POETIC CENTOS. – A cento is a poetic composition resulting from verses and parts of verses by some well-known poet, sewn together so as to express a new subject.
Among those dealing with Christian themes, the best known is the Cento Vergilianus Proba (v.), probably composed around 360. It recounts, through Vergilian passages and hemistichs, the entire life of Jesus and sacred history up to the Flood. Evidently, an undertaking of this kind could not succeed. The author is obliged to omit proper names and often to express herself vaguely and approximately, in the vain effort to give her material an unnatural form. St. Jerome (Ep., 53, 7) condemned such attempts as childish and charlatan-like, and the Decretum Gelasianum relegated the cento among the apocrypha. Other Vergilian centos, probably later, are: the Pomponii versus in gratiam Domini, or Tityrus, 132 hexameters drawn from Virgil’s first eclogue, perhaps an introduction to a cento on the Aeneid by the same author; De Verbi Incarnatione, in 111 hexameters; and De Ecclesia, in 110 hexameters, which aims to be a sermon on redemption, both by an unknown author. There were also centos 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 by Elia Eudossia (d. in 460), and the tragedy Christus patiens, attributed to St. Gregory Nazianzen, composed with verses by Euripides, Aeschylus, and Lycophron in the 12th century. There are very many minor centos in brief compositions, and nearly all the poets of the decadence amused themselves with such productions.