The Biblical Exodus in Late Antique and Early Medieval Latin Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation combines Classical and Hebrew philology to examine the role of the Biblical text in the remaking of Latin poetry from Late Antiquity through the Early Middle Ages. In this period, the Biblical Exodus became perhaps the most popular subject for Latin poets. I account for this vogue by arguing that the Exodus offered a Christian answer to Virgil’s Aeneid, an ideal subject for contemporary poetic style, and a mirror for evaluating kingship.

My first two chapters concern the social function of poetry in the fourth through sixth centuries. Literate Romans understood their Romanness through the canonical cultural memory enshrined in Virgil’s Aeneid, which narrates the foundational myth of escape and migration across a sea to a divinely promised homeland, Rome. I argue that the Exodus offered authors a Christian alternative to this narrative. Proba, Prudentius, and Avitus saw the flight of the Israelites from Egypt across the Red Sea to the Promised Land as a figure for the salvation of the individual soul. This last-mentioned redemption was the memory that these Christian poets thought truly worth preserving in verse. Their poems exemplify a new late antique literary form, the “Aeneid of the Soul,” which reworked Virgilian material and made special use of the Exodus to narrate this new cultural memory for Roman Christians. Comparison with contemporary Hebrew poetry and Roman plastic art reveals, respectively, what was especially Christian about these works and how they fit into the late antique aesthetic world.

My third chapter focuses on aesthetics. In it I argue that the Red Sea crossing made an ideal match for the jeweled style that characterized late antique Latin verse. The subject provided the antitheses, paradoxes, and marvels that poets wanted to set in verse. It lent itself to highly visual descriptions, it fit neatly into self-contained poetic units, and the canonical sea storms of Roman literature offered abundant material for intertextual borrowing. Finally, since a traditional school exercise taught students to describe storms at sea, poets were especially well prepared to handle the Red Sea crossing. This chapter breaks new ground in the study of late antique poetics by considering how much the Bible’s own poetry could have contributed to novel aspects of late antique style.

My final two chapters concern poetry and power in the Early Middle Ages. The Waltharius is the only complete, surviving early medieval poem aside from Beowulf that preserves Germanic oral traditions. My fourth chapter tracks parallels between the narratives of this Latin epic and of the Biblical Exodus to argue that the anonymous poet used a Biblical frame to organize disparate legendary material. While Old English and Irish authors transposed the Exodus to define the identities of contemporary groups, this poet used it to characterize bad kingship. In this way, the poem resembles Ermoldus Nigellus’s In Honor of Emperor Louis and Walahfrid Strabo’s On the Statue of Theoderich. In my fifth chapter I posit a new connection between these works by Ermoldus and Walahfrid, argue that they both present Moses as a model for Louis the Pious, and consider their relationship to Louis’s interment in a fourth-century sarcophagus with the Red Sea crossing carved on its front.

This dissertation characterizes the agency that the Biblical text had in the Latinate world. On the one hand, Jews, Christians, Romans, and others remembered the Exodus to understand their own places in the world. On the other, Biblical poetics changed the preexisting Latin forms that embraced this central redemptive motif. These conclusions suggest a reevaluation of what the culture of the Latin West owed to the literature of the ancient Near East.