Post fromSam

Two seemingly incompatible strands in Prudentius' thought, his fondness for bloody spectacle and his poeticized theology, came together in today's Latin. The rather lovely meditation on Mary and the Incarnation* followed on the heels of Chastity's throat-stabbing defeat of Lust, and her subsequent evocation of Judith's decapitation of Holofernis. You could argue that there's something un-Christlike about all the gore and martial exultation, but it's no worse than what one finds in Revelation; it's possibly even less problematic, insofar as here only abstractions are disemboweled, whereas the Apocalypse revels in the destruction of beasts and human beast-worshippers alike. What's so fascinating is that the sublimation of graphic violence into truths about the human psyche, which you see, for instance, Camille Paglia reading rather dubiously into the Marquis de Sade, is actually intentional on the part of Prudentius. This strikes me as a very modern way of looking at the imagination. Finally, as regards Optatian: for all the fascination he holds, there's something about his methodology that's uncomfortably close to the modern "conceptualist" movement in poetry, which is similarly anti-lyric and "against expression" as one of their anthologies puts it. Whereas Prudentius uses puns and other verbal pyrotechnics to make a point, and Ausonius' technopaegnia (the actual work of that title, the Cento Nuptialis, etc.) are, as R. P. H. Green points out, merely playful interludes in an otherwise rather genial, sincerely felt corpus, Optatian comes across as pretty hollow and superficial. That will not, however, prevent me from running to Lockwood for a text of him as soon as I finish typing this. 

*Because I apparently have to bring Dante into everything, one thinks of the beginning of the last canto of the Paradiso, St. Bernard's "Virgina madre, figlia del tuo figlio", for the delighted paradox of "Verbum caro factum non destitit esse quod fuerat, Verbum".