By either happenstance or providence, this semester I find myself reading a whole lot of epic poetry. I brought it on myself, in part, by agreeing to teach a class on epic a few months ago. Now that the semester is here, I realize just how very much epic poetry such a class requires reading. Yes, there’re the epics everyone knows about, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, but the students in my epics class have already read those. So I selected for the class some rather less well-known epics, including the Dionysiaca by Nonnus of Panopolis (at over 20,000 lines it's the longest Greek epic ever), and the Cento De Laudibus Christi by Faltonia Proba (at just under 700 lines, it's much more manageable). Now my head is awash in heroic epithets and invocations of muses and book after book of shipwrecks, wily tricksters, and doomed warriors.

If the class only involved reading and leading discussions on epics, that would be one thing. But I decided that this semester I'm also going to try to translate a good portion of one of these epics, the Cento of Proba. At 697 lines, one could translate it in a year at 2 lines per day! We’ll see if I get there. This essay is not, thankfully, about how to translate Latin epic. But it is about something I'm learning from Latin epic, something that I’m finding that resonates with the nature of education as we pursue it here at Saint Constantine. 

The Cento of Faltonia Proba is a very odd epic poem. Written around 360 AD, it is arguably the first epic in history to take as its subject God’s creation of the world from a Christian perspective. Roughly the first half of the poem retells the creation, fall, flood, and exodus accounts from the Old Testament. The second half recounts the gospel story, including Christ’s birth, flight to Egypt, baptism, ministry, passion, death, and resurrection. There were poets before Proba, most importantly Juvencus (330 AD), who had written epic poems about Christ, but she is the first to include Old Testament elements within an epic. 

But there is something more radically strange about Proba’s poem: only the first 23 lines were actually written by Proba. The next 600+ lines are taken from Virgil’s poems, rearranged and adapted by Proba to tell the story of Scripture. The word “cento” means “patchwork” and that is what the poem is: a patchwork of pagan Latin poetry stitched together to resemble a Christian message. Thus, every line of the Cento reveals strange resonances between pagan myth and Christian doctrine. When God the Father speaks of his divine Son, it is often with the words of Venus speaking of her half-divine son Aeneas. When the resurrected Christ shows his wounds to his disciples, Proba uses the eerie words of Aeneid Book 2, where the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, covered in scars.

One of the most striking resonances I’ve recently noticed regards a feast we recently celebrated, the Theophany of Christ. At the Feast of Theophany we remember Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. It is at Christ’s baptism that the Trinity is revealed: the Father bears witness to Christ, calling Him His “beloved son,” while the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon Christ. 

In Proba’s account, God the Father gives a longer speech about the Son than is found in scripture. The Father speaks of the Son giving “in return a great… honor to your Father.” The exact Latin that Proba uses here is “magnum rediture parenti,” which means, literally, “greatness returning to the parent/father.” In the context of the baptism of Christ, this makes perfect sense: Christ’s glory reflects back upon the Father. Christ himself speaks at length about His relationship of mutual glorification with the Father in John 17. Proba’s deep knowledge of both the Gospel of John and Virgil's Aeneid means that she can deftly use Virgil to echo St John’s language. But Proba’s use of Virgil’s words from book 10 have more significance than this.

The whole point of a cento is to take words out of one context and place them into a new context. Readers who know both contexts have the opportunity to read such a work with both in mind—to read one set of words which reside and have meaning in two worlds at once. What, then, is the context from which Proba took the words magnum rediture parenti? These words are used in Book 10, line 570 of Virgil’s Aeneid in a deeply tragic scene. The Etruscan King Evander has graciously allowed his beloved son Pallas to accompany Aeneas into battle. Pallas has fought bravely and won glory, but cannot, in the end, defeat the vicious Rutulian warrior Turnus. Turnus slays Pallas and insultingly strips his corpse. In lines 505 - 507 of book 10, Pallas’s friends and allies take up his body and mourn him:

Comrades are crowding around Pallas now as he’s laid on his curving
Shield, as they carry him back to their ranks amid weeping and deep groans.
“Oh what a sorrow and glory you’ll be when you come home to your father!”

Thus the “glory returned to the father” here is grievous, bittersweet: Pallas has truly won great glory and honor for his father, but he returns to his “parenti” not as a conquering hero, but as a corpse, the promise of his father’s house—indeed, the promise of his whole people—cut down untimely. 

I think that we are supposed to be thinking of Pallas even as we read Proba’s re-contextualization of Virgil’s words in the mouth of the Father at the moment of Theophany. For as Christians we know that the Christ who is being baptized is also the Christ who will soon die, and that “comrades” will “crowd around” and mourn his death. We know that Christ will become an image and a fulfillment of all who die untimely, unjustly, cut down by hateful enemies. And because Christ can appear so Pallas-like, he can transform our understanding of untimely death. Christ is the Pallas who dies and, through dying, conquers death. Indeed later in the Cento the risen Christ will be described as coming to comfort those who mourn, and the phrase about “those who mourn” is originally from Aeneid Book 10, describing those who mourn the death of Pallas. 

Thus, through Proba’s epic, we see Christ play in myriad places throughout the old myths—fulfilling, subverting, allying, transforming—the hero in a thousand roles. It would be enough to stop here and marvel at the power both of the Christian gospel and of the strange genius of Proba, who so uniquely presented that gospel to her readers. But this is a Saint Constantine blog post, which means we should come around at last to the subject of education. It is worth noting that Proba became by the middle ages a figure who represented great learning. Medieval woodcuts show her teaching from a scroll, surrounded by many books. Though we have no indication that Proba ever actually taught at a school in her lifetime, those who historically read her Cento imagined that through it she taught each new age. 

And what does Proba teach? Among other things, I think that Proba has shown me the importance of remembering the classics of Greece and Rome even as we fully live out our lives as Christians. Each feast, each holy day is an opportunity to remember Christ’s fulfillment of the world’s desires, his healing of the world’s hurts. Every road down which the wise have sought will terminate in Christ; every house of grief anticipates His balm. And this is a use of literature, of fairy tale, of story: to remind each reader of their shared humanity, their shared desire and pain. At Saint Constantine we do not read Virgil’s Aeneid because we think Virgil had all the answers; rather, we read the Aeneid, at least in part, because Virgil uniquely discerned the true questions, the true tensions, the true tragedies that all human lives will bear. Though Virgil did not know it, his words would be a lamp unto the world. And it took Proba’s Christian vision to light that lamp.