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POETRY
is Cato Uticensis rather than Cato the Censor. The collection is interesting
as an echo of how the silent majority thought they ought to behave, and recalls
the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus (p. 293). What makes it worth mention in a
history of literature is the enormous success which it enjoyed in the Middle
Ages, when a number of different recensions, some interpolated, others abbreviated,
circulated in hundreds of manuscripts, excerpts were embodied by
many authors in their works, and translations and adaptations were made
in the vernacular languages.
Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, most probably an African, and to be identified
with the Praefectus urbi in 329 and 333, addressed to the emperor Constantine
in 325 or 326 a collection of twenty short panegyric poems, to which he later
added seven others. Several poems in the Latin Anthology attributed to
'Porfyrius' are probably also by his hand. Porfyrius' poems, which appeal
to the eye rather than to the ear, let alone to the mind, of the reader all involve
complicated double or triple acrostics, lines which can be read backwards or
forwards, words arranged according to the number of syllables they contain,
and the like. His tours de force are his figurate poems, in the shape of a palm
tree (9), a water organ (20), an altar (26) and a shepherd's flute (27). Such
word games had been played by men of letters in their less serious moments
since Hellenistic times. What confers on the poems of Porfyrius some importance
in the history of Latin literature is that these trifles won the approval
and patronage of Constantine, who deigned to address a letter of commendation
to the ingenious versifier. Roman poets needed a patron but the level of taste
at the imperial court in the early fourth century offered little hope of recognition
to serious poetry.
Tiberianus, who may be identified with C. Annius Tiberianus, comes
Africae in 325—7, comes Hispaniarum in 332—5, and Praetorian Prefect of
Gaul in 336—7, is known as the author of four short poems — or fragments of
longer poems. The first is a description in 20 trochaic tetrameters catalectic
of an idyllic country scene, which recalls in metre and tone the Pervigilium
Veneris. The others are an attack on the power of money in 28 hexameters,
which draws its examples exclusively from Greek legend, a description in 12
hendecasyllables of the death of a bird, from which an edifying moral is drawn,
and a hymn in 32 hexameters which is monotheistic but not specifically Christian.
Tiberianus is an elegant and graceful poet, whose works were still read
and quoted with approval by Servius in the fifth century. But it is difficult
from the few fragments to form an idea of the scope and quality of his writing.
A poem in 85 elegiac couplets on the Phoenix is attributed to Lactantius in
some manuscripts and by Gregory of Tours and may well be by his hand.
It is in a rather inflated, rhetorical style, crammed with mythological references.
In the Middle Ages it was taken to be an allegory of the Fall and Redemption
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