Sometime around the end of the first quarter of the fourth century C.E., a former resident of the imperial city of Rome then living in exile in Achaea began a written campaign for his recall to the capitol. The campaign coincided with the Vicennalia, or twentieth anniverary, of the reign of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, an event celebrated in July 325 in Nicomedia and again in the summer of 326 at Rome itself. The writing campaign took advantage of this event and consisted of a series of panegyric poems addressed to Constantine in commemoration of both the Vicennalia and Constantine’s earlier defeat of Licinius in 324. The series, included in what is now known collectively as the Carmina or Carmina Figurata, is of an unusual and innovative sort: the poems contain supplementary text ‘hidden’ within the main body of the individual poems and intended to be ‘discovered’ by the reader. These versus intexti poems were apparently intended to dazzle Constantine with their technical virtuosity and thereby inspire the hoped–for recall of their creator, Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius. [1] The campaign was ultimately successful, and the intriguing larger body of work created by Optatianus remains captivating even today, both for its simple visual appeal and for its display of remarkable technical skill.



Despite the dazzling technical virtuosity and captivating visual appeal of the poems, they remain at the fringes of scholarly interest. One philologist describes their purely literary content as lacking elegance and refinement, even as banal. [2] Their value as sources of historical data is also limited. These two factors may partially explain why only a handful of modern scholars have given attention to the works and their creator. [3] Yet it must be remembered that the poems were almost certainly not composed as works of elegant literature, but rather as displays of purely technical skill designed to impress through visual impact, not verbal eloquence. Optatianus’ masterful display of word ordering in the later Carmina has had significant influence on an entire genre of ‘literary’ output, especially its modern direct descendant, the acrostic puzzle.



Historians have periodically debated a number of aspects of the poems, especially the dates at which the majority were written. All attempts at dating the poems have focused exclusively on the poems’ intratextual data. None have yet considered the overall design of the individual poems relative to each other and the resultant evidence of a logically evolving creative process and ever-increasing mastery of skill. This creative process, evolving as it does over time, provides a new method for sequential dating of the poems and is consistent with dating that utilizes intratextual references. The apparent evolving mastery in design skill also suggests, despite Timothy Barnes’ argument to the contrary, that not all of the poems were intended for presentation to Constantine. [4] Only a small subset of the poems displays the epitome of complexity, symmetry, and imagery necessary for truly ‘dazzling’ an imperial recipient.



This paper will examine a representative selection of the more than twenty poems for evidence of the evolution of Optatianus’ creative process and perfection of his technical skill. Implicit in the argument for a creative process lies a proposal that a sequential chronology for the poems can be established when evidence of relative complexity is considered. An analysis that utilizes textual evidence and the medieval manuscript tradition and that also incorporates evidence of the authorial creative process provides a more complete understanding of the poems as an entire body of work.



The Carmina of Optatianus survive only in fragmentary form spread through over a dozen separate manuscripts, all transcribed between the latter part of the eighth century and the middle of the sixteenth century. [5] Importantly, none of these manuscripts incorporates all of the poems in a single collection. According to Polara’s tabulation, eleven of the manuscripts have only seven of a known thirty–one poems in common (Poems II, III , and V-IX). [6] The remaining twenty-four poems appear with varying but lesser frequency in the many manuscripts. The late–thirteenth century Codex Parisinus 7806 incorporates the largest total number of poems: twenty-five plus two letters of dubious authenticity. The sixteenth–century Codex Monacensis Latinus 706a contains the fewest, at just fourteen poems. Thus there is no manuscript tradition to suggest with any certainty that all of the poems were ever intended by their author to be considered as a single entity. [7] All we can say with certainty is that Optatianus created an unknown total number of poems over an unknown span of time, and that some lesser portion of those poems were composed specifically for presentation to Constantine. Rather than beginning to write figured poetry specifically to win recall from exile, this paper argues that Optatianus was already toying with the form at the time of his exile. Only later, after he had perfected his skill in the form, did he write complex poems for the emperor in a specific effort to win recall. The Carmina can thus be divided into at least two separate subsets. An early subset was created for personal enjoyment and represents the evolution of the creative process, much like the preliminary drafts of a modern scholarly article. A later subset, representing the best that Optatianus had to offer, was intended for imperial presentation, in the same way that a modern historian presents only his best and most refined work for publication.



Optatianus produced three distinct types of poetry, two of which are imitations of earlier forms, and one type that was an original creation. Taken as a body of work, the Carmina are part of an evolving tradition of poetry known as technopaignion. [8] This type of poetry is meant to display the skill of the writer for arranging words in a complex way so as to create either a visual pattern with the verses themselves, known as pattern poetry, or to conceal a text within the poem for the reader to ‘puzzle out,’ or versus intexti. A limited number of pattern poems pre–date Optatianus’ work, most originating in Greece. Simmias and Theocritus are the best known creators of Greek pattern poetry. Optatianus’ pattern poems are probably a continuation of that Greek tradition and represent the genesis of his creative process. Similarly, Optatianus also wrote one known proteus poem, the words of which can be re–arranged to create new verses while maintaining the established poetic meter. There are no known examples of versus intexti prior to Optatianus, so that he is thus credited with having invented that form. He did so with amazing virtuosity. The intexti vary from simple acrostics to complex patterns that produce a graphic design within the text of the poem, a kind of self–contained illustration. As further evidence of his remarkable skill, a number of the poems also contain proteus poems, while others have intexti that can be transliterated from Latin to Greek. A minority of the poems goes so far as to incorporate all of these elements into one carmen, a masterful achievement of skill and inventiveness.



The simplest of the Carmina are the pattern poems, certainly created in imitation of the earlier Greek form. Optatianus may well have been exposed to Greek pattern poetry either in his putative birthplace Africa or during his exile in Achaea. Earlier Greek examples include the poems of Simmias of Rhodes, who produced a pattern poem in the shape of wings and another in the shape of an ax, both around 325 B.C.E. Theocritus produced a panpipe-shaped poem, known as a syrinx or fistula, around 300 B.C.E. Dosiadas of Crete is credited with a poem known as ‘Jason’s Altar’ It is a pattern poem in the shape of a pagan altar that doubles as a riddle poem, explicitly inviting a solution from the reader. [9] Optatianus’ Poem XXVI is undoubtedly a direct imitation of Dosiada’s ‘Jason’s Altar.’ [10]