In the Peristephanon, a collection of hymns in praise of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (a.d. 347/8–c. 405) refers back to a time more than a hundred years before he was writing, when Christianity was not the predominant influence in the Roman world but the religion of a beleaguered minority. In the course of Prudentius' lifetime, the trials that were suffered by that minority under emperors such as Decius and Diocletian became an important point of reference for increasing numbers of Roman converts seeking to identify with Christianity and its sectarian past.Footnote ¹ At the time, however, those trials were recorded in only meagre written accounts.Footnote ² Prudentius, whose successful administrative career might have culminated in elevation to a senior position in the imperial scrinia, displays particular interest in the extent of the official archival material in the Peristephanon.Footnote ³ In a number of passages in this work, he comments on the fragility of historical documents, which are easily destroyed by acts of malice or the effects of time.Footnote ⁴ The following discussion will examine the ways in which he reflects on the permanence, or otherwise, of his own written texts.Footnote ⁵ Analysis of his imitation of elegiac verse inscriptions will demonstrate how he draws attention to the inadequacy of even the most monumental types of human writing. But I will argue that, by identifying his poems with the martyrs' perishable bodies, Prudentius claims that they too can be a medium for a divine presence not confined to any perishable physical form.

From the very beginning of his collection, Prudentius presents his accounts of the martyrs' trials as recovering a kind of unwritten history. In Perist. 1, the poet inveighs against the Roman functionaries who destroyed the documents (chartulas, 1.75) relating to the deaths of the martyrs Emeterius and Chelidonius of his native Calagurris (modern Calahorra): ne tenacibus libellis erudita saecula | ordinem, tempus modumque passionis proditum | dulcibus linguis per aures posterorum spargerent (‘so that generations educated by the indomitable books would not disseminate the recorded order, time and manner of their passion with sweet speech among the ears of posterity’, Perist. 1.76–8).Footnote ⁶ But, while the details about these events may have been erased from the records of human history, Prudentius asserts in the poem's first lines that the eternal book of heaven preserves the martyrs' names, aureis quae Christus illic adnotauit litteris | sanguinis notis eadem scripta terris tradidit (‘which Christ has entered there in golden letters, the same writings he set down on earth in characters of blood’, 1.2–3).Footnote ⁷ In these verses, the finite, mortal bodies of Prudentius' martyrs are shown to reveal a truth that cannot be erased or overwritten, even in the face of the greater durability of institutional power.Footnote ⁸ That truth, of the martyrs' salvation from death, is retained in part by oral tradition, from which Prudentius claims to derive his description of the forms in which their souls ascended to heaven (1.82–90). In this way, his poem sets the historical record to rights by restoring the truth that Christ had originally written in the martyrs' blood.

As well as the 120 trochaic septenarii of Perist. 1, Prudentius also appears to have preserved the story of Emeterius and Chelidonius through another, more enduring medium. Perist. 8 is an epigram of nine elegiac couplets, intended as an inscription for the baptistery erected at the site of their passion in Calagurris. As in Perist. 1, the poet does not refer to the martyrs by name, but says only: hic duo purpureum … martyrium pulchra morte tulere uiri (‘here two men bore scarlet martyrdom by their beautiful death’, 8.3–4).Footnote ⁹ Prudentius' use of the elegiac metre, the standard mode of sepulchral epigram, indicates his engagement with the epigraphic tradition.Footnote ¹⁰ The reference in the final couplet to the poem's readers as passers-by is a conventional feature of verse epitaphs: ibitis hinc, ut quisque potest, per uulnera Christi | euectus gladiis alter et alter aquis (‘you will go from here raised up through the wounds of Christ, each as he is able, one by swords and the other by water’, 8.17–8).Footnote ¹¹ This epigraphic commonplace is revised, however, in the light of a more certain Christian belief in life after death.Footnote ¹² Thus, readers are not separated from the dead who are commemorated when they take their leave of the inscription; rather, they take a step towards joining the martyrs in heaven, through the rite of baptism.

In Perist. 8, then, Prudentius definitively reverses the attempts of the martyrs' persecutors to efface their memory by endowing his own poetic memorial with the authority and permanence of inscription on stone. This desire to guard against oblivion, the erasure of identity, has been identified as an important motivation of the distinctive ‘epigraphic habit’ that was resumed with some vigour in the Roman Empire from the time of Constantine onwards.Footnote ¹³ The resurgence of inscriptional activity in the fourth century may help to explain the popularity in later Latin poetry of elegiac epitaphs, large collections of which were published by Prudentius' predecessor Ausonius in his Parentalia, Professores, and Epigrammata.Footnote ¹⁴ It can be observed that in Ausonius' poems, as in Prudentius', the adoption of an epigraphic mode is closely related to a concern with oblivion. In one elegiac epigram, for instance, Ausonius describes an inscription that has been partially obliterated, and concludes: mors etiam saxis nominibusque uenit (‘death comes even to stones and names’, Epigr. 37.10).Footnote ¹⁵ Latin poets from Ennius onwards used this topos of the perishable monument to emphasize the more enduring quality of their own, literary monuments.Footnote ¹⁶ In the Peristephanon, however, Prudentius' martyrs are inscribed with a form of writing that will outlast the ruin of both physical and literary monuments.

In the main part of this discussion, I will focus on Perist. 11, in which Prudentius makes his most ambitious attempt at transforming the genre of the elegiac epitaph.Footnote ¹⁷ Here, the poet expands the traditional sepulchral epigram into a narrative of 123 elegiac couplets, comprising a detailed account of the martyrdom of the third-century Roman saint Hippolytus. The practice of embedding epigraphic verses into longer poetic compositions has been profitably investigated in a number of recent studies of the elegy of the Augustan period.Footnote ¹⁸ One of those, by Martin Dinter, introduces the useful term ‘intermediality’ to describe the process by which a literary text adopts the conventions of other kinds of media as a way of creating meaning.Footnote ¹⁹ This term has the advantage of being applicable to the medium of visual art, as well as to the epigraphic medium – and Prudentius' poem incorporates not only an inscriptional account but also a painted image of Hippolytus' martyrdom. As the example of Perist. 1 makes clear, though, the truth of the martyrs' fates is contained in their flesh and blood. In Perist. 11, Prudentius seeks to reproduce the medium of the martyr's body in textual form. In so doing, I will argue, he claims for his elegy an authority and permanence that transcends all earthly forms of writing and representation.

Rome, the eternal city where all monuments are eventually reduced to ruins, provides a fitting backdrop to Prudentius' elegiac martyr poem.Footnote ²⁰Perist. 11 is presented as a personal account, addressed to Valerian, bishop of Calagurris, of a pilgrimage that he made to the capital soon after the beginning of the fifth century.Footnote ²¹ ‘I have seen innumerable ashes of saints in Romulus’ city' (innumeros cineres sanctorum Romula in urbe | uidimus, 11.1–2), he says in the opening verses, setting the martyrs side by side with Romulus just as, in Rome in the early 400s, the martyrs' shrines sat side by side with the religious sites of the old pagan city.Footnote ²² Like Romulus, whose supposed hut was preserved on the Palatine as a symbol of the city's rustic origins, Prudentius' martyrs have also come to represent a past that Rome has lost, existing now in the form of relics.Footnote ²³ Apologetically, the poet explains to Valerian that it is difficult for him to give details about the tituli and nomina inscribed on the saints' tombs, because of the sheer number of them that were killed when the pagan gods were still worshipped in Troia Roma (11.6) – another reference evoking the ruins on which Roman culture was founded.Footnote ²⁴ These martyrs' names, forgotten on earth, are preserved only in the heavenly record, where Christ alone knows them (11.15–16).

In Perist. 8, as I have shown, Prudentius uses the form of the elegiac epitaph to commemorate two martyrs whose public identities were almost obliterated. At the beginning of this poem, too, he reflects on the correlation between memorial and oblivion: while the monuments to the martyrs are more complete in themselves than the ruins of Troy, or of the original buildings of Romulus, they none the less bear witness to a history that is bound to be incomplete. The example of Hippolytus, however, demonstrates that the martyr's sacred presence is not confined to any perishable, physical form. Prudentius proceeds as follows (11.17–22):

The word apex, with which Prudentius refers in this passage to the text of the inscriptions (rerum apices ueterum, 11.18), is used properly of the tips of physical objects, but can also designate the tip that forms part of a written letter (OLD s.v. apex 5a). In the Peristephanon, it tends to be applied to those letters, or parts of letters, that are particularly susceptible to erasure.Footnote ²⁵ In Ausonius' epigram on the illegible epitaph, which was quoted above, one of the apices is described as being ‘damaged by the stone breaking off’ (saxi fragmine laesus apex, Epigr. 37.4 Green).Footnote ²⁶ While it appears that the rerum apices ueterum in Prudentius' poem were not literally ruined, the phrase none the less emphasizes their fragility as visible fragments of the past. And, however intact the letters on that inscription may have been, the past to which they refer is by no means set in stone.

In fact, the inscription that Prudentius represents can be identified as Damasus' elogium Hippolyti, of which Giovanni Battista de Rossi recovered ten marble fragments from the pavement of the Basilica Laterano. The text, which is still legible in parts on these fragments, reads (Epigr. 35):

On the basis of oral tradition, Damasus claims that Hippolytus had broken away from the Church of Rome by adopting the uncompromising stance of the schismatic Novatus on the treatment of Christians who lapsed into pagan worship during the persecutions. A leading Roman presbyter in the early part of the third century, Hippolytus does seem to have come into conflict with the papal establishment on a number of occasions before being exiled to Sardinia in 235, under the emperor Maximinus Thrax. Moreover, he also seems to have been reconciled to the Catholic Church prior to his death, which apparently occurred fairly soon after his exile.Footnote ²⁸ The schism of Novatus, however, began some time afterwards, in 252, so the report of Hippolytus' adherence to it in Damasus' elogium is very probably inaccurate.Footnote ²⁹ And Prudentius, seeking to extrapolate an unexpurgated history of the martyr from the tenuous traces preserved in this inscription, reproduces the same error in his poem.

One respect in which Prudentius does modify Damasus' epigram is metre: the hexameters of the elogium are rewritten in the form of elegiac couplets. The significance of Prudentius' metrical choice in Perist. 11 is discussed in a recent study by Christian Kaesser, who suggests that the poem was composed as an elegy in accordance with what he takes to be its central theme of fragmentation.Footnote ³⁰ Thus Hippolytus, who had himself created a rupture in the body of the Church, is condemned to be killed in a manner in keeping with his name: he is tied to wild horses and dragged across the countryside, so that his body is torn limb from limb.Footnote ³¹ Kaesser contends that the elegiac metre was also associated with the idea of bodily mutilation – in relation to the pentameter's ‘missing’ sixth foot, which is stolen away by Cupid in Ovid's incipit to the Amores (1.1–4). This is certainly a bold reading: the structure of elegiac poetry, in which each individual couplet is almost always self-contained as a unit of metre and of meaning, does tend to give rise to an effect of discontinuity or fragmentation.Footnote ³² In general, then, elegy is regarded as being less suitable for extended narrative than the more continuous hexameter.Footnote ³³ But, as persuasive as Kaesser's argument might seem, I would still like to suggest that it does not quite tell the whole story. Offering a more nuanced interpretation of Prudentius' poem, I will demonstrate in what follows that this elegy is concerned not simply with fragmentation but in fact with putting fragments back together again.

I have already observed that Prudentius responds to an elegiac tradition that is not narrowly Ovidian, but to a broader tradition of elegy as the paradigmatic verse form of epigraphic memorial. The general propensity of elegiac verse to brief, precise expression made it particularly appropriate for inscription on physical objects – and in the elegiac Perist. 11, Prudentius attempts to evoke the physical presence not simply of the martyr's monumental shrine but also of the martyr's flesh and blood. As mentioned above, however, it is not only by imitating the medium of inscription that the poet aims to create this impression of presence. His account also features a detailed ekphrasis of a painting above Hippolytus' tomb, which depicts the moment of the martyr's violent dismemberment.Footnote ³⁴ While it was not uncommon for Roman funerary monuments to include both text and images, it is unclear whether the picture described in Perist. 11 is a figment of Prudentius' imagination or whether it actually existed.Footnote ³⁵Perist. 9 also recounts the death of the martyr Cassian as it is depicted in a portrait, which the poet claims to have seen for himself while visiting a shrine in the Italian town of Forum Cornelii (modern Imola). More will be said about the comparison between these two passages below, but it will become clear that, in both examples, Prudentius has recourse to ekphrasis as a means of drawing attention to the elements of visual artworks that can only be seen with the mind's eye.

First, it can be noted that, in his ekphrasis of the mural at the site of Hippolytus' sepulchre in Perist. 11, Prudentius describes the fragmentation of the martyr's body in terms that recall the fragmentation of his own text (11.127–40):

As Michael Roberts has shown, Hippolytus' followers here resemble Prudentius himself, among the tombs of the saints in Rome. Just as he reviewed with his eyes (lustro oculis, 11.17) and attended (sequor, 11.18) in his search for letters (apices, 11.18), the martyr's disciples are also attending (sequentes, 11.133) and probing with their eyes (oculis, 11.135), among the blood-stained tips (apices, 11.127) of the rocks.Footnote ³⁶ But it can be observed that these followers, like the poet himself, only begin with fragments. As they find the pieces of his mutilated body scattered in no order (ordine nullo, 11.131), they pick them up (legit, 11.140), and start to reassemble them into a coherent whole: first the head, then the shoulders, arms, and legs.Footnote ³⁷ In this way, Prudentius hints at a parallel between the arrangement of Hippolytus' body and the narrative of his own poem. Earlier Latin authors had also used dismembered bodies as a metaphor for texts that are fragmented in some way.Footnote ³⁸ In an example that is especially significant for the present discussion, Ausonius likens his Cento Nuptialis to Hippolytus, the hero of pagan myth, whose relevance to Prudentius' martyr poem will be addressed at greater length below. In his prefatory epistle, Ausonius tells his friend Paulus, the Cento's dedicatee, that when he sees how verses of Virgil's poetry have been reconstituted to form a new poem, he will no longer wonder how Hippolytus' dismembered limbs were reconstituted to form a new man, Virbius.Footnote ³⁹

Like Ausonius' Cento, Prudentius' elegiac poem is meant as a fitting substitute for Hippolytus' body not in the sense that it is fragmented into individual parts (that is, self-contained elegiac couplets) but in the sense that it creates an overall unity out of those parts. It is true that the couplet itself, with its ‘dismembered’ structure, can be divided into the hexameter and the pentameter, which are themselves subdivided into half-lines; the effect of these divisions is clearly demonstrated at line 11.131, where the noun-adjective pairing ruptis conpagibus (‘sundered joints’) is itself ‘sundered’ by the caesura in the third foot of the hexameter. At the same time, Prudentius' ekphrasis can be seen as typical of an aesthetic that was highly favoured in this period, whereby the whole of the thing being described was broken down into telling details (leptologia or distributio), in order to create the impression of vividness, as though it were physically present in front of the reader (enargeia or euidentia).Footnote ⁴⁰ Not only in Late Antiquity but at all times in the history of Latin literature, the structure of the elegiac couplet was conducive to this technique of isolating and arranging individual details, and thus to achieving the effect of visual immediacy.

As a former advocate trained in rhetoric, Prudentius would have been well versed in the techniques of ekphrastic composition, the purpose of which was to induce in the imaginations of one's audience a picture of what they could not see for themselves.Footnote ⁴¹ These techniques were especially important in the case of the martyrs, as it was necessary to understand that the relics themselves were more than what they appeared to be – that is, fragmentary parts of dead human bodies.Footnote ⁴² An author contemporary with Prudentius, Victricius of Rouen, explains in his De laude sanctorum that the saints are wholly integrated to God's divinity, which cannot ever be anything less than perfect and complete. Thus, he argues, the martyrs' relics should be regarded, not as just bits of blood and clay, but as concrete embodiments of this transcendent plenitude: totum in parte dicendo non corporalium luminum obices, sed cordis oculos aperimus (‘by uttering the whole in the part, we open the eyes of the heart, not the barriers of our bodily sight’, 10.4–5).Footnote ⁴³ In a similar way, Prudentius' task as the poet of the martyrs is to reveal the invisible divine presence that is totally immanent in their parts – and, by extension, in representations of them as well.

The example of Perist. 9 demonstrates that this divine presence was not self-evident in visual representations of the martyr. At the beginning of the poem, Prudentius observes the painting in which Cassian, a schoolteacher, is shown being stabbed to death by his own pupils, using the tips of their styluses. The poet appeals to the sacristan, who assures him that what he sees non est inanis aut anilis fabula; | historiam pictura refert, quae tradita libris | ueram uetusti temporis monstrat fidem (‘is no empty old wives’ tale; the picture represents a history of events, which was handed down in books and displays the true faith of olden time', 9.18–20). Like the monuments described at the beginning of Perist. 11, the portrait of Cassian represents a partial history, the truth of which has to be reconstructed from whatever other sources are extant (tradita libris, 9.19). It is only after the sacristan has recounted the full narrative of Cassian's martyrdom that Prudentius recognizes the truth of Christian salvation depicted in the image.Footnote ⁴⁴ As an object of faith, rather than of historical enquiry, that truth cannot be seen with one's own eyes, but must be apprehended through a heightened form of perception. The poem ends with Prudentius, fully inspired with devotion to the martyr, embracing Cassian's tomb in worship.

In Perist. 11, Prudentius appears to be even more concerned to distinguish the portrait of Hippolytus from a mere inanis fabula. Previous scholarship has noted a number of specific resemblances between the death of Hippolytus in Prudentius' poem and that of the martyr's mythological namesake in Seneca's Phaedra.Footnote ⁴⁵ Particularly remarkable is the way that, whereas Seneca states that Hippolytus' servants were unable to recover all of their master's remains (Phaed. 1109–10), Prudentius stresses that the Christian Hippolytus' followers did not leave so much as a drop of blood unsalvaged (Perist. 11.145–50).Footnote ⁴⁶ I have shown above that the dismembered body of the pagan Hippolytus was used in Late Antiquity as an analogy for texts compiled from disparate sources.Footnote ⁴⁷ Accordingly, Prudentius presents his own poem for Hippolytus as a more complete version of the myth; in this respect, Seneca may not be the only predecessor that he has in mind. In a prolonged attack on the practice of idolatry in his Contra Symmachum, Prudentius argues that pagan gods are merely the fictitious creations of poets and visual artists. He attributes these criticisms to the brother emperors Arcadius and Honorius, who cite the Hippolytus myth as an example of the absurdity of pagan religion (C. Symm. 2.53–6):

These verses very closely paraphrase Virgil's treatment of the myth at Aen. 7.778–80.Footnote ⁴⁸ Virgil explains in this passage that Diana brought Hippolytus back to life, giving him the name Virbius, in the forests of Latium.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, in Perist. 11, Prudentius emphasizes that his own story of death and resurrection, which is also depicted on a ‘wall painted in many colours’ (paries … uersicolorus, C. Symm. 2.56), is not just a poetic fabula.Footnote ⁵⁰ His shifting of the story of Hippolytus' martyrdom from the city of Rome to the more wooded landscape of Portus, at the mouth of the Tiber, serves to reinforce the similarities with the scene of the mythical Hippolytus' dismemberment.Footnote ⁵¹ To the eyes alone, then, the painting of Hippolytus the martyr may be indistinguishable from a painting of Hippolytus the hero, but to eyes enlightened by Christian faith, only the former image can be seen as conveying divine truth.Footnote ⁵²

Perhaps the most unusual feature of Prudentius' ekphrasis of Hippolytus' mural is that it does not come to an end: without any change of register, the narrative continues for the rest of the poem, about one hundred lines of elegiac verse.Footnote ⁵³ Kaesser suggests that the description can thus be considered ‘a limb of the text that has not been completed, but cut off’.Footnote ⁵⁴ But for Prudentius, as I have suggested above, the limb of a martyr implies the whole of his sacred body, even if it has been cut off. Correspondingly, the image of a martyr implies the whole story of his martyrdom, even if it represents only a single moment excerpted from that story. It is clear that the ekphrasis quoted above (11.127–40) includes some elements of temporal narrative that a work of visual art would be unable to portray. This is a feature that Prudentius' poem shares with some of the most famous ekphrastic passages in ancient literature.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even in ekphrases where this narrative element is particularly strong, though, earlier authors still tend to maintain the illusion of a finite, physical medium.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus Prudentius, by effacing the distinctions between his own poem and first the inscription, then the painting, and ultimately the martyr's body itself, gives the impression that what he describes is not bounded by any physical limitations.

In elegiac poetry especially, as has been discussed, the text regularly acts as the representation of a physical monument, which may itself act as the representation of the dead person it commemorates. In this elegiac poem, however, Prudentius seeks to elide the degrees of separation that are created by these intervening media, and to effect a direct connection with the martyr's sacred relics. The final part of Perist. 11 recounts the commitment of Hippolytus' body by his followers to an underground cave just outside Rome (11.153–4), and then describes the poet himself in adoration before the shrine that holds the ‘debris’ of the martyr's soul (animae exuuias, 11.183). Here, as in Perist. 8, Prudentius rewrites the genre of the elegiac epitaph to reflect his own view of the relationship between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Although the martyr's physical remains may be located beyond the boundaries of the city walls, in keeping with ancient burial practices, he continues to be present among Rome's Christian inhabitants.Footnote ⁵⁷ Accordingly, in his account of Hippolytus' festival on 13 August, Prudentius stresses the close contact among the worshippers themselves, who mingle from all social classes and all over Italy (11.199–202):Footnote ⁵⁸

Prudentius draws attention to the exceptional unity between the worshippers by the striking enjambment between these elegiac couplets: the patricians in the first couplet, and the plebeians in the second, are brought together as part of a single grammatical construction, where the conventions of elegiac composition would normally demand that they remain separate. As Hippolytus dies by renouncing his adherence to Novatus' schism and wishing that, ‘the faith may grow strong as one’ (una fides uigeat, 11.31), the poem concludes by reasserting the unity of the Catholic Church.

In the Peristephanon, therefore, elegy is transformed from a poetic form that is characterized by separation to one that is characterized by togetherness. I have argued above that Prudentius was working with a different conception of the canon of Latin elegy from that which is current in Classics today – but it is clear none the less that he retained a strong sense of the metre's identity, based on its original attachment to (and subsequent detachment from) physical objects, especially funeral monuments.Footnote ⁵⁹ The poet follows earlier elegiac practice by embedding Hippolytus' sepulchral inscription within his narrative. Further to that, he reproduces a visual image of the martyr's death, in his ekphrasis of the wall painting. But the truth about Hippolytus' martyrdom, he emphasizes, is contained in neither the inscription nor the painting, both of which are incomplete and impermanent forms of representation. Rather, it is the martyr's body – which Prudentius identifies with his own martyr text – that is the ultimate medium for conveying his divine power. That power, moreover, transcends the boundaries that divided the authors of earlier elegiac poetry from the dead or desired person. In this case, then, the fragments of elegy could still be put together with the effect of evoking the martyr's sacred presence. And in this sense, too, the poetry of Prudentius can be seen as more than the sum of its parts.