Cyprianus Gallus or Cyprian the Gaul (fl. c. 397–430) is the conventional name of the poet who wrote a

Late Latin Late Latin is the scholarly name for the form of Literary Latin of late antiquity.Roberts (1996), p. 537. English dictionary definitions of Late Latin date this period from the 3rd to 6th centuries CE, and continuing into the 7th century in ...

epic Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film defined by the spectacular presentation of human drama on a grandiose scale Epic(s) ...

versification of the historical books of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

based on the Old Latin translation, although only his version of the Heptateuch (''Heptateuchos'') has survived to the present day. He has sometimes been credited with the authorship of two other poems, ''Carmen de Sodoma'' and ''Carmen de Iona'', but neither fits his style and language. These have also been attributed to Cyprian of Carthage and

Tertullian Tertullian (; ; 155 – 220 AD) was a prolific Early Christianity, early Christian author from Roman Carthage, Carthage in the Africa (Roman province), Roman province of Africa. He was the first Christian author to produce an extensive co ...

. The name "Cyprianus Gallus" was coined by based on the misattribution of the ''Heptateuchos'' to Cyprian of Carthage and the actual author's presumed origin in

Gaul Gaul () was a region of Western Europe first clearly described by the Roman people, Romans, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Northern Italy. It covered an area of . Ac ...

. The author has also been called " Pseudo-Cyprian".Michele Cutino and Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl, "Introduction", in ''On Pseudo-Cyprian's Heptateuchos: Biblical Rewriting between 'narratio probabilis' and Allusive Intertextuality'' (De Gruyter, 2023), pp. v–vi.

Notes

Sources

*Kriel, D. M. (1991). "''Sodoma'' in fifth century Biblical Epic," ''Acta classica'', 34, 7–20. *Longpré, André (1972). "Traitement de l'Elision chez le Poete Cyprianus Gallus," ''Phoenix'', 26(1), 63–77. {{Authority control 5th-century writers in Latin 5th-century Roman poets 5th-century Gallo-Roman people