CENTONI POETICI. — A cento is a poetic composition made up of verses or parts of verses by a well-known poet, stitched together so as to express new content.
Among those of Christian subject matter, the best known is the Cento Proba (v.), composed probably around 360. It recounts, using Virgilian passages and half-verses, the entire life of Jesus and sacred history up to the Flood. Evidently such an undertaking could not succeed. The authoress is forced to omit proper names and to express herself often in vague and approximate terms, in a vain effort to clothe her subject in an unnatural guise. St. Jerome (Ep., 53, 7) condemned such attempts as puerile and charlatanesque, and the Decretum Gelasianum relegated the cento to the category of apocrypha. Other Virgilian centos, probably later, are: the Pomponii versus in gratiam Domini, or Tityrus, 132 hexameters drawn from the 1st and 9th eclogues of Virgil, perhaps an introduction to a cento on the Aeneid by the same author; the De Verbi Incarnatione, in 300 hexameters; the De Ecclesia, in 200 hexameters, which aims to be a sermon on redemption, both of unknown authorship. Centos also existed in the Middle Ages. St. Jerome (loc. cit.) also mentions Christian Homeric centos, of which we know nothing else. Among later Greek centos, mention should be made of the Homeric centos of Elia Eudoxia (d. 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 countless minor centos in short compositions, and nearly all the poets of the decadence amused themselves with such productions.