Prudentius's Romanus: the rhetorician

as hero, martyr, satirist and saint

"Prudentius's Romanus: the rhetorician as hero, martyr and saint," Rhetorica IX (1991), pp. 5-38.

Although almost all readers of Prudentius agree that he

is the major poet produced by early Christianity, some have

been disturbed by what seems to them his bad taste(1). They

find his use of violence excessive, his mixing genres

anti-classical, and his shifts of tone generally

troublesome.

Typical of this group of readers, Pierre LaBriolle finds

the "failings of taste" in the Peristephanon even more

intolerable than those in the Cathemerinon. His greatest

objections are to the "grandiloquent verse in the mouths of

the martyrs," and to the "interminable harangues" they

deliver to their tormentors(2). He particularly objects to

the rhetorical abilities Prudentius bestows upon Romanus:

One (martyr) "under examination" utters no fewer

than six tirades -- the two last of 32 and 93

lines -- after his tongue has been cut out!

Prudentius does not know how to keep himself

within limits.

He attributes Prudentius' lack of self-control to "the

natural bent of his Spanish temperament nourished on Roman

rhetoric."

Among those who have been less eager to attribute

Prudentius' peculiar qualities to Iberia, two groups have

formed to argue about whether he is working in a classical

or anti-classical tradition. Klaus Thraede and Charles Witke

argue that Prudentius is essentially a classical poet(3).

On the other hand, Macklin Smith, proceeding from a reading

of Curtius' excursus on "Early Christian Poetry," argues

that, "The rich flood of his poetry is independent of the

system of the antique genres and hence is not forced to come

to terms with antique literary theory"(4) The basis for his

opposition to Thraede, as well as to Charles Witke, is the

fear(5) that Prudentius' Christian intentions may be

overlooked:

With Witke, Thraede tends to overstress the

positive meaningfulness of the classical form at

the expense of the Christian content(6).

One faction, then, is primarily interested in dogma, the

other in poetry(7).

Part of what gives rise to the controversy is the range

of Prudentius' imagination, which, as Filippo Ermini

remarks, not only combines "l'orrido, l'atroce e il comico,"

but is also remarkably elastic: "sovente il tropo á anche

pi ardito e pi lontana á l'analogia con la realt‹."(8)

These distinctive qualities are what compel Jacques Fontaine

to borrow Curtius's use of the term "mannerism"(9) to

characterize Prudentius' poetry. The Mannerist, Fontaine

says, displays an interest in irrationality, instability,

excess, affective violence, as well as a taste for display,

a pleasure in ambiguity, constructive imbalance, structure

and ornament that do not match, and broken unity(10).

Fontaine invokes another term from art history when he

suggests that the choice of lyric measures instead of

hexameters freed Prudentius to indulge in "baroque"

excess(11). In addition, he finds Prudentius' performance

in the Peristephanon naive and folkloric, offering, as the

extreme case, as well as "le plus exemplaire" of these

qualities, the poem devoted to the martyrdom of Romanus(12).

Hippolyte Delehaye also finds Peristephanon X exemplary,

but of a whole genre, and not merely of Prudentius'

individual style:

La longue histoire du martyre de S. Romain

pourrait ¦tre donn€e comme sp€cimen du genre tout

entiár."(13)

The genre to which it belongs, however, is compounded out

of other genres, and the strange mixture has contributed to

the critical disagreement about exactly what Prudentius

produced. Walther Ludwig, for example, points out that

Prudentius introduces bucolic in a hymn, and satire in a

learned epic(14). In his remarks on Peristephanon X,

Walther argues that Prudentius attempts to produce a

Christian tragedy, in which Romanus plays the part of ein

beredter Bekenner des christlichen Glaubens. Although

Walther correctly points out that the meter is that of

Senecan tragedy, it is also that of Plautine and Terentian

comedy. Furthermore, as Walther himself remarks, Prudentius'

decision to compose Peristephanon IX in the verse form

Horace used to describe his journey to Brundisium seems to

be a conscious allusion to comedy(15). Prosody alone, then,

does not reveal Prudentius' intentions.

Other readers have resorted to compounding genres in

their attempts to describe Prudentius' accomplishments. In

his discussion of the Peristephanon, Raby found in

Prudentius' text, "a combination of the epic and lyric which

can almost be described as a ballad."(16) Another Prudentian

text in lyric measures, the Cathemerinon XII provoked

Jean-Louis Charlet to speak of the mixture of lyric,

allegorical, epic, tragic, and idyllic elements, producing

what he calls, borrowing Brozek's term, a Pindaric

quality(17).

The mixture of genres, however, would be merely academic,

were it not for the sensational, violent subject matter,

which is by definition unendurable. Herbert Musurillo

expresses a general discomfort when he tries to deal with

the accusation that martyrdom is a psychotic state:

...surely it is to go to excess to speak of the

'martyr psychosis' and the masochistic phenomenon

of early Christianity(18).

Fantasies involving mutilation, pain, sadism, and death

penetrate the poems, as martyr after martyr endures

unbearable torture. Avid for specific detail, Prudentius

expresses his regret, in the opening poem of the

Peristephanon, that truly bloody details are unavailable for

the carmen triumphalis of Hilarius(19):

haec loquentes obruuntur mille poenis martyres;

nexibus manus utrasque flexus involvit rigor,

et chalybs adtrita colla gravibus ambit circulis.

o vetustatis silentis obsoleta oblivio!

invidentur ista nobis fama et ipsa extinguitur.

chartulas blasphemus olim nam satelles abstulit,

ne tenacibus libellis erudita saecula

ordinem, tempus modumque passionis proditum

dulcibus linguis per aures posterorum spargerent. (ll. 70-78)

At these words the martyrs are overwhelmed with a

thousand tortures. Stiff fetters curve round

their two hands and clasp them in their grip, and

heavy rings of iron surround and chafe their

necks. Alas for what is forgotten and lost to

knowledge in the silence of the old time! We are

denied the facts about these matters, the very

tradition is destroyed, for long ago a reviling

soldier of the guard took away the records, lest

generations taught by documents that held the

memory fast should make public the details, the

time and manner of their martyrdom, and spread

them abroad in sweet speech for posterity to hear.

However, Prudentius' martyrs endure pain and death not

merely with conventional Stoic fortitude(20), but with joy,

a sense of play, and in several instances, among which

Peristephanon X is the most elaborate, with a loquacity that

is simultaneously stunning and disturbing.

For them, torture is sport and pain is pleasure. They

deliver speeches of great length, while parts of their

bodies are cut, burned, whipped, and amputated, in scenes

that seem designed to illustrate Wordsworth's contention

that verse is a kind of pharmakon, enabling readers or

listeners to endure what they could not bear to see or hear

in the real world(21).

In Peristephanon V, for example, Vincent grows laetior

(l. 125) as he is torn to pieces:

Ridebat haec miles dei

manus cruentas increpans

quod fixa non profundius

intraret artus ungula.

But the soldier of God laughed at these commands,

rebuking the blood-stained hands because the claw

thrust into him did not enter more deeply into his

body.

When he is taken from the pit, his followers wander with

their kisses over the double rows made in his body by the

claws, joyfully licking the purple gore:

ille ungularum duplices

sulcos pererrat osculis,

hic purpurantem corporis

gaudet cruorem lambere. (ll. 337-340)

One covers with kisses the double cuts made by the

claws, another eagerly licks the red gore on the

body.

In Peristephanon XI, Prudentius varies the representation

of dismemberment by describing a painting(22) that depicts

Hippolytus' death, with a catalogue of bodily parts, and the

martyr's fellow Christians soaking up the blood from the

sand:

Ille caput niveum conplectitur ac reverandam

canitiem molli confovet in gremio;

hic umeros truncasque manus et bracchia et ulnas

et genua et crurum fragmina nuda legit.

Palliolis etiam bibulae siccantur harenae,

ne quis in infecto pulvere ros maneat.

Si quis et in sudibus recalenti aspergine sanguis

insidet, hunc omnem spongia pressa rapit. (ll. 137-144)

One clasps the snowy head, cherishing the

venerable white hair on his loving breast, while

another picks up the shoulders, the severed hands,

arms, elbows, knees, bare fragments of legs. With

their garments also they wipe dry the soaking

sand, so that no drop shall remain to dye the

dust; and wherever blood adheres to the spikes on

which its warm spray fell, they press a sponge on

it and carry it all away.

When the executioner approaches Agnes, in Peristephanon

XIV, she greets him as a savage lover, more welcome than a

delicate, perfumed young man; she promises to respond

eagerly to the full, vigorous thrust of his sword between

her breasts:

exulto, talis quod potius venit

vaesanus atrox turbidus armiger,

quam si veniret languidus ac tener

mollisque ephebus tinctus aromate,

qui me pudoris funere perderet.

hic, hic amator iam, fateor, placet:

ibo inruentis gressibus obviam,

nec demorabor vota calentia;

ferrum in papillas omne recepero

pectusque ad imum vim gladii traham. (ll. 69-78)

"I rejoice that there comes a man like this, a

savage, cruel, wild man-at-arms, rather than a

listless, soft, womanish youth bathed in perfume,

coming to destroy me with the death of my honour.

This lover, this one at last, I confess it,

pleases me. I shall meet his eager steps half-way

and not put off his hot desires. I shall welcome

the whole length of his blade into my bosom,

drawing the sword-blow to the depths of my

breast."

This is the kind of detail that provoked Fontaine and others

to invoke the term "Mannerism." The art of rhetoric,

however, rather than the plastic arts, may account for more

of what goes on in Prudentius' verse.

When panegyrists claimed saints' lives as their material,

Delehaye points outs: "l'€loquence s'empare d'un tháme

nouveau."(23) For Christian poets, then, saints' lives offer

a new subject for an ancient discipline -- Graeco-Roman

rhetoric -- as Walther implies when he describes Romanus as

ein beredter Bekenner des christlichen Glaubens. Prudentius

shows none of the guilt about using classical rhetoric that

penetrates the texts of Jerome and Augustine, perhaps

because he sees literary ramifications in the Eusebian

proposition of "the empire as a providential preparation for

the unity of mankind in Christ."(24) By exploiting pagan

rhetoric, then, he may adapt it to Christian uses, and he

may also surpass it.

On the basis of this hypothesis, violence, for example,

becomes more appropriate and comprehensible. Certainly

Virgil's description of the death of Priam should satisfy

most appetites for Grausamkeit(25). Fascination with the

horrible had characterized the Roman declamatory tradition

and the poems of Lucan and the plays of Seneca reflect that

tradition(26). Four centuries later, Prudentius' use of

violence is not necessarily a violation of classical

decorum, as Miceislaus Brozek suggests when he points out

that several passages in Quintillian might have served as

models for Prudentius' use of gruesome detail(27).

According to the statistics compiled by Henderson, only 20

percent of the lines in the Peristephanon qualify as in some

sense violent(28). More important, he suggests, is the

rhetorical, thematic function of the violence: "Prudentius'

intention is clear; the greater the mortification of the

flesh in all its terrifying details, the greater the triumph

of the spirit."(29) The violence, then, is not necessarily a

sign of a Spanish fondness for "excess," which for some

readers is a word synonymous with "rhetorical."(30) Instead,

Prudentius' rhetorical excess is part of a deliberate, even

programatic attempt to provide his subject matter with what

Milton, in a similar predicament, called "answerable style."

Traditionally, the defense of literary excess relies on

matching words either to subject matter, or to feelings.

For example, Roland Barthes defends the stylistic excesses

of late eighteenth-century writers by insisting that their

words matched the events themselves. In addition, he insists

upon the difficulty of later times perceiving the function

of rhetorical amplification:

The Revolution was in the highest degree one of

those great occassions when truth, through the

bloodshed that it costs, becomes so weighty that

its expression demands the very forms of

historical amplification. Revolutionary writing

was the one and only grand gesture commensurate

with the daily presence of the guillotine. What

today seems turgid was then no more than

life-size(31).

On the other hand, Henri Peyre defends the inflationary

tendencies of Romantic rhetoric on the basis of the need to

express an excess of feeling:

Even when they resorted to inflated language or to

exclamatory rhetoric to convey an experience they

deemed unique, they were trying to render

passionately and exaltedly what they had

experienced ardently(32).

Prudentius' poems offer an opportunity for both defenses;

the poet attempts to fabricate a style analogous both to the

divine nature of the events related, and to the poet's

feelings about his subject matter(33).

Even his prosody shows signs of deliberate excess. The

number and variety of metrical forms he uses is at least

remarkable, if not excessive; the Praefationes, for example,

offer alternating iambic trimeter and dimeter, iambic

trimeter, and aeolian verse (aesclepedians and glyconics).

The Cathemerinon offers hypercatalectic dactylic trimeter,

Phalaceans, asclepedians, catalectic diambs, iambic

trimeter, sapphics, catalectic trochees, and catalectic

anapestic dimeters. The variety among the fourteen poems

that make up the Peristephanon is equally impressive.

Prudentius' prosodic self-consciousness also asserts

itself in a cadenza on Saint Vincent, inserted into

Peristephanon IV, where he exceeds the number of syllables

permissible in a Sapphic line, in order to introduce the

name of Saturn(34). In the process of violating the rules,

he fastidiously calls attention to his transgression, and

claims that his subject matter is sufficient excuse for what

otherwise would be blameworthy and, in effect, in bad taste:

quattuor posthinc superest virorum

nomen extolli renuente metro,

quos Saturninos memorat vocatos

prisca vetustas.

carminis leges amor aureorum

nominum parvi facit, et loquendi

cura de sanctis vitiosa non est

nec rudis umquam. (ll. 161-68)

It still remains to exalt the names of four though

my meter refuses. Old times of long ago tell that

they were each called Saturninus. Love of their

golden names makes light of the rules of verse,

and concern to speak of the saints is never

incorrect nor barbarous.

By divine literary standards, Prudentius insists that his

measure is "full," or "complete," and appropriate for the

heavenly book, to be explicated at the right moment:

plenus est artis modus adnotatas

nominum formas recitare Christo,

quas tenet caeli liber explicandus

tempore justo. (ll. 169-172)

The measure of art is full if we recite to Christ

the forms of the names as they are written down

and contained in the book of heaven which shall be

opened at the due time.

Prudentius' self-conscious use of images of the book is

one of several ways in which he implies that his

achievements will be judged in terms of, rather than in

spite of his rhetorical propensities. In several poems of

the Peristephanon, rhetoric itself becomes not merely a

tool, but the central subject matter(35). In addition to

Romanus, at least three other Prudentian martyrs provide

examples of self-conscious, even heroic, rhetorical

competence. In Peristephanon III, for example, composed in

hypercatalectic dactylic trimeters, St. Eulalia's major use

of language is to provoke her tormentors. When they respond

by tearing her sides, she triumphantly calls the torn flesh

"God's writing."(36)

Nec mora, carnifices gemini

iuncea pectora dilacerant

et latus ungula virgineum

pulsat utrimque et ad ossa secat

Eulalia numerante notas.

"Scriberis ecce mihi, domine.

Quam iuvat hos apices legere,

qui tua, Christe, tropaea notant.

Nomen et ipsa sacrum loquitur

purpura sanguinis eliciti." (ll. 131-140)

In a moment, two executioners are tearing her slim

breast, the claw striking her girlish sides and

cutting to the bone, while Eulalia counts the

marks. "See, Lord," she says, "thy name is being

written on me. How I love to read these letters,

for they record thy victories, O Christ, and the

very scarlet of the blood that is drawn speaks the

holy name."

Even more self-consciously involved with images drawn

from books and writing, although more involved with literal

elements, Peristephanon IX, composed in alternating dactylic

hexameters and iambic senarii, depicts the martyrdom of

Saint Cassian, the magister litterarum of Imola. The poem

begins with Prudentius praying at the saint's tomb, looking

at a picture of Cassian's martyrdom:

Erexi ad caelum faciem, stetit obvia contra

fucis colorum picta imago martyris

plagas mille gerens, totos lacerata per artus,

ruptam minutis praeferens punctis cutem.

innumeri circum pueri, miserabile visu,

confossa parvis membra figebant stilis,

unde pugillares soliti percurrere ceras

scholare murmur adnotantes scripserant. (ll. 10-16)

I lifted my face towards heaven, and there stood

confronting me a picture of the martyr painted in

colours, bearing a thousand wounds, all his parts

torn, and showing his skin broken with tiny

pricks. Countless boys round about (a pitiful

sight!) were stabbing and piercing his body with

the little styles with which they used to run over

their wax tablets, writing down the droning

lessons in school.

Since the children and their weapons are small, the wounds

they make are small, but sufficient in number to bring about

the death of Cassian.

A verger who happens to be present proceeds to relate the

story to the grateful poet, assuring him that the event

represented in the picture has been tradita libris, in good

faith, and is no inanis aut anilis fabula. Cassian's skill

was not in composing poetry or prose, but in the physical,

necessarily tedious act of writing:

praefuerat studiis puerilibus et grege multo

saeptus magister litterarum sederat,

verba notis brevibus conprendere cuncta peritus,

raptimque punctis dicta praepetibus sequi (ll. 21-24).

He had been in charge of a school for boys and sat

as a teacher of reading and writing with a great

throng around him, and he was skilled in putting

every word in short signs and following speech

quickly with swift pricks on the wax.

When Cassian refused to worship pagan gods, he was taken

from the classroom, and then handed over to those whom he

used to beat, donetur ipsis verberator parvulis (l. 38).

With the roles reversed, he now becomes the object of sport

to his pupils:

ut libet inludant, lacerent inpune manusque

tinguant magistri feriatas sanguine.

ludum discipulis volupe est ut praebeat ipse

doctor severus quos nimis coercuit. (ll. 39-42)

"Let them make sport of him as they please, give

them leave to mangle him at will, let them give

their hands a holiday and dip them in their

master's blood. It is a pleasant thought that the

strict teacher should himself furnish sport to the

pupils he has too much held down."

His former pupils hurl writing instruments at him, and as he

heroically encourages them to redouble their efforts, they

ironically describe themselves as paying him back in kind:

non potes irasci quod scribimus; ipse iubebas

numquam quietum dextera ut ferret stylum.... (ll. 73-74)

Exerce imperium, ius est tibi plectere culpam,

si quis tuorum te notavit segnius.

Talia ludebant pueri per membra magistra... (ll. 81-83)

"You cannot be angry with us for writing; it was

you who bade us never let our hand carry away an

idle style...Use your authority; you have power to

punish a fault, if any of your pupils has written

carelessly on you."

Cassian, however, is not the most satisfying rhetorical

hero, since the pupils, not the martyr, get to "play," and

they also get the last word in the exchange.

St. Lawrence offers a better model for the rhetor as

hero; in the iambic dimeters of Peristephanon II, play,

dogma, and literary self-consciousness combine to produce a

martyr with an unusual sensibility. At one point in the

poem, in response to a lengthy harangue against materialism

that Lawrence has just delivered, and which the saint has

supported by an allegorical reading of a group of beggars,

the angry prefect exclaims that he is being mocked :

"ridemur," exclamat fremens (furens A)

praefectus, "ac miris modis

per tot figuras ludimur:

et vivit insanum caput!

inpune tantas, furcifer,

strofas cavillo mimico

te nexuisse existimas,

dum scurra saltas fabulam?

Concinna visa urbanitas

tractare nosmet ludicris?

egon cachinnis venditus

acroma festivum fui? (ll. 313-324)

"He is mocking us," cries the prefect, mad with

rage, "making wonderful sport of us with all this

allegory. And yet the madman lives! Think you,

rascal, to get off with contriving such trickeries

with your comedian's quibbling and theatrical

buffoonery? Do you think it neat pleasantry to

make a butt of me? Have you made your guffaws out

of me and turned me into a merry pice of

entertainment?

That he is laughing at his tormentor becomes theatrically

clear, when, on the gridiron, Lawrence makes jokes well

enough to serve as Curtius' example of medieval kitchen

humor(37):

"converte partem corporis

satis crematum iugiter,

et fac periclum, quid tuus

Vulcanus ardens egerit."

praefectus inverti iubet.

tunc ille: "coctum est, devora,

et experimentum cape

sit crudum an assum suavius. (ll. 401-08)

"This part of my body has been burned long enough;

turn it round and try what your hot god of fire

has done." So the prefect orders him to be turned

about, and then, "It is done," says Lawrence; "eat

it up, try whether it is nicer raw or roasted."

Lawrence's sense of humor in this poem is one of the items

that offended Pierre de Labriolle(38): "St. Lawrence draws

an almost ludicrous parallel between physical ills and the

ills of the soul." The pun that Lawrence makes in the

following passage, referring to morbus regius (jaundice) as

the illness from which his judge suffers, is what

particularly offended LaBriolle:

tute ipsis, qui Romam regis,

contemptor aeterni Dei,

dum daemonum sordes colis,

morbo laboras regio. (ll. 261-64)

You yourself who rule over Rome, who despise the

everlasting God, worship foul devils, are

suffering from the ruler's sickness.

The ludic element appears again, though only briefly, in

the iambic dimeters of Peristephanon V, when saint Vincent

speaks of dying as a Christian sport:

tormenta carcer ungulae

stridensque flammis lammina

atque ipsa poenarum ultima

mors christianis ludus est (61-64).

Torture, imprisonment, the claws, the hissing

red-hot plate, even to the final suffering of

death, are all mere sport to Christians.

His persecutor picks up the motif:

inpune ne nostris sibi

dis destruendis luserit. (101-104)

He shall not get off with pulling down our gods

for his amusement.

Both the torture and the tortured, then, describe their

common activity as "play."

Prudentius' tendency to attribute a ludic quality to

elaborately amplified scenes of pain and violence is

responsible for producing most of the disapproval which

LaBriolle and others, particularly those primarily

interested in Christian dogma, have expressed. However,

piety and play are not necessarily exclusive categories, as

the work of Huizinga, Rahner, Suchomski, and others has

demonstrated(39).

In the poems of Prudentius, the sense of play embraces

several elements, including athletic contest, rhetorical

contest, and laughter. Saints are traditionally represented

as God's athletes, and, in his description of Romanus, John

Chrysostom compares the martyr's efforts to those of the

Olympic athlete(40). Jacques Fontaine's richly evocative

comment that the struggle of Jacob with the angel, "vaut

aussi pour toutes les formes de l'imaginaire dans la po€sie

de Prudence," may have even wider implications than Fontaine

intended(41). Brozek also likes the analogy, and uses it to

support his argument for Prudentius as the Christian

Pindar(42).

The sense of rhetorical contest is more complex. The

primary contest in Peristephanon X is the extensive attack

on pagan religion Romanus delivers in three lengthy speeches

to his tormentor Aesclepiades(43). At the same time,

Prudentius engages in a contest with the predominantly pagan

texts and traditions from which he derives his skill and

authority, but whose beliefs he as a Christian poet must

oppose. Neither contest can be won by the strength and

competence of an individual human being, since each is

designed to demonstrate the superior efficacy and truth of

Christianity(44).

The ludic elements also fit the doctrinal purpose. Play

involving laughter as well as competition was part of Roman

declamatory training, as S.F. Bonner suggests(45), but

laughter was also interpreted as an imitation of God's

divine play, in the texts of Gregory of Nazianus, Philo,

Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine(46). According to

Gregory, God the Word plays with the world:

The Holy Word plays; with colored pictures he

decorates the whole world.

In his attempt to explicate Genesis 26.8, Philo composes an

elaborate Platonic allegory on Abimelech's discovery of the

true nature of the relationship between Isaac and Rebecca:

Moses, at all events, holiest of men, shows us

that sport and merriment is the height of wisdom,

not the sport which children of all sorts indulge

in, paying no heed to good sense, but such as is

seen in those who are now becoming grey-headed not

only in respect of age but of thoughtfulness. Do

you not observe that when he is speaking of the

man who drew directly from the well of knowledge,

listening to no other, learning through no other,

resorting to no agency whatever, he does not say

that he had a part in laughter, but that he was

laughter itself? I am speaking of Isaac, whose

name means "laughter," and whom it well befits to

sport with "patient waiting." who is called in

Hebrew "Rebecca."(47)

The transaction among Isaac, Rebecca, and Abimelech provoked

Clement of Alexander to compose verses in which the

allegorical, or at least figural potential of laughter and

play is Christianized:

Oh, what wise child's-play. It is laughter

supported by patience, and the king is the

onlooker. Happy is the spirit of those who are

patient children in Christ. That is holy play.

The paradoxical combination of youth and wisdom articulated

by Clement seems analogous with the rhetorical topos, puer

senex, to which Curtius devotes considerable attention, and

which reappears vividly in the portrayal of the infant

martyr in Peristephanon X(48).

Prudentius participates in this sense of divine laughter,

which clearly has little to do with what we normally mean by

a sense of humor. For the Christian rhetorician, engaged in

a battle against the forces of darkness, laughter expresses

power, not pleasure, and therefore becomes both a weapon and

a sign of victory. Prudentius is also capable of turning

comic material to serious purposes. For example, if

Jean-Louis Charlet is correct in locating the source for the

phrase, cantilenae suaserint (Peristephanon X. 351), then

Prudentius turned a phrase Ausonius used for the mildest

kind of humor into part of Romanus' diatribe against pagan

religion(49). For the Christian rhetorician, as Peter von

Moos has suggested, "everything written is exploitable."(50)

However, to demonstrate the full range of Prudentius'

abilities to combine play, contest, violence, poetry, and

Christian doctrine, one must turn to the longest of the

poems in the Peristephanon, the 1140 iambic septenarii

devoted to Romanus, whom Eusebius(51) lists among those

martyred by Galerius at Antioch in 303 AD. A combination of

hagiography, polemic, diatribe, and lyric, Peristephanon X

has generated the most exasperation and disapproval among

its professional readers(52). "It is a strange mixture of a

poem, extended beyond reason, with anti-climactic results,

the clearest case in the Peristephanon that Prudentius could

fail to see that the half may be better than the whole."(53)

Charles Witke, perhaps the most tolerant of Prudentius'

American readers, suggests that the length and detail of

some of the texts, as well as, "his relish for grotesque

injury in the Peristephanon," account for the difficulties

readers have experienced(54). Prudentius' excess, then, is

the problem.

The answer to the problem lies in the subject matter and

the poet's relationship to it, as Prudentius indicates at

the beginning of Peristephanon X. Anticipating the major

miracle in the poem -- Romanus' ability to continue speaking

even after his tongue has been cut out -- Prudentius offers

an initial declaration of incompetence, which also provides

the first example in the poem of the poet's ability to make

a conventional topos into an integral part of the poem's

theme:

Romane, Christi fortis adsertor Dei,

elinguis oris organum fautor move,

largire comptum carmen infantissimo,

fac ut tuarum mira laudum concinam.

nam scis et ipse posse mutos eloqui. (ll. 1-5)

Romanus, stout defender of the divine Christ,

grant thy favour and stir up the tongue within my

speechless mouth, bountifully bestow graceful song

on the mutest of men and enable me to sing the

wonders of thy glory; for thou knowest, thyself

too, that the dumb can speak.

Prudentius now extends and complexifies the

inability-topos by combining it with what will become the

motif of milkiness, spiritali lacte, to reinforce the image,

begun in line 3 by infantissimo, of the poet as baby, a

figure that combines both innocence and incompetence:

sic noster haerens sermo lingua debili

balbutit et modis laborat absonis,

sed si superno rore respergas iecur

et spiritali lacte pectus inriges,

vox inpeditos rauca laxabit sonos. (ll. 11-15)

So my speech sticks and stammers with feeble

tongue and labours in inharmonious measures; but

if thou sprinkle my heart with the dew from on

high and flood my breast with the milk of the

spirit, my hoarse voice will unloose the sounds

which are now obstructed.

For the powerless, of course, Christ, potens facundiae, is

the solution; therefore Prudentius declares Christ to be his

tongue(55):

evangelista scripsit ipsum talia

praecepta Messian dedisse apostolis:

"nolite verba, cum sacramentum meum

erit canendum, providenter quaerere;

ego inparatis quae loquantur suggeram."

sum mutus ipse, sed potens facundiae

mea lingua Christus luculente disserent. (ll. 16-22)

The Evangelist has written that the Messiah

himself instructed the apostles in this wise:

"Seek not with forethought for words when my

mystic doctrine is to be proclaimed. I shall

furnish the unready with what they shall say." In

myself I am dumb, but Christ is master of

eloquence; he will be my tongue and discourse

excellently.

Here Prudentius turns part of Mathew X.18-19 into verse,

without giving the full message, which is made explicit in

Matthew X.20: Nos enim vos estis qui loquimini, sed

Spiritus Patris vestri qui loquitur in vobis.

The enemy in the perpetual contest is represented now by

the image of a wounded snake, suggested by the recollection

of the devil in the process of being defeated by Christ:

Sic vulneratus anguis ictu spiculi

ferrum remordet et dolore saevior

quassando pressis immoratur dentibus,

hastile fixum sed manet profundius

nec cassa sentit morsuum pericula. (ll. 26-30)

Just so a serpent wounded by stroke of spear-point

bites back at the steel and keeps on shaking it in

the grip of its teeth, growing more savage with

the pain, but the lance has pierced too deeply and

stays fast, unconscious of the futile danger of

the bites.

Perhaps no figure is more familiar in Christian doxologies

than that of the evil snake, however Prudentius' use of the

figure, in connection with the mouth, both in this poem and

in the Harmatigenia, has a special significance. It provides

a negative, perverse mirror image for the creative power of

the Logos(56). In the Hamartigenia, the image is

accompanied by what Prudentius represents as a perverse

sexual union by the vipers, whose oral method of

impregnation destroys the three-tongued male of the species:

Si licet ex ethicis quidquam praesumere vel si

de physicis exempli aliquid, sic vipera, ut aiunt,

dentibus emoritur fusae per viscera prolis,

mater morte sua, non sexu fertilis aut de

concubitu distenta uterum, sed cum calet igni

percita femineo, moriturum obscena maritum

ore sitit patulo. Caput inserit ille trilingue

coniugis in fauces atque oscula fervidus intrat

insinuanas oris coitu genitale venenum. (ll. 581-89)

If we may draw on the moralists for anything or

take an instance from natural history, it is thus,

the say, that the viper perishes by the teeth of

the progeny that is brought forth through her

flesh. She becomes a mother by her own death; she

does not bear her young by an organ of sex, nor

does her womb swell from inttercourse, but when

she burns with the excitement of the female's heat

the lewd beast opens her mouth wide in thrist for

a mate that is doomed. He puts his three-tongued

head into his spouse's jaws, eagerly entering her

alluring mouth and inserting his baneful seed by

an oral union.

At the moment of highest passion, the female decapitates the

male:

Nupta voluptatis vi saucia mordicus haustum

frangit amatoris blanda inter foedera guttur

infusaque bibit caro pereunte salivas. (ll. 190-192)

The bride, smitten with the strong pleasure, takes

her lover's head between her teeth and breaks his

neck with a bite in the middle of the fond

compact, drinking in the injected slaver while her

dear one dies.

The female, however, does not last long, but dies in the act

of giving birth, as her children tear her belly apart to

escape from her body. Prudentius continues the simile,

describing the soul imbibing evil from the devil, thereby

producing countless sins.

No such graphic scenes of copulation and birth occur in

Peristephanon X, but the matrix of serpents, sexuality, and

procreation recurs several times(57). The image of the

serpent reappears a few lines later, applied to Galerius

persecuting Christians with his "royal mouth":

haec ille serpens ore dictat regio...(l. 36)

It was the serpent that uttered these words by the

imperial lips...

Opposed to the royal mouth, however, Romanus defends

himself against Asclepiades, ore libero (l. 96), provoking

the king's representative to torture him. Because of

Romanus' rank, the rack cannot be used; instead he is

lashed. Romanus takes the event as material for an ex

tempore rhetorical display, in this case on the nature of

nobility of blood: generosa Christi secta nobilitat viros,

"it is Christ's noble teaching that enobles men" (l. 125).

Furthermore, Romanus asserts that the root of true nobility

begins, genealogically, Dei ab ore, from God's mouth, and he

urges his tormentor to continue the torture, to ennoble the

victim: incumbe membris, tortor, ut sim nobilis (l. 138).

Romanus continues to develop the topic(58), insisting that

all symbols of earthly nobility pass away:

Nonne cursim transeunt

fasces secures sella praetexta et toga

licta tribunal et trecenta insignia

quibus tumetis, moxque detumescitis? (ll. 142-146)

Do not they pass away quickly, the rods, the axes,

the chair of state, the bordered robe, the lictor,

the judgement-seat, and all the thousand badges of

honour on the strength of which you swell with

pride, and then fall flat?

At this point, Romanus begins attacking pagan religion as

ludicrous, not in the sense of holy play, but as vulgar and

absurd. The Lupercal, for example, where each celebrant runs

naked, like a slave, puellas verbere ictas ludicro (l.

165)(59), is vilissimum.

The sequence of nudity and women at least partially

generates the next part of Romanus' speech, an attack on the

sexual profligacy of pagan gods, their base progeny, and the

deceptions they practise on their deluded wives:

"Iubes, relictis patris et Christi sacris

ut tecum adorem feminas mille ac mares,

deas deosque deque sexu duplici,

natos nepotes abnepotes editos

et tot stuprorum sordidam prosapiam.

Nubunt puellae, saepe luduntur dolis,

amasionum conprimuntur fraudibus,

incesta feruent, furta moechorum calent,

fallit maritus, odit uxor paelicem,

deos catenae colligant adulteros. (176-185)

You bid me abandon the worship of the Father and

Christ, and along with you venerate a thousand

males nd females, goddesses and gods and children,

grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren of both

sexes born to them, and the base progeny of their

many unchastities. The girls marry, or often they

are made the sport of trickery and violted by

dishonest lovers, lewdness and stratagems of

paramours go briskly on, a husband is unfaithful

and a wife hates a mistress, chains bind

adulterous gods.

Plato, of course, had voiced the same misgivings about the

behavior of the Homeric gods, but Prudentius' Romanus goes

to much greater lengths, with much more specific detail. He

attacks the homosexuality of Apollo, who corrupted the young

while they were at play:

Delphosne pergam? set vetat

corrupta ephebi fama, quem vester deus

effeminavit gymnadis licentia. (ll. 189-90)

Shall I go to Delphi? No, I am forbidden by the

spoiled of the lad on the exercise-ground, whom

your god dishonoured, taking advantage of the

freedom of the wrestling-bout.

At this point Romanus also recalls that Apollo's lover

Hyacinth was accidentally killed while at play, occisum

gravi/ disco (ll. 191-192).

Moving from homosexuality to castration -- a topic to

which he returns towards the end of the poem, significantly,

after his tongue has been cut out -- Romanus cites the

emasculation of Attis (ll. 196 ff.) as another abhorrent

pagan myth:

an ad Cybebes ibo lucum pineum?

puer sed obstat gallus ob libidinem

per triste vulnus perque sectum dedecus

ab impudicae tutus amplexu deae,

per multa Matri sacra plorandus spado. (ll. 196-200)

Or shall I go to Cybebe's pinegrove? No, for there

stands in my way the lad who emasculated himself

because of her lust, and by a grievous wound

cutting the parts of shame saved himself from the

unchaste goddess's embrace.

From the sexual nightmare that anticipates his own

sacrificial act, Romanus turns to the ludicrous, adulterous

activities of Jupiter. In the theater, Romanus asserts,

Jupiter's actions are a source of laughter that has nothing

to do with what is sacred:

cygnus stuprator peccat inter pulpita,

saltat Tonantem tauricornem ludius;

spectator horum pontifex summus sedet

ridesque et ipse, nec negando diluis

cum fama tanti polluatur numinis. (ll. 221-25)

The ravisher swan does his evil deed on the stage,

a player dances the part of the Thunderer with the

bull's honrs, while you, the high priest, sit and

watch these things and laugh at them yourself, and

never discredit them by denying their truth,

though the good name of this great deity is

soiled.

The Roman stage offers Venus as a meretrix, (l. 228)

lustfully mourning for Adonis, Ganymede as a symbol of

Jove's perversity, Ceres searching for the daughter raped by

a divinity, and Hercules made into a ludibrium (l. 240) by

his passion(60).

Faunus, Priapus, nymphs at the bottom of frog-ponds,

divinitatis ius in algis vilibus (l. 245), all make laughter

a necessity:

nonne pulmonem movet

derisus istas intuens ineptias,

quas vinolentae somniis fingunt anus? (ll. 248-250)

Does not derisive laughter shake your sides at the

contemplation of these absurdities, the phantasies

of tipsy old wives' dreams?

Romanus continues his diatribe, attacking the absurd

worship of animals (ll. 256-258) and vegetables (ll.

259-60), as well as the practise of worshipping statues.

Developing the Biblical injunction against worshipping

statues, Romanus attacks pagan gods, because they are made

of metal utensils, "broken and melted":

Non eruescis, stulte, pago dedite,

te tanta semper perdisse obsonia,

quae dis ineptus obtulisti talibus,

quos trulla pelvis cantharus sartagines

fracta et liquata contulerunt vascula? (ll. 296-300)

Do you not blush, foolish man, devoted to pagan

worship, to think that you have always wasted all

those victuals that you have absurdly offered to

gods like these, made out of an assemblage of

ladles, basins, tankards, frying-pans, broken

vessels melted down?

Here he goes beyond Commodian, the "black sun"(61) of early

Christian poetry, who had reworked the Biblical injunction

into unscannable verse:

Nolite, inquid, adorare deos inanes

De manibus vestris factos ex ligno vel auro(62).

"Do not", he said, " worship empty gods made

by your own hands out of wood or gold."

Romanus now turns from ridiculing pagan religion to

deliver a sermon of almost one hundred lines on the nature

of true, Christian belief. In response to Romanus' tirade

and doxology, Asclepiades delivers a thirty-line declaration

of outrage, accusing Romanus of upholding a new-fangled

religion and of simultaneously violating political and

religious authority, ore foedans impio (l. 400).

When Aesclepiades threatens to make him pay with his

blood for refusing to honor the ancient gods, Romanus

refuses, and the soldiers plow lines in the saint's body

until the white bones show:

Scindunt utrumque milites taeterrimi

mucrone hiulco pensilis latus viri,

sulcant per artus longa tractim vulnera,

obliqua rectis, recta transversis secant

et iam retectis pectus albet ossibus. (ll. 451-55)

The foul soldiers cut both his sides with gashing

sword as he hangs, ploughing wounds in long lines

over his body and making criss-cross cuts, till

his breast shows white where the bones are laid

bare.

Claiming to feel no pain, Romanus continues to defy his

tormentors, arguing that what he feels is less than the pain

felt by those with fever, arthritis, gout, as well as less

painful than than that inflicted by doctors in their

attempts to cure physical ills. He describes in detail his

own torture and the medical practice of lancing, to prepare

for a kind of Socratic paradox by means of which the

torturer is the healer:

Putate ferrum triste chirurgos meis

inferre costis, quod secat salubriter.

Non est amarum quo reformatur salus.

Videntur isti carpere artus tabidos,

sed dant medellam rebus intus vividis. (ll. 501-505)

Fancy that the surgeons are putting the grim knife

to my ribs and it is cutting me for the good of my

health; that by which health is restored is not

vexatious. These men appear to be rending my

wasting limbs, but they give healing to the living

substance within.

Romanus now modulates to an attack on the flesh and its

pleasures, appealing to the carnifex to "heal" him by

leaving nothing for the devil to cut off: quod tyrannus

amputet (l. 520), continuing the motif of amputation(63).

Drawing from Isaiah xxiv.4, and Revelations vi.13-14, his

vision of the end of all things includes the vision of the

book:

quandoque caelum ceu liber plicabitur. (l. 536)

One day the heavens will be rolled up like a book.

In recognition of his opponent's rhetorical superiority,

Asclepiades becomes so angry that he wants to cut into

Romanus' very words:

verbositatis ipse rumpatur locus,

scaturrientes perdat ut loquacitas

sermonis auras perforatis follibus,

quibus sonandi nulla lex ponit modum;

ipsa et loquentis verba torqueri volo. (551-555)

"Shatter the seat of his verbosity, puncture the

bellows so that his loquacity may lose the gushing

winds of words, since no law puts a stop to their

sounding. I will have the very words tortured even

as he speaks."

After his face has been slashed, anticipating the remarks

Shakespeare's Antony makes at Caesar's funeral, Romanus

asserts that the results are in his favor, since the

multiple wounds give him multiple mouths:

grates tibi, o praefecte, magnas debeo,

quod multa pandens ora iam Christum loquor.

artabat ampli nominis praeconium

meatus unus, inpar ad laudes Dei. (ll. 562-565)

"Much thanks I owe to you, sir, because now I open

many mouth to speak of Christ. The single passage

used to restrict the publishing of his mighty

name; it was too little for the praises of God.

Romanus' supreme rhetorical ability to make something good

out of everything bad continues, when the increasingly

furious Asclepiades decides to burn his victim, to humiliate

him, as Christ was humiliated on the cross. Romanus takes

the cue, and argues that Christ's humiliation was a symbolic

act of sublimity; rather than new-fangled, it is eternal.

To prove the strength of his position, Romanus now asks

to examine a child, to hear from the harmless infant's

"milky mouth" the truth of Christianity:

...ardens experiri innoxiam

lactantis oris indolem (ll. 666-67)...

...desiring strongly to make trial of the

innocent suckling's native thought...

Asclepiades agrees, and orders a child, nec olim lacte

depulsum brought forth to be examined(64). Paradigmatically

pious, the child gives the answers which Prudentius tells us

were imbibed at his mother's twin fountains:

ego, ut gemellis uberum de fontibus

lac parvus hausi, Christum et hausi credere (684-685)

And I in drinking as a babe the milk from the twin

founts of her breasts drank in also the belief in

Christ.

Infuriated once again, Asclepiades orders that the child be

beaten; when the child cries out with thirst, he is

castigated by his mother, in whose speech the motif of milk

reappears, now mingled with blood and honey, in a passage

that recalls both for the child and for the readers of the

poem, the Massacre of the Innocents:

Hic hic bibendus, nate, nunc tibi est calix,

mille in Bethleem quem biberunt parvuli;

oblita lactis et papillarum immemor

aetas amaris, mox deinde dulcibus

refecta poclis mella sumpsit sanguinis. (ll. 736-40)

This, this, my son, is the cup you now must drink.

A thousand little ones in Bethlehem drank of it;

forgetting their milk, with no thought of the

breast, their life was restored by bitter cups

that turned to sweet, partaking of blood that was

changed into honey.

Adressing him now as fortis puer, she reminds him that he

has also received sapientia, as she weaves the ludic motif

together with the idea of sacrifice, reminding the child

that his play was learning Christian doctrine. In the

Bible, she reminds him, Isaac stretching his neck at the

altar prepared by his father is the major model for infant

sacrifice:

Scis, saepe dixi, cum docenti adluderes

et garrulorum signa verborum dares,

Isaac fuisse parvulum patri unicum,

qui, cum immolandus aram et ensem cerneret,

ultro sacranti colla praebuerit seni. (ll. 746-750)

You know, for I have often told you, when you used

to turn my lessons into play and prattle sounds

that stood for words, that Isaac was a little boy,

his father's only child, and how, when he was to

be sacrificed and saw the altar and the sword, of

his own will he stretched out his neck to the old

man who was making the offering.

Her next Biblical illustration is taken from II Maccabees

vii, where children again died before their mother's

eyes(65). Like a typical Prudentian speaker, she provides

specific, graphic detail for the "contest," certamen (l.

753), which she paraphrases:

Comam cutemque verticis revulserat

a fronte tortor, nuda testa ut tegmine

cervicem adusque dehonestaret caput.... (ll. 761-763)

The torturer tore away the hair and skin of the

head from the brow backwards, so that the bare

skull uncovered down to the neck should dishonour

it.

Anticipating Romanus' own fate, the child's mother

describes the amputation of the tongue of one of the

Biblical martyrs, allowing the Maccabean mother to compose

an encomiastic series of apostrophes to the the tongue,

culminating in addressing the tongue as redemptrix prima

membrorum omnium, an analogue for Christ himself:

Linguam tyrannus amputari iusserat

uni ex ephebis; mater aiebat: 'Satis

iam parta nobis gloria est, pars optima

deo immolatur ecce nostri corporis,

digna est fidelis lingua, quae sit hostia.

Interpres animi, enuntiatrix sensuum,

cordis ministra, praeco operti pectoris,

prima offeratur in sacramentum necis

et sit redemptrix prima membrorum omnium. (ll. 765-774)

The oppressor commanded the tongue of one of the

young lads to be cut out, and his mother said:

"Now we have won glory enough, for lo, the best

part of our body is being sacrificed to God. The

faithful tongue is worthy to be an offering. The

mind's spokesman, which declares our sentiments,

the heart's servant, which proclaims the silent

thoughts of our breast, let it be offered first

for the celebration of the mystery of death, and

be the first to redeem all the members.

Responsive to his mother's exhortation, laetus, the child

laughs at the blows that fall upon him, provoking

Asclepiades to torture and decapitate him. As the

executioner strikes her baby's neck, the blood pours over

his ecstatic mother, and the docta mulier sings Psalm

CXV.6-7 (CXVI.15-16 AV), then catches the blood (ll.

841-845) and

palpantis oris exciperet globum. (l. 844)

In an ironic reworking of the motif of milk, then, the

maternal flow undergoes a grim reversal, and the pectoris

nectar (l. 783) is returned as a flood of blood(66). The

child, then, is the ultimate puer senex, a Christ-like

martyr, whose mother, like Mary, is left with the remains of

her son; unlike Mary, however, she is left not with the

body, but with the blood of her son.

The death of the child may also be an example of the

contest with pagan texts in which Prudentius imagined

himself to be engaged, if the scene is regarded as an

attempt to "correct" a scene in Statius Thebaid. Mourning

the death of the infant Opheltes, killed by a snake,

Hypsipyle describes her milk as a barren, unfortunate rain

falling from her breasts upon the dead child's wounds, and

she attributes the calamity to the gods:

sic equidem luctus solabar et ubera parvo

iam materna dabam, cui nunc venit inritus orbae

lactis et infelix in vulnera liquitur imber.

nosco Deos... (V.617-620).

For so indeed did I console my griefs, and gave

the babe a mother's breasts, where now in my

bereavement the milk flows in vain and falls in

barren drops upon thy wounds. 'Tis the gods' work

I see..(67).

Where Hypsipyle blames the gods, Prudentius' Christian

mother thanks the one God, in an example of intertextuality

that anticipates Dante's use of Rifeo to correct Vergil's

diis aliter visum(68).

Prudentius now returns to Romanus' predicament. When the

pyre being prepared for him is extinguished by rain,

Asclepiades becomes enraged that his victim seems to be

turning punishment into play:

"Quousque tandem summus hic nobis magus

inludet", inquit, "Thessalorum carmine

poenam peritus vertere in ludibrium?" (ll. 868-870)

"How long," he asked, "is this great sorcerer to

make game of us through his skill in turning

punishment to mockery with a Thessalian spell?

If quousque tandem is intended to invoke the opening of the

first oration against Catiline, then Cicero is both invoked

and defeated in this passage, since Asclepiades in the

analogy is parallel to the most famous Roman orator. If the

suggestion that Romanus is parallel to Catiline weakens the

impulse to draw the parallel, however, the saint's ability

to speak after his tongue is cut out may rekindle the

enthusiasm. Since Cicero, in the process of being

assassinated, said nothing after losing his tongue, the

comparison with Romanus' tongueless performance suggests

that the Christian speaker is superior.

Prudentius continues to ring the changes on the motif of

dismemberment; Asclepiades now expresses the desire to kill

Romanus as many times as his victim has members. To carry

out his wishes in a responsible, professional manner, he

summons a medicus, who undertakes, as his first assignment,

the task of amputating Romanus' tongue. Prudentius focuses

sharply on the extended tongue, on the scalpel as it cuts,

on the tissue being torn, and on Romanus' Stoic ability to

resist clenching his teeth or swallowing the blood:

Linguam deinde longe ab ore protrahens

scalpellum in usque guttur insertans agit.

Illo secante fila sensim singula

numquam momordit martyr aut os dentibus

conpressit artis nec cruorem sorbuit. (ll. 901-905)

Then drawing the tongue far out from the mouth he

puts his lancet inside, right down to the gullet.

While he was gradually cutting the filaments one

by one, the martyr never bit nor let his teeth

meet to close his mouth, nor swallowed blood.

The amputated tongue was a hagiographical commonplace(69),

which Prudentius also uses in the recollection of II.

Maccabees vii that occurs in Peristephanon V:

Num Maccabei martyris

linguam tyrannus erutam

raptamve pellem verticis

avibus cruentis obtulit. (ll. 533-536)

Did the oppressor offer the Maccabean martyr's

tongue to bloodthirsty birds after it was plucked

out, or the skin of the head after it was torn

out?

However, the amputated tongue was also a commonplace in

the literature of pagan philosopher-martyrs. Zeno of Elia

mutilates his inquisitor, the tyrant Nearchus, by biting off

either his ear or his nose, then biting off his own tongue

and spitting it at his tormentor, in return for which he is

pounded to death in a mortar. Diogenes Laertius tells

roughly the same story about Anaxarchus(70).

Since the pagan martyrs with whom Romanus, in a sense, is

competing, cut out their own tongues, and since Romanus

denounces self-mutilators twice in the poem, another

correction of a pagan notion may be taking place here

also(71).

Romanus, however, kingly in the purple of his own blood,

without a tongue in his head, speaks on (ll. 926 ff.),

explaining that this miraculous speech is a gift of the

creator, who can change the laws of nature, since he who

established them may violate them at will. Furthermore,

Romanus' ability to speak after his own tongue has been cut

out reinforces the validity of the miracles Christ performed

in biblical times:

Habet usitatum munus hoc divinitas,

quae vera nobis colitur in Christo et patre,

mutis loquellam, percitum claudis gradum,

surdis fruendam reddere audientiam,

donare caecis lucis insuetae diem.

Haec si quis amens fabulosa existimat,

vel ipse tute si parum fidelia

rebare pridem, vera cognoscas licet.

Habes loquentem, cuius amputaveras

linguam. Probatis cede iam miraculis. (ll. 951-960)

It is a familiar power of the true divine nature

which we worship in Christ and the Father, to

restore speech to the dumb, a quick step to the

lame, the benefit of hearing to the deaf, and give

to the blind the unwonted light of day. If any man

is fool enough to think these things are fabulous,

or if you yourself formerly judged them unworthy

of belief, you kay learn that they are real: you

have here a man speaking after you have cut his

tongue out. Yield now to miracles you have proved.

Cede infuriates Asclepiades yet once more; instead of

yielding, however, he attacks the incompetence of the doctor

who performed the mutilation. The doctor replies that

Asclepiades should look for himself, and asks for a test pig

upon whom to perform a repetition of the operation. When

Asclepiades asks whether the blood that he saw was truly

that of Romanus, the saint insists that the blood is his

own, Meus iste sanguis verus est, non bubulus (1007). Blood

now becomes a topic to be amplified, and he proceeds to

compose an attack on pagan blood-letting rites of

initiation.

First he attacks the taurobolium, with a graphic

description of the slaughtered ox and the priest who stands

below the bleeding animal, bathing in the blood and drinking

the dark gore as it rains upon his tongue:

Quin os supinat, obvias offert genas,

supponit aures, labra nares obicit,

oculos et ipsos perluit liquoribus,

nec iam palato parcit et linguam rigat,

donec cruorem totus atrum conbibat. (ll. 1036-1040)

Laying his head back he even puts his cheeks in

the way, placing his ears under it, exposing lips

and nostrils, bathing his very eyes in the stream,

not even keeping his mouth from it but wetting his

tongue, until the whole of him drinks in the dark

gore.

Prudentius' Romanus scornfully describes the blood-smeared

priest standing before the devotees of Mithras and the Magna

Mater, an absurd object of worship, visu horridus (l. 1043),

and then proceeds to attack hecatombs, centena ferro cum

cadunt animalia, when so many animals are slaughtered that

the worshippers seem in danger of drowning in blood:

vix ut cruentis augures natatibus

possint meare per profundum sanguinis. (ll. 1054-55)

So that the augurs almost have to swim to make

their way through the sea of blood?

Modulating from this sardonic attack on mutilating

animals, Romanus turns to self-mutilation, attacking the

pagan practice of castration, extending his earlier diatribe

against the ritual (ll. 196 ff.) with a routine on the

indeterminancy of the resultant sexuality:

ast hic metenda dedicat genitalia,

numen reciso mitigans ab inguine

offert pudendum semivir domum deae;

illam revulsa masculini germinis

vena effluenti pascit auctam sanguine.

uterque sexus sanctitati displicet,

medium retentat inter alternum genus,

mas esse cessat ille, nec fit femina.

felix deorum mater inberbes sibi

parat ministros levibus novaculis. (1066-1075)

Another makes the sacrifice of his genitals;

appeasing the goddess by mutilating his loins, he

unmans himself and offers her a shameful gift; the

source of the man's seed is torn away to give her

food and increase through the flow of blood. Both

sexes are displeasing to her holiness, so he keeps

a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a

man without becoming a woman. The Mother of the

Gods has the happiness of getting herself

beardless minsters with a well-ground razor!

Now almost at the end of his final diatribe, Romanus

attacks the practice of branding the body with burning

needles, a lesser form of self-mutilation, but one whose

absurdity permits Romanus to return to the ludic motif, in

this case offering the practice as evidence of demonic

delusion:

Has ferre poenas cogitur genitilitas,

hac di coercent lege cultores suos.

Sic daemon ipse ludit hos quos ceperit,

docet execrandas ferre contumelias,

tormenta inuri mandat infelicibus. (ll. 1086-1090)

Such are the sufferings pagans are compelled to

bear, such the law their gods impose on their

worshippers; this is how the devil himself makes

sport of those whom he has taken captive, teaching

them to suffer accursed indignities and ordaining

that marks of torture be branded on his luckless

victims.

Asclepiades now orders him to prison, giving specific

instructions to strangle Romanus by breaking his windpipe:

Aliter silere nescit oris garruli

vox inquieta quam turba si fregero. (ll. 1104-05):

"The restless voice in your chattering mouth can

only be silenced if I break its pipe="

As the poem moves towards its conclusion, images of books

return; Prudentius asserts that Asclepiades sent written

documents, chartulis vivacibus, as a report of his

proceedings against Romanus to the emperor, but time has

decayed them; Christ's page, however, is immortal, and

Romanus' martyrdom is recorded for ever in regestis ...

caelestibus.

At the end of the poem, as he had at the beginning of the

poem, Prudentius calls upon Romanus for assistance, in a

version of the humility-topos, this time not to aid him to

speak, but to become an analogue for the the Word itself. He

says that Romanus' prayer could change him from a goat to a

lamb, from the abhorrent animal, the pagan "scapegoat," to

the sacred Christian animal, the agnus Dei, i.e.,