Juvencus

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Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus (fl. c. 330) was a Roman Christian poet from Hispania who wrote in Latin.

Life

The only source on Juvencus's life is

. From one passage in his work (II, 806, sq.) and from Jerome's Chronicle it must be inferred that he wrote about the year 330.

Works

His poem, in

. He follows his model very closely, "almost literally", as St. Jerome says.

The whole problem for him is to render the Gospel text into easy language conformable to the tradition of the Latin poets, and borrowed especially from

Prosody

betray the period in which the work was written. The whole effect is carefully wrought out.

In the

.

The work is divided into four books, which make arbitrary divisions of the life of

gifts of the Magi

— the incense offered to the God, the gold to the King, the myrrh to the Man.

Lastly, eight preliminary verses, Juvencus's authorship of which is disputed, characterize the Evangelists and assign emblems to them; but they assign the eagle to Mark and the lion to John.

The Bible text which Juvencus paraphrased was of course an ancient one. He appears, too, to have had recourse at times to the Greek text. The source of his poetical phraseology and his technic is, first, Virgil, then Lucretius, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, Silius Italicus, and Statius. The cold correctness of the work recommended it to the taste of the Middle Ages, when it was frequently quoted, imitated, and copied.

Jerome mentions that Juvencus composed another, shorter, Christian poem on "the order of the mysteries" (Sacramentorum ordinem). This work is lost.

Modern writers have incorrectly attributed to him the Heptateuchus, a work of

(Autun).

Editions and translations

• Reginald Oliver published an edition of Historia Evangelica in Ipswich in 1534. ^[2]
• C. Marold (Leipzig, 1886) in the "Bibliotheca Teubneriana"
• J. Hümer (Vienna, 1891) in the "Corpus script. ecclesiast. latinorum"
• McGill, Scott (2016). Juvencus' Four books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum libri quattuor. Routledge later Latin poetry. London: Routledge.
  ISBN 978-0-415-63583-7
  .

Notes

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Paul Lejay (1913). "C. Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. This work in turn cites:
  • W. S. Teuffel
    , Geschichte der römischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1890), 1016
  • Martin Schanz, Geschichte der röm. Literatur, IV (Munich, 1904), 1, 190
  • Otto Bardenhewer, tr. Thomas J Shanan, Patrology (St. Louis, 1908)
• Cornel Heinsdorff, Christus, Nikodemus und die Samaritanerin bei Juvencus. Mit einem Anhang zur lateinischen Evangelienvorlage, Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 67 (Berlin/New York 2003)
  ISBN 3-11-017851-6
  .
• Cornel Heinsdorff, Der interpolierte Juvencus des Codex Augiensis 112 und Severus von Malaga, Vigiliae Christianae 60 (2006), 148–170.
• R. P.H. Green, "The Evangeliorum Libri of Juvencus: Exegesis by Stealth," in Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity: The Encounter between Classical and Christian Strategies of Interpretation. Eds. Willemien Otten and Karla Pollmann (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007) (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 87),
• Roger P H Green, Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, Oxford UP 2008
  ISBN 978-0199284573
  (reviewed by Teresa Morgan in the article "Poets for Jesus", Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 2008, p 31).

External links

• "Juvencus, Gaius Vettius Aquilinus" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
• Opera Omnia by Migne Patrologia Latina
• Preface in English translation by Patrick McBrine
• Works and Bibliography at Bibliotheca Augustana