A “Roman” Wedding in Vandal Africa

Author:

Schwitter Raphael1

Affiliation:

1. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn

Abstract

The Epithalamium Fridi is a sixth-century Virgilian cento that commemorates the marriage of the Vandal noble Fridus with his unnamed bride. Its author, the African poet Luxurius, engages in versatile poetic play fusing Virgil with multiple epithalamial models such as Statius, Claudian, and Ausonius. Through the dynamics of triangular intertextuality the centonist is able to strengthen the wedding poem's generic bonds and to connect himself and his work firmly to the classical Roman tradition. At the same time, echoes of distinctive African idiosyncrasies as prefigured by Dracontius highlight the hybrid character of sixth-century Romano-Vandal elite culture and its celebration of what appears to be a distinctive African Romanness.

Publisher

University of California Press

Subject

History,Classics

Reference73 articles.

1. An early draft of this paper was presented at a workshop in Prague in April 2017. I thank the organizers, Martin Bažil and Daniel Vallat, and the participants, particularly Marie Okáčová, Marcos Carmignani, Maria Teresa Galli, María Luisa La Fico Guzzo and Franca Ela Consolino for their valuable feedback. I am grateful to David van Schoor for his diligent proofreading of the final article, and to the editors and referees at SLA for their extremely helpful responses and advice.

2. A few notable titles among many: Samuel J. T. Barnish, “Transformation and Survival in the Western Senatorial Aristocracy, C. A. D. 400–700,” in Papers of the British School at Rome 56 (1988): 120–55; Geoffrey Greatrex, “Roman Identity in the Sixth Century,” in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (London: Duckworth, 2000), 267–88; Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer, ed., Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World: Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni, and Marianne Pollheimer-Mohaupt, ed., Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018); for Africa see the excellent study of Jonathan Conant, Staying Roman. Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); for Italy, Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); for Gaul, J. Drinkwater and H. Elton, ed., Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ralph W. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Dieter Hägermann, Wolfgang Haubrichs, and Jörg Jarnut, ed., Akkulturation: Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen Kultursynthese in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004).

3. Anthologia latina (AL) 7-18, ed. A. Riese (Leipzig: Teubner, 18942), a collection Shackleton Bailey (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982) refused to re-edit: "neque is sum qui uati reuerendo denuo haec edendo contumeliam imponere sustineam" (praef. III)

4. for a recent discussion see Marco Carmignani, "La recepción de la épica virgiliana en la tardía: antigüedad Juno y las Furias en los centones de Medea e Hippodamia," in Varia et diversa. Épica en movimiento: sus contactos con la historia, ed. Rubén Florio (Mar del Plato: U.N. de Mar del Plata, 2018), 72-112

5. on the general importance of Virgil in the Codex Salmasianus (now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. lat. 10318) see Étienne Wolff, "Virgile dans l'Anthologie latine," in Virgiliennes. Hommages à Philippe Heuzé, ed. J. Pigeaud (Paris: Belles lettres, 2016), 197-208. After Riese2 the EF has been edited by Heinz Happ, Luxurius. Vol. I: Text und Untersuchungen (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1986), 5-9

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