Abstract
Vergilian centos are Late Antique literary forms stemming from and reflecting the epic tradition. They are based on the fact that it was a well-known tradition and, indeed, it was not by accident that the majority of the sixteen cento poems have been preserved in the Codex Salmasianus, and so have e.g. themata Vergiliana and argumenta Aeneidis.
Centos, however, differ from these other Late Antique texts in that they evoke specific parts from their sources by means of literal quotations and, in some cases, they manage to create a certain tension between the new and the original texts. Then there is the category of genre - the largest group of preserved Late Antique centos consists of minor mythological epyllia, while the most extensive of Antique Vergilian centos, the Cento Probae, has features of a heroic epic.
There are significant generic markers already in the programmatic proem of the Cento Probae, which is not written using the cento technique. They, needless to say, refer namely to the Aeneid, but repeatedly also to Lucan's Bellum Ciuile (and other epics).
The very opening outline of the poem's contents (Proba, Cento 1-7), nevertheless, shows that Proba varies traditional epic structures, thus demonstrating its critical approach towards them: throughout seven verses, strongly inspired by the opening of Lucan's poem, Proba makes readers/listeners believe that it is a traditional exordial topos only to frustrate their expectations and to disavow both its original (unpreserved) war epic and the entire epic tradition. The remaining verses of the proem contain specific motifs of distance (rejection of the traditional exordial topoi) and introduce new Christian poetics.
Likewise, the narrative part of the Cento Probae is rooted in epical structures which are, however, placed in new contexts and presented with a new function: the scene of the storm and Jesus's walking on water (Proba Cento 531-561), for instance, contains strong intertextual references to the funeral games in Aeneid 5, which shape its meaning, namely the concept of the figure of Jesus. The references to the epic structures in the cento epyllia are also used with similar originality.
The description of the race in Hippodamia, for instance, refers not only to the ship race in Aeneid 5 but also to other funeral game events. De Opera Pistoria, a non-mythological poem, transposes the connotations to games to a mundane theme, in a clear parallel to the pseudo-Vergilian Moretum; the tension between the original and the new text therefore has features of a light-hearted parody.
This is even more apparent in Ausonius's non-epic Cento Nuptialis, in the last part of which (Imminutio) the connotations of games and the ultimate fight of the helmsman Palinurus in Aeneid 5 are transposed to the broom and the bride on the wedding night.