The Poet and the Light: Modulation and Transposition of a Prudentian Ekphrasis in Two Poems by Sidonius Apollinaris

The present study aims at investigating phenomenons of modulation and transposition within an intertextual dialogue between two Christian Latin poets of Late antiquity, Prudentius and Sidonius Apollinaris. In the c. 11 (an epithalamium written for the wedding of Ruricius and Iberia, illustrious members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy), Sidonius describes a sanctuary that is built by Vulcan as a token of love for Venus and that, for the richness and variety of materials, is reminiscent of the temple erected in honour of Sapientia after the triumph of the Virtues over the Vices in Prud. psych. 823-87: the Gallic poet keeps the hexametrical facies of the model, but reshapes the technique of evocation of the plays of light and colour in the high-quality materials of the building, opting for a more refined selectio and dispositio verborum; moreover, the allegorical-didactic component of the epic model is obliterated in favor of echoes from the tradition of a minor genre like the epithalamium. The Prudentian ekphrasis is also the basis of Sid. ep. 2.10.4, an epigram inserted in a letter to the young rhetorician Esperius and celebrating a basilica erected in Lugdunum by the bishop Patient: this time Sidonius retrieves the allegorical interpretation of the sunlight hitting the building, but replaces the hexameter with the phalaecean hendecasyllable. Thanks to a skillful orchestration of the relationship between words and meter, Sidonius engages in a challenge already faced in a long section of c. 23 (where he narrated in phalaeceans a typically epic scene as a chariot race) and shows how the phalaecean, basically associated with nugatory frivolity, can deal noble themes and be as evocative as the hexameter used not only by Prudentius, but also by two other poets, Constantius and Secundinus, who had written on the same basilica.