The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul

• Introduction
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 1-13
• View Citation
• Additional Information

Introduction

haec dum scribo vel eloquor
vinclis o utinam corporis emicem
liber quo tulerit lingua sono mobilis ultimo!   (Prudentius, Praefatio, 43–45)
While I write or speak of these things,
how I wish to break free from the chains of my body
to the place where my nimble tongue’s last sound carries me!

With these programmatic words the late antique poet Prudentius announces that his poetry will allow him to transcend his oppressed, earthly condition and achieve salvation. The passage perhaps would have reminded Prudentius’ readers of the poet Horace, who, nearly four centuries earlier, had made a similar boast that his poetry would be an enduring monument to his talent and thus would free him from the limits of mortality (Carm. 3.30). Prudentius refashions the Roman convention of the immortality of the poet. For Prudentius, immortality is achieved in the poetic expression of his Christian faith. And although in these programmatic lines he communicates his overwhelming desire for personal salvation, there is also a clear sense of his connection to the canon of Roman poets.¹ Like them, Prudentius indicates his self-awareness of his craft by calling attention to the practice of poetry through the word lingua, a metonymic designation for poetry itself. In the work of Prudentius, lingua stands for poetry (Cath. 3.94) and the correct faith (catholicam linguam, Apoth. 2), which must be disseminated through writing, speaking, and singing. In reworking the Roman convention of poetic immortality—and by propagating his poetic self-awareness—Prudentius fuses the aspirations and accomplishments of the Roman poetic tradition with an explicit wish for salvation defined by Christian faith.

Prudentius’ inventive and skillful fusion of Roman poetry and Christianity breaks new ground in two distinct but related ways. Poetry cannot only treat and promote a personal conversion along with its spiritual groundings, but can also articulate a vision of Roman Christian empire. This political function of poetry hearkens back to the achievement of Roman epic, especially Vergil’s Aeneid and its meditation on Rome’s imperial identity. In his collected works, Prudentius’ treatment of imperial Romanitas, as well as his Christian concern for his own and others’ salvation, inaugurates a new Christian literature. Prudentius’ poetry gives voice to a vision of Rome as a divine empire, whose national identity is determined by both past imperial successes and the assertion of a Christian political ideology. Simultaneously, Christian spiritual ideas of free will and individual salvation shape Prudentius’ representation of a Christian Rome. Prudentius’ broad notion of poetry engages with and redefines Romanitas and Christianitas both individually and collectively.

In the Roman empire of the fourth century, Constantine had sealed paganism’s doom and cemented Christianity as the dominant paradigm in political, social, and intellectual matters. Prudentius and other members of the Roman elite such as Augustine, Paulinus of Nola, and Ambrose experienced powerful conversions that led them to embrace Christianity completely. For Prudentius and other intellectuals, Christianity’s divine “truths” and Rome’s earthly, imperial success furnished subject matter for a new Christian literature. To write meant to express personal convictions about a spiritual life and create new genres in order to persuade other like-minded Romans to live up to orthodox Christian ideals and rules. Prudentius’ personal wish for his own life in the preface develops into a highly wrought strategy in his work as a whole, through which he seeks to persuade complacent readers to commit to Christ and Rome.

Prudentius promotes this Christian mission while reasserting Roman poetry’s past artistic and cultural authority. Strikingly, the poetry from his tongue will offer an ambitious literary manifesto in which, as I will argue, Roman poetry renews itself by integrating the new intellectual, theological and political realities of the post-Constantinian world. Not since the Epicurean Lucretius wrote in the middle of the first century BCE, had a Roman poet demonstrated the ultimate value of poetry as a source of knowledge and as a means to accomplish salvation. Furthermore, for Prudentius, poetry is just as much a political as religious vehicle. It expresses the imperial dimension of Roman Christian identity. Not since Vergil had there been a Roman poet so effective at establishing a master narrative for his people.

For centuries scholars have not hesitated to credit Prudentius with an important legacy, and this comes in the form of assigning the poet a grand status. For instance, in the eighteenth century the great Latinist Bentley called Prudentius “the Christian Vergil and Horace,” and thirty years ago Macklin Smith, whose monograph on Prudentius remains essential reading, pronounced Prudentius “the best Latin poet between the Augustan age and the twelfth century.”² Several book-length studies and a bevy of articles over the past two decades certainly have contributed to a better understanding and appreciation of Prudentius’ poems.³ Recently, in addition to traditionally historical and philological studies, scholars have produced poststructuralist readings of poems that illuminate issues of gender, narrative stance, and hermeneutics.⁴ Implicit in much of this scholarship is the desire for a more muscular, literary-historical profile for the poet.

Despite all this, Prudentius has never been given his due in literary history. From the Church History of the early fourth-century historian Eusebius to the recently published Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, he and his fellow poets have been excluded from serious discussions of the late antique intellectual milieu, and, as a result, poetry remains marginalized as an index of the period’s revolutionary contribution to the history of ideas.⁵ Prudentius remains an outlier because scholars have failed to include him and his contemporary Christian poets within the literary, political, and intellectual setting of fourth-century Rome. Studying Prudentius either from an exclusively doctrinal perspective or in isolation from the fourth century’s intellectual renaissance has done him a disservice. Even recent critical work on Prudentius’ poetry, much of which is valuable and interesting, has not concerned itself with the poet’s relationship and contribution to fourth-century intellectual history.⁶ Thus, I seek a broader, deeper, and more long-range view of the poet’s originality by considering his work as a successful artistic synthesis of literary, historical, philosophical, and theological ideas. Specifically, I claim that Prudentius’ use of his intellectual inheritance, as manifested in the Roman epic tradition, the Bible, Christian theology and pagan philosophy, constitutes a vigorous contribution to the fourth-century reformulation of Greco-Roman literary and intellectual tradition. This reformulation is best understood as an effort to produce a “grand narrative” or “meta-narrative” of Roman Christian identity in all its cultural, ideological, and intellectual expression.⁷

A grand or master narrative is “central to the representation of identity, in personal memory and self representation or in the collective identity of groups.”⁸ An essential function of Roman epic was to restate national identity through a master narrative of larger than life figures.⁹ The Aeneid, in Philip Hardie’s words, made a powerful “claim to totality,” fashioning a narrative that reached beyond cultural and literary categories into the realm of history itself.¹⁰ By recasting his intellectual inheritance as a historical, philosophical, theological, and literary synthesis that makes use of the pagan, Hebrew, and Christian traditions, Prudentius’ poetry, as a whole, achieves a master narrative. The resulting vision of Roman Christian identity not only accomplishes the goals of the epic master narrative—to shape historical memory and collective ideology—but also, by engaging with a wide range of intellectual and ethical ideas, reflects a renewed concept of self and its relation to the political community and the world.¹¹

The foundations for Prudentius’ literary accomplishment can be seen in the story of his life, which culminates in a radical conversion experienced by other prominent thinkers and writers of the day. He was born in 348 in Northern Spain¹² and, as befitted an aristocrat, attended the schools of rhetoric, which, he says, taught him the art of lying (Praef. 7–15).¹³ He went on to have a distinguished civil career, which took him all the way to the imperial court of Milan under the administration of a fellow Spaniard, Theodosius I (Praef. 16–20).¹⁴ He began writing poetry in his later years, after his civil career, which he viewed as part and parcel of a life of sin. Like other aristocratic contemporaries such as Paulinus of Nola, Marius Victorinus, and Augustine, Prudentius rejected his past life and underwent a conversion experience¹⁵ in which an accomplished vir Romanus with an already Christian proclivity retires from his prestigious career and becomes a radically committed Christian. The voice of this new phase of his life was poetry, which he composed for God’s glory and as a complete artistic expression of Roman Christian identity.

My study of Prudentius’ poetry engages the Aeneid, contemporary poets, the Bible, Epicurean, Platonist, and patristic texts. Such a range of texts requires a variety of approaches to allusion in Prudentius’s poetry ranging from direct, intentional references to a broad intertextual analysis that compares shared language and thought. Recent critics of golden and silver age Latin poetry have developed groundbreaking methods of allusion, resulting in stimulating literary criticism.¹⁶ For the most part, however, such methods have eluded much of the literary criticism of late fourth-century poets.¹⁷ I draw upon these methods of allusion with the goal of opening new directions for the interpretation of the Prudentian corpus. I approach Prudentius’ texts as part of a system of language—poetic and otherwise—shared in varying degrees by Prudentius, Vergil, the Bible, Platonist texts, and patristic literature. Prudentius’ poetic pose as persuader, converter, and cajoler circumscribes my approach to intertextuality and allusion in his work. I include the literary, historical, philosophical, and theological contexts of language shared between Prudentius and other writers in order to illuminate the meaning of passages and the poems as a whole.

This approach to allusion and intertextuality is partly determined by the relationship between the poet and the audience that is delineated in the Prudentian corpus. Prudentius himself defines the relationship between the author and audience in his work, arguing that the reader’s fides (“faith”) becomes the bulwark of the soul¹⁸ because it represents a soul persuaded by an author (Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, John the author of Revelation, and Prudentius himself) to acknowledge its free will and make a correct moral choice. In the Hamartigenia (“The Origin of Sin”), a poem dedicated to exposing false doctrine and solving the problem of evil, Prudentius addresses the reader directly: sanctum, lector, percense volumen; / quod loquor invenies dominum dixisse (Reader, read through the holy book; you will discover that the Lord spoke as I say [he did]; Ham. 624).¹⁹ The context of this address is a treatment of Christian free will in which Prudentius argues that each individual has a choice to do good or bad, and consequently, he concludes, the soul generates its own sin. But along with this emphasis on free will, he suggests a strong role for poetry—namely, that it speaks to the reader with the authority of scripture. For Prudentius, poetry is a speech act parallel to the way Christians imagined the world to be created by the Word.²⁰

The first man and scriptural (and poetic) exemplar, Adam, parallels the experience of the reader. This scriptural character is the prototypical example of free will, for he is “the judge of his own mind (Iudex mentis propriae, Ham. 700).” Second, Adam was “persuaded” by the serpent, not coerced (suadellis, suasisse, suaserat, Ham. 714, 715, 718). Words persuaded Adam to choose badly but the words of the Bible as well as—so Prudentius implies—the words of his poetry can persuade a reader to make good choices. Prudentius’ poetry is an act of persuasion toward a reader who exercises free will. The Hamartigenia and Prudentius’ other works are designed to persuade, to engage a reader of faith who is amenable to persuasion. Both reader and author must participate fully in this process. The words of scripture or poetry de scripturis bind author and reader in the process of persuasion and choice (free will) in which fides tips the balance toward goodness. The Psychomachia best exhibits this reader/author partnership because Prudentius’ allegorical presentation of the soul with its warring virtues and vices assumes that, like Adam, there is a persuadable reader of faith (or not) who, once presented with the facts and arguments de scripturis, will exercise his freedom of choice well (or badly). While having a clear effect at the ethical level, the Psychomachia’s concern with persuasion has political implications as well, for, as a former elite bureaucrat in Theodosius’ administration, Prudentius exhorts his reader, through language and metaphors of war and civil war, to embrace a Roman Christian empire.

The example of Adam functions as a typological instrument of persuasion directed at the reader. For he represents a figure from the Old Testament whose fate as the “first man” is reversed by the new first man, Jesus. The reader must recognize this connection and apply it to himself: will the reader choose to live as an Adam or a Jesus? Typology is the method by which Prudentius presents the reader with choices from which he must choose. In addition, typology in Prudentius’ works functions as an essential and flexible trope central to his poetic program. Biblical typology produces one-to-one correspondences between persons and events from Old and New Testament texts. Prudentius innovates by adding Roman figures such as Romulus, Numa, and others to this conventional typological framework. In general, Prudentius’ poetry employs typology as a literary trope where connections between his source material (Old and New Testaments, Roman historical tradition), poetic stories and characters (personifications, martyrs), and an implied reader (a seeker of divine knowledge) express religious, ethical, and political concepts. The use of typology allows Prudentius to develop a sophisticated salvation history from Creation to Rome and beyond. This unified, historical continuum serves as the foundation of a new allegorical poetry, which expresses the political, intellectual, and literary ideals of his age.

The centrality of typology in this study presupposes the ability of the reader to recognize Prudentius’ biblical figures and events, and interpret them. Typology demands that both the reader and the author be complicit in recognizing particular exegetical interpretations of the biblical material. Jean-Louis Charlet, whose work on fourth- and early fifth-century poetry is influential, sees the poetry of the fourth century as a combination of neoclassicism and neo-Alexandrianism rolled into a triumphalist expression of Constantino-Theodosian ideology.²¹ Moreover, scholarly criticism of Prudentius often begins from a bias that used to infuse critics’ views of “Silver” Latin poetry—namely, that early Christian poetry is a product of rhetorical excess. Whereas the triumph of Christianity plays an important role in my analysis of Prudentius’ poetry and Prudentius’ use of rhetoric is a worthwhile investigation, I focus on an underdeveloped critical approach, which is rooted in the notion that poetry in la renaissance constantino-théodosienne took an exegetical turn.²² My view is that the rich and varied components of “exegetical poetry” have yet to be explicated. Exegetical poetry interprets texts, proclaims truths, and asserts doctrines. It is fundamentally a Christian poetry, and Christianity is a religion based on texts. Unlike pagan religion, the sacred texts acted as a common store, both of agreement and disagreement, for Christians to interpret and thus stabilize their religion’s rules, rituals, and principles.

Prudentius’ poetry joins patristic literature in this exegetical mission. The interpretation and assertion of an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments are the bulwarks upon which fourth-century Christians forged their faith and spiritual identity. Prudentius develops this stance into an aspect of his literary manifesto that poetry, unlike most patristic prose works, communicates to a wide audience the most deeply held principles concerning God and the soul. This Christian poetry is built on an exegetical stance toward specific aspects of Greco-Roman literary and intellectual traditions. Thus, Prudentius interprets biblical texts, Roman poetry and history, the history of pagan philosophy and Christian theology, with a view toward delineating the Roman-Christian self and state.²³

The devaluation of poetry in the fourth century, at least for the intellectual class, has been an impetus for the arguments of this book. Certain barriers to the appreciation of Prudentius’ impact originate in the longstanding conventional wisdom that any literary innovations of the time are to be found almost exclusively in patristic prose. Eusebius’ Church History inaugurated this entrenched view by focusing on patristic prose writers alone.²⁴ This preference for prose is especially unfortunate because, for other ages of antiquity, the work of poets is usually understood as engaging and reflecting core artistic, intellectual, and cultural issues.²⁵ In both the Greek and Roman world, poets traditionally retained the status of wise interpreters of their cultures. The status accorded the poet in ancient Athens is evident from Plato’s effort to debunk the myth of the poet’s divine inspiration (Ion) and reject Homer’s central position in Greek education (Republic, books 2, 3, and 10). On the Roman side, Vergil’s recitations of the Aeneid to an expectant Augustus and his court, as well as the speedy inclusion of the poet’s work in school curricula, confirm poetry’s centrality in shaping and reflecting Roman ideas and identity. But in the fourth century, poetry, including Vergil’s works, which Romans were still reading, had lost the cultural authority to shape directly Roman identity. There was an opportunity for poetry to reassert its cultural and intellectual centrality.

In Prudentius’ day poetry was second to prose in terms of prestige and, one could argue, intellectual heft. This was so for two reasons. First, by celebrating the Bible as the pinnacle of literature, complete with divinely inspired poetry, the church encouraged the dominance of prose genres that functioned as critical defenses and explications of the Bible. Prose works became, for all intents and purposes, literary criticism of the Bible with the function of propagating and stabilizing scripture’s theology and doctrine throughout the empire. Clergy who could write persuasive, philosophy-like treatises on the Trinity or on scripture became intellectual stars. The most preeminent church fathers of the fourth-century West, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, whose writings helped to secure the priority of orthodox doctrine, earned sainthood. Moreover, because of their persuasive abilities, these figures were able to maintain and exploit close connections with the Roman political hierarchy and, as a result, came to represent the Roman state to their audience. Christian poets of the period did not garner such power and prestige.²⁶ Second, Roman poetry had reached an impasse. The mission of poets under the new world order of the Christian Roman Empire had yet to be clarified, especially against the rich aesthetic heritage of their pagan predecessors whose works contributed to Rome’s idea of itself. In Prudentius’ youth, poets responded to this challenge by assembling full and half lines of Vergil’s verses to tell the story of the Creation and the Incarnation. These centones possess their own distinctive place in literary history and represent early steps on the way to a poetry that would encompass the contrary currents that make up Roman Christian identity.²⁷ The centones of Juvencus and Proba, in particular, define themselves against the pagan past by substituting Christian for pagan content.²⁸

Prudentius takes up the challenge with far-reaching results for poetry. He is the first Christian poet to engage Roman literary tradition as Roman poets of the past had done—namely, through the complicated poetic strategies of imitation and emulation. The interplay between tradition and originality, which guided the epic successors of Vergil—including Ovid, Lucan, and Statius—guides Prudentius as well. Prudentius integrates his Christian message within an intertextual dialogue with his literary predecessors, a dialogue that is possible in the fourth century because of the compatibility between Christianitas and Romanitas, between Rome the city and the city of God, and finally, between the Roman Empire and Christian government.²⁹ To be sure, hostility toward paganism is part of the rhetorical pose of Christian writers, including Prudentius, but this must not handicap a modern reader’s ability to understand the poetry’s synthesis and interpretation of the pagan and Christian intellectual traditions.

In the fourth century, poetry, though less prestigious as a form of expression for the intellectual class, became more prevalent in everyday life, for example, in the form of hymns for the liturgy. The poetry of Prudentius succeeded in satisfying daily liturgical needs into the Middle Ages with his Cathemerinon, a set of hymns for the liturgical calendar. Prudentius, however, also makes a significant challenge in the name of poetry against the ascendancy of prose in the late fourth century. His dogmatic works, the Hamartigenia and Apotheosis, his attack on Roman paganism in the Contra Symmachum I and II, his genre-forming contribution to the history and cult of the martyrs (Peristephanon), and his groundbreaking, allegorical epic of the battle between the virtues and the vices (Psychomachia) all attempt an extraordinary integration of his historical, theological, and literary inheritance. With this in mind, each chapter in this volume lays out a series of arguments that aim to reposition Prudentius and his poetry at the center of late antique intellectual and artistic life.

1. Epic Successor? Prudentius, Aeneid 6 and Roman Epic Tradition. Mark Vessey has argued that the career and corpus of Jerome (c. 340–420 CE), a central intellectual figure of the fourth century, established him as the first “Christian literatus.”³⁰ Jerome was neither interested in prescribing a new Christian rhetoric nor in overturning the classical literary canon. Rather, he wished to define Christian literature in contrast to and emulative of pagan poetry, composed according to a set of rules associated with the Bible.³¹ Jerome conceived of an “antiliterature” based on scripture. A Christian writer was therefore a writer de scripturis, not an imitator of biblical forms, but “an interpreter of the Bible text itself, one who cleaves to the letter and fastens on to its sense.”³² There is much to agree with in Vessey’s insightful formulation of Christian literature. All Christian writers, both poetry and prose writers, saw the Bible as their template for literary production. The creation of the world and humans in Genesis, the incarnation of Christ in the Gospels, the end of times in Revelation, and the stories in between, provided the content and structure of Christian literature, yet to apply mechanically Vessey’s claims for Jerome to Prudentius would be inadequate because he was a Roman poet practicing in the wake of centuries of Roman poetic tradition that included Lucretius, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. Any literary historical evaluation of his poetry must include his work’s engagement with Roman tradition to the same degree as its relationship to the Bible. Hence in chapter 1, I show a programmatic relationship between Prudentius and his epic predecessor Vergil that establishes the soul as the focal point of moral and political development. By such a bold and transformative engagement with Vergil’s Aeneid, I argue, the Psychomachia stakes its claim as the national epic for Christian Rome because it reflects an ideal Christian self in a Roman context.

2. Christian History and the Narrative of Rome. Gerard O’Daly has commented that “[Prudentius’] poetry contains some of the most far reaching attempts in late antiquity to remodel the history and cultural traditions of Rome along Christian lines.”³³ Prudentius lived and wrote in one of the most important times in the history of the West. In this age of upheaval, both pagans and Christians competed to possess the idea of Rome in its forms and traditions. In such times history itself is up for grabs, available to be claimed by whatever side wins the political, religious, and intellectual battles. In the fourth century, Christians were winning these battles and thus staking their claim to a particular view of history. This view is crystallized in the imperial theology of the era’s most important historian, Eusebius, and in the commentaries of the church fathers. However, Prudentius as well puts forward a Christianizing view of history and an imperial theology, both of which lie behind many of the poetic choices he makes.

In chapter 2 I argue that Prudentius employs typologies, pairs, or triads of events or characters from biblical and Roman historical traditions that are connected and interpreted according to subsequent events. The Psychomachia’s narrative of the battle between the virtues and the vices contains fragments of historical narratives from Genesis, Exodus, and Revelation as well as the paradigmatic narrative of Roman civil war. The Peristephanon’s martyr stories are combined with allusions to biblical narratives and narratives of Roman kings. Prudentius typologically connects the biblical events of creation, the incarnation, and the last judgment to the whole of Roman history, from Romulus to Theodosius, to form unified narrative of salvation history. Hence, a Roman and Christian imperial history is born. The poet’s historiographical strategy can be summed up as follows: future events, constructed as a set of ideologically fixed points in time (e.g., the Incarnation), cause the stories of the past (e.g., Melchisedec’s entertaining of the triple-formed angel) to exist as history. That is, on a metaphorical level, because the poet (and thus the reader) knows the future for certain, he or she can affirm what events in the past are to be included in the construction of history. Prudentius offers this circular, literary argument within the metaphorical space of a closed text: typology proves the legitimacy of specific future events, which, in turn, furnish the criteria for the selection and interpretation of past events. So, for instance, the victory of Chastity (Pudicitia) over Lust (Libido) in the Psychomachia recalls the killing of Holofernes by Judith in the Old Testament, which, in turn, prefigures and helps to legitimize the Incarnation of Christ as an historical event.

3. Christian Theology and the Making of Allegory. Regarding the history of thought, John Rist observed nearly twenty-five years ago that “the role of philosophy in the background of Christian writers … is largely misunderstood” and what is needed is “no less than a rewriting of the intellectual history of the fourth century.”³⁴ Rist’s appeal, especially regarding Roman Christian poets, remains a challenge to contemporary scholarship. As part of a response, I investigate Prudentius’ use of theological and philosophical ideas, which remains fertile ground for both an understanding of fourth-century intellectual history and Prudentian allegory, which, until recently, was the central topic for critics assessing the poet’s legacy.³⁵ To this end, chapter 3 revisits Prudentius’ use of typology and argues that his typological interpretations of biblical texts contribute to the construction of the Psychomachia’s personifications of virtues and vices, and that typological interpretations form the substance of the Psychomachia’s allegorical representations of indescribable phenomena, such as God and the soul. By positing in language “what God is not,” Prudentius, like most of the church fathers, poses an apophatic challenge in which the reader (and poet) attempts to gain knowledge of God and the soul without the benefit of language, which is incapable of prescribing divine qualities. The poet’s response to this linguistic impasse is to construct biblical typologies that produce nonlinguistic, allegorical effects that, in turn, convey a way of knowing the divine. It is impossible for descriptive and prescriptive language to make available to human beings this kind of knowledge.

4. Pagan Philosophy and the Making of Allegory. Prudentius also operationalizes a received tradition of pagan philosophy in order to further develop his indescribable allegorical creations. Chapter 4 argues that Prudentius attaches pagan Platonist and Epicurean ideas to the Psychomachia’s vices to show how a human soul ought not to behave. Thus, pagan philosophy informs the typological connection between vices, biblical villains, and an implied, non-radically converted Christian reader. Prudentius deploys pagan intellectual discourse in the portrayal of the personified vices while simultaneously exploiting Christian Platonist ideas in the description of the virtues such as metaphors of ascent in which the soul rises to commune with God. The poet is keenly aware of pagan philosophical ideas and integrates them into his poetry as part of his response to the apophatic dilemma.

5. Self and Poetry. My study envisions Prudentius’ poetry as a product of a deeply ingrained typological view of the world where reality and history become illuminated through a series of prefigurings and correspondences. This worldview drives Prudentius’ literary practice, view of history, interpretation of the Bible, free will, and finally, concept of self. In the epilogue, I suggest that in the work of Prudentius, typological thinking points to a concept of self that has both relational and individualist characteristics. The typological triad of the Father-Christ-human being provides a relational paradigm according to which a person’s soul can become joined to God and other humans. The Roman Christian soul and citizen are one and the same: a metaphysical, political, and literary amalgam, whose communion with God drives his or her very identity. In the written record, this vision of the Roman self was temporary and lasted until Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 CE. Augustine would change the self’s focus away from the city of Rome and refocus it toward the city of God. Prudentius’ vision of the soul and its relation to God, however, remains a vital and vibrant example of a mentalité that saw no conflict between the “imperial Roman” and the “radical Christian.”

On the other hand, the notion of free will in Prudentius’ poetry—that is, the freedom to choose between “positive” and “negative” typologies and thus between faith in the Christian God and faithlessness—resides in the inner space of the soul and is independent from all other beings, including God. This individualist and separatist notion of the self results from, perhaps, the most important contribution of early Christian thought to Western intellectual history—namely, that the individual himself has the freedom and the will to act as he sees fit, for good or for ill and independently of a preordained fate. The self appears to gain an existence and autonomy unprecedented in Greco-Roman thought, a status that would periodically burst forth in subsequent intellectual history and counter Christianity’s monarchic and imperial shepherding of peoples. Prudentius’ poetry reflects both the coming of the autonomous self and the power of an authoritarian church. His corpus keeps faith with all the great poetry that preceded it by representing the central issues of its time in terms of a meditation on both the individual and the collective.