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The Carmen apologeticum, written in 259, is a collection of instructions, twisted into acrostics, in popular hexameters, with caesuras introduced according to the heroic verse style, composed without regard to quantity or hiatus and often accompanied by such rhymes as the Church Latin would later supply in such abundance.
My adversaries, in order to deny me the possession of other qualities which interfere with their apologeticum, are so profuse in their allowance of talent to me that I need not scruple to accept an encomium which, coming from them, is a criticism.
The Apologeticum, the greatest of his earlier works, and, upon the whole, his masterpiece, was composed towards the beginning of this persecution, in the last years of the second century.
They had heard of Chateaubriand, but, with a truer instinct than that of the would-be Neo-Catholics, whose heads are crammed with all sorts of delusions, they mistrusted him. A Tertullian enlivening his Apologeticum with Atala and René was not calculated to command their confidence.
Jerome's catalogue of ecclesiastical writers, mentions his work in a very singular phrase: "After his conversion," he says, "Commodianus wrote a treatise against the pagans in an intermediate language approximating to verse," mediocri sermone quasi versu. This treatise, the Carmen Apologeticum adversus Iudaeos et Gentes, is extant, together with other pieces by the same author.
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