THE UMAYYAD REGIME 213had important consequences for the Christian community in Cordoba.
Being unable to leave the peninsula as a result of the disturbed con-
ditions then prevailing across the Pyrenees and around Barcelona, he
was persuaded to remain at Pam pion a in the hope that safe passage
across the passes might eventually become possible. Under the guid-
ance of Bishop Wiliesind of Pamplona, Eulogius whiled away some of
the time in visiting monasteries in that region, and in one of them he
discovered a store of texts that were not available at that time in the
south, and which, when he decided to abandon his plan and to re-
turn to Cordoba, he took back with him. These manuscripts included
Augustine's City of God, Virgil's Aeneid, the Satires of Horace and
various other poetic works by Juvenal, Aldhelm, Optatianus Porphyrius
and Avienus. On the basis of these Eulogius began to instruct his
friends in Cordoba in the rules of Latin metre, thus initiating a small
poetic revival, now best represented in a small collection of verses by
Alvar, which in form and content very much followed the lines of
similar works composed in the Visigothic period by Eugenius of Toledo
and others.^72 These and the prose writings generated by the con-
troversy over the martyr movement mark the first flourishing of Latin
literature in the south of the peninsula since the end of the Visigothic
kingdom.
The works of Eulogius and his friends were often intended to be
deliberately evocative of a lost past, that of the departed realm of the
Goths, that had been 'foremost in the blessed practice of the Chris-
tian faith, flourishing in the worthiness of most venerable bishops
and radiant in the most beautiful building of churches' .73 They looked
to the literary heritage of that idealised past to illuminate their own
writings and to provide the materials for a renaissance of Spanish-
Christian Latin culture in a society in which they felt beleaguered.
Their Latin style was as a result highly mannered, and they drew
an almost absurdly archaic vocabulary from the writings of Isidore,
notably the Etymologiae, that allowed them for instance to refer to
the regnal years of the amirs as 'consulships' and to call young men
'ephebes'.
The numbers of those who took the road to voluntary martyrdom
were relatively small. Eulogius chronicles the deaths of thirteen of
them in the year 851, in which the movement effectively came into
being. About the same number followed suit in the next year and
between June of 853 and July 856 some seventeen martyrdoms are
recorded. Apart from two girls called Alodia and Nunila, who met