Centos

CENTOS. - A cento is a poetic composition made up of verses and parts of verses by some well-known poet, stitched together so as to express a new content.

Among those on Christian subjects, the best known is the Cento Vergilianus of the Roman matron Proba (v.), composed probably around 360. It narrates, with Virgilian passages and hemistichs, the whole life of Jesus and sacred history down to the flood. Evidently such an undertaking could not succeed. The author is forced to pass over proper names and to express herself often in a vague and approximate manner, in the vain effort to give her material an unnatural dress. St. Jerome (Ep., 53, 7) condemned such attempts as puerile and charlatanical, and the Decretum Gelasianum relegated the cento among the apocrypha. Other Virgilian centos, probably later, are: the Pomponii versus in gratiam Domini, or Tityrus, 132 hexameters taken from Virgil's 1st eclogue, perhaps an introduction to a cento on the Aeneid by the same author; the De Verbi Incarnatione, in 111 hexameters; the De Ecclesia, in 110 hexameters, which is meant to be a sermon on the redemption, both by an unknown author. There were also some in the Middle Ages. St. Jerome (loc. cit.) also mentions Christian Homeric centos, of which we know nothing else. Among the later Greek centos are remembered the Homeric ones of Aelia Eudocia (d. 460), and the tragedy Christus patiens attributed to St. Gregory Nazianzen, composed with verses of Euripides, Aeschylus and Lycophron in the 12th century. Of minor centos in short compositions there are very many, and almost all the poets of the decadence toyed with similar productions.