ABSTRACT

In about ad 400 a Christian writer, Prudentius, wrote an epic poem called the Psychomachia, or Battle for the Soul, in which the vices and virtues of his time appeared as warriors waging a heroic struggle to gain control of the human mind. The idea was quite new, and Prudentius explained that his intention was to create an exciting poem which was more instructive and less dangerous for Christians to read than Virgil's popular Aeneid. In this he succeeded, because the piece achieved wide circulation, and the new technique he had introduced, of representing inner desires and motives as 'characters' in a 'drama', was regularly used by later writers to analyse the processes of the human mind and eventually led to modern theories of personality.