Minor Latin poets; with introductions and English translations

INTRODUCTION TOhad not before him the same poem as we have, buta lost one by Lactantius. On Jerome's authoritywe know that Lactantius wrote a ohoLnopiKov fromAfrica to Nicomedia, presumably when he went onDiocletian's invitation to teach rhetoric in thatcity; and it is Baehrens' suggestion that into thisnarrative of his own journey eastwards he mighthave appropriately worked an account of the fabledOriental bird, using our extant poem (according toBaehrens, by a pagan) but adding Christian colour.The hypothesis next assumes that after the supposeddisappearance of Lactantius' poem monkishcopyists made an incorrect ascription of the survivingpoem to the " Christian Cicero," being misled bythe outward resemblances in it to Christian ideas andby the knowledge that a Phoenix had actually beencomposed by Lactantius. It will be noted that themonks, if this guess be true, did not find the paganismof the poem so much of a stumbling-block asBaehrens and Pichon have done. But the majorityof critics, including Ebert, Manitius, Riese, Birt andDechent, have been satisfied with a less elaboratetheory and have accepted our poem as Lactantius'authentic work.For English readers the Phoenix possesses specialhistorical and literary interest as the basis ofan early Anglo-Saxon Phoenix in alliterative accentualverse. Its author, whether the NorthumbrianCynewulf or not—for here too there is adispute—undoubtedly modelled the earlier portionof his poem upon the extant Latin poem. Hereagain, as in the original, we meet the earthly paradise,partly a plain, partly " a fair forest wherefruits fall not " (wuduholt wijnlic,waestmas ne dreosa'b).646