Prudentius, MARCUS AURELIUS CLEMENS, the most important of the Roman Christian poets, was born in the north of Spain in 348 A.D. Nothing is known regarding him except what he has himself told in a poetical autobiography prefixed to his works. From this we learn that he received a liberal education, practised as a pleader, discharged the functions of civil and criminal judge, and was ultimately appointed to a high office at the imperial court. His religious convictions came late in life, and he devoted the evening of his days to the composition of religious poetry. The year of his death is not known. Of his poems the chief are (1) Cathemerinon Liber, a series of twelve hortatory hymns, the first half for the different hours of the day, the latter half for different church seasons (Eng. trans. 1845); (2) Peristephanon, a collection of fourteen lyrical poems in honour of martyrs; (3) Apotheosis, a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against heretics; (4) Hamartigenaea, on the Origin of Evil, a polemic, in verse, against the Marcionites; (5) Psychomachia, on the Triumph of the Christian Graces in the Soul of a Believer; (6) Contra Symmachum, the first book a polemic against the heathen gods, the second against a petition of Symmachus for the restoration of the altar and statue of Victory cast down by Gratian; (7) Diphychon, a series of forty-nine hexameters, arranged in four verses, on scriptural incidents and personages. Bentley calls Prudentius 'the Horace and Virgil of the Christians,' which may be true enough if the critic only meant to say that he is the first of the early Christian verse-makers. See the article HYMN, Vol. VI. p. 46.
Editions are by F. Areval (Rome, 1788), reprinted in Migne's Patrologia, lix.-lx.; Obbar (Tübingen, 1845); and Dressel (Leip. 1860). See Brockhaus, A. Prudentius (1872); Ebert, Geschichte der Christlich-Latein. Lit. (vol. i. 1874); Faguet, De A. Prudentii Clementis Carm. lyricis (1883); and F. St John Thackeray, Translations from Prudentius (1890), with an excellent introduction on his life and times, language, metre, and style.