CENTO (Gr. idvrpwv,

See also:

• LAT

Lat. cento, patchwork)  , a composition made up by collecting passages from various works . The Byzantine Greeks manufactured several out of the poems of Homer, among which may be mentioned the life of Christ by the famous empress Eudoxia, and a version of the Biblical history of Eden and the Fall . The Romans of the later empire and the monks of the middle ages were fond of constructing poems out of the verse of Virgil . Such were the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, the sketch of Biblical history which was compiled in the 4th century by Proba Falconia, wife of a Roman proconsul, and the hymns in honour of St Quirinus taken from Virgil' and Horace by Metellus, a monk of Tegernsee, in the latter half of the 12th century . Specimens may be found in the work of Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1504; Frankfort, 1541, I544) . In 1535 Laelius Capitulus produced from Virgil an attack upon the dissolute lives of the monks; in 1536 there appeared at Venice a Petrarca Spirituale; and in 1634 Alexander Ross (a Scotsman, and one of the chaplains of Charles I.) published a Virgilius Evangelizans, seu Historia Domini nostri Jesu Christi Virgilianis verbis et versibus descripta .