Versus Paschales Prosodic
Versus Paschales Prosodic Late Antiquity Ausonius, Decimus Magnus Latin- The holy solemnities of saving Christ return, and the devout mystics celebrate the pious fasts. But we, holding an eternal worship in our heart, continue the force of undefiled honours: the care is yearly for the rites, the reverence in us continual. Great Father of things, whom the earth and the sea and the air, and Tartarus, and the milky tract of the painted sky obey; whom the populace, guilty of crimes, trembles at, and whom in turn the kindly throng of pious souls celebrates with vows: you grant, by the gift of eternal life, this course of a brief age and the swift end of the falling soul. You impart the gentle admonitions of the law and the holy prophets to the human race, and you preserve their descendants, pitying deceived Adam, whom Eve, caught by poisons, entangled as her companion in her coaxing errors. You, kindly Father, grant to the lands your Word, your Son and God, whole, like and equal to you, true from the true, living from the living origin. He, taught by your admonitions, added this one thing: that the Spirit, who swam over the waters of the deep, should quicken the sluggish limbs with the immortal washing — a threefold faith with one author, a sure hope of salvation. Grant pardon, and bestow the gifts of the hoped-for life, on him who embraces this number with its joined powers. Such a pattern too is beheld on earthly shores: Augustus the father, the begetter of twin Augusti, who, embracing both his brother and his son with pious power, shares his realm yet does not divide its unity — alone holding all things, and having lavished all things. These, then, strong with a threefold piety, the gentle rulers of the earth and ministers of heaven, do you, O Christ, who can be appeased, plead for us before the eternal Father.