The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poeticsof the Soul (review)

Charles Witke

Journal of Late Antiquity, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2008, pp. 390-392(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/jla.0.0014

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Limerick (1 May 2013 20:07 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jla/summary/v001/1.2.witke.html

390 Journal of Late Antiquity

with the site. Melqi originally had housed a Neo-Assyrian temple of Ishtar which, after its abandonment, had been renovat-ed and converted to military and sacred uses in the Sasanian period. Over time, Walker posits, Christians came to asso-ciate the structures on the site with Mar Qardagh. Ultimately, three Christian edi-fi ces would be built on the site, including two churches and a monastery. The repu-tation of Qardagh then spread out from Melqi to fi nd its way into a range of later Syriac literary treatments.

Walker is to be commended for hav-ing the vision to take this relatively un-known text and develop from it a series of intriguing studies of late antique Meso-potamian society. This approach ensures that, regardless of their familiarity with Sasanian literature and society, Walker’s readers share a set of common references through which to understand his broader arguments. This strategy pays off because of the diligence of Walker’s research and the general clarity of his expression. As is perhaps natural with a study such as this, one wishes that some topics were treated in greater depth or updated to in-clude more recent scholarship. Walker’s discussion of intellectual exchange in the early sixth century, for example, could take greater advantage of the abundant recent scholarship on both John Philo-ponus and sixth-century Roman-Persian philosophical interaction. None of this is to diminish the overall contribution of the volume, however. Walker’s study will simultaneously increase the profi le of this important text and introduce a new audi-ence to the cultural and religious world of the western Sasanian Empire. The book will likely long remain the defi nitive study on the Mar Qardagh legend as well as an important resource for the study of the later Sasanian Empire.

The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the SoulMarc MastrangeloBaltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 259, ISBN 978–0-8018–8722–2

Reviewed by Charles Witke (University of Michigan)

This book persuasively re-evaluates Pru-dentius as a poet who effectively reshaped the reader’s awareness of Christian self in relation to the wider Christian commu-nity, doing in poetry much the same thing that Augustine sought to do in his Con-fessions. Beginning with a confrontation between the Psychomachia and Aeneid VI, Mastrangelo assesses Prudentius’ epic ambition in terms of Aeneas’ descent to the underworld in search of understand-ing and the Christian’s spiritual wander-ing ended by Christ speaking through Prudentius’ poetry. Roman national iden-tity gives way to Christianitas on both the moral and political planes.

As the Roman epic tradition engaged the narrative of Rome, so Prudentius seeks, in the Psychomachia, Peristepha-non, and to some extent in the Hamarti-genia and Contra Symmachum, to pres-ent salvation history through a synthesis of Roman pagan history in tension with the biblical narration of God’s works, both Jewish and Christian, and the sto-ries of martyrs. Emphasis here and else-where is placed on the poet’s drive to link the soul of the reader who engages the text, especially the Psychomachia, with the moral and spiritual battles set forth in that work. This kind of exegeti-cal strategy for strengthening the read-er’s personal journey toward salvation results also in the strengthening of the Christian community as a whole, as well

Book Reviews 391

as in re-invigorating Latin epic and lyric. Narrative as both historia and fabula is revealed as human stories connected ty-pologically to the Roman past. Doctrine likewise plays a formative and control-ling role in such historical narrative, as a new kind of historical memory is pre-cipitated in readers reading works such as those of Prudentius that draw together profane and sacred history.

The thorny topic of allegory is ad-dressed as well. Mastrangelo presents Biblical exegesis as driving the signifi ers of the allegorical universe of the Psycho-machia by giving us a wealth of exam-ples introduced by a careful analysis of the praefatio of that work. Text, reader, and author go hand in hand with God, Christ, and the human soul as typologies unfold for the faithful reader growing in that faith. The reader negotiating the connections between biblical characters, abstract qualities, and a sense of his own spiritual identity, is enabled to choose be-tween virtue and vice. Shadow and type, Old and New Testament texts, and other typological pairs reveal a new epoch in human history as well as a new direction for Latin poetry.

Pagan philosophy is not neglected, but is shown to color the vices rampant in the Psychomachia, where the allegory of the soul also is informed by pagan philosophical traditions such as the Pla-tonist metaphysical and political analogy of city and soul, the Platonist doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul, the mortality of the soul according to the Epicureans, and the later idea of the soul as a Christian Neo-Platonist refl ection of the Trinity.

Throughout, the methodology em-bodies a careful study of poetic allusion, intertextuality, typology, and fi gurative reading; and specifi c passages are ex-

haustively examined from these points of view. Mastrangelo gives us a Prudentius who was deeply concerned with effects of his poetry that take place outside of the poem, the “political purpose of creating one Christian Roman at a time” (161). Thus, the poetic self, it would seem, of both poet and audience is conceived of in relational terms. But a typological self also is postulated as mediating through Prudentius’ texts, which likewise is an “inner space” inside the reader where moral confl icts and decisions are resolved by freedom of choice. Crucial events and characters in the allegorical framework stand for moral dilemmas. The Pyscho-machia stimulates spiritual improvement and the strengthening of moral choice by mediating an internal typological land-scape where abstract moral personifi ca-tions and the major players in salvation history stage battles. The book claims that the Roman Christian reader can be alerted, changed, and shaped toward the good by this right kind of poetry. One would welcome further discussion of how the reader might be derailed from this worthy goal. To be sure, Augustan readers of the Aeneid might choose to be uplifted into Roman patriotic commit-ment, but might at other readings play the intertextual game, refl ect on metrical nuances, or otherwise evade an autho-rial intent to mold and shape an extra-textual response of a civic or faith-based nature. Readers of Prudentius might do the same.

Mastrangelo makes an effective plea for revisiting E.R. Curtius, European Lit-erature and the Latin Middle Ages, and Erich Auerbach, Mimesis and Literatur-sprache und Publikum, with an eye to in-cluding Prudentius alongside Vergil and Dante as major shapers of the European literary tradition. The book cites a wealth

392 Journal of Late Antiquity

of secondary literature and offers welcome discussions of other Christian Latin poets, most notably Paulinus of Nola. The latter, we are told, did not attempt to use fi gural techniques illuminating the humani status, the historical and political position of the reader. For Paulinus, Christian and pagan joined in the administration of empire, but his concern was not so much with his-tory like Prudentius but with moral and spiritual dimensions of human existence (60 ff. on Paulinus, Carm. 21).

In a work with so many detailed ob-servations, a few slips seem inevitable. It was Abraham (correct on 89 and 91), not Melchisedec (11 and 50), who hosted the

three angels at Genesis 18. Spes is trans-lated as Pride (99) and esse-nolle-velle (155) should be esse-nosse-velle (correct on 159). And it may seem somewhat of a stretch to link the apices in Peristephanon 11.18 (rerum apices veterum), where Pru-dentius reads the apices/letters of inscrip-tions recounting ancient acta of martyrs, to the headgear of Roman fl amines and to the victor’s crown (198n33).

Students of Late Antiquity will fi nd much of interest in this study of an ambi-tious poet who challenges not only Vergil in the epic tradition but the fathers of the church in laying out a path for deepening one’s relationship with the divine.