Proba's cento

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
Leucius Charinus
Posts: 2817
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 4:23 pm
Location: memoriae damnatio

Proba's cento

Post by Leucius Charinus »

Some notes on this amazing work from a 4th century woman Faltonia Betitia Proba.
Does anyone have a better English translation of the opening lines than that below?



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_(poetry)

A cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order.


POET (1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausonius

Decimius Magnus Ausonius (ca. 310 – ca. 395) was a Latin poet and teacher of rhetoric at Burdigala (Bordeaux, France). For a time he was tutor to the future emperor Gratian, who afterwards bestowed the Consulship on him. His best-known poems are Mosella, a description of the river Moselle, and Ephemeris, an account of a typical day in his life. His many other verses show his concern for his family, friends, teachers and circle of well-to-do acquaintances, and his delight in the technical handling of meter.

The poem Mosella:
http://wiki.dickinson.edu/index.php?tit ... us_Mosella



POET (2): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faltonia_Betitia_Proba
WIKI wrote:
Faltonia Betitia Proba (c. 306/c. 315 - c. 353/c. 366) was a Latin Roman Christian poet, possibly the most influential Latin poet of Late Antiquity.

A member of one of the most influential aristocratic families, she composed the Cento vergilianus de laudibus Christi, a cento composed with verses by Virgil re-ordered to form an epic poem centred around the life of Jesus

Two poems are attributed to "Proba", and only one is extant. Most modern scholars identify Faltonia Betitia Proba as the author of these works, with the other possible identification being her niece Anicia Faltonia Proba.[citation needed]

Constantini bellum adversus Magnentium[edit source]

The first poem, now lost, is called Constantini bellum adversus Magnentium by the Codex Mutinensis. It dealt with the war between Roman Emperor Constantius II and the usurper Magnentius. Proba was involved to this war through her husband Clodius Celsinus Adelphus, who had been praefectus urbi of Rome in 351, that the same year Italy passed from the sphere of influence of Magnetius to Constantius after the Battle of Mursa Major.[3]

The existence of this first poem is based on the first verses of the second poem. Here Proba rejects her first Pagan composition, and scholars think that the Pagan poem was destroyed according to her will.[5]

De laudibus Christi[edit source]

After her conversion, around 362,[6] Proba composed a Christian epic poem, the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, also known as De laudibus Christi.

The poem is a Virgilian cento, a patchwork of verses extracted from several works of Virgil, with minimal modifications (in this case, with the introduction of Biblical names). The 694 lines are divided into a proemium with invocation (lines 1-55), episodes from the Old Testament (lines 56-345), episodes from the New Testament (lines 346-688) and the end.[7]

Proba was skilled in both Greek and Latin. She knew Virgil's poems quite well and memorized most of them. She devised a scheme one day that the history of the Bible could be compiled in a pleasant easy-to-read verse. She researched Bucolics, the Georgics, and the Aeneid and would then mix various lines from each with great care and skill to complete a story following all the rules of meter and the respect of verse that a connoisseur had trouble detecting the scheme. The resulting cento presents the Biblical story from the creation of the world up to the coming of the Holy Spirit by using 694 lines from Virgil. She also wrote a Homeric cento with verses taken from Homer that followed a similar scheme.

Jerome heavily criticized this work, claiming that an "old chatterbox" wanted "to teach Scriptures before understanding them", considering "the Christless Maro a Christian" (Letters 53.7, written from Bethlehem to Paulinus of Nola).[8] Pope Gelasius I (492-496) declared the De laudibus Christi an apocryphal; therefore, even though the poem was not considered heretical, its public reading was forbidden. Despite this prohibition, the work had some success. Emperors Arcadius (395-408) and Theodosius II (408-451) requested copies of the poem, for example, and Isidore of Seville praised the author of this work;[9] furthermore, during the Middle Ages this cento was widely used in education, leading Giovanni Boccaccio to include Proba on his list of famous women. The first printed edition of the De laudibus Christi, dating back to 1472, is possibly the first printed work composed by a woman.




**********************************************************
Proba's Introduction to Her Cento
Author(s): R. P. H. Green
Source: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1997), pp. 548-559
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/639689

Iam dudum temerasse duces pia foedera pacis,
regnandi miseros tenuit quos dira cupido, diversasque neces,
regum crudelia bella cognatasque acies,
pollutos caede parentum insignis clipeos nulloque ex hoste tropaea,
sanguine conspersos tulerat quos fama triumphos,
innumeris totiens viduatas civibus urbes,
confiteor, scripsi. satis est meminisse malorum.

nunc deus omnipotens, sacrum, precor,
accipe carmen aeternique tui septemplicis ora resolve
spiritus atque mei resera penetralia cordis,
arcana ut possim vatis Proba cuncta referre.

non nunc ambrosium cura est mihi quaerere nectar,
nec libet Aonio de vertice ducere Musas,
non mihi saxa loqui vanus persuadeat error laurigerosque sequi tripodas
et inania vota iurgantesque deos procerum victosque penates.
nullus enim labor est verbis extendere famam
atque hominum studiis parvam disquirere laudem.


Castalio sed fonte madens, imitata beatos quae sitiens
hausi sanctae libamina lucis hinc canere incipiam.
praesens deus, erige mentem: Vergilium cecinisse loquar pia munera Christi.
rem nulli obscuram repetens ab origine pergam,
si qua fides animo, si vera infusa per artus mens
agitat molem et toto se corpore miscet spiritus
et quantum non noxia corpora tardant terrenique
hebetant artus moribundaque membra.

English translation ....
Google Translate wrote:

Outraging religious leaders have been talking of peace,
a ruling which held miserable longing, and the various murders,
The wars of kings cognatasque line
defiled with the murder of the parents of the famous shield, no trophies,
whose fame had taken blood tempered triumphs
countless times, robbed citizens of cities,
I confess, I have written. is enough to remember the bad.

now God Almighty, so sacred, I pray,
Take your eternal song of the seven mouths open
Unlock the recesses of my heart and spirit,
Prove that I can relate all the secrets of the bard.

now do not take care for me to seek ambrosial nectar;
Aonian not want to lead from the top of the Muses,
vain to convince me not to speak rocks error laurelled follow tripod
and empty vows iurgantesque tall gods vanquished gods.
for no one to stretch out the words of the report of the task is
and human studies to investigate a little praise.

Whereas but wet spring, which followed those happy thirsty
I drank from the holy offerings of light begin to sing.
God is present, set up the mind of Christ 's Virgil sung speak.
nothing back from obscure origins go,
if there be faith in my mind, if the truths the mind is infused through the limbs,
is driven by the mass and total body blends the spirit
and not as harmful bodies stayed his earthly
dull mortal limbs.
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
User avatar
Leucius Charinus
Posts: 2817
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 4:23 pm
Location: memoriae damnatio

Re: Proba's cento

Post by Leucius Charinus »

For those that may be interested in this subject a cento is defined as a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order.

Is it possible to argue that ... in one sense, a cento is a type or a form of parallelism. A mapping of passages from author A1 in text T1 by a later author(s) A2 (A3 etc) in text T2.

Is a cento a

With this question in mind, I'd like to thank maryhelena for pointing out Carrier's comments in her OP here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=853

Page 430.

Given that Mark is essentially a Christian response to the Jewish War and the destruction of the Jewish temple, it is more than a little significant that he chose this Jesus to model his own Jesus after. This also tells us, yet again, how much Mark is making everything up. (It also confirms that Mark wrote after the Jewish War.)

Footnote: 86. Theodore Weeden, ‘Two Jesuses, Jesus of Jerusalem and Jesus of Nazareth: Provocative Parallels and Imaginative Imitation’, Forum N.S. 6.2 (Fall 203), pp 137-341
  • *
    Ted Weeden:

    Consequently, unusual parallelism, commonality and similarities between
    literary works may suggest to us in the post-modern world mere accident or
    coincidence. But in the Grec-Roman world a skilled reader would suspect
    imitation before coincidence, and likely be right, that what was at hand was
    the respected and expected imitation of one author by another, the text of
    the former serving as the hypotext for the development of the hypertext of
    the latter. In view of the appearance, at least, of the practice of
    *MIMESIS* behind the parallelism of the two Jesus stories, I do not think
    one, then, should chalk up the similarities between the two Jesus stories to
    mere coincidence. I do not think that explaining the parallelism which
    exists between the two stories as a matter of coincidence adequately
    accounts for the narrative features that stories share in common. Rather
    imitation, in my judgement, appears to be what drives the parallelism which
    exists between the two "Jesus" stories.

    https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cro ... pics/13040

If we looked at the cento process (new text wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors) as a literary tool where certain elements (ie: not necessarily the whole new text) of the new text have been generated by copying other sources, how close is this to what we find in the books of the canonical NT?


The cento process appears to be a type of mimesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis

It appears to have been a reasonably well known literary genre in antiquity.

Mapping the LXX to the NT and the inter-mappings of the canonical NT books seem to involve the "copy/pasting of verse or passages".

While this can be a complex mapping, it becomes extremely complex when we try and add the non canonical texts to the entire and overall picture. Because most of the non canonical gospels and acts involve not only the "copy/pasting of verse or passages" from the canonical NT and the LXX, but also from other non canonical texts.
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
perseusomega9
Posts: 1030
Joined: Tue Feb 04, 2014 7:19 am

Re: Proba's cento

Post by perseusomega9 »

So we get a new intimation every 30 days or so?
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
-Giuseppe
Post Reply