Frugibus alternis, non consule computat annum;
Auctumnum pomis, ver sibi flore notat;
Idem condit ager soles idemque reducit,
Metiturque suo rusticus orbe diem,
Ingentem meminit parvo qui germine quercum
Aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus—
are in grace and feeling like the very finest work of Tibullus; and the concluding couplet—
Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Hiberos,
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae—
though, in its dependence on a verbal point, it may not satisfy the purest taste, is not without a dignity and pathos that are worthy of the large manner of the classical period.
Claudian used the heroic hexameter for mythological as well as historical epics. Of his Gigantomachia we possess only an inconsiderable fragment; but the three books of the unfinished Rape of Proserpine are among the finest examples of the purely literary epic. The description of the flowery spring meadows where Proserpine and her companions gather blossoms for garlands is a passage perpetually quoted. It is interesting to note how the rising tide of romanticism has here, as elsewhere, left Claudian wholly untouched. The passage, though elaborately ornate, is executed in the clear hard manner of the Alexandrian school; it has not a trace of that sensitiveness to nature which vibrates in the Pervigilium Veneris. We have gone back for a moment to that poetical style which perpetually reminds us of the sculptured friezes of Greek art, severe in outline, immensely adroit and learned in execution, but a little chilly and colourless except in the hands of its greatest masters. After paying to the full the tribute of admiration which is due to Claudian's refined and dignified workmanship, we are still left with the feeling that this kind of poetry was already obsolete. It is not only that, as has been remarked with truth of his historical epics, the elaboration of the treatment is disproportionate to the importance or interest of the subject. Materiam superabat opus might be said with equal truth of much of the work of his predecessors. But a new spirit had by this time penetrated literature, and any poetry wholly divorced from it must be not only artificial—for that alone would prove nothing against it—but unnatural. Claudian is a precursor of the Renaissance in its narrower aspect; the last of the classics, he is at the same time the earliest, and one of the most distinguished, of the classicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth century.
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. We have already had occasion to notice its earliest efforts in the rude verses of Commodianus. The revival of letters in the fourth century, so far as it went, affected Christian as well as secular poetry. Under Constantine, a Spanish deacon, one Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, put the Gospel narrative into respectable hexameters, which are still extant. The poems and hymns which have come down under the name of Bishop Hilary of Poitiers are probably spurious, and a similar doubt attaches to those ascribed to the eminent grammarian and rhetorician, Gaius Marius Victorinus, after his conversion. Before Prudentius published his collection, the hymns of St. Ambrose had been written, and were in use among the Western Churches. But these, though they formed the type for all later hymn-writers, were few in number. Out of the so-called Ambrosian hymns a rigorous criticism only allows five or six as authentic. These, however, include two world-famed pieces, still in daily use by the Church, the Aeterne rerum Conditor and the Deus Creator omnium, and the equally famous Veni Redemptor.
To the form thus established by St. Ambrose, Prudentius, in his two books of lyrical poems, gave a larger volume and a more sustained literary power. The Cathemerina, a series of poems on the Christian life, and the Peristephanon, a book of the praise of Christian martyrs—St. Lawrence, St. Vincent, St. Agnes, among other less celebrated names—at once represent the most substantial addition made to Latin lyrical poetry since Horace, and the complete triumph of the new religion. They are not, like the Ambrosian hymns, brief pieces meant for actual singing in churches. Out of the twenty-six poems only three are under one hundred lines in length, and that on the martyrdom of St. Romanus of Antioch runs to no less than eleven hundred and forty, almost the proportions of a small epic. But in the brilliance and vigour of their language, their picturesque style, and the new joy that, in spite of their asceticism, burns throughout them, they gave an impulse of immense force towards the development of Christian literature. In merely technical quality they are superior to any poetry of the time, Claudian alone excepted; in their fullness of life, in the exultant tone which kindles and sustains them, they make Claudian grow pale like a candle-flame at dawn.
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. The two most eminent and copious prose writers of the later fourth century, Jerome and Augustine, occupy the same ambiguous position. Apart from them, and from the less celebrated Christian writers who were their predecessors or contemporaries, the prose of the fourth century is both small in amount and insignificant in quality. The revival in verse composition which followed the settlement of the Empire under Constantine scarcely spread to the less imitable art of prose. The school of eminent Roman grammarians who flourished about the middle of the century, and among whom Servius and Donatus are the leading names, while they commented on ancient masterpieces with inexhaustible industry, and often with really sound judgment, wrote themselves in a base and formless style. A few authors of technical manuals and epitomes of history rise a little above the common level, or have a casual importance from the contents of their works. The treatises on husbandry by Palladius, and on the art of war by Flavius Vegetius Renatus, became, to a certain degree, standard works; the little handbooks of Roman history written in the reigns of Constantius and Valens by Aurelius Victor and Eutropius are simple and unpretentious, but have little positive merit, The age produced but one Latin historian, Ammianus Marcellinus. Like Claudian, he was of Asiatic origin, and Greek-speaking by birth, but, in the course of his service on the staff of the captain-general of the imperial cavalry, had spent much of his life in the Latin provinces of Gaul and Italy; and his history was written at Rome, where he lived after retiring from active service. The task he set himself, a history of the Empire, in continuation of that of Tacitus, from the accession of Nerva to the death of Valens, was one of great scope and unusual complexity. He brought to it some at least of the gifts of the historian: intelligence, honesty, tolerance, a large amount of good sense. But his Latin, which he never came to write with the ease of a native, is difficult and confused; and to this, probably, should be ascribed the early disappearance of the greater part of his history. The last eighteen books, containing the history of only five and twenty years, have survived. The greater part of the period which they cover is one of decay and wretchedness; but the account they give of the reign of Julian (whom Ammianus had himself accompanied in his Persian campaign) is of great interest, and his portrait of the feeble incapable rule of Julian's successors, distracted between barbarian inroads and theological disputes, is drawn with a firm and almost a masterly hand.
The Emperor Valens fell, together with nearly the whole of a great Roman army, in the disastrous battle of Adrianople. A Visigothic horde, to the number of two hundred thousand fighting men, had crossed the Danube; and the Huns and Alans, names even more terrible, joined the standards of Fritigern with a countless host of Mongolian cavalry. The heart of the Empire lay helpless; Constantinople itself was besieged by the conquerors. The elevation of Theodosius to the purple bore back for a time the tide of disaster; once more the civilised world staggered to its feet, but with strength and courage fatally broken. At this dramatic moment in the downfall of the Roman Empire the last of the Latin historians closes his narrative.