Emma Greensmith looks at the ways in which early Christians used ancient epic
At some point in the mid-fourth century C.E., a guard at the imperial palace dozes off in the middle of a shift. As he sleeps, he receives a vision directly from God. This vision transports him to heaven, where he becomes a gatekeeper of God’s palace. This celestial kingdom looks strangely like a Roman court: the host of angels are arranged like a retinue of imperial bodyguards, everyone is dressed in military costume, and they speak in a mixture of Homeric Greek and Roman administrative code. The new gatekeeper is enthralled by these wondrous surroundings and he wanders off to explore, leaving his station at the gate unmanned. As he strolls, he is apprehended by Jesus, who berates him for deserting his post, and orders that he be flogged. The angel Gabriel arrives and intercedes on the gatekeeper’s behalf, but the flogging takes place regardless. After he endures his painful punishment, Jesus and Gabriel take the battered wanderer to appear before God. At first, God contemplates banishing him from heaven entirely, but eventually opts for forgiveness. The gatekeeper repents for his sins, is re-baptised by Jesus, changes his name to Andrew and resumes his position filled with commitment and vigour. At this point, the guard on earth awakens with a jolt, realises how blessed he was to receive such a miraculous vision, and vows to record the experience in song so that everyone in the future may know God’s power.
That’s quite a story, isn’t it? It sounds like a piece of Biblical science-fiction, or a fever dream of a Late Antique historian; a fantastical utopia or dystopia (depending on one’s perspective) where a heady mix of settings, characters, and dialects slip and slide into one another.
Very few would guess that this is in fact the plot of an ancient Greek epic. An epic of 343 hexameters, entitled The Vision of Dorotheus, written by an otherwise unknown author. The epic survives today in tantalising but decipherable fragments, the result of a remarkable twentieth century papyrological discovery. It still remains largely unknown to classicists, and those who have encountered it are often left entirely baffled by it. Read in detail and in depth, however, the poem is challenging but extraordinarily rewarding, and can shed important light on the creative use of the ancient epic tradition in the early Christian empire.
The story outlined above is narrated in the first person, by a poet-narrator who proudly names himself as Dorotheus multiple times in the tale. There is much debate on whether or not this Dorotheus corresponds to an actual historical figure. Some scholars align him with a Dorotheus mentioned by the Church Father Eusebius, who was persecuted by the Emperor Diocletian (an argument with which I disagree, given the likelihood of a fourth century dating). Whatever the identity of the real author, the narrator of the tale is a lively poetic persona, and should be treated as such. The surviving text is badly mutilated, with many words and even whole verses missing, and our ability to read it is only thanks to many phases of close and careful reconstruction, culminating most recently in the excellent edition and translation by A.H.M. Kessels and P.W. Van Der Horst (Vigiliae Christianae 41 [1987]: 313-39), which I use throughout this article. It has come down to us as part of a papyrus codex containing nine other eccentric visionary stories (the Codex of Visions) which was discovered in 1952 in Dishna in Upper Egypt. The codex was found among many other papyri, which form a library comprising books in Greek, Latin and Coptic, about both Christian and non-Christian topics (now named ‘The Bodmer Papyri’ after the collector who eventually acquired them). The original purpose of this library is hard to pin down for certain, but since it also contained letters from abbots from the nearby Pachomian monastery, it seems likely that it belonged to a community of monks, who read, copied and shared the texts among themselves and sent them out to others for wider circulation and trade.
This story of the Vision’s origins is more than just background. It gives Dorotheus’ poem a tangible material form and functional purpose. It is not just a floating oddity, quoted out of context by some later author, but rather was part of vibrant, animated reading culture, the product of erudite and socially engaged Christian ascetics. This provenance is also vital for comprehending the curious mixture of Biblical, Homeric and Roman elements within the poem itself. As is shown by the variety of works within the larger library, in this community, Christian and non-Christian ideas, sources and authors were clearly read and consulted simultaneously, and physically placed alongside one another, nestling ‘spine to spine’.
Due to the specific types of Roman positions it mentions, which have been masterfully identified by Jan Bremmer (‘An Imperial Palace Guard in Heaven’, ZPE 75: 82-8), the poem can be dated with some certainty to the fourth century C.E. This chronological context also really matters. In terms of religious history, it puts the Vision in the Post-Constantinian era, after the Donatist schism, and potentially in the midst (or on the cusp) of the pugnacious Arian controversy. And, crucially, it means that it was composed after the Council of Nicaea, and in the wake of its important Trinitarian rulings on the nature and substance of Christ (deeming father and son to be homoousios – of the same essence). This was also a time where the most dramatic form of gaining access to heaven – martyrdom – was no longer on the cards, and when indifference and distraction were greater threats to Christian communities than the active danger of persecution. By narrating a story involving both God the father and Jesus his son, which dramatizes the power of repentance and God’s forgiveness, but also the brutal punishments on offer for a ‘distracted’ Christian who abandons his duty to God, this poem offers a highly topical commentary on the lived experience of fourth century Christianity.
In terms of literary history, this dating also makes the Vision of Dorotheus the earliest, stand-alone Greek Christian epic poem. Prior to this time, poetry had a very limited purpose in Christian settings: despite the widespread use of song and rhythmic hymns in exegetical writing, liturgical settings and community worship, creative composition of poetry by Christians remained strikingly limited. This author’s decision to record his encounter with God not only in verse, but in epic is far from a casual stylistic choice. Epic – the foundational genre of paganism, inextricably attached to Homer and his immoral pagan Gods, and the home of semi-divine heroes, martial competitiveness for worldly goods, and kleos, eternal fame achieved through personal advancements – sets forth a value system which is in many ways entirely incompatible with Christian ethics. Writing about Biblical topics in the epic form, therefore, represents an intervention into the very fault-lines of religious expression: it involves a transportation not only of language and metre, but of associations and principles from one ideological system to another. This is a high stakes process: a collision of Christian content and pagan form, which could cause an unsettling change to both.
It is clear that in Late Antiquity, Greek-speaking Christians did find a place for epic within their worldview. Reading and studying Homer and Vergil remained central to education and cultural life in the Greco-Roman Empire long after the institutionalisation of Christianity, and resulted in the failed and short-lived attempt of the Emperor Julian to curtail such ‘pagan’ erudition (for example in a school decree aimed at banning teaching of pagan texts, Codex Theodosianus 13.3.5). Partly in response to this fervent opposition to classical learning, in the fifth century C.E. there was a surge in production of Greek Biblical epic: major poems were composed during this century which directly ‘translated’ canonical Christian literature – for example books of the Old or New Testament, prose hagiographies (Saints’ Lives) and martyrdom accounts – into epic verse. Surviving examples of this poetry include the Homeric Centos by the Empress Eudocia (passages of the Old Testament retold using cut and pasted lines of the Iliad and Odyssey), a hexameter version of a famous Martyrdom legend (The Martyrdom of St Cyprian) also by the Empress, and the Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel by Nonnus of Panopolis, who also authored the 48 book tour de force the Dionysiaca, the longest surviving epic in antiquity, about the exploits of the pagan god Dionysus. This new wave of fifth century poetry has been hailed by scholars as showcasing the triumph of cultural assimilation between pagan tradition and Christian thought: moving away from the antagonism and resistance marked by the persecution era and Julian the Apostate, these works take up the best parts of the epic form, its prestige, classicism, idiom and style, use them to increase the appeal of the prosaic Christian sources, creating connections with all educated readers – both signed-up Christians and pagans who are yet to be converted – for whom epic poetry was the ultimate lingua franca.
The Vision of Dorotheus is never considered to be a part of this story, but it is in fact a crucial opening chapter to it. When the persecutions were still fresh in historical memory, and when debates about what it meant to be a Christian were still scorching and ongoing, this poet also turned his hand to epic verse, and created something much bolder and more brazen than any of the later fifth century works. Its tone is quite different to the later epics of Eudocia or Nonnus: this is a highly personal story; not a grand Gospel narrative or life of a sainted martyr, but a dreamy adventure of a ‘working class’, ordinary Christian man. In style, it does not only mimic Homeric epic idiom, but commingles it with Hellenistic allusions (for example to Callimachus’ Aetia, which is also framed around a dream) and bureaucratic Roman titles: we get Latin transplanted directly into Homerizing Greek, something which does not occur anywhere else in the surviving epic corpus. And its plot turns God, Jesus and Gabriel into epic characters in a non-Biblical, autobiographical tale, casting them as a trio in a way completely unique to this text and infusing them with a whole host of complicated heroic characteristics.
A closer look at one of the poem’s most dramatic episodes illustrates the effects of these incredible moves. When Jesus catches Dorotheus shirking from duty, he reacts in a highly un-Christian way. First, he summons Gabriel, and orders him to “Throw the ostiarius into the signa and subdue him with flagellations” (131). Jesus Christ, the victim of brutal scourging during the Passion, is now the one administrating a persecutory punishment to a Christian, and he does so by ventriloquising the language of Roman rule: ostiarius is the Latin name for a gate-keeper or porter, and the signa was a kind of prison in a military camp. Jesus, the sinner-embracing, tax-collector befriending, betrayer-forgiving figure of the canonical Gospels, is thus depicted as behaving like a Roman commander, or even a merciless pagan emperor. Christ then explains the reasons for this harsh reaction: Dorotheus left the house of almighty God unguarded, caring nothing for his honour or shame, and trusted in his wickedness: ἀτασθαλίῃσι πιθήσας (132). The Greek word for ‘wickedness’ here, ἀτασθαλίαι, is a driving term in Homer’s Odyssey, where it connects the greed and wantonness of Penelope’s Suitors with the comrades of Odysseus who devour the sun god’s cattle and do not heed divine warnings. The presence of this striking term on Jesus’ own lips, adds another note to the contemporary Roman terminology: it paints Dorotheus as a sinner in a Homeric sense too, turning Jesus into not only an imperial punisher, but a heroic avenger, in the mould of the triumphant bloodthirsty Odysseus, when he sees the destruction wrecked on his own palace and home.
But the audacious analogies do not stop there. Dorotheus the narrator then intervenes, and describes the intensity of Christ’s rage in a way that strikingly resembles Homer’s depictions of Achilles:
[χωομένου] δ’ ἄσβεστον ἐπὶ βλεφάροις κέχυτ’ ἀχλὺς
ἀ̣[χνυμένο]υ, μένεος δὲ μέγα φρένες ἀμφιμέλαιναι
π̣[ίμπλ]α̣ν̣τ̣[’, ὄσ]σε δέ οἱ πυρὶ λαμπετόωντι ἐΐκτην.
[ἔστη] δ’ ὥσ[τε] λέων κραδίην γναθμοῖσι τανύσσας
[θήγ]ω̣ν λευκὸν ὀδόντ’ , ἅμ’ ἐκέκλετο μ’ ἐμβαλέεσθαι… 137-41
In his unquenchable anger a mist spread over his eyes,
While lamenting, and his heart darkened on either side was filled
With great passion
And his two eyes showed like blazing fire.
He remained there standing as a lion straining his rage with his jaws,
grinding white fangs, and at once gave the order to throw me in.
Jesus has Achilles’ unquenchable rage, deep sorrow and animalistic passion, and is compared to a lion, the most frequent simile given to Achilles in the Iliad. The specific description of Christ’s eyes blazing with fire also echoes specifically Achilles’ reaction when he sees his famous shield (ὡς εἶδ᾽, ὥς μιν μᾶλλον ἔδυ χόλος, ἐν δέ οἱ ὄσσε | δεινὸν ὑπὸ βλεφάρων ὡς εἰ σέλας ἐξεφάανθεν, ‘When he saw it, anger came on him still more, and his two eyes showed forth terribly from beneath their lids, like flame’. Il.19.16-17). So at the peak of his rage, Jesus is at once a Roman commander and a Homeric hero; and as a Homeric hero, he is both Achilles and Odysseus, exhibiting the language, emotion and behaviour of these diametrically opposed Greek warriors. The lion simile in fact encapsulates this remixing of models: it is Achilles’ main animal comparison in the Iliad, but it is also memorably used for Odysseus in the Odyssey, at the very moment when he punishes the suitors for their ἀτασθαλίαι (Odyssey 22.405, repeated at 23. 48).
What is the reader to make of these clashing reference points? On the one hand, this could all be dismissed as simple literary ostentation: this author is trying to show off, by flaunting how many different models he can cram into his verses. Given, however, the freighted cultural politics of classical learning at this time, and the serious Christian concerns with which this poem strongly engages, it seems to me that there is something much more deeply disconcerting at play here. Part of what was at stake in fourth century Christian disputes was how to understand and express the nature of Christ. Dorotheus here offers us a literary response to this question: he casts the Lord as a character in epic verse, makes him part of the long Greek tradition of semi-divine heroes with strong emotions and military might, and describes him in language recognisable to Romans and Greeks, to educated pagans and Christians. This depiction is alluring and engaging, but it carries with it as many risks, challenges, and complications as the most argumentative of religious treatises. This author clearly recognises the profound difficulty of capturing Christ’s essence, and he uses poetry to celebrate as well as confront it. The Vision reveals how epic might just work as a vehicle for communicating Christian thought, so long as one is prepared to embrace all the contrary aspects of this crafty literary form.
In many respects this tiny and tattered poem poses more questions than it answers. Reading it leaves one charged but confused, curious but unsated. It is precisely such feelings that make the Vision so worth engaging with. In the century before a firmer, self-confident brand of Christian Greek Epic emerged onto the scene, it offers a glimpse of a much more jagged, experimental form of poetry writing, the residual traces of which might just be detected beneath the triumphant fifth century voices. As our modern world continues to grapple with its own disputes concerning religious and non-religious belonging, Dorotheus’ poem also provides a timely reminder that piety and playfulness can exist side by side. This deeply spiritual narrative is filled with wackiness and wit, and despite its fragmentation, transports us back into the thick of early Christian theology, which emerges before our eyes with all the shining vividness and bloodthirsty energy of Achilles on the fields of Troy.
Emma Greensmith is Associate Professor of Classics and Tutor and Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. Her book on imperial Greek epic, The Resurrection of Homer, is now available in paperback. She has recently finished editing the Cambridge Companion to Greek Epic, which will shortly be available from Cambridge University Press. Her new book, Homer and the Bible: Essays on Christian Greek Epic, which begins with a chapter on The Vision of Dorotheus, will be out in 2024-5.
