It is left us to mention the two books against Symmachus, the Roman senator, whom Ambrose so earnestly and successfully opposed. Symmachus had purposed to restore the idols, revive the revenues of the pagan temples, and generally to cast out Christianity from Rome. The poetry of Prudentius is again valuable here, for it plunges into the origin and baseness of idolatry, describing the conversion of Rome, and presenting a picture of the times which is invaluable to the historian. It is from the pages of Prudentius that we learn the cruelty of the purest of the Roman women, when
“The modest vestal, with her down-turned thumb
Urges the gladiator to his stroke
Lest life may lurk in any vital place!”
One line in our author’s hymn in honor of St. Lawrence preserves an historical fact which was not appreciated in its full significance until our own times. He says, Aedemque Laurenti tuam Vestalis intrat Claudia—“Claudia, the Vestal Virgin, enters Thy House.” In 1883 there was discovered in the Atrium of the Vestals a pedestal of a statue dedicated to one of the heads of the order, from which her name had been effaced purposely. Nothing of it was left except the initial C., while there still remained the praise of “her chastity and her profound knowledge in religious matters” (Ob meritvm Castitatis Pvdicitiae adq. in Sacris Religionibusqve Doctrinae Mirabilis). The statue was erected in the year 364, and the order was abolished by the younger Theodosius in 394, so that her conversion must have taken place between those two dates. The conversion of a person filling a place of such high honor in pagan eyes, of a Vestalis maxima, must have been a severe blow to the pagan party, which in Rome was making a fierce but hopeless fight for the old worship. Yet we find no other reference to it in literature, unless the letter of Symmachus to a Vestal, of whom he had heard that she meant to withdraw from her order, was addressed to Claudia. See Professor Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, pp. 170-72 (Boston, 1888).
It is uncertain in what year or in what part of Spain Prudentius died. Conjecture varies between 410 and 424 A.D. This infinitude of filmy particulars causes one to feel as if he were walking through spider-webs of a morning in the country. This hard, practical nineteenth century only experiences a sense of annoyance as it encounters the elaborate nothings of that strangely laborious, all-gathering scholarship which prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To create any intensity of interest to-day requires an imagination which would sacrifice truth to attractiveness.
But certainly, from what we can see of the man in his works, we can have no hesitation in pronouncing a verdict highly favorable both to his poetry and his piety. As governor of important towns he merited—or he would scarcely have received—his title of “the Merciful.” As a close observer of his time and a student of its thought, he has preserved for us what we cannot spare. It is he who in the Jam moesta quiesce querela struck the first notes which were to vibrate in the Dies irae. It is he again who in the Ales die nuntius anticipated Henry Vaughan and his
“Father of lights, what sunny seed,
What glance of day hast thou confined
Into this bird!”