Abstract
This chapter returns to the metapoetic and metatextual dimensions of Optatian's poetry, by exploring these concepts in relation to ideas about his "text". If Optatian's concept of a fabricated textuality is intricately interwoven with ideas about textured fabrics, his terminology of "texere" and "textus" is complex: only after Optatian (during the later fourth century) was the term "textus" transformed from a word for something "woven" into an expression for literary production; before this time, the word had been a relatively marginal for literary production.
The parallels with Lucretius and Manilius - the only poets who use this word before Optatian - suggest that Optatian understood "textus" in relation to "atomic" ideas of language, characterised by the variability, three-dimensionality and indivisibility of words or letters as verbal "atoms". Such models of textuality, the chapter argues, comes close to the anagrammatic model of language that Ferdinand de Saussure postulated in the early twentieth century: a knowingly poetic strategy of composition, rooted in theologically derived ideas.
By the same token, we find in Optatian's poems evidence for a belief in the convergence of single meaning, which exists in tension with the potential arbitrariness integral to atomic model of language.