Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/295

 DC] EARLY LATIN CHRISTIAN POETRY 277 the people. He observes the caesura after the second foot; and the two final feet of the hexameters are usually correct in quantity. The substance is dull and unpoetical. Prudentius, whose ballad-hymns have been noticed, also wrote theological and controversial poems. The first of these is his Apotheosis^ a work in 1084 hexame- ters, directed against heresies, and especially against those impugning the divinity of Christ. Though it has spirited passages,^ it is but a fiery rhetorical polemic set in metre. The same in general may be said of the poet's Hamartigenia, a poem on the source of evil, fiercely polemic in character and directed against the dualistic heresy of Marcion. Lucretius' De Rerum Natura is poetry, where it is poetry, through the intensity of its feeling. The mind of a Christian poet might dwell on heresies and the ills springing from them, until his thoughts fused to images and visions embodying these evil results. This may be poetry, and thus it is with passages in the Hamartige- nia. In a prologue of iambic trimeters the poet likens Marcion to Cain, and then begins his hexameters : — Quo tepraecipitat rabies tua, perfide Cain? Divisor blaspheme Dei I No 1 there is no second God, author of the Old Testa- ment, as Marcion falsely says; we know the author of evil, — no God, but the slave of hell ; he is the Afar- cionita deus, tristiSy feruSy insidiator. There follows the first great picture of the devil in Latin poetry. His anguiferum caput and hairy shoulders covered with ^ E.g., Hues 321-OAl against the Jews.