Simona NICOLAE (ISSEE, Academia Română/Universitatea din București)
QUAND L’AMOUR CHRÉTIEN REVÊT LE PÉPLOS D’APHRODITE (ANTHOLOGIA PALATINA, LIBER V)
Keywords: Palatine Anthology, Christian epigrams, pagan Hellenism, eros and agape.
Abstract: When Christian love puts on the peplos of Aphrodite (Palatine Anthology, Book V). Selected and transmitted by a Christian civilization, composed mostly in the Christian era, under the influence of Rome or Constantinople, using archaic dialects and ancient rhythms, revealing the nude bodies of the hetairai and praising the Olympian deities, erotic epigrams delighted the ears of those baptized in a new faith and speaking a language considerably different from that in which the poems themselves were written. The dichotomy between the eros of Hellas, carnal, sensual, tumultuous, and the protective love called agape, reserved for the spirit, and detached from the impulses of the soul, deepened so much in the Roman Empire of the Christians that the cardinal text of this world, the New Testament, bible of love for God and of God’s love, banished Eros and forgot his name. However, secular literature flourished in this world seemingly governed by a hieratic and passionless love. It is the fruit of certain writers who do not renounce the Holy Trinity, who know and quote the Scriptures, but consider themselves the “craftsmen of a new song” and compete, from this position of “neoteric” writers of the Second Rome, with the fathers of elegiac verses. Their poetry – here cited that of Agathias Scholasticus, Paulus Silentiarius, Macedonios the Consul, cultured figures, privileged of the time and close to Emperor Justinian, as well as others unknown or little known – has all too often been analyzed as a conventional and anachronistic result of classical paideia, in disagreement with the life and culture of the time. In our study, we explore the relationship between Antiquity and the Middle Ages and ask whether poetry is, in this case, knowledge to be transmitted or an archetypal vehicle of human emotions.