Prudentius (fl. c. ad 400) can arguably be called the greatest Christian Latin poet in late antiquity, called by Richard Bentley ‘Christian Vergil and Horace’. While the field of early Christian poetry is generally still under-researched, Prudentius’ style, metre, imagery and poetic technique have been paid scholarly attention. There are commentaries on some of his works, including the Hamartigenia (by Roberto Palla, Pisa 1981, a title not mentioned in Anthony Dykes's bibliography; some other relevant secondary literature is also missing). Dykes's book, a revised Manchester PhD thesis, proclaims, according to the dust jacket, to be interested in the poem's ‘theological as in its literary contribution’, which is an important approach rarely chosen in scholarship. The Hamartigenia (‘The origin of sin’) on whose title Dykes (pp. 249–51) is unhelpful, intends to offer a non-dualistic account of evil in the world, against heretics like Marcion, by making human beings fully responsible both for the physical and the moral evils of this world. It is regrettable that Dykes does not take more Christian exegetical and other prose texts into account in order to illuminate how far Prudentius follows majority thinking here and what his own specific ideas and goals are. One of Dykes's major assumptions is that the Hamartigenia's view of the world is mirrored in its poetics: in the same way as the world requires human responsibility in dealing with it in a salutary way, this poem can only be adequately understood by what Dykes calls ‘the responsible reader’. Dykes uses, perhaps overuses, this analytical category to explain instances in the Hamartigenia where the reader's expectations are destabilised by conflicting intertextual signals (for example pp. 73, 99) that include evocations of Lucretius, Catullus, Vergil, Ovid and Manilius. It is the Bible which provides the ultimate, superordinate instance of sense-making. All in all it has to be said that the disadvantages of this book outweigh its merits. It is unnecessarily repetitive and verbose: occasionally the repetition of a statement is regarded as its sufficient proof. More often than not the translation and close reading fail to do full justice to the admittedly very complex Latin and dense mode of expression in the Hamartigenia. Some of the intertextual results are far-fetched; there are inaccuracies like Matthew's ‘literal’ quoting of the Old Testament (p. 160) or the careless usage of ‘man/men’ for both ‘male(s)’ and for ‘human being(s)’ (with its counterintuitive justification on p. xviii). Finally, Dykes's conclusion that the poem's uncertainties, inconsistencies and paradoxes radically interrogate the reader's desire for unity and cohesion, arguably owes more to Dykes's own unwarranted aesthetic assumptions and insufficient grasp of the poem's complex structure and argument than to the poem's inherent message. This is a courageous piece of work which with more careful revision could have been far more powerful, convincing and pioneering.