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AUSONIUS’ CENTO NVPTIALIS AND THE DATE OF THE PERVIGILIVM VENERIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2026

Scott McGill
Scott McGill*
Affiliation:
Rice University
*
smcgill@rice.edu
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Abstract

This note argues that imitation of Ausonius’ Cento nuptialis in the Peruigilium Veneris establishes 374 c.e. as the terminus post quem for the Peruigilium Veneris. The note enlarges on the argument of Danuta Shanzer, who identified debts to Ausonius in the Peruigilium Veneris and dated the latter poem accordingly: the approach is to locate evidence for Ausonian imitation that Shanzer missed, and thus to reinforce and confirm her position. While the note does not propose a poet for the Peruigilium Veneris, it shows that certain figures to whom the work is commonly attributed, notably Florus and Tiberianus, cannot be its author.

Keywords

Peruigilium VenerisAusoniusCento nuptialisimitationFlorusTiberianus

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Shorter Notes
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The Classical Quarterly , First View , pp. 1 - 4
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

When was the Peruigilium Veneris written? This note argues that evidence in the poem for its imitation of Ausonius’ Cento nuptialis establishes a terminus post quem of 374 c.e., the probable date of the cento.Footnote 1 My proposed dating has significant implications for the authorship of the Peruigilium Veneris: specifically, it counters common attributions of the poem to pre-370s poets, including the second-century c.e. Florus and the early fourth-century Tiberianus.Footnote 2 I make no claim for who the author might have been. But by showing that the Peruigilium Veneris postdates Ausonius’ cento, my note at least establishes when we can begin to look for him.Footnote 3

My discussion of Ausonian imitation in the Peruigilium Veneris builds upon the work of Danuta Shanzer. In an article on the dating of the poem, she argues that its author relies on the Cento nuptialis in lines 22–6 of the Peruigilium Veneris. In a passage teeming with double entendre, the poet describes how Venus causes virgin roses to open as bridal flowers in the morning light, and thus to lose their (figurative) virginity beneath her power:Footnote 4

ipsa iussit mane ut udae uirgines nubant rosae.
facta Cypridis de cruore deque Amoris osculis
deque gemmis deque flammis deque solis purpuris,
cras ruborem, qui latebat ueste tectus ignea, 25
unico Noto marita non pudebit soluere.

She herself [Venus] has ordered the dewy virgin roses to be brides in the morning. Made from the blood of the Cyprian, from the kisses of Love, from gems and the flames and the red glow of the sun, tomorrow the bride will not be ashamed to open her crimson, which lay hidden in her robe of flame, to the South Wind alone.

Shanzer contends that the passage responds to the notorious conclusion of Ausonius’ cento, the imminutio or deflowering of the bride: in that passage Ausonius recombines lines from Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid to describe in pornographic detail how the poem’s lustful groom takes his bride’s virginity on their wedding night (Cent. nupt. 101–31). Shanzer bases her argument on close echoes of the cento in Peruigilium Veneris 25. Those echoes, she proposes, show the poet of the Peruigilium Veneris imitating two consecutive lines in Ausonius and a third line that appears a little later (Cent. nupt. 105–6, 111):Footnote 5

ramum, qui ueste latebat, (Aen. 6.406)
sanguineis ebuli bacis minioque rubentem (Ecl. 10.27)

[He whipped out] his rod, which was lying hidden by his robe, crimson with blood-red elderberries and cinnabar.

ignea rima micans (Aen. 8.392)
The trembling fiery crack.

Despite the clear textual resemblances between the poems, critics have by and large resisted Shanzer’s argument: to them, the intertextual echoes are not enough to prove that the author of the Peruigilium Veneris depended on Ausonius, and they assume instead that the poets reused Virgil independently of each other.Footnote 6 I want to push back against those critics by finding a parallel between the Peruigilium Veneris and the Cento nuptialis that Shanzer and those who oppose her have all missed. This is to strengthen Shanzer’s position by taking it a step further: the additional evidence I provide makes it more difficult to view the resemblances to the Cento nuptialis in the Peruigilium Veneris as accidental, and more difficult not to interpret them instead as products of a deliberate turn to Ausonius.

The unidentified parallel with Ausonius’ cento lies in the phrase non pudebit soluere in Peruigilium Veneris 26. This varies the sexually charged language which was used earlier in the same section of the poem: pudebit modifies pudorem in line 19 (pudorem florulentae prodiderunt purpurae, ‘the purple blossoms have unveiled their blush’), while soluere modifies soluit in line 21 ([umor] uirgineas papillas soluit, ‘the dew releases the virgin buds’). But I propose that non pudebit soluere also adapts soluitque pudorem (Aen. 4.55 ‘and he [the groom] loosened her [the bride’s] modesty’) in line 100 of the Cento nuptialis. Not only do the phrases resemble each other in language, but they also appear at comparable points in their poems: non pudebit soluere closes the section in the Peruigilium Veneris on the blooming roses, while soluitque pudorem closes the section in the cento on the bride and groom’s ingressus, or entry, into the bedchamber (80–100), just before the imminutio.Footnote 7 This means that Cent. nupt. 100 deals with a virgin who, like the roses in the Peruigilium Veneris, will not be a virgin for long: the rose will ‘reveal her crimson’ with the morning light, while the bride—her pudor, modesty, loosened or undone by the aroused and sexually aggressive groomFootnote 8 ––will quickly lose her virginity to her new husband in Cent. nupt. 101–31.

The similarities in the poems’ language, context and content are close enough to support an argument for the imitation of Ausonius’ cento in the Peruigilium Veneris––for Occam’s Razor compels us to suppose that Ausonius was the source for the Peruigilium Veneris rather than the other way around, since he is far more likely to have worked directly from Virgil than to have rearranged Virgilian verses to imitate Peruigilium Veneris 25–6.Footnote 9 What is more, the Ausonian echo in Peruigilium Veneris 26 gains cogency through its combination with the echoes that Shanzer identifies in Peruigilium Veneris 25, and vice versa: the parallels are less plausible as a set of coincidences across two lines than as a burst of debts to a coherent group of verses, from early in Ausonius’ imminutio and from a line introducing that scene.Footnote 10 Those debts, I suggest, show the poet of the Peruigilium Veneris creating sublimated eroticism out of the blunt eroticism of his source text. The approach is to produce a very brief quasi-cento from a cento, and to turn language that Ausonius had made pornographic into decorous sexual imagery.Footnote 11 The obscene is transformed into the elegantly metaphorical and pictorial, and the ravished bride into a pretty flower.

It is tempting to think that the poet of the Peruigilium Veneris anticipated or hoped for a segment of readers who would recognize the Ausonian counterstrokes in lines 25–6. Perhaps he sought to entertain them with the contrast between his seemly sexual content and Ausonius’ seamy pornography; or perhaps he aimed polemically to ‘correct’ Ausonius, by sexualizing Virgil in a cleaner way. Yet, whatever his intentions, the evidence offered in this note brings his reliance on the Cento nuptialis, and thus his post-Ausonian date, into clearer focus.

References

1 On the date of the cento, see S. McGill, Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity (New York, 2005), 92–3, who argues that the occasion described in the poem is the wedding of Gratian and Constantia in 374.

2 For attributions to Florus, see e.g. E.K. Rand, ‘Sur le Peruigilium Veneris’, REL 12 (1934), 83–95 and the discussions in L. Catlow (ed.), Peruigilium Veneris: Edited with a Translation and Commentary (Brussels, 1980), 21–2 and W.M. Barton (ed.), The Peruigilium Veneris: A New Critical Text, Translation and Commentary (London, 2018), 13. Meanwhile, Alan Cameron, Studies in Late Roman Literature and History (Bari, 2016), 7–30 (a revised version of ‘The Peruigilium Veneris’, in La poesia tardoantica: tra retorica, teologia, e politica. Atti del V Corso della Scuola Superiore di archeologia e civiltà medievali [Messina, 1984], 209–34) argues that Tiberianus composed the poem in the early fourth century. H. MacL. Currie, ‘Peruigilium Veneris’, ANRW II.34.1 (Berlin and New York, 1993), 207–24, at 214 also suggests Tiberianus as the author, while Barton (this note), 21 proposes either Tiberianus or someone ‘who belonged to a similar time period and intellectual milieu’. Catlow (this note), 24–5, by contrast, contends that a woman wrote the poem sometime after 350 c.e.; this echoes the position of P. Boyancé, ‘Encore le Peruigilium Veneris’, REL 28 (1950), 212–35. Most recently, A. Kucz, Kobiety i milczenie w Pervigilium Veneris (Katowice, 2024), 27–31 and 40–3 revives earlier critics’ arguments that the third-century Nemesianus is the author. For a good summary discussion of criticism on the authorship and date of the Peruigilium Veneris, see A. Cucchiarelli (ed.), La veglia di Venere: Peruigilium Veneris. Introduzione, traduzione, e note (Milan, 2003), 19–27.

3 While I use ‘him’, I do not dismiss the possibility that the Peruigilium Veneris could have been written by a woman (even though the arguments for that attribution [see the previous note] rely significantly on gender stereotypes).

4 D. Shanzer, ‘Once again Tiberianus and the Peruigilium Veneris’, RFIC 119 (1990), 306–18, at 307–8. For the text of the Peruigilium Veneris, I use the edition of D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Anthologia Latina I.1 (Stuttgart, 1982), 139–44 (Anth. Lat. 191 SB).

5 I use the text of R.P.H. Green, Ausonii opera (Oxford, 1999), 145–54.

6 Barton (n. 2), 19–20, Cameron (n. 2), 29–30 (especially scathing), Cuchiarelli (n. 2), 109, G.B. Perini, ‘Per la datazione del Peruigilium Veneris’, in Storia letteratura e arte a Roma nel secondo secolo dopo Cristo (Florence, 1995), 142 and C. Formicola (ed.), Peruigilium Veneris: Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione, commento e lexicon (Naples, 1998), 52–4. By contrast, E. Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford, 1993), 429 accepts Shanzer’s reading.

7 The ingressus ending at line 100 and the imminutio beginning at line 101, however, are separated by a parecbasis, a short prose digression in which Ausonius (ironically) defends himself for adapting Virgil to pornographic ends.

8 soluere in Cent. nupt. 100 has the same connotation as it does in the Peruigilium Veneris, of the ‘untying’ of a girl’s virginity, ‘a highly effective metonymy evoking the naked and blushing surrender of the young bride’ (Catlow [n. 2], 72, who compares Catull. 61.52–3 tibi uirgines | zonula soluunt sinus).

9 Similarly, Shanzer (n. 4), 308.

10 In connecting non pudebit soluere in Peruigilium Veneris 26 with the object ruborem in Peruigilium Veneris 25, moreover, the poet of the Peruigilium Veneris may adapt a line in Ausonius’ parecbasis, where he claims that he is blushing, erubescamus (6), because he is making Virgil immodest, impudentem (7), by using his poetry to describe wedding-night sex. In that case, the poet would rely not only on Ausonius’ ingressus and imminutio but also on the bridge passage linking them; and ruborem and pudebit would be examples of double imitation, since they would each respond to two different lines in Ausonius. Yet the primary, if not exclusive, model for non pudebit soluere is clearly soluitque pudorem in Cent. nupt. 100. noto in Peruigilium Veneris 26, moreover, echoes notus (ludus), ‘well-known fun/festivity’, describing Fescennine verses, in Ausonius’ parecbasis (4). One could propose imitation and the creation of a kind of intertextual zeugma, notus ‘well-known’ vs Notus ‘South Wind’. But this would be to push things too far, not least because the reading unico Noto marita is very uncertain.

11 It bears noting that Venus appears in Cent. nupt. 102 (et mentem Venus dedit = Verg. G. 3.267). Just maybe this too led the Peruigilium poet to think of the cento passage.