Cento

Cento, a name applied to literary trivialities in the form of poems manufactured by putting together distinct verses or passages of one author, or of several authors, so as to make a new meaning. After the decay of genuine poetry among the Greeks, this worthless verse-manufacture came into vogue, as is proved by the Homero-centones (ed. by Teucher, Leip. 1793), a patchwork of lines taken from Homer and forming a consecutive history of the fate and redemption of man. It was much more common, however, among the Romans in the later times of the Empire, when Virgil was frequently abused in this fashion, as in the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, and especially in the Cento Vergilianus, constructed in the 4th century by Proba Falconia, wife of the Proconsul Adelfins, and giving, in Virgil's-misplaced words, an epitome of sacred history. The cento was a favourite recreation in the middle ages. In the 12th century a monk at Tegernsee, named Metellus, contrived to make a cento of spiritual hymns out of Horace and Virgil. See Delepiere, Tableau de la Littérature du Centon (1875).