad fit) takes as its theme the ‘matching’ of one person with another (which can turn out to be a good fit or a bad fit). The epithalamium enjoys a surge in late antique literature:45 Ausonius’ cento may here have made that genre a little more self-conscious.46

And so to bed, after a Parecbasis in which Ausonius warns his readers of the Fescennine ribaldry ahead, which will lead to blushes not just for his own modesty but for Virgil’s too ([…] qui et Vergilium faciamus impudentem). A full survey of the famously explicit wedding-night scene at the end of the

44 Sparge, marite, nuces (Cent. Nupt. 73; Virg. Ecl. 8.30); tibi ducitur uxor (Cent. Nupt.

74; Virg. Ecl. 8.29): see passage quotations in text above. 45 Epithalamium in late antique Latin literature: Sabine Horstmann: Das Epithalamium in

der lateinischen Literatur der Spätantike, München/Leipzig 2004, including pp. 290–301 on the (in some ways oblique) relationship of Ausonius’ cento to the tradition; and see now Harich-Schwarzbauer in the present volume.

46 This paragraph’s suggestion perhaps invites comparison with the move at Hardie (n. 17), p. 175, to read the dismembered and fragmented Absyrtus in Hosidius Geta’s cento Medea as a figure of centonic self-consciousness.

194 Stephen Hinds

Cento Nuptialis (101–31) is beyond the brief of this article;47 but a representa-tive glimpse may help to set up a couple of final thoughts about poetological framing (105–12):

[…] | ramum, qui veste latebat, sanguineis ebuli bacis minioque rubentem nudato capite | et pedibus per mutua nexis, monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum, eripit a femore et trepidanti fervidus instat. est in secessu, | tenuis quo semita ducit, ignea rima micans; | exhalat opaca mephitim. nulli fas casto sceleratum insistere limen. 105b] A. 6.406. 106] E. 10.27. 107] A. 12.312, 7.66. 108] A. 3.658. 109] A. 10.788. 110] A. 1.159, 11.524. 111] A. 8.392, 7.84. 112] A. 6.563 […] the rod lurking within his garment, crimsoned with blood-red elderberries and vermilion, its head laid bare (as their legs together entwined), a shocking, misshapen monster, huge, no sight in its single eye, he draws forth from his flank and eagerly presses as she quivers. In a spot secluded, where leads a narrow path, there glows a fiery crack, whose dark depths exude a pungent vapour. No chaste man is permitted to stand on this accursed threshold.

Unsheathing a hideously engorged one-eyed weapon (106–9), our hero pene-trates a dark and pungent abyss (110–12) where, as the scene develops, he will unlock some heady imagery of sexuality and death: this is, in its own way, a post-Virgilian catabasis. The opening half-line of my quotation (105b ramum, qui veste latebat) yields this cento’s signal reuse of a talismanic object from Aeneid 6: the Golden Bough.48

Ausonius’ subtitle for this scene is Imminutio, but just what is being ‘im-paired’ or ‘diminished’: the bride’s virginity or, in this section more than in any other, Virgilian diction and dignitas? The lexica specify this as the sole attestation of the noun in the sexual sense (paralleled for the verb at Apuleius, florida 14 virginem imminuisset);49 but hardly less apt here is the more com-mon and longer-established use of imminutio in relation to literary style and status. Perhaps, indeed, in reference to the great Augustan poet whose nick-

47 Discussion esp. at McGill (n. 1), pp. 92–114; on the specifics of the language, see J.N.

Adams: Ausonius Cento Nuptialis 101-131, in: Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 53 (1981), pp. 199–215.

48 Significantly, Aen. 6.406 is identified as a cacemphaton by the late antique grammarian Diomedes (GL Keil 1.451.7): Adams (n. 47), p. 201.

49 TLL s.v. imminutio 463.11; Lewis & Short s.v. imminutio; cf. Green (n. 14), p. 518.


name was ‘Parthenias’ (‘the maidenly’),50 the two interpretations of the subtitle are here closer to one another than they seem.

My final passage of Ausonius comes from the closing apologia which balances the cento’s opening epistle and, like the epistle, is addressed to his friend Axius Paulus:

sed cum legeris, adesto mihi adversum eos, qui, ut Iuvenalis ait, ‘Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt’, ne fortasse mores meos spectent de carmine. ‘lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba’, ut Martialis dicit. But when you have done reading, stand by me to face those who, as Juvenal [2.3] says, ‘put on the airs of Curius and live like Bacchanals’, lest perchance they picture my life in colours of my poem. ‘My page is naughty but my life is pure’ as Martial [1.4.8] says.

Ausonius’ afterword on the contrasting morals of poetry and poet (while the excitement of the cento’s climactic bedroom scene is still subsiding) includes the citation above of a famous line of Martial, itself in the tradition of Catullus 16. But I quote it because of a different sense which may sound in the line when re-cited by a poet with the verbal sensibility of a centonist:

‘lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba’

That is (to paraphrase Martial’s line anew) ‘Although my cento (unlike that of a certain recent predecessor in the genre) is playful/parodic/obscene, my life is proba: like Martial’s, but also like … Proba’s.51

I return, in closing, to the titular agenda of this volume. In the world of mid to late first-century AD literary studies, what has crucially allowed long-standing charges of decline and secondariness to be reclaimed from hostile critics, and to become newly empowering and newly explanatory terms, is the 50 Donatus, Vit. Verg. 11; significantly, Virgil’s nickname ‘Parthenias’ is mentioned right

here in our cento’s closing apologia (in a different but related sexualizing context). 51 Note that Proba puns on her own name in her programmatic preface: Cento Probae 12

arcana ut possim vatis Proba cuncta referre ‘[…] so that I, the poetess Proba (or the morally good poetess), can recall all mysteries’: see Green (n. 28), p. 553, on ‘the pun in line 12, one evidently popular with its beneficiaries and no doubt tiresome to others’; one of the two parallels he cites is Auson. ep. 9b 35–52 (an extended conceit upon his name addressed to a Probus). With the present paper already in press, I was alerted to an anticipation of my suggestion about the Martialian tag at Paola F. Moretti: Proba e il Cento nuptialis di Ausonio, in: Debita dona: Studi in onore di Isabella Gualandri, ed. by Paola F. Moretti/Chiara Torre/Giuseppe Zanetto, Napoli 2008, pp. 317–47, here: pp. 341–3, within an article which reopens the question of Ausonian engagement with Proba.

196 Stephen Hinds

fact that both decline and secondariness are self-conscious tropes repeatedly manipulated by Neronian and Flavian poets: so that, by a typographical short-hand adopted in my Allusion and Intertext, talk of decline can be replaced by talk of ‘decline’ (so, in brief, the poetics of Lucan); and talk of secondariness by talk of ‘secondariness’ (so, in brief, the poetics of Statius).52 Is such an approach applicable to the rehabilitation of the mid to late fourth-century cento?

In the passages here examined, the cento does indeed seem to embrace its status as, in its very essence, derivative or ‘secondary’ literature; we have seen the centonist negotiating twists and turns of poetological self-reflexivity, and doing so with a degree of detailed wit perhaps underestimated heretofore, at least in the case of Proba. But what about ‘decline’ – or indeed ‘décadence’, our volume’s related (but not identical) master-term? Until recently (as noted at the outset of this article), readers were only too ready to label the cento, disparagingly, as decadent poetry: so any suggestion that the cento may engage self-consciously with ideas of décadence and decline is potentially a liberating one. However, some circumspection is in order.

Certainly, Ausonius’ self-conscious debasing of Virgil (as advertised in his epistolary preface, in his Parecbasis and in his use of the subtitle Imminutio) involves some appeal to the idea of ‘decline’ from a high literary standard, and even, in moral terms, the striking of a playful pose of ‘décadence’; but in the context of Ausonius’ œuvre more broadly this comes across as no more than a temporary mask, a flag of temporary generic convenience. In the case of Proba, the connotations of ‘decline’ seem less than half-right for the peculiar combi-nation of diffidence and self-confidence which this writer’s preface program-matically brings to its Christianizing project. Only the ‘superseded’ Proba of the very opening verses, she of the early misguided career in martial epic, seems ready to own a self-description in terms of moral or literary decline or decadence – unless her programme includes the implication (and perhaps it does) that the inadequacy of the human poet in the face of the Word of God constitutes a new poetic of decline, less in relation to one’s literary tradition than to one’s Maker.

Implicit in all the above is a belief in the power of metapoetics to energize the discussion of literary history. As Michael Roberts indicated more than twenty years ago, such energy is often to be found in the late antique poets’ own compositional metaphors;53 and, as Ausonius’ prefatory epistle to Paulus shows by example, there is no need to limit those metaphors to just one. It is in this spirit that my paper has highlighted the whole range of tropes for the trans-formation of inherited materials extractable from this small piece of cento-

52 Hinds (n. 7), pp. 83–98. 53 Roberts (n. 5), esp. pp. 52–5; p. 66; pp. 116–21.


reading: from Proba the grafting of trees and the problematic (re)animation of old limbs; from Ausonius the processes of colonial settlement, the sexualized imminutio which is a kind of opposite to jouissance, and, above all, the patches, matches and conjugal mismatches of cento itself, apt vehicle for a dialogue with tradition in a late antique world whose wholeness for writer or reader – if it is wholeness – is in its own macrocosmic terms a sum of seeming incongruities.

'The self-conscious cento'

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