Proba: Cento

Faltonia Betitia Proba, a Roman aristocratic woman of the fourth century, composed this poem of nearly 700 hexameters entirely from lines and half-lines of Virgil, rearranged to tell the biblical story. After a proem in which she renounces her earlier epic on civil war and invokes God in place of the Muses, the cento narrates the creation, the fall and the flood from Genesis, then the life of Christ from his birth to the ascension. A dedication to an emperor stands at the head of the text.

Proba’s cento is the earliest surviving Christian poem by a Latin woman and an ingenious attempt to show that Virgil, the poet of Rome, could be made to tell the Christian story. Jerome scorned the technique, and the poem was later listed among the apocrypha, yet it was widely read in schools throughout the Middle Ages. It is a remarkable witness to the meeting of classical culture and Christian faith in the Roman aristocracy.