Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry by Philip Hardie (review)

Specialists in early imperial literature have discovered the treasures of late Latin poetry. Prominent among them is Philip Hardie, who has already published discerning essays on Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. Perhaps it is unsurprising that scholars who have labored in the well-tilled fields of Augustan and post-Augustan poetry should migrate to fresher terrain. Hardie himself identifies "the relative youth of studies of late antique Latin poetry" as one of the discipline's defining features (3). That such emigrants to this new frontier should also bring along the tools that have proved so effective in rehabilitating Ovid, Lucan, and Statius is equally unremarkable. Nevertheless, it is an act of loyalty that thrusts them into the center of debates over the exceptionality of late Latin poetics. By championing critical principles honed on the poetry of Vergil and his successors, Classicism and Christianity takes its stand on the side of those who see the writing and reading practices of late Latin poets and their audience as fundamentally continuous with those of the classical past.

The first chapter of Classicism and Christianity ("Farewells and Returns: Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola") models Hardie's approach and, as he notes, introduces most of the book's themes and strategies. The poetic epistles exchanged by Ausonius and Paulinus have long been a favorite site for exploring the intersection of biography and literature in the later fourth century. Though less interested in lives than some scholars, Hardie like others spotlights the interplay with Vergil (especially the Eclogues) and Ovid (especially the exile poetry) that undergirds the textual maneuvers and emotional complexity of these letters. For Hardie, the "noise and clatter of classical poets" that animate these letter-poems (21) and the "patchwork of old intertexts" (19) that structures them are clear evidence that even the radically committed Christian poet (Paulinus) was licensed to deploy the "verbal resources and stylistic ornament" (43) of pre-Christian poetry in the service of Christian truth. Consequently, Hardie argues, content constitutes the primary difference between Late Antiquity's Christian and traditional Latin poetry and contrastimitation stands as a privileged technique by which Christian poets bridged content and form (e.g., 2 and 39). This position is not in itself new, of course, but Hardie further argues that late antique Kontrastimitation is broadly continuous with the "emulative and agonistic practices of pre-Christian poetry" (8). In short, as the readings of this chapter are meant to illustrate, the critical methods developed in recent decades by scholars of early imperial poetry are appropriate and effective for assessing late ancient poetry, Christian and traditional alike.

There are, then, two ways of engaging Classicism and Christianity, as an assemblage of close readings and as an interpretative primer. Chapters 2–4 focus on late antique elaborations of themes and narrative ploys already present primarily in the works of Vergil. In these chapters Hardie foregrounds the late antique absorption, modification, and transvaluation of Vergilian narratives and ideologies of imperial renewal and exilic longing; the adaption and occasional subversion of the Aeneid's ruminations on cosmic and imperial order; and late Latin poetry's recapitulations of Vergil's emphasis upon the dialectic of concord and discord in perceptions of Roman history and identity formation. Claudian, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and Rutilius Namatianus claim most of the spotlight but the poets of Biblical epic, centones, and carmina figurata, as well as Augustine, that shrewd reader of Vergil, edge in. Less linear argument than a run of soundings bringing to light the classical formations underlying late Latin poetry's political, religious, and aesthetic surfaces, these chapters also reaffirm the centrality of Vergil to the late antique consciousness. In the following two chapters this literary archaeology is brought to bear on topics that are often heralded (inappropriately in Hardie's view) as quintessentially late antique. Chapter 5, which includes an emblematic discussion of the intertextual tapestry that voices the De ave phoenice's program of...