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EPILOGUE
Terence and Virgil is the Paulinus who adapts the genres of classical poetry to
the proclamation of the Christian message. The Augustine whose De doctrina
Christiana sponsors the teaching of the liberal arts is the Augustine who later
argues against their relevance for the Christian life.
This ambivalence remains characteristic of much Christian thinking throughout
the Middle Ages, for clerics are susceptible to the 'humanist' enthusiasm of
men like Prudentius and Cassiodorus on the one side, and to the condemnations
of those like Gregory the Great (' The same lips cannot sound the praises of
both Jupiter and Christ') on the other. Even Alcuin, whose verses so often
evoke Virgil and who is known by the soubriquet Flaccus at Charlemagne's
court, can reprimand his monks for enjoying Virgil in private. But by the ninth
century the value of classical literature, initially as ancillary ro biblical study but
increasingly as inculcating higher cultural standards in both state and church,
is almost universally recognized.
Utilitarian functions rather than literary qualities dictate the pattern of
survival and study of texts up to the Renaissance, as the contents of libraries at
York, Corbie and Lorsch demonstrate. Lyric and love-elegy lie below ground;
Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius appear only occasionally in a catalogue or
isolated quotation, though Horace's Odes become popular from the eleventh
century, and Ovid's fame is even more widespread subsequently. The fiction of
Petronius and Apuleius, irrelevant to Christian education, is ignored till the
Renaissance, when Apuleius aids the creation of the Spanish picaresque novel.
The letters of Cicero and Pliny remain virtually unread until the fourteenth
century. The didactic epic of Lucretius, closely studied by Christian savants like
Lactantius and Prudentius, vanishes subsequently till rediscovered by Poggio.
The most pervasive classical genre throughout the medieval period was epic,
and the epic poet dominating the millennium was Virgil. Evoked or echoed on
almost every page by Prudentius and Paulinus, exploited by practitioners of
biblical and courtly epic in the late Empire, allegorized by Fulgentius in the sixth
century as by Bernard Silvester in the twelfth, Augustine's poeta nobilissimus
reaches the summit of his glory in the Carolingian age, the aetas Vergiliana.
Subsequently, he continues to be the model of epic poets, both Latin and
vernacular. Dante signals his supremacy by greeting Virgil as ' lo mio maestro e
il mio autore', and the Aeneid likewise inspires the epics of Camoens, Tasso and
Milton. But if Virgil is the sun, lesser stars of Roman epic twinkle round him.
Lucan's colourful style won him regular imitators from Lactantius to the
Renaissance, and Dante places him with Homer, Horace and Ovid in the
reception-party for Virgil in Hades. Statius' Thebaid is another perennial
favourite for its flavour of mythological romance and its allegorical mode.
Claudian is not continually popular, but his poetry is familiar especially to
twelfth-century literati.
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008