ABSTRACT
The Christian letter-writer, anonymous, makes a pretense at modesty, but she is enjoying herself just as much as the pagan—if Eucheria is a pagan. She cultivates the prodigal image with as lavish a hand as the epigrammatist Eucheria. Eucheria was married to the grammarian Dynamius of Marseilles, a Frankish aristocrat. Eucheria’s epigram against a lowborn suitor bears the traits for which her husband’s literary circle was known: refinement, complexity, and the ornate use of metaphor. A match with the oafish suitor, says the poem, would be comparable to a series of grotesque incongruities in both art and nature, which Eucheria develops in an outrageous array of impossibilia, conditions that violate the natural order. The monstrous couplings overturn for themselves the decrees of the dark fates—and let a churlish farmhand hanker for Eucheria!
