Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/287

 IX] EARLY LATIN CHRISTIAN POETRY 269 nature of an elegy. The characters sometimes speak in the first person — dramatically. The narratives are not given such breadth and extent as to bring them into the category of epic poetry. The greatest Christian poet of the fourth and fifth centuries was the Spaniard Prudentius, who was bom in 348 and died sometime after 405. He and his amiable contemporary, Paulinus of Nola, unite classic culture with Christian sentiment. The resulting prod- uct is interesting, often charming, sometimes admira- ble. Rarely does either poet attain to great poetry or express feeling deeply and truly interpretative of Christ. Yet the feeling is as genuine as could exist under the limitations of classical verse-forms and a rhetorical literary epoch. Prudentius' hymns were literary, rather than adapted for worship, and none of them in its entirety was used as a church song. The Liber Cathemerinon of Prudentius consisted of twelve hymns ranging in length from eighty to two hundred and twenty lines. The first six were written for the six daily hours of prayer. They contain much symbolism.^ The facts are chosen with regard to their symbolical import, and are told briefly, symbolically as it were.* In the ninth hymn, Hymnus omnis hoi-ae, the deeds and incidents of Christ's life are told suc- cinctly, or apostrophized somewhat as Jehovah's deliv- erances of Israel are narrated in the seventy-eighth Psalm. The twelfth hymn, for the feast of the Epiph- 1 Thus in Hjmn I, Ad galli cantum, the cock is a symbol of Christ, as the dawn is in Hymn II. '^ One might make comparison with the conventionalized sym- bolical manner of catacomb paintings, as, e.g., Noah in the ark.