All but one of the twenty-four essays in Paul-Augustin Deproost’s In Melius have previously appeared in print. For the purposes of this collection, however, most have been outfitted with amendments and bibliographic updates. The earliest pieces arrived in 1989; the latest in 2017. Together, therefore, they span the crucial decades during which late Latin poetry regained favor in the fields of classical, cultural, and literary studies and garnered renewed attention among historians of the later Roman empire and its aftermath. Thematic units, however, not publication date determine the order of presentation in this volume: the reinvention of epic, wisdom and devotion, the first days of the world (creation), body and portrait, and the reception of ancient myth (e.g., Circe and Icarus). Two poets do exercise sufficient sway to claim their own sections: Juvencus (two essays) and Arator (three essays), on whose Historia apostolica Deproost has published extensively and sagaciously.[1] Apart from the early fourth-century Juvencus and the sixth-century Arator, it is Prudentius, Avitus of Vienne, Dracontius, and Claudius Marius Victorius who dominate the volume’s pages, though Lactantius—especially as author of the De ave phoenice—Paulinus of Nola, and Boethius receive their due. Coverage is broad and deep, which will hardly surprise. Deproost, Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain, long ago established himself as a thoughtful expositor of late Latin verse and most readers of this review will already be familiar with some of the volume’s essays. To have them collected here, however, is more than a convenience. Greater than the sum of its parts, In Melius not only serves as a reminder of paths once blazed but also projects this body of work into current discussions of the very nature and character of late Latin poetics. While the collection’s retrospective introduction highlights several themes featured in the original “case studies” (8), its concluding essay, the volume’s only previously unpublished piece, positions Deproost’s entire oeuvre as a contribution to recent debates over the distinctiveness of late Latin poetry in respect to the classical poetic traditions from which it borrowed and to which it responded.
Overarching many of the volume’s essays is Deproost’s conviction that late Latin Christian poets saw themselves not as tasked with subverting an outmoded literary legacy that they reluctantly inherited from the imperial past but rather as caretakers of a vital poetic tradition that should be channeled toward the interests and requirements of their own moment. Late antique writers and social engineers of all kinds, Deproost observes, were fond of the expression in melius and its equivalents, which blunted the edge of change and uncertainty by couching it as improvement. We are asked to consider, for example, the Tetrarchic slogan omnia in melius reformantur or the centoist Proba’s Maro mutatus in melius. The slogan’s ideology of reformatio or renovatio—whether inscribed as a political watchword or paraded as an intellectual and aesthetic agenda—distilled the spirit of a post-Constantinian age that just could, perhaps, convince itself of its essential truthfulness. It should not be unexpected then, Deproost emphasizes, that this idea saturated the public-facing Christian verse of a period marked as much by continuities as disruptions. Skills and attitudes honed by an educational system that continued to require paraphrase of the classical poets and mastery of classical prosody inevitably shaped the Christian poetry of the fourth and fifth centuries. Imbued with the ethos of the age’s conservative grammarians, poets from Juvencus to Arator naturally “returned to the sources of the past to give birth to a new poetry” (6), reworking the catalog in ways blaringly overt (the Virgilian cento, for example) or ingeniously subtle (Prudentius’s Psychomachia or Sedulius’s Paschale carmen), melding respect for their literary inheritance with the freedom to redefine it while cultivating a medium well suited to articulating Christian values or restaging Biblical history. In Deproost’s estimation, therefore, the new poetry was not merely accessory to theology and commentary but was capable of plumbing historical and spiritual depths beyond the reach of common language. It is unlikely that these general claims, illustrated throughout the volume in essay after essay, will meet much resistance, for understanding the interplay of classical models and Christian ideals is now a common quest of many readers of this remarkable body of poetry. To read the essays of In Melius seriatim, therefore, is to sense the subtle ways in which they have shaped our own readerly habits.
Almost instinctually we now approach late Latin poetry like intertextual sleuths, as conditioned to detect the ghosts of pasts present as we are vigilant for the generic elisions and episodic segmentations that seem endemic to the late Latin literary milieu. This volume, whose essays are deeply committed to such detective work, equally illustrates how we have become such shrewd readers—convincing ourselves at the same time that late antique poets and their readers engaged in the same deft textual maneuvers that we deploy. But from the outset Deproost has also asked us to move beyond enjoying the surface gamesmanship of intertextual play and to read deeply into those realms where words and ideas fermented to yield refashioned notions of wisdom, heroism, piety, and salvation, challenging contemporaries to resituate the (classical) past and its values in a landscape reformed by Christian scriptura and the virtutes of the saints and martyrs. The ancient phoenix rises as the bird of a new paradise, a striking emblem of the resurrection of Christ, of the saints, and ultimately of all Christian fideles. Familiar figures and scenes metamorphose under the weight of a Christianizing society—the vir sapiens and the locus amoenus reforming as the Prudentian martyr or a heavenly dreamscape. Aeneas and Orpheus are transfigured, presaging Christ; Vergil’s psychologically complex Dido offers not only phrases for glossing Mary and Eve but also a theater for observing and reporting the “interior combat” unfolding where the spirit meets the bone, challenging the will and complicating the lives of late antique Christians, subject themselves to amorous temptation as well as enfeebled by original sin. We are reminded why the classical epic poets—not just Lucretius and Vergil but also their successors—and their flirtations with interiorization served the Christian Latin poets so well, poets who were exceedingly serious about their craft, Deproost avows, because they perceived the stakes to be so high.
But did these poets, therefore, set about fashioning a truly new medium for expressing late antique Christian ethics and ideas about mankind and God? Is there, in fact, in this age a Christian Latin poetry or poetics that can be marked off in aesthetics or techne from its classical inheritance or even from its non-Christian contemporaries? By broaching this question in his concluding essay, Deproost is, in fact, circumscribing with religious affiliation a broader question that has emerged in the wake of the renewed attention to late Latin poetry, especially among scholars migrating to the fourth and fifth centuries from Augustan and post-Augustan Rome: are there features of late Latin poetry generally that make it something sufficiently unlike early imperial poetry in form or style or technique or aesthetic assumptions to warrant viewing it as more than just a continuation (or revival really) of classical poetics by the poets of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian empire? Interestingly Deproost’s answer to this question focuses on the one feature of late Latin poetry that most scholars have readily acknowledged as novel but typically downplayed as diagnostic for the problem just posed: content and subject matter, which for so much of extant late Latin poetry are overwhelmingly biblical, hagiographical, or apologetic. Late Latin Christian poetry, Deproost asserts, is indeed foremost a literary manifestation of Christian “belief” and an “expression of faith” while its very composition is a performative “spiritual exercise” (481). The poetry canvassed in In Melius, Deproost argues, was inspired by the same twinned liturgical and Christocentric imperatives that propelled the development of Latin Christian hymnography—itself intellectually and emotionally rooted in the lyrics of Horace as well as the Davidic psalms—or that fueled the revival of Christian epigraphic poetry sponsored by the fourth-century Roman bishop Damasus, whose verses retuned the Latin elogium to commemorate contemporary Christian witnesses as well as the (legendary) martyrs. Similarly biblical epicists—Juvencus, Claudius Marius Victorius, Avitus, and Arator, for example—frankly announced their catechetical and missionary aims. To post its messages and engage its readers, late Latin Christian poetry, unhampered by theological rigor, elevated spiritual enlightenment over doctrinal precision, aesthetic appreciation over exacting exegetical commentary. If in doing so, Deproost observes, its poets plundered the Egyptians—not by erasing texts that could still be considered “sacred” (above all the Aeneid) but by transforming them into something better—that particular love and theft could be justified by subordinating it to a higher agenda. In its techniques and devices and ways of doing poetry, Deproost concedes, late Latin Christian verse may not have strayed far from its classical models, but this continuity in craft and form, epitomized by extensive intertextual allusion, also ensured an elite readership not unduly put off by novelty or radical reorientation (485). In the end, then, Deproost is hardly at odds with scholars who see little that is fundamentally “new” in the way late Latin poets worked (488), but his sympathy for their deep literary-spiritual agenda gives to them a gravitas that distances them from their classical forebearers: everything, he notes, is made anew, energized by new scriptural, hagiographic, and mystical inspiration in the service of new pedagogical aims within new sociological and cultural frameworks. The essays of In Melius incessantly demand, then, that we look past the familiar and recognize “la poésie des chrétiens latins” as “l’expression littéraire d’une spiritualité vécue” (489). It is this argument that should take us back to these essays and the poetry they serve with fresh eyes and new questions.
Notes
[1] E.g., L’Apôtre Pierre dans une épopée du VIe siècle: l’Historia apostolica d’Arator (Collection des Études Augustiniennes. Série Antiquité 126), Institut d’Études Augustiniennes: Paris, 1990; and with Bureau Bruno, Arator. Histoire apostolique, (Collection des Universités de France. Série Latine 417), Les Belles Lettres: Paris, 2017.