Poeta arte christianus: Pomponius's Cento Versus ad Gratiam Domini as an Early Example of Christian Bucolic

Abstract

Critics have amply considered how Christian authors in late antiquity adapted the forms, language, and themes of classical poetry to create an ecclesiastical poetic tradition. Studies related to this topic have largely focused upon biblical epic and the carmina of well-known poets like Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. In this paper, I wish to proceed into the less trodden area of Christian bucolic poetry, and specifically to one of the first examples of the form, Pornponius's Versus ad Gratiam Domini. This text, dating to the late fourth or early fifth century, is a 132-line Virgilian cento (with a concluding lacuna), or a work created out of unconnected verse units of varying length taken from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that an author pieces together to compose a new narrative. These units can be up to three lines long, but usually consist of a segment of a hexameter line. Sixteen centos ranging in date from ca. 200–ca. 530 survive from antiquity, with four handling Christian topics. Because the ecclesiastical centonists reuse Virgilian verses directly, their texts serve as extreme examples of how Christian authors created poems by reworking the classical past. It is this transformative gesture that will concern me in this paper. I will investigate how Pomponius redeploys Virgil's language to compose his Christian Versus ad Gratiam Domini and, in the process, endows his text with specific features manifesting the continuity with and change of classical bucolic that is so fundamental to the development of the Christian pastoral form.