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
This is the largest Latin biblical epic of late antiquity, a hexameter paraphrase running from Genesis to Judges, and it has never been translated as a whole. White's Early Christian Latin Poets prints only 'Genesis: 25-133' under 'Cyprian the Poet', roughly a hundred lines out of a poem that runs from Genesis to Judges (https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/alma990085386220203941). HOLLIS lists the Latin editions (CSEL 23, the 1881 Peiper text with the spurious De Sodoma and De Iona, Brepols 2025) and a body of German and English scholarship - Hedwig Schmalzgruber's Studien zum Bibelepos des sogenannten Cyprianus Gallus (2017) and the De Gruyter essay collection On Pseudo-Cyprian's Heptateuchos (2023) - but no translation into any modern language (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Cyprianus%20Gallus%20Heptateuchos&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0
The Heptateuchos is the Latin West's only full versification of the Pentateuch plus Joshua and Judges, and the principal witness to how fourth- and fifth-century poets handled legal and genealogical material that resisted epic form. English readers have one Genesis passage, which means the Exodus and the law-code books - the hardest and most revealing parts - are effectively unreadable.
Schmalzgruber, Hedwig. "Studien zum Bibelepos des sogenannten Cyprianus Gallus : mit einem Kommentar zu gen. 1-362." Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag, [2017]. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/990149058110203941
Gallus, Ps.-Cyprianus. "On Pseudo-Cyprian’s Heptateuchos : Biblical Rewriting between 'narratio probabilis' and Allusive Intertextuality." Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2023]. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99157958268203941
CTLO - Centre 'Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium' · 2025 · lat
CTLO - Centre 'Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium'. "Carmen de Sodoma." Turnhout Brepols Publishers NV 2025. https://hollis.harvard.edu/permalink/f/1s5nto6/99158909370403941