Alethia
· Claudius Marius Victorius (Victorius of Marseille)
· c. 425-450
· bible
Latin · domain: latin-poetry-late-antique · researched 2026-11-14
partial / older only. An English translation exists but is partial or older than the critical edition. The gap is a modern, complete translation from the original. A rendering of a daughter version does not count here: it is recorded on the dossier of the text it actually translates.
Why this is in the register
The Alethia retells and comments on Genesis 1-19 in three books of hexameters, combining biblical epic with Lucretian didactic, and in English it exists only in extracts. White's Early Christian Latin Poets prints 'Alethia: 1.398-547, 2.13-34' as its only Victorius passage (https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/alma990085386220203941). HOLLIS shows the Latin editions (CSEL 16; the 1960 Brepols volume with Commodianus, Alethia cura et studio P. F. Hovingh), German scholarship (Kuhn-Treichel 2016, Homey 1972) and a complete German bilingual translation, Alethia = Wahrheit (2018) - but no complete English version (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Claudius%20Marius%20Victorius%20Alethia&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/alma99153685412903941).
The Alethia is the most philosophically ambitious of the Latin biblical epics - it uses Lucretius to argue for providence against pagan cosmology - and it breaks off in Book 3, which makes its structure a live scholarly problem. With two passages in English, its argument cannot be followed, and the German translation is the only complete modern-language access.
White, Carolinne. "Early Christian Latin poets." London ; New York : Routledge , 2000. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990085386220203941