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But an entire cross is attributed to us . . . . The truth however is that your religion is all cross . . . You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship unadorned and simple crosses." In the Instructions of Commodianus we read "The first law was in the tree, and so, too, was the second." Cyprian contends that "By the sign of the cross, also, Amalek was conquered by Moses."
The province of Africa, fertile as it was in prose writers, never produced a poet of any eminence. The pieces in verse they can hardly be called poems ascribed to Tertullian and Cyprian are forgeries of a late period. But contemporary with them is an African verse-writer of curious linguistic interest, Commodianus. A bishop of Marseilles, who wrote, late in the fifth century, a continuation of St.
* This phrase seems to indicate that, if one is to believe Macrobius, the "Copa" is by Virgil. "And since then, O great shade, thou hast received no other messages?" "I have received none." "To console themselves for thy absence, O Virgil, they have three poets, Commodianus, Prudentius, and Fortunatus, who were all three born in those dark plays when neither prosody nor grammar were known.
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.
Only one Christian poet, Commodianus, represented the third century in his library.
We have already had occasion to notice its earliest efforts in the rude verses of Commodianus. The revival of letters in the fourth century, so far as it went, affected Christian as well as secular poetry. Under Constantine, a Spanish deacon, one Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, put the Gospel narrative into respectable hexameters, which are still extant.
The poem is thus a document of great importance in the history of the development of mediaeval out of classical poetry. Though not, of course, without his barbarisms, Commodianus was obviously neither ignorant nor careless of the rules of classical versification, some of which for instance, the strong caesura in the middle of the third foot he retains with great strictness.
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