other · 405
Prudentius was a provincial governor who retired at about fifty-seven and announced, in a preface to his collected works, that he intended to spend what was left writing for God. What he produced is technically formidable: the Psychomachia, which invented the allegorical battle of the virtues and vices and was illustrated in manuscripts for eight hundred years, and the Peristephanon — fourteen long poems on the martyrs of Spain, Rome and Africa, several of them describing shrines and pictures he had seen. Passages cut out of them became hymns and are still sung. He is in this dataset with twenty-four works on his shelf and, until now, nothing to say when or why any of them was written.
To do for the martyrs what Virgil and Horace had done for the gods, in the same metres and to the same standard.
The first Christian poetry a classically trained reader could take seriously, and hymns still in use.