"The Night is Long Without a Lover" by Anonymous Multiple Authors

Abstract

The Pervigilium Veneris, often translated as “The Eve of St. Venus” and literally rendered as “The All-night Vigil of Venus,” is an oft-forgotten love song in Latin from either the second- or fourth-century CE. Speaking strictly after its manner, it appears to me to be a composite song, perhaps with multiple contributing authors, many participants then originally using the same refrain to link the pieces together in a method similar to Responsion. It may of course be from a single author, as it has traditionally been understood to be, and its form and repetition have widely known classical precedents (Theocritus, Idyll 3; Catullus 64.323-381, the so-called Song of the Fates; and Virgil, Eclogue 8).