Sex and Salvation in the Vergilian Cento of the Fourth Century

In a cento, a writer uses fragments from texts of canonical authors (Genette’s hypotext) taken out of their original context to create a new work (Genette’s hypertext), which one could call ‘literary patchwork’. This chapter argues innovatively to differentiate between the predominantly parodical aim of pagan centos and the predominantly exegetical aim of Christian centos, and illustrates the implications and consequences of this assumption by analysing the centos of the fourth-century writers Ausonius and Proba. While both poets are adhering to a classicism that sees Vergil as indispensable for conveying a culturally convincing message, they manage to exploit the authority and embedded polysemy of the hypotext for diametrically opposed messages. Thus the chapter programmatically demonstrates that the literary genre of the cento, instead of being wrongly accused of epigonality, is a highly original and complex literary form.

Art · Classicism · Context (archaeology) · Linguistics · Literature · Polysemy · Rhetoric · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy