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The Miniature Epic in Vandal Africa
by David Bright

History has many byways, and one of the least travelled started when the Asdingi and the Salingi began their wanderings. In Spain the Salingi received a good whuppin' from the Visigoths, while the remaining 80,000 Asdingi were led by the incredibly talented and heroic Gaeseric across the Straits of Gibraltar. Once in North Africa, they headed East, through regions no one has ever heard of, and occupied Carthage, 500 years after it had been delenda by the Romans.

Then, probably around '49 the poet Dracontius was born. He became a lawyer, but then foolishly offended the ruling Gunthamund, presumably in verse. Although the nature of the criticism is no longer known, it was not severe enough to execute him, and he was thrown in prison in '86, where he remained until '94, composing poetry all the while.

Of course, I speak of the years 449, 486, and 494, right at the oft-neglected beginning of the medieval era.

Apart from his poetry, the dates of his imprisonment are the only known biographical details of Dracontius' life, aside from what can be inferred from his poetry. What is clear is that he was the best poet of his milieu, a milieu made all the more intriguing in light of the fact that the Asdingi, as Vandals, were illiterate.

Consequently, any literature was not in asdingi but in latin, which as rulers they appeared to tolerate. Evidently it was okay write in latin, but you still had to be careful what you said.

At any rate, Dracontius' claim to fame is his contribution to the 'miniature' epic, or epyllion, a type of poem all poets in that milieu wrote or attempted to write as some kind of coming-of-age task to prove their ability as poets. The epyllion however was not widespread enough to become a genre, and thus is characterized as a non-genre, believe it or not.

If there's one thing my university education lacked, surely it is the study of non-genre poetry. Had my learning taken a different path, perhaps today I could have counted myself among the cognoscenti.

The rest of the volume is a tour de force of fifth-century comparative literature, in which David Bright does not trouble to translate Dracontius' deathless 300-line epyllion or indeed any of the other poems, from the latin (with some untranslated greek references) into English, which I must sadly say reduces considerably the number of potential readers of this otherwise quite catchy monograph.