Tiberianus: Carmina

Tiberianus, a poet of the fourth century, is known from a handful of poems in various metres. The best known, in trochaic septenarii, describes a river running through fields in a cool valley, laughing with bright pebbles and painted with flowers, with laurels and myrtles stirred by the breeze and birds singing. Other poems treat the corrupting power of gold and offer a prayer to the supreme god in a Platonic manner.

The river poem is one of the finest descriptions of an ideal landscape in later Latin poetry, and its metre and imagery have often been compared with the Pervigilium Veneris. The poems show the refined, classicizing taste of fourth-century pagan culture, and the poet has sometimes been identified with Annius Tiberianus, a high official under Constantine. His few surviving poems have been admired by modern readers for their musical verse.