Consentius

Consentius

The name of a fifth-century Gallo-Roman family, three of whose representatives are known in history:

(1) CONSENTIUS OF NARBONNE, clarissimus, "who combined the honour of a prefecture with philosophy", was a correspondent of Sidonius Apollinaris, who dedicated to him a poem on Narbonne. He used all metres — iambic, elegiac, hendecasyllabic, and the hexameter — and wrote in Greek as well as in Latin. His poems are redolent of flowers and thyme (Sidonius, Carm., xxiii, 20, and 234-240; Epist., III, 6; VIII, 4; IX, 15). However, these praises must not he taken too literally, as Sidonius counted among his friends thirty men who were similarly gifted. The authors of the "Histoire littéraire de la France" make a distinction between the Consentius to whom the poem was dedicated and Consentius the epistolary author, maintaining the former to have been the father of the latter.

(2) CONSENTIUS, father of the former, a native of Narbonne and a poet, a contemporary of Valentinian, and son-in-law of Flavius Valens Jovinus, consul in 367.

(3) CONSENTIUS, a Gallic grammarian, was the author of two treatises, which are perhaps the fragments of a complete grammar: one on the noun and the verb, much used during the Carlovingian period, and the other on barbarisms and metaplasm. An edition of these treatises has been published by Keil in "Grammatici Latini" (Leipzig), vol. V, p. 336.

Histoire littéraire de la France (Paris. 1735), II, 249-50, 431- 33, 653-56; TEUFFEL, Geschichte der römischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1890); KEIL, Grammatici Latini (1885), V. 338, 404.

PAUL LEJAY.