Late antique disruptors of Latin verse

Although their ways of exploiting the form could hardly be more different, Proba regularly finds herself paired with Ausonius in consideration of the fourth-century Virgilian cento, not least because Ausonius supplies in an epistle to his friend and fellow-rhetorician Axius Paulus a full paratextual discussion of cento composition. In this paper I lean further into the comparison with Ausonius. The French Atlantic poet’s technical playfulness, most famously associated with his own centonic wedding-poem (probably composed a few years after Proba’s biblical cento), is a recurrent feature of his work, and can be argued to be reflective of a broader emphasis upon experimentation with textual elements in fourth-century Latin verse. Indeed the term technopaegnion (nowadays used more broadly as a descriptor of Greco-Roman special-effects verse) is Ausonius’ own coinage, serving him as the title of one particular ‘plaything’, namely a tour de force series of hexameter poems in which each verse ends with a different monosyllable. A look at the range of Ausonius’ experiments with poetic and linguistic form, which also include alphabet games and a full-blown exercise in linguistic hybridization between Greek and Latin (Epistle 6), can serve, by both comparison and contrast, to give some context to the ways in which Proba disrupts poetic ‘business as usual’ in her biblical cento, and to the kinds of expectation which late antique readers may have brought to her poem.