COMMODIANUS. – Of this Christian poet, neither the place of his birth nor the period in which he lived is known with certainty. From the epithet “Gaseus,” which appears in the title of one of his poems (*Instructions*, II, 39), some have been led to believe that he was from Gaza (Palestine), but nothing in his writings confirms such a hypothesis, and that epithet can be explained otherwise, as indeed it has been. It is far more probable, however, that he was an African.
As for the period in which he lived, proposed dates range from the second half of the 3rd century to the second half of the 5th; but the first of these is the one most securely confirmed by internal analysis of his two little poems. One of these is the *Instructions*: it consists of 80 poems, ranging from 6 to 48 hexameters, divided into two books—41 in the first, addressed to pagans, to those uncertain between the two faiths, and to Jews, all of whom the poet, in possession of the truth, reveals the errors in which they live lost; 39 in the second book, intended to instruct believers (catechumens, matrons, ecclesiastics). The entire work has a didactic purpose, for which even the use of the most archaic language serves as a mnemonic device; yet in his teaching Commodianus does not shrink from satire. The other little poem, in 1060 hexameters, has come down to us anonymously and without a title in a single 8th-century manuscript discovered at Middlehill by J. B. Pitra and published by him in Paris (1852) in his *Spicilegium Solemense*, I, pp. 21 ff., under the title *Carmen Apologeticum adversus Iudaeos et Gentes*. The attribution to Commodianus is due to Pitra himself and rests on valid arguments. The title, however, is unsatisfactory, for the poem is essentially a celebration of human destiny through revelation, the Incarnation of the Word, and the end of the world; it should therefore be regarded as the first attempt at Christian epic, and whatever didactic element it contains is introductory or episodic.
Commodianus wished to be “the new poet,” the Christian poet, the singer of the life of the spirit renewed by Christianity, just as Tertullian had wished to be the creator of a new prose. For this reason, and not out of ignorance or with the intention of lowering poetry to the level of the uneducated (as has been claimed), he broke more boldly than Tertullian the lexical, grammatical, and metrical bonds of classical Latin: he was not ignorant of the schools, but he rebelled against them. Convinced that Rome, “the conqueror of all,” and the things of Rome were destined to perish (*Carmen Apologeticum*, 917 ff.), and in his mystical fervor—superficial as he was—he thought that a Christian culture could be created in the West without reference to the past. Nor did he realize that more than once his verse and expressions, drawn from the classics he had studied, crept into his writings, and that far more often he was forced to resort to the humblest formal devices of the school he criticized (*Carmen Apologeticum*, 583 ff.). But
he wished to be one of the *humiliati*, the *mendicus Christi* (*Instructions*, II, 39, ll. 1–15), spiritually rebellious against everything that was Roman-pagan tradition, against which, in the second half of the 3rd century, the new nobility of the *honorati*, i.e., the rich and the powerful, stood as a bulwark. He succeeded in becoming a poet not lacking in feeling and imagination, but disordered in conception, harsh and obscure in form, bristling with barbarisms, with words and expressions from the *sermo vulgaris*, with neologisms, and solecisms. His metrical skill, with few exceptions, reproduces the classical rhythm only imperfectly, chiefly by means of a succession of tonic accents.
As a Christian thinker, Commodianus is, if possible, even more deficient than as a writer. His lack of religious instruction is evident in both works. Both are manifestly and enthusiastically millenarian; the *Apologeticum*, moreover—which was probably the first he wrote—also professes a crude Sabellianism (ll. 89 ff., 277 ff., 771 ff.). For this reason, his works were probably condemned by the *Gelasian Decree* (v.).