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THE LITERATURE of the fourth century reflects the dynamism and upheaval of the time. The third century appears to have been a c ultural wasteland for Latin literature, remarkable for the paucity of literature, especially poetry, that has survived. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the floodgates opened: old genres were revived and new ones created. After the silence of the third century, the voices of men like Julian and Augustine, Ausonius and Claudian , Prudentius and Ambrose, Jerome and Ammianus emerge. Rhetoricians, grammarians, editors and commentators, philosophers, and historians scrutinized and revitalized many classical genres, while the rapid Christianization of the empire led to new forms of Christian literature, including the sermon, the hymn, scriptural exegesis, the saint’s life, and autobiography. And yet, amid this cultural ferment, as Mastrangelo (2009, 313) has argued, there appears to have been a significant erosion of the cultural authority of classical poetry for the cultured elite of the period, as many of the philosophical, ethical, and political functions of poetry were taken over by the new genres of patristic prose and the devotional hymn: While the church fathers were appropriating and recasting issues such as the relationship of myth to history, the construction of political identity, and the definition of the good life, they were also dismantling pagan poetry ’s claims to pronounce on these questions and thus eroding poetry’s political, social, and ethical relevance. This disenfranchisement of poetry as a purveyor of truth marginalized the practice of poetry in the Roman Christian context. Roman Christian poets thus began from a disadvantageous position in which poetry’s claims to truth had been dismissed. As the classicizing philosophy that had dominated the Second Sophistic gave way to Christian theologians bent on verifying the truth of the biblical text and converting souls, sermons, exegesis, and doctrinal treatises became the most influ1 . WRITING IN CHAINS WRITING IN CHAINS [ 57 ential genres; the more complex classical poetic genres such as tragedy, heroic and national epic, lyric, and epigram faded in importance. Increasingly, Christians placed pagan rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry in opposition to t he Christian search for truth. Lactantius gives an indication of the scorn that philosophy, rhetoric, and poetry evoked in the mind of the Christian reader: “Philosophy, oratory, and poetry are all pernicious for the ease with which they ensnare incautious souls in beguiling prose and the nice modulations of poetical flow. They are honey, hiding poison.”1 Lactantius inverts Lucretius’s famous dictum that philosophical verse was like honey smeared on a cup of medicine to ma ke it more palatable. For Lactantius, honeyed verse is instead a trap, within which lies not medicine but poison (a metaphor Prudentius adopts, as we will see below). This anxiety about poetry’s distance from the truth, about its essential fictionality, was widespread among Christian thinkers; the most sustained critique of poetry on these terms is Augustine’s dismantling of Vergilian epic in The City of God. The complex intermingling of myth, history, divine machinery, and human history that characterized the epic tradition was reduced by Augustine to a s tark contrast between truth and lies.2 The consequences of such thinking for the literature of the fourth century were profound. For Christian writers, poetry was of marginal interest—poets are virtually absent from the Chronica of Eusebius and the De viris illustribus of Jerome and Gennadius. A new Christian poetry developed , featuring the genres of of biblical epic, didactic epic, and hymns, and privileging the functions of praise and didacticism over all others. This poetry was to a large extent circumscribed by and harnessed to an ideological program: As a result, each genre of poetry appears to have a definable (authorial) function that translated into specific and instrumental effects on the audience. This suggests that fourth-century poetry was produced in an effectively circumscribed political environment where the church, the imperial government , the authors, and readers collectively possessed to an unprecedented degree the same ideological and literary assumptions.3 Prudentius and his contemporaries, Claudian and Ausonius, appear to be writing their classicizing verse at a moment when it was losing its cultural capital, which may explain why their verse is not mentioned by patristic writers. Prudentius stands out for the intensity of his engagement with Rome’s literary history, political success, and cultural legacy. Above all, through his use of typology, Prudentius revives the ethical, historical, and political functions of poetry, and connects that poetry directly to the reader.4 In the Psychomachia, for example...

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