In a previous post, I claimed that Jupiter’s prophecy in Aeneid 1.279, imperium sine fine dedi (“I have given them empire without end”), was “one of the most alluded-to lines in Latin literature.” I also said I hadn’t verified this. I’m no longer sure it’s actually true–it’s not alluded to nearly as often as I had thought from my own reading–but it does appear occasionally. In the last post, I discussed an instance from American literature. In this, I’m going to discuss an instance from late Latin Christian literature.

The fifth century poet Sedulius has appeared at Ad Fontes already in my translation of one of his hymns.^[1] In this post, I want to discuss a hymn to the Virgin Mary found in Book 2 of the Paschale carmen, Sedulius’s epic poem about Christ. Here is the passage (2.63-72):

Salve, sancta parens, enixa puerpera regem,
Qui caelum terramque tenet per saecula, cuius
Nomen et aeterno conplectens omnia gyro                    65
Imperium sine fine manet; quae ventre beato
Gaudia matris habens cum virginitatis honore
Nec primam similem visa es nec habere sequentem:
Sola sine exemplo placuisti femina Christo.
Tunc prius ignaris pastoribus ille creatus                    70
Enituit, quia pastor erat, gregibusque refulsit
Agnus et angelicus cecinit miracula coetus.

And here it is in Carl Springer’s translation:

Hail, holy mother! In childbirth you have brought forth a king,
Who governs heaven and earth throughout the ages.
His name and dominion embrace all things in their eternal compass,
And they continue without any limit. In your blessed womb
You have the joy of motherhood along with the honor of virginity,
You are seen to have no equal before or since;
Alone of women, without compare, you have found favor with Christ.

In my unsatisfying dissertation lo these many years ago, I described Sedulius’s maneuver, in which he “polemically borrows Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus about the Romans,” like this:

Whereas Jupiter must give (dedi) power to the Romans, acting in accord with fate (manent immota tuorum/ fata tibi, 1.257-8), Sedulius, in recasting the sentiment in a Christian context, strikingly alters dedi to manet: Christ’s name and power “abide,” because they always belonged to Him to begin with. He did not need someone else to bestow them on him. Hence, the allusive argument goes, Christ’s power and kingship is greater than that of the mortal Romans, the descendants of Aeneas. Christ has had his power from eternity past and will have it in eternity future; he does not receive it from Jupiter at his mother’s request, as Aeneas does, and he will not pass it on to a merely mortal heir.

Regarding the first half of the paragraph: maybe. But I should have noted that even Sedulius’s manet comes from Jupiter’s “fate.” (I literally quoted it in the same paragraph, after all!) I think the point in the second half of the paragraph stands, though.

That is not the only Vergil in his hymn to the Virgin, either. Salve, sancta parens is an allusion to Aeneid 5.80 (salve, sancte parens), where Aeneas addresses his father Anchises at the latter’s tomb. By altering the dead Anchises to the living Mary, it is almost as if Sedulius says, “Why, Vergil, do you seek the dead among the living?”

The same shift is found in Sedulius’s tenet per saecula…nomen et aeterno. This is Vergilian, too: In Aeneid 6.236 we find aeternumque tenet per saecula nomen (“…and holds an eternal name forever”). Once more, the Vergilian context is death, for Aeneas is honoring the tomb of the dead Misenus. Sedulius has again traded death for life, corruption for incorruption.

I hope you can see that Sedulius is an immensely talented and intelligent poet. It is exactly this sort of thing that makes the Latin poetic tradition and its descendants so, well, endlessly fascinating to me.