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himself back to the present and the praising that must be performed between lines 56
and 77, he first wonders about his worthiness (ll. 57–62), and then tells Lupus how
others, i.e., the Roman, the Greek, the German and the Briton, shall flatter him with
their instruments and songs (ll. 63–71).
In the last line, however, Venantius bestows upon Lupus the most private, but in
its cringing simplicity also the highest esteem when he says:
ast ego te dulcem semper habebo, Lupe.
(Venantius Book VII, poem 8, l. 79)
but I shall always love you, Lupus.
The poem refers mainly to two events. The first is Venantius’ arrival at Metz, the
other Lupus’ safe return to the same place. The latter event has just happened and it
is the reason for composing the poem. We know that Venantius arrived in spring 566
AD and we are told in the poem that that was the time when Lupus was giving advice
to the fatherland. Judging from the feverish feelings towards Lupus which possess
Venantius, when he reminds himself of the situation, and the anxiety he feels when
Lupus is away, and nobody has any information about him, we must suppose that his
love for Lupus is still fresh. The much calmer tone of the third and fourth poems, nine
years later, supports this interpretation.
What Lupus is returning from, or in the language of the love-sick Venantius, what
he has been ‘saved from’, is almost certainly the campaign against the Dano-Saxon
army. To a Germanic hero war is of course nothing you are saved from unless everything
he has uttered in the hall before he went out to the campaign was but empty
words and he himself is not a hero. However, to the peaceful and sentimental
Venantius the horrors of war must, if we survive, obviously be something from which
we have been saved. Even the widespread praise and songs that Venantius foresees
indicate that it is indeed Lupus’ martial skill and victories that are going to be praised
by everybody and Venantius’ first poem to Lupus is precisely that kind of verse and
the only ones that he could refer to when in line 69 he says that ‘I give you verses,
may the barbaric song give you lays, so shall in different ways the same praise be
bestowed on the man’. This reference cannot be to the poem we are reading at the
moment, since it is not what we would expect, e.g., of a German scop singing about
Lupus. Venantius’ first poem to Lupus is, however, the equivalent of the scop’s lay.
The two first poems to Lupus are in other words two ways of viewing the same
matter.
Venantius’ first poem to Lupus, the official one, is indeed an example in Latin of
what, according to the second poem, is happening just now, also in the Celtic and
Germanic languages. In his second poem Venantius shows himself to be even more
flattering than others when he points out that to him Lupus is still the father (or beloved)
rather than the official hero. Of course, this fact does not prevent Venantius,
as Sigibert’s scop, from praising Lupus officially. That is his craft and it enables him in
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