ABSTRACT
The medieval popularity of Arator's History of the Apostles, with its glorifying emphasis upon St. Peter and Rome, is the reason that have subject for honor of Tom Noble. The early sixth-century Ostrogothic revival of the Roman legacy was then being destroyed by the wars with the armies of the emperor Justinian in Constantinople, temporarily recovering wide stretches of the western Roman Empire. Arator's poem follows the precedent of earlier biblical epics in synthesizing his material and presenting it in an aesthetic guise to persuade his listeners. The traditional poetic that is, imagisticmode of Arator's presentation is likely to have stimulated an affective receptivity that would open the listeners' hearts. Because of this, the spiritually expanded visible events suggested by the poem could have been experienced as a brief foretaste of the "mysteries" traditionally "embodied" and enacted in the Church's liturgy.
