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Our Blessed Father read and re-read these lines several times, thinking them so beautiful that he wished to engrave them on his memory, believing that they had been written by some Christian poet, perhaps Prudentius.
Ambrose, Prudentius and Gregory the Great of gross ignorance of the rules of Latin verse and, what to the critics was worse, ignorance of the ways of pagan classical models. But, was the rhymed, tonic accented lyric, which was to be sung by all sorts and conditions of men, in public, such an outrageous literary sin?
Hilarius of Poitiers, the most eminent of the Gallic bishops of this period, wrote controversial and expository works in the florid involved style of the neo-Ciceronian orators, which had in their day a high reputation. As the first known author of Latin hymns, he is the precursor of Ambrose and Prudentius.
He preferred to thumb the Psychomachia of Prudentius, that first type of the allegorical poem which was later, in the Middle Ages, to be used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris whose correspondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaisms and enigmas, allured him.
In Prudentius' first published work, 'Liber Cathemerinon, we find hymns composed absolutely after the manner of St Ambrose, in the same or in similar metres, but with this difference, the hymns of Prudentius are three, four, and sometimes seven times longer than those of St Ambrose. The Spanish poet did not consider, or he lost sight of, the practical usages of poetry.
With Prudentius, however, as with Claudian, we have almost passed beyond the strict limit of a history of ancient Latin literature: and any fuller discussion, either of these remarkable lyrical pieces, or of his more voluminous expository or controversial treatises in hexameter, properly belongs to a history of the Christian Church.
"In like manner I trace the origin of the ballad, most particularly the English ballad, to Prudentius, a contemporary of Claudian." "You don't mean to say that you trace back our north-country ballads to, what do you call him?" "Prudentius. I show that there is much in his hymns that recalls the English ballads." "In his hymns?" "Yes; in the poems that come under such denomination.
Herbert states that Attila is represented on an old medallion with a teraph, or a head, on his breast; and the same writer adds: "We know, from the Hamartigenea of Prudentius, that Nimrod, with a snaky-haired head, was the object of adoration of the heretical followers of Marcion; and the same head was the palladium set up by Antiochus Epiphanes over the gates of Antioch, though it has been called the visage of Charon.
In Claudian's distinguished contemporary, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, Christian Latin poetry reached complete maturity. His collected poems were published at Rome in 404, the year celebrated by Claudian as that of the sixth consulship of Honorius. Before Prudentius, Christian poetry had been slight in amount and rude or tentative in manner.
"But his best book to my thinking is by far, 'Peristephanon, that is to say, the hymns celebrating the glory of the martyrs. "I was saying just now that the hymns of Prudentius, by the dramatic rapidity of the narrative, by the composition of the strophe, and by their wit, remind me very forcibly of our English ballads.
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