ABSTRACT
When Juvencus' Jesus describes to Nathaniel the greater miracles that are to come, the poet once more brings together John and Virgil, but in a new way. Written circa 330 CE, the Evangeliorum libri quattuor (ELQ), retells the story of Jesus in the Gospels over the course of four books and about 3200 hexameter lines. It is natural to assume that Juvencus wanted the number of books to correspond to the number of Gospels. As Jerome indicates, Juvencus was an aristocrat and a committed Christian, as well as an author of Christian hexameters beyond the ELQ. Bookending Juvencus' epilogue is a 27-line preface to the ELQ. Seeing that Juvencus treats epic as a genre of praise, it stands to reason that he understood his poem to be itself encomiastic. Juvencus here presents a particular vision of poetic success, in which truth and falsehood are the measures of achievement.
