ABSTRACT
Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was born in Spain in about 348 and died some time after 405. In the 45-line Preface to his collection of poems, written when he was in his fifties, Prudentius gives the reader some information about his life and his motive for writing; most of his life had been spent in a successful career in public administration until near the end of his life he decided to give up his career to devote himself to Christ, a move reminiscent of the dramatic renunciation Paulinus of Nola had decided upon a few years earlier. Prudentius visited Rome on pilgrimage in 402-3 and it was at about this time that he started to write poetry with a passionately Christian bias and in the space of a few years produced eight works. He was clearly determined to produce, even at this late stage of life, something worthwhile to show that his ‘sinning soul’ had ‘put off her foolishness’ (Preface 35); he must have sensed that he had poetic talent, in addition to a good grounding in literary studies, and that he should use this talent to praise God and to support the true faith. In the final lines of his Preface he alludes to the works he has presumably already written, works in which he variously fights against heresies, expounds the Catholic faith, attacks the pagan cults and celebrates the martyrs’ achievements. To all these works he gives Greek titles, just as Ovid chose a Greek title for his Metamorphoses.
