Following on from last weekend’s post on the Te deum,
I offer another example of how important prose rhythm is in understanding late
Latin texts – and also how neglected. The following passage is one which I would
not normally have read. The Donatist schism polarised north African Christianity
long after the Great Persecution initiated by Diocletian in 303, and was still the
most important feature of the religious landscape of Latin north Africa in the age of Augustine, a
century and more afterwards. However historically important they may be, I must
admit that Christian heresies and schisms somehow do not capture my interest,
and that the details tend to slip my mind soon after taking them in. The passage
I shall discuss was sneaked into my awareness through appearing on the handout at
a splendid talk given by Neil McLynn at the Oxford Late Roman seminar a couple of weeks
ago.
In the year 347, the arrival in Africa of two imperial
notarii, Macarius and Paulus, precipitated violent disagreements after a period
in which the Donatists had largely been left alone. Marculus was a Donatist
bishop who went with others to protest, was arrested, tortured, and eventually
executed by being hurled off a cliff on 29 November 347. Others questioned the facts (Augustine
thought Marculus had jumped), but such is the account of the Passio benedicti martyris
Marculi. The Passio’s survival was doubtless aided by the fact that readers
did not know that it was a Donatist text. After all, they Donatists did not
call themselves by that name, and their rivals, whom we call catholics, they named traditores,
translatable as traitors but in fact alluding to the claim that they had handed over scriptures to the persecutors. The Passio is an artful and well written
text, but little attention has been paid to it: the text of Jean-Louis Maier
in Le dossier du Donatisme (Berlin 1987-9), 1.275-291, is confessedly taken over
from Migne’s text in Patrologia Latina 8.760-766, which is itself more or less
taken over from Mabillon’s Analecta vetera vol. 4 (1685), 105-115.
The passage in question (Passio Marculi 3.10) is printed
in the editions more or less as follows:
Ecce subito de Constantis regis
tyrannica domo et de palatii eius arce pollutum Macarianae persecutionis murmur
increpuit. et duabus bestiis ad Africam missis, eodem scilicet Macario et Paulo,
exsecrandum prorsus et dirum ecclesiae certamen indictum est; ut populus
Christianus ad unitatem cum traditoribus faciendam nudatis militum gladiis et
draconum praesentibus signis et tubarum uocibus cogeretur.
[I have made a couple of corrections: Mabillon and Migne have
unionem rather than unitatem, against the consensus of the
manuscripts* and Latin idiom, and somehow Migne and Maier have managed to
change Mabillon’s tubarum, which is also in the manuscripts, to turbarum.]
Behold, suddenly from the tyrannical
home of Constans the king and from the citadel of his palace, the polluted rumblings
of the Macarian persecution sounded forth, and through the sending to Africa of
two wild beasts, namely the same Macarius and Paulus, an altogether damnable
and ominous war was declared on the church, with the aim that the Christian
people should be compelled to unity with the betrayers, while the soldiers’ swords
were drawn, the dragon standards present, and to the sound of the war-trumpets.
It immediately struck me that the passage was written with
attention to both accentual and metrical prose rhythm – and almost as instantly
that there was a problem. In what follows as in last week’s post, I = cursus
planus, II = cursus tardus, III = cursus velox, x = absence of cursus; C = cretic
(long short long), S = spondee (long long), T = tribrach (short short short), D
= ditrochee (long short long short):
Ecce subito de Constantis regis tyrannica domo I
et de palatii eius arce x
pollutum Macarianae persecutionis murmur increpuit. II, CT
Et duabus bestiis ad Africam missis I, CS
(eodem scilicet Macario et Paulo) ? (quasi CS if
elision)†
exsecrandum prorsus et dirum ecclesiae certamen indictum
est, I (CS if elision)/ II (CC)†
ut populus Christianus ad unitatem cum traditoribus
faciendam III
nudatis militum gladiis II,
CT
et draconum praesentibus signis I, CS
et tubarum uocibus cogeretur. III, CD
The clausulation is very regular and even two cases where standard metrical clausulae are missing --tyrānnĭcā dŏmō, tradi-tōrĭbūs făcĭēndăm -- are close to the cretic spondee and cretic ditrochee rhythms respectively, and both maintain cursus. The exception comes in the second line. We should correct to read:
Ecce subito de Constantis regis tyrannica domo I
et de palatii eius arce polluta I,
CS
Macarianae persecutionis murmur increpuit. II,
CT
Behold, suddenly from the tyrannical
home of Constans the king and from the polluted citadel of his palace, the rumblings
of the Macarian persecution sounded forth…
And instantly, we find that two other problems are solved:
there is now parallelism with the first clause (adjective, genitive and noun)
and in the following clause an illogical combination of adjective and noun (polluted
murmuring?) no longer challenges translators. Nor is the corruption a difficult
one, with a following m encouraging dittography and the potential for an
a written with a gap at the top in early Carolingian script (a bit like cc)
to be misread as a u.
In the first place, this should remind us that schismatic
Christians were just as capable of writing in elaborate rhythmical art-prose as
others, and that it is really is a very widespread feature of later Latin
literature. Secondly, it is striking that the Passio Marculi lacks a
modern critical edition – and it is far from alone in texts from late antiquity
in that fact. And indeed, it is one of many texts written in clausulated prose whose
editors did their job either without a knowledge of prose rhythm or without an appreciation
of its relevance to their task. Over a century after the rediscovery of Latin
prose rhythm, there must be many thousands of corrections to be made in Latin
literary and subliterary texts on that basis.
*Manuscripts: I have not had time to investigate fully, but with
the help of H. Deleheye, ‘Domnus Marculus’, AB 53 (1935), 81-89, I know
of four manuscripts, of which three are digitised:
-Paris, BNF, Lat. 5643, 35r-44r, considered 11th-century
by the library, and as a/the source of the editio princeps https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10034493j/f37.item
-Paris, BNF, Lat. 12612, 79v-83v, 14th century,
formerly Corbie and cited as such in Migne https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90668292/f80.item
-Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, C.10.i, 243v-246r (9th century,
now kept long-term in Sankt Gallen, where it originates) https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbz/C0010i/243v/0/Sequence-1137
-Brussels 9289, 106-107v
†Elision: it would take an analysis of the whole work to
decide whether to elide indictum est and Macario et or to
maintain the hiatus. In the latter case, elision would not quite create a
cretic spondee clausula as the second syllable of Macarius is short, but this
is a nuance of which fourth century Latin-speakers probably would not have been aware.
