Holy Fathers, Poetic Sons: The Vision of Dorotheus and Christian Epic Filiation

The Vision of Dorotheus (P.Bodmer 29) is a remarkable and underexplored text which offers a fascinating glimpse at an early, experimental style of Christian epic poetry in the fourth-century Greek world. Found near Dishna, Egypt, in 1952 on a codex containing several other poems and hymns composed in a rhetorical style, it is written in the voice of a Christian who names himself Dorotheus, “the son of Quintus the poet,” and recounts his visionary, violent experience as a doorkeeper in God’s heavenly palace. Scholarship on the poem to date has largely focused on issues of dating and historical context. In this article, I use the notion of a relationship between Dorotheus and Quintus Smyrnaeus, author of the third-century epic the Posthomerica, as a prism for a literary analysis of the poem and a means to perceive and appreciate the radical novelty of its poetics.