COMMODIANO. — Of 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, instead, very probable that he was an African.
As for the age in which he lived, the proposed dates range from the second half of the third century to the second half of the fifth; but the former finds the most secure confirmation in the internal analysis of his two brief 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, addressed to pagans, to those uncertain between the two faiths, and to Jews, to all of whom the poet, possessing the truth, reveals the errors in which they live astray; and 39 in the second book, intended to instruct 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 brief poem, in 1,060 hexameters, has been preserved anonymously and without a title in a single eighth-century manuscript, 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 Carmen apologeticum adversus Iudaeos et Gentes. Its attribution to C. is due to Pitra himself and rests on valid arguments. The title, however, is unsatisfactory, because the poem is essentially a celebration of humanity’s destiny through revelation, the incarnation of the Word, and the end of the world: it must therefore be regarded as the first attempt at Christian epic, and whatever is didactic in it is introductory or episodic.
C. wished to be “the new poet,” the Christian poet, 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 neither through ignorance nor with the intention of lowering poetry to the level of the ignorant, as has been asserted, he broke the lexical, grammatical, and metrical bonds of classical Latin even more boldly than Tertullian: he was not ignorant of the school; he rebelled against the school. He was convinced that Rome, “the triumphant over all,” and the things of Rome were destined to end (Carmen apologeticum, 917 ff.) and, in his mystical ardor, being a superficial thinker as he was, he imagined that a Christian culture could be created in the West independently of the past. Nor did he even realize that more than once the verse and expression derived from the classics he had studied flowed into his writings, and that even 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 humiliores, the mendicus Christi (Instrucciones, II, 39, vv. 1-15), spiritually rebellious against everything that was part of the Roman-pagan tradition, of which, in the second half of the third century, the new nobility of the honorati, that is, the wealthy and the all-powerful, constituted the bulwark. And he became a poet not devoid of feeling and imagination, but disorderly in conception, harsh and obscure in a form bristling with barbarisms, words and expressions from the sermo vulgaris, neologisms, and solecisms. His hexameter, with few exceptions, reproduces classical rhythm as best it can, chiefly through a succession of tonic accents.
As a Christian thinker, C. is, if possible, even inferior to the man of letters. His deficiency in religious instruction is revealed in both works. Both are manifestly and enthusiastically millenarian; the Apologeticum, moreover, which was probably the first that he wrote, also professes a crude Sabellianism (vv. 89 ff., 277 ff., 771 ff.). This is probably why its reading was discouraged by the Galaxianum Decretum (v.).