“The modest vestal, with her down-turned thumb Urges the gladiator to his stroke Lest life may lurk in any vital place!”
One line in our author’s hymn in honor of St. Lawrence preserves an historical fact which was not appreciated in its full significance until our own times. He says, _Aedemque Laurenti tuam Vestalis intrat Claudia_—“Claudia, the Vestal Virgin, enters Thy House.” In 1883 there was discovered in the _Atrium_ of the Vestals a pedestal of a statue dedicated to one of the heads of the order, from which her name had been effaced purposely. Nothing of it was left except the initial C., while there still remained the praise of “her chastity and her profound knowledge in religious matters” (_Ob meritvm Castitatis Pvdicitiae adq. in Sacris Religionibusqve Doctrinae Mirabilis_). The statue was erected in the year 364, and the order was abolished by the younger Theodosius in 394, so that her conversion must have taken place between those two dates. The conversion of a person filling a place of such high honor in pagan eyes, of a _Vestalis maxima_, must have been a severe blow to the pagan party, which in Rome was making a fierce but hopeless fight for the old worship. Yet we find no other reference to it in literature, unless the letter of Symmachus to a Vestal, of whom he had heard that she meant to withdraw from her order, was addressed to Claudia. See Professor Lanciani’s _Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries_, pp. 170-72 (Boston, 1888).
It is uncertain in what year or in what part of Spain Prudentius died. Conjecture varies between 410 and 424 A.D. This infinitude of filmy particulars causes one to feel as if he were walking through spider-webs of a morning in the country. This hard, practical nineteenth century only experiences a sense of annoyance as it encounters the elaborate nothings of that strangely laborious, all-gathering scholarship which prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To create any intensity of interest to-day requires an imagination which would sacrifice truth to attractiveness.
But certainly, from what we can see of the man in his works, we can have no hesitation in pronouncing a verdict highly favorable both to his poetry and his piety. As governor of important towns he merited—or he would scarcely have received—his title of “the Merciful.” As a close observer of his time and a student of its thought, he has preserved for us what we cannot spare. It is he who in the _Jam moesta quiesce querela_ struck the first notes which were to vibrate in the _Dies irae_. It is he again who in the _Ales die nuntius_ anticipated Henry Vaughan and his