historical imagination is an
indispensable condition of interest and sympathy. If Prudentius has a habit
of leaving the main issue and making lengthy and tedious _detours_ into
the picturesque parables and miraculous incidents of the Old Testament,
there is method in his digressiveness. He knows that one of the charms of
Paganism lies in its rich and variegated mythology. Yet Christianity
also can point to an even nobler inheritance of the supernatural and the
wonderful in the mysterious evolutions of its history. Hence the stories
of the early patriarchs, of the Israelites and Moses, of Daniel and Jonah,
are imported by the poet as pictorial illustrations of his theme. If
occasionally the details border on the grotesque, he certainly reveals a
striking knowledge of the Old Testament.

The New Testament is also adequately represented. In one poem (ix.) the
miracles of Christ in His earthly ministry and His descent into Hades are
narrated with considerable spirit and eloquence. Besides being a student
of the Bible, Prudentius is a theologian. His theology is that of the
Nicene Creed. The Fall of man, the personality of the Tempter, the mystery
of the Trinity and of the Incarnation, the Virgin-birth, the Death and
Resurrection of Christ, the pains of the lost and the bliss of the saints,
the resurrection of the Body and the life everlasting--these are the themes
of his pen, the themes too of the theology of his age. If the poet's
treatment of these truths occasionally appears antiquated and crude to
modern ideas, it is at least dignified and intelligent. His mind has
absorbed the Christian religion and the Christian theology, and he not
unfrequently rises to noble heights in the interpretation of their
mysteries. His didactic poems, the _Hamartigenia_ or the _Origin of Evil_
and the _Apotheosis_, a treatise on the Person of Christ, prove him to be
a theologian of no mean calibre. He is also an allegorist, as is proved by
the _Psychomachia_ or the _Battle of the Soul_, a kind of _Holy War_
which was very popular in the Middle Ages. He is a martyrologist: as
witness the _Peristephanon_, a series of poems on Christian, principally
Spanish, martyrs. Moreover, he is an undoubted patriot, and in the _Contra
Symmachum_, which he wrote on the famous affair of the Altar of Victory,
he proves that, while a Christian, he is also _civis Romanus_, loyal to
the Empire and the powers that be. He is a skilful versifier, and in this
co