Aurelius Prudentius Clemens wrote a series of profoundly complex Latin poems and published most of them in 404. In his own preface to the edition that he published, Prudentius confesses his sins and failings; says that he dedicated himself to writing Christian poetry late in life; and hoped for salvation as he speaks. By describing this salvation as a function of his poetry, he entangles the classical ideal of poetic immortality with a Christian vision of life as devotion. Prudentius was the first Christian in the Latin West who was also a poet of the first rank. He remains important for anyone interested in the intersection of religion and culture.

The marketing summary at the beginning of this book calls it “a breakthrough in Prudentian scholarship” and points out that “Prudentius and his envisioned Spanish audience cannot be fully understood in isolation from their environment in late fourth- and early fifth-century Spain” (i). The author explores what can be gleaned about Prudentius's Spain from his own poetry, from archaeological evidence, and from a few contemporary Christian authors. This is fine enough, but Prudentius cannot be understood in isolation from the rest of the late antique world. Hershkowitz should have made better use of research on Prudentius's life and audience by scholars such as Altay Coşkun, Jacques Fontaine, and Marc Mastrangelo, and this broader and deeper context cannot be dissociated from the contemporary mosaics that Hershkowitz does describe. As regards the audience envisioned by Prudentius, the Roman Empire was always pluralistic in practice (despite the religious oppression perpetrated by some emperors including Diocletian, Julian, and Theodosius), and so it should not be surprising that an educated and talented poet like Prudentius expected to be read by those of every faith and none. His merit was to praise the Christian God in beautiful and profoundly complex poetry that shines through even in translation; readers should be told that he wrote this poetry in the meters of Vergil and Horace, in lines and stanzas—and not in the undifferentiated paragraphs found in this book.