Enclosed is the transcription for the month of August! (A day late… sometimes time runs away from you, but the text is here nevertheless!)
It is the beginning of a 1020-line hexameter poem by Claudius Marius Victorinus, a 5th century Rhetor from Gaul (Marseille), which recapitulates the Christian creation story in this antique meter.
The text for August is the first of the four sections of the poem, the Præfatio ad Deum Optimum Maximum, the succeeding parts will come in the following months. The Præfatio entails a laudation of the Lord, from whom creation has come.
Claudius is known to us via the work De Viris Illustribus by a contemporary in the city of Marseille, Gennadius Massiliensis, who continued the work of St. Jerome by the same name. Here is what Gennadius has to say about him:
Victorinus, a rhetorician of Marseilles, wrote to his son Etherius, a commentary On Genesis, commenting, that is, from the beginning of the book to the death of the patriarch Abraham, and published four books in verse, words which have a savour of piety indeed, but, in that he was a man busied with secular literature and quite untrained in the Divine Scriptures, they are of slight weight, so far as ideas are concerned.
He died in the reign of Theodosius and Valentinianus.
(Translation by Philip Schaff, chapter LXI)
I look forward to editing the remainder of the poem and delivering them to you in the coming months!
In Christo,
Brooks H. Romedy
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