JUVENCUS (Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Iuvencus). - He is the first Christian Latin poet whom we are able to encounter after the Edict of Milan (513 A.D.). A native of the Vettones, an ancient people of Lusitania, he seems to have been born at Cesarobriga, later called Oliva (present-day Talavera de la Reina), on the right bank of the Tagus. To further his education, G. went to nearby Salamanca, an archiepiscopal and university seat: a center, therefore, that influenced the poet's literary studies and at the same time his religious vocation. And it appears that he was also bishop of Salamanca and that he died there in 337.
The title of G.'s work is Evangeliorum libri quattuor. It was composed around 330 according to the testimony of St. Jerome and the indication of the poet himself that is read at the end of the poem. It consists of 3211 hexameters divided into four books of ca. 800 verses each.
As Homer sang the Greek world and Virgil the Latin one, so too G. wished to exalt the Christian world epically with the hexameter. The difficulty of such a task must not have been of little magnitude, inasmuch as the poet, even while devoting himself to composing a literary work, wished to remain as faithful as possible to the biblical narrative. He had to repress his flights of poetry in order to reproduce «paene ad verbum» the earthly deeds of Christ; nevertheless, in the composition, in which the imitation of the classics is always careful and the scrupulousness regarding language and metrical laws is also notable, he aimed to make of the Gospels a purely poetic work. He thus succeeded in fashioning a genre of his own, characteristic, in which language, verse, style, and the idea of the classical world are forced to manifest concepts completely new and entirely different from those of the ancient classical world. And the poet fully succeeded in his intent, to the point, one may say, that one must recognize with Hatfield that G. deserves a notable place not only in Christian poetry, but also in Latin literature. Nor, on the other hand, should one think that the imitation of the classical poets is arid, and still less that it is reduced to a mere transcription of verses, phrases or simple words, since in G. it is determined by a profound assimilation of classical literature, so that the author's thought finds its most genuine and natural manifestation in the expressions of the pagan poets, which, having by now become the poet's intimate patrimony, flow from him almost unnoticed in the composition of the work. Among the authors whom G. imitated in his poem, the one who more than any other influenced his poetic formation, both formal and spiritual, was evidently Virgil; there follow, but at a distance: Lucretius, Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Silius, Statius.
The text to which the poet adhered most closely is that of the Itala of the Gospel of Matthew; the content of the other Gospels is included only in a fifth part of the work. G. moreover succeeds in giving his poem a content of universality, which aims to make Christ accepted as the founder of the Christian religion by the Romans, to whom he dedicates his work. And the Christ of G.'s poem, even if in some episode he appears somewhat wanting, does not fall short of the sublimity of the evangelical conception: he rather, gathering in himself all the qualities and all the attributes that the Evangelists had recognized in the Son of God, presents himself complete, perfect, more profoundly human and, at the same time, more sovereignly divine.
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Flora Laganà