Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

POETRY
are full of Virgilian and Ovidian echoes. Some have seen in Nemesianus*
poems some reference to the programme of political restoration attributed
to the emperor Carus and his sons, but this is highly doubtful. Nemesianus
is a competent and uninspired imitator of classical models, whose poetic
persona is entirely traditional.
The mythological epyllion of Reposianus, De concubitu Veneris et Martis,
in 182 hexameters, cannot be dated with certainty. It recounts the story of the
amorous dalliance of Venus and Mars, first told in the Odyssey (8.266—360;
developed by Ovid, Ars Am. 2.573—600, Met. 4.169—89) with an abundance
of picturesque and on occasion slightly lubricious description. The tone
is graceful and sentimental, but the poet is unable to convey any depth of
feeling or to make his characters come to life. It has been suggested, but can be
neither proved nor disproved, that the poem is an adaptation of a Greek
original.
Six short elegiac poems by Pentadius are of equally uncertain date. The
first, De fortuna, in 36 lines, proclaims with a series of illustrations from Greek
mythology, each contained in a single couplet, the fickleness of fortune. The
second, De adventu veris, in 22 lines, is an example of versus echoici; the first
half of each hexameter is repeated in the second half of the following pentameter,
e.g.
Laeta uireta tument, foliis sese induit arbor,
uallibus apricis laeta uireta tument.
The joyous greensward swells, the trees put on their leaves,
in. the sunny valleys the joyous greensward swells.
The remaining four poems are short epigrams. Pentadius' sole virtue is neatness.
A letter from Dido to Aeneas in 150 hexameters is a frigid piece of rhetoric
stuffed with classical reminiscences. In the Indicium coci et pistoris iudice Vulcano,
in 99 hexameters, by an otherwise unknown Vespa the speeches of the
two contendants are decked out "with much rather obvious mythological
learning. An anonymous poem in 89 hexameters sets out the speech of Achilles,
hiding in the women's quarters, when he hears the trumpet of Diomedes.
These and similar productions owe more to the schoolmaster than to the
Muse. Their value, if they have any, is as indicators of the continuation of
elements of the classical tradition of poetry in education. But everything in
them is small in scale, mean in conception, and trite in expression.
The Pervigilium Veneris purports to be a processional song for a festival
of Venus at Hybla in Sicily, in 93 trochaic tetrameters catalectic, with the
recurring refrain
Cras amet qui numquam amauit quique amauit eras amet.
Tomorrow he will love who never loved and he who loved will love tomorrow.
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