The Greatest Stories Ever Told: Pagan Myth in Christian Times

From which century of classical antiquity does the most epic poetry survive? The answer may be a surprise. In the fifth century AD, a series of brilliant poets wrote what were pretty much the last hexameter poems to survive, prior to the antiquarian revivalism of the renaissance. Why this late flowering? And more to the point, why were Christians so keen on writing and reading a type of poetry that was heavily associated with moral and theological error, and which deployed a metrical scheme that was phonologically obsolete?

The fifth and sixth centuries were a time of transition — in Reinhardt Koselleck’s famous phrase, a Sattelzeit. No one in Constantinople, the ‘new Rome’, was unaware of the explicit project to combine old and new. On the one hand, there was a deliberate attempt to embed the new religious dispensation, by turning pagan sites into Christian ones, and by deconsecrating pagan religious imagery. On the other hand, the new Rome saw itself as a capital of culture, and culture inevitably meant the embrace of models of rhetoric, philosophy and poetry rooted in the deep past. Constantinople sought to reposition and circumscribe the old pagan culture via an artful blend of forgetting, remembering and reimagining. This is a major part of the reason why epic was still being written and read in Constantinople: because the new Rome may have been ‘new’, but it was also ‘Rome’.

Poets were as aware as anyone that their world sat between the new and the old. Take, for example, Agathias Scholasticus, the author and editor who played an instrumental role in the formation of the Palatine Anthology. The first category of poems he collected consisted of those written in imitation of ancient pagans: ‘First of all, competing with past generations, I would select for you / All that the begetters of new song wrote / As if in devotion to the gods of yore; for it seemed fitting / To preserve also the clever imitation of ancient writing. (Anth. Pal. 4.4.67–70). These new poets wrote in imitation of the old; they mimicked ancient devotion, producing a simulacrum that was similar in form and language but without the theological commitment to paganism.

My argument is that the Christian intellectual revolutions of late antiquity put particular pressure on the idea of poetic form. Formalism is much in vogue at the moment, particularly in the aftermath of Caroline Levine’s influential Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015; classicist responses include P. Vasunia ed. The Politics of Form in Ancient Greek Literature (2021) and S. Nooter and M. Telò eds. Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical (2023). My approach builds on the ‘new formalism’, while also offering a historicising perspective: form, I argue, comes into salience in specific contexts, and for specific reasons. In late antiquity, Christian poets (I argued) viewed the form/content distinction as an effective means of articulating the relationship between pagan past and Christian present.

The key figures here were the late-fourth century theological superstars, and friends, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea: it was they who not only decreed that it was permissible for Christians to read and write poetry, but also defined the epistemological framework through which it was to be read. In particular, they insisted that Christian readers of pagan literature should be selective when it came to content, taking only what is theologically useful and morally enriching, and leaving the rest (as a bee culls only the nutritious pollen from a flower: Basil, To Young Men 4.8); and that adopting pagan poetic forms does not imply endorsement of pagan content (‘All composition is twofold really, / Made up of thought and expression. Expression is like an outer / Garment; thought is the body which it clothes’, Gregory, On Himself and the Bishops 267–9).

This explains the adaptation of pagan poetry to Christian purposes in the two dominant modes of Christian poetics in late antiquity: cento and paraphrase. Cento (the sole surviving late-antique Greek example of which is the empress Eudocia’s Homerocentones) ostentatiously guts pagan poetics of their pagan content, repurposing it for Christian ends. Paraphrase (Eudocia’s St Cyprian, ps.-Apollinaris’ Paraphrase of the Psalms, and Nonnus’ Paraphrase of John’s Gospel) rehearses a similar movement, taking an original Christian document and retelling it in ‘pagan’ hexameters. Ps.-Apollinaris’ prologue, notably, shows a poet grappling with the full cultural complexity of life in the New Rome: he presents himself both as a traditionalist, restoring metre to the Psalms (‘during translation into / The Greek language, the grace of the metre was in turn lost’, 18–19) and as an imperialist supersessionist. The translation of Hebrew scripture into Greek hexameters is the fulfilment of divine providential purpose: God ‘put the whole of other-sounding, foreign speech … into one order of righteousness’ (59–60), and decreed that ‘there should again be a world language’ (61).

More complex still is the question why Christian poets wrote on pagan themes, and indeed on risqué topics: Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, Musaeus’ Hero and Leander and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen all deal with varieties of sexual impropriety (in late antique Christian terms). My argument is that the content of these poems was constructed as fictional (which explains the dominance in them of the self-conscious language of mimesis, and their allusions to the Greek novel), which helped readers process them as ‘safe’, delimited as they were within an unreal, invented world. At the same time, however, rather than presenting the disreputable matter they describe as morally corrupt, these poems seem to revel in moral ambiguity. Pagan poetry flourished in this era not despite but because of the sexually repressive culture that surrounded it, offering an outlet for the dark desires and extravagant fantasies of an elite, male reading class.