Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/307

 IX] TRANSITION TO BiEDLEVAL POETRY 289 Gandesheim, De gestis Oddonis limperatoriSj is a sort of family history.^ Of the Latin poems of the early Middle Ages, the poem of Abbo (cir. 896), De bellis Parisidcce urbis,^ rude as it is, approaches nearest to an epic. The subject of its three books of hexameters is the attack of the Normans upon Paris, a topic having national importance. As the poem treats of a central event, so it also has a proper hero, Odo, and the bar- barous Latin narrative is spirited. Ekkehard's TFoZ- tharius was an equally spirited and far more polished production. But the successful escape and 'adventures of Waltharius and Hildegarde hardly make a subject of epic breadth, and lack the epic element of national importance which is possessed by the subject of Abbo's poem. As the successors of antique didactic, philosophic, and scientific poets — classical Greek, Alexandrian, and Roman* — Prudentius and others used both the hexameter and the elegiac metre in polemic and religiously didactic poetry. The plaintive or com- memorative elegiac poems, which make the proper Christian elegy, had also their pagan predecessors.* 1 This poem of Hrotsvith is printed in Mon. Oerm. Hist. Scrip- tores, IV, p. 317, etc. 2 Printed in Mon. Oerm. Hist. Scriptores, II, 776-803, and in Poet. Lat. Aev. Car., TV, 72-121. See also Ebert, op. cit., Ill, 120-138. Parmenldes, Empedocles ; the Alexandrians, Aratos {Phaenomena, translated by Avienus last part of fourth century a.d.) and Era- tosthenes; the Romans, Lacilios, Lucretius, Virgil {Oeorgics), Ovid (Fasti). < One mi^ht look as far back as to the ancient elegiac poets, Solon, Theognia, etc. ; then Antimachus of Colophon (see Cooat,
 * The ancient classic line of poets wonld be Hesiod. Xenophanes,