GIOVENCO (Gaius Vettius Aquilius Iuvencus). — He is the first Latin Christian poet we encounter after the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). A native of the Vettones, an ancient people of Lusitania, he seems to have been born in Cesarobriga, later called Oliva (now Talavera de la Reina), on the right bank of the Tagus. To deepen his culture, G. went to nearby Salamanca, an episcopal and university seat—a center that influenced both literary studies and the poet’s religious vocation. He appears to have been bishop of Salamanca and to have died there in 337.
The title of G.’s work is *Evangeliorum libri quatuor*. It was composed around 330, according to the testimony of St. Jerome and the indication given by the poet himself at the end of the poem. It consists of 321 hexameters divided into four books of about 800 verses each.
Just as Homer sang of the Greek world and Virgil of the Latin, so G. sought to exalt the Christian world in epic form. The difficulty of such a task cannot have been slight, for while composing a literary work, the poet wished to remain as faithful as possible to the biblical narrative. He had to restrain his poetic impulses to reproduce the landscape of the land and to maintain a connection with nature. In this sense, G. never felt himself, in his composition, to be anything but an imitator of the classics, and his scrupulous attention to language and metrical laws aimed to make of the *Evangelia* a purely poetic work. Thus he forged a characteristic genre in which the language, verse, style, and conception of the classical world are compelled to express concepts entirely new and wholly different from those of the ancient classical world. The poet fully succeeded in his aim, so much so that, as Hatfield rightly observes, G. deserves a notable place not only in Christian poetry but also in Latin literature. Nor should one think that he is a dry imitator of classical poets or that his work is reduced to a mere transcription of verses, phrases, or words, for in G. there is a profound assimilation of classical literature, so that the author’s thought finds its most genuine and natural expression in the words of pagan poets, which, having become his intimate patrimony, arise almost unconsciously in the composition of his work. Among the authors whom G. imitated in his poem, the one who most influenced his poetic formation, both formal and spiritual, was evidently Virgil; followed 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 about a fifth of the work. Yet G. succeeds in giving his poem a universal scope, aiming to have the Romans, to whom he dedicates his work, accept Christ as the founder of the Christian religion. And the Christ of G.’s poem, even if in some episodes He appears somewhat incomplete, does not fall short of the sublimity of the evangelical conception: indeed, uniting in Himself all the qualities and attributes that the Evangelists had recognized in the Son of God, He presents Himself complete, perfect, more deeply human and, at the same time, more supremely divine.