Christianity Learns to Sing

About this volume

The Gospel in Virgil’s meter

Around 330 AD, a Spanish presbyter named Juvencus did something no one had tried: he retold the four Gospels in the hexameters of Virgil, arguing in his preface that if the fictions of Homer earned immortal fame, the true deeds of Christ deserved a greater song. His four books founded the biblical epic. A century later Sedulius perfected the form in the Paschal Song, five books of Scripture’s miracles that medieval schools read beside the classics — then rewrote the whole poem in prose, a twin composition later authors from Aldhelm to Bede would imitate. His hymn "A solis ortus cardine" is sung at Christmas to this day.

Around the two epics stand the century’s other experiments. Faltonia Betitia Proba, a Roman aristocrat — and the first woman in this collection — stitched her account of creation and the life of Christ entirely from lines of Virgil. Optatianus Porphyrius wrote his way back from exile with picture-poems for Constantine: verses shaped like altars and organs, with acrostics woven through the grid. Endelechius set the cattle plague of the 380s AD in bucolic stanzas where the herds are saved by the sign of the cross. And the Decretum on received books preserves an early Roman canon list — which books the Church reads, and which it does not.

Beside them all stands Ausonius of Bordeaux, the professor whose pupil Gratian made him consul: epigrams, verse letters, the Moselle, epitaphs for Homer’s heroes, a roll-call of the professors of his city, and a day in his own household from waking to dinner. As across the whole project, we translate the original works only, in fresh English, and give them away free to read.