Prudentius

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was born in 348 in Roman Spain, probably at Calahorra or Saragossa. He tells his own story in a short preface written when he was fifty-seven, and it is one of the few first-person career summaries to survive from the ancient world.

He describes it with self-disgust. School, where he wept under the rod and learned to lie. Then the law courts, where he pleaded cases 'with more ferocity than honesty.' Then two provincial governorships, then a senior post at the imperial court under Theodosius the Great, as high as a Spaniard of his class could reasonably climb. And then, he says, old age reminded him how much of it had been wasted, and he asked what he had to show God.

So he resigned and wrote poetry for the rest of his life. He seems to have gone to Rome around 401 or 403 and died sometime after 405; nothing certain is recorded of the end.

The body of work he produced in those few years is the foundation of Christian poetry in Latin.

The Cathemerinon is a book of hymns for the hours of the day and the seasons of the church, for cockcrow, for the lighting of the lamps, before meals, at a funeral, for Christmas and Epiphany. Pieces of them are still sung; the Christmas hymn 'Of the Father's love begotten' is a translation of one, and 'Earth has many a noble city' of another.

The Peristephanon is fourteen long poems on the martyrs, Lawrence roasted on the gridiron at Rome, Vincent, Eulalia the girl of Merida, Agnes, Cassian killed by his own pupils with their writing styluses, Hippolytus torn apart by horses. Prudentius had walked the shrines and read the inscriptions, and the poems record the cult of the martyrs in Spain and Italy about the year 400 in unmatched detail.

The Psychomachia, the Battle for the Soul, is the strangest and most influential. It stages the Christian moral life as a pitched battle between personified virtues and vices: Faith against Idolatry, Chastity against Lust, Patience against Wrath, Pride riding to a fall in a pit her own troops dug. It invented sustained allegory of that kind in Western literature, was illustrated in manuscripts for centuries, and stands behind everything from medieval cathedral sculpture to The Pilgrim's Progress.

He also wrote two books against the pagan senator Symmachus, who had petitioned for the restoration of the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate house; a work on the Trinity; and a set of verse captions for scenes from the Bible, apparently for church walls.

Richard Bentley, the great classical scholar, called him the Horace and Virgil of the Christians. He remains the only Christian Latin poet of the ancient world regularly read as literature.

Sources: Prudentius, Cathemerinon, Peristephanon, Psychomachia, and the Praefatio (Loeb Classical Library, translated by H. J. Thomson); Gennadius, De viris illustribus; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.