COMMODIAN. - Concerning this Christian poet, neither the place where he was born nor the age in which he lived is known with certainty. From the epithet Gaseus, which is read in the title of one of his poems (Instructiones, II, 39), some have been led to think 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, on the other hand, very probable that he was an African.
As for the age in which he lived, the dates proposed range from the second half of the 3rd century to the second half of the 5th century; but the former is the one that finds the surest confirmation in the internal analysis of his two short poems. One of these is the Instructiones: it consists of 80 poems, ranging from 6 to 48 hexameters, distributed in two books, 41 in the first, directed to the pagans, to those uncertain between the two faiths, to the Jews, to all of whom the poet, in possession of the truth, reveals the errors in which they live astray; 39 in the second book aimed at instructing the believers (catechumens, matrons, ecclesiastics). The whole work has a didactic purpose, for which the use of the acrostic also serves, as a mnemonic device; but in his teaching C. does not refrain from satire. The other short poem, in 1060 hexameters, has been preserved for us anonymous and without a title by a single manuscript of the 8th century, which was discovered at Middlehill by G. B. Pitra and published by him in Paris (1852) in his Spicilegium Solesmense, I, p. 21 ff., under the title of Carmen apologeticum adversus Iudaeos et Gentes. The attribution to C. is due to Pitra himself and rests on valid arguments. The title, however, is not satisfactory, because the short poem is, in substance, the celebration of the destinies of man through revelation, the incarnation of the Word, the end of the world: it must therefore be considered as the first attempt at Christian epic, and what in it has a didactic character is introductory or episodic.
C. wished to be "the new poet," the Christian poet, singer of the life of the spirit renewed by Christianity, as Tertullian had wished to be the creator of a new prose. For this reason, and not out of ignorance nor out of a purpose of lowering poetry to the level of the ignorant, as has been asserted, even more boldly than Tertullian he broke the lexical, grammatical and metrical bonds of classical Latin: he does not ignore the school, he rebels against the school. He was convinced that Rome, "the triumphant one over all," and the things of Rome were destined to end (Carmen apologeticum, 917 ff.) and in his mystical ardor, superficial mind that he was, he thought that a Christian culture could be created in the West disregarding the past. And he did not even notice that more than once the verse and the expression, deriving from the classics he had studied, flowed into his writings, and that even more often he was forced to resort to the humblest formal means of the school he criticized (Carmen apologeticum, 583 ff.). But he wished to be one of the humiliores, the mendicus Christi (Instructiones, II, 39, vv. 1-15), spiritually rebellious against everything that was Roman-pagan tradition, of which, in the second half of the 3rd century, the new nobility of the honorati, that is, of the rich and the all-powerful, was making itself the bulwark. And he succeeded as a poet not devoid of feeling and imagination, but disorderly in conception, harsh and obscure in form, bristling with barbarisms, with words and expressions of the sermo vulgaris, with neologisms, with solecisms. His hexameter, save for a few exceptions, reproduces the classical rhythm as best it can, above all by means of a succession of tonic accents.
As a Christian thinker C. is still, if possible, inferior to the man of letters. His deficiency in religious instruction is revealed in both works. Both are manifestly, enthusiastically millenarian; the Apologeticum moreover, which was probably the first he wrote, also professes a crude Sabellianism (vv. 89 ff., 277 ff., 771 ff.). For this reason his reading was probably discouraged by the Galaxianum Decretum (v.).
Bibliography
Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci