EUDOCIA, UNA POETESSA DA ATENE AD ANTIOCHIA E A GERUSALEMME.

This paper deals with the main aspects of empress Eudocia's (400-460 CE) life and literary production, focusing especially on her formation and cultural program. After receiving a traditional classical education, probably related also to some pagan sympathies of her father, Eudocia became Christian and married the emperor Theodosius ii. For all her life, in Constantinople and later in Jerusalem, she had an engaged literary activity, producing epic panegyrics, verse paraphrase of the Optateuch, an hagiographic poem on Cyprian of Antioch, and she was involved in the project of the Homerocentones, a patchwork of Homeric lines rewriting the NT. Especially the poem on saint Cyprian, a verse paraphrase of a hagiographical dossier (known by Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Ethiopian versions), raises many interesting questions from the literary and religious point of view. Nevertheless it remains one of the most undervalued product of Late antique literature, despite some excellent recent studies. I argue that the S. Cyprian was an attempt to demystify secular wisdom and transforming in Christian sense the language of the epic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]