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This chapter provides an overview of how authors created the Virgilian centos and explores topics in the texts' reception, with an emphasis on the issues they raise related to allusion. The examination for the most part uses the 4th-century CE Ausonius' poetics of the cento as its basis. Subjects include how the poems serve as language games; the role of mnemotechnics in their composition; and the different ways audience members can read the works allusively, i.e., against their Virgilian subtexts.

This chapter returns to the 4th-century CE Ausonius and examines his Cento Nuptialis along with the other Virgilian cento on the topic of a wedding, Luxurius' Epithalamium Fridi. The major interest is to examine the works as occasional poems, and to explore how their identity as centos complicates that status. The chapter also analyzes how the centos contain inset parodies of Virgil in their obscene accounts of a bride's deflowering, and investigates different ways of reading those passages allusively.

This chapter considers two celebrated epistolary relationships from the 4th century AD: the famously dysfunctional correspondence of Augustine and Jerome, and the reputedly bitter final years of Ausonius' correspondence with his former pupil Paulinus. In both of these exchanges, epistolary codes are cleverly manipulated to remarkable rhetorical effect; and any explication of what went wrong (or right) in these complicated letter exchanges requires close attention to the ‘rules’ of the epistolary game. In the case of Augustine and Jerome, the chapter argues that the discernible hostilities in the correspondence arise because Augustine deliberately refuses to play the iuuenis to Jerome's senex and instead represents himself as Jerome's exegetical equal. In the case of Ausonius and Paulinus, on the other hand, it is precisely through their careful adherence to the codes of father-son letters that evidence for a persistent amicitia can be seen despite apparent tensions.

The underlying notions of the self in these letters form the link between all the other chapters. We now investigate the vocabulary of selfhood, especially the development of the term persona. In fourth‐century ideas of the self, soul is superior to body, but, far from being dismissed, the bodily part of the self is taken very seriously – as is commensurate with an incarnational theology. We return to the role of the letter carriers: they, as well as friends, are described as ‘another self’. This leads to a climactic notion of the self as fully relational: a reading of Paulinus’ letter exchange with his former tutor Ausonius demonstrates how the ‘relational self’ is played out.

This chapter argues that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are proofs of William Shakespeare's self-conscious Renaissance exercises in the imitation and amplification of Roman poet Ovid. It suggests that these two narrative poems need to be read side by side with the narratives upon which they improvise. The author proposes that several contemporary texts have precedents in ancient literature. These include Ausonius' Fasti for William Warner's Albion's Englande and Lucan's Pharsalia for Daniel Drayton's civil war poems.

This introductory chapter discusses the figure of the reader in poetry of late antiquity. Poets in late antiquity came to describe their material as needing interpretation, recovery, and activation. The figure of the reader structures the poetry of late antiquity, thus revealing how the formal aspects of their poetry worked for authors such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius. The book explores the ways in which reading was constructed in late antiquity on the level of text, paratext, intertext, and commentary. In this way, it hopes to contribute to the study of reading in the ancient world, particularly to the study of the Reader as figured in and through poetry. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter uses Gérard Genette's idea of the paratext to interrogate the development of prefaces to Latin poetry. It shows that the prefaces of Claudian and Prudentius are distinct from earlier poetic forms, and addresses the prose prefaces of Ausonius in terms of the poet's construction and imagined reception of his work. Because a paratext stands apart from the work, it allows the author a space in which to read his own poem. In this way, prefaces allow poets to enact for their readers one possible approach to the text. Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius use their prefaces to invite, to interrogate, or sometimes even to ward off the reader's influence over their text.

The fourth to sixth centuries ad witnessed considerable poetic activity, which is the subject of this chapter. Itinerant poets gave performances, and festivals flourished. Poetry in both Latin and Greek was composed, and the reading of poems remained both a public and a private activity. This chapter pays particular attention to two poets: Ausonius, as an example of a poet who wrote for private consumption, and Claudian, whose poetry was performed in public for political ends. The rise of Christianity produced a more popular body of verse derived from Jewish psalmody: hymns in Latin metres that evolved from quantitative to accentual, reflecting the loss of quantitative distinctions in the language. The same loss occurred in Greek, the language of the eastern Empire centred on Constantinople, where one verse composer of particular interest in the sixth century was Romanos the Melodist.

Chapter 2 provides detailed analysis of the circumstances in which the first two western child-emperors, Gratian and Valentinian II, were acclaimed as co-Augusti. It examines the political crises which led to their accessions in 367 and 375, the different aims of the key players involved, such as the general Merobaudes, the senator Petronius Probus, and Gratian’s former tutor Ausonius. It highlights the ways in which both boys experienced a ‘phantom’ accession, after which they remained little more than ‘sleeping partners’ in government until a further political crisis brought about their ‘real’ accessions as ruling Augusti. The early attempts of those involved in these accessions at both stages to build support for the young emperors among the senate and the military are examined, and the essential differences between the regimes built up around Gratian and Valentinian II are investigated.

The category of ‘semi-Christians’ has often been criticized, but nevertheless seems to endure in academic discourse. It is used for describing Christians who do not fully embrace Christianity. After a review of the use of this category and its critics, this chapter proposes a shift of paradigm for approaching ‘religious identity’ in late antiquity. Instead of classifying individuals according to one category membership, their ‘religious identity’, I introduce the notion of identity salience and that of arrangement of category membership sets. Finally, I consider what such theoretical considerations can bring to the understanding of individuals described as ‘semi-Christians’ with the case-studies of Ausonius and Macrobius.

The fourth century poet Ausonius wrote many letters in both verse and prose, but difficulties associated with the transmission of his extant works prohibit satisfactory arrangements in modern editions. Even the inclusion or exclusion of certain letters has proven to be remarkably varied. This chapter surveys the problems that have obstructed our understanding of Ausonius’ letters and posits that any modern arrangement of the letters remains tenuous. New approaches are needed. Toward that end, it will consider the organization and meaning of theoretical letter groupings that may have existed within the larger design and it will also explore the relationship of letters commonly included under the rubric of an “epistolary collection” to those commonly excluded.

By the late fourth century, the Roman Empire was replete with ‘conventional Christians’, not necessarily shallow, not necessarily insincere, just not radical. In his old age, the poet Ausonius (consul, 379) undertook an exercise in self-knowledge. He articulated the result in 16 charming elegiac couplets called the Herediolum, a poem which employed the agricultural estate he had inherited from his father as a metaphor for his own character. His farming régime was intended to be well balanced and self-sufficient; by implication the poet considered himself also a coherent character. Ausonius’ other works suggest multiple personae for their author: the smiling public man, the troubled dreamer, the purveyor of donnish smut. The self-portrait furnished by the Herediolum is of one who is, au fond, single-minded. It may be that this quality is connected with Ausonius’ ‘conventional Christianity’.

This essay explores aspects of the ‘bookishness’ of late ancient Christians through an analysis of receptions of Varro leading up to Augustine’s City of God. Augustine was not the only Latin Christian writer of late antiquity to latch on to the personality and ‘books’ of Varro as a medium through which to reconfigure his contemporaries’ sense of relationship to the Roman past. Jerome had seen the opportunity too and taken it in his own fashion and the poems of Ausonius provide further hints of the serviceability of Varro’s oeuvre in late antiquity—both what had been transmitted and what had not. A study of the kinds of recourse made to Varro by these writers can help us to understand the broader ways in which they engineered the canons and traditions in relation to which they and their readers recognized themselves as Romans, and as Christians in a Roman world.

This chapter begins by exploring the accession of the emperor Theodosius and then events of the period 378‒9. Recognizing deficiencies and inconsistencies within the various, later, historical accounts of this episode that we possess from (mostly) Eastern sources, the chapter examines the gratiarum actio of Ausonius and the total silence that this speech maintains on the subject of Theodosius, demonstrating that Theodosius in fact seized imperial power in the year 378. The chapter then examines the usurpation of Magnus Maximus and Theodosius’ response to it, carefully constructing a narrative of Maximus’ progressive advance through Collectio Avellana 39 and 40 and Ambrose, Epistula 30[24]. Finally, the chapters considers the war between Maximus and Theodosius in 388, and explores how Pacatus’ Pan. Lat. II can shed light upon the way in which Theodosius sought to distance himself from association with Maximus after the latter’s death.

This chapter identifies a typically late antique phenomenon: the emergence of a “poetics of silence” involving a metaliterary problematization of language and representation. This phenomenon, reminiscent of the postmodern “linguistic turn,” is not restricted to literature but is omnipresent in late antique culture; it underlies Augustine’s semiotics, Evagrius Ponticus’s hesychasm, Gregory of Nyssa’s apophaticism and Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative mysticism. The metaphor of silence is tackled by several authors: Sidonius Apollinaris, Fulgentius, Augustine, Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus, and the anonymous writer of the Peruigilium Veneris. At times, silence is depicted as the haven of tranquillity enabling literary creation; at other times, as a threat of dissolution hovering over the fragility of the poet’s work. Above all, it is the deep, ultimately unknowable reality beyond the murmuring of words. Common to all these authors is a problematizing approach to language and a fundamental distrust of the classical idea of representation.

The Latin poetic output of Late Antiquity contains, in addition to polymetric collections, polymetric poems that combine different meters in a single work. Focusing on this particular development of late Latin poetics, this chapter explores the peculiar characteristics of these individual poems, and inquires into the possible meanings and implications of the recourse to polymetry. Most problematic are the reasons that may have inspired the choice of a given metre. In certain cases, literary genre can make this clear, as happens in Cyprianus Gallus’s heptateuchos and in Ennodius’s epithalamium of Maximus. The examination of polymetric poetry casts a brighter light on the relationship of the authors concerned, both with each other and with the rest of the Latin poetic tradition.

This chapter brings together three of the most widely read late Latin poems—Ausonius’s Mosella, Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, and Rutilius Namatianus’s De reditu suo—under a single thematic umbrella: displacement. Displacement in these texts emerges not only as a journey or physical movement; it can also be read allegorically, that is, as a process of distantiation from the centre, which is represented by the language of the classical poetic tradition. Allegory and allegoresis are common hermeneutic elements in late antique literature, but their significance is normally recognized within religious and philosophical contexts. By emphasizing the allegorical quality of literary texts and, above all, these texts’ allegories of textuality itself, this chapter argues for the emergence of a poetic language, which constructs itself through a process of distantiation from the classical literary past rather than from veneration of it.

This chapter examines Ausonius’s treatment of revision in the prose prefaces to his poems. Ausonius refers both to his own revision of his work and to collaborative revision, in which he asks others to edit his poetry and, thus, to help him improve it. The concern is to examine how Ausonius uses the subject of revising his work to communicate to the addressees of his prefaces and to his readership. In every instance, Ausonius uses revision to strike a pose of modesty. Yet there is more to his treatment of the topic than this strategy for attracting the reader’s goodwill. When he communicates with Theodosius and his readership about his relationship with the emperor, or advertises his bond with his own son Hesperius, he effectively makes claims about his cultural and political standing and that of his family, and demonstrates that he belongs to an ideal textual community inhabited by the cultural elite.