Library › Latin: Myth, Hymn & Religion › Orationes
These short verse prayers are transmitted with the works of Orientius, the fifth-century Gallic poet, and printed as his in the Vienna corpus. Written in iambic lines with a repeated refrain, they describe the praise offered to God by the Cherubim, the seven archangels, the sun and stars and all creation, and after each stanza the human community responds that it sounds the amen and says the alleluia as an image of the heavenly song.
The prayers show the liturgical character of some late antique Latin verse, in which the earthly church joins the worship of heaven. Their refrain structure links them with the hymns and litanies sung in the churches of Gaul. Though brief and of uncertain authorship, they belong to the small body of Christian lyric that survives from the period of the barbarian settlements.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the Open Greek and Latin digital edition of the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (edition: Michael Petschenig, CSEL 16.1, 1888), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.