‘Prudentius is a first class innovator in Latin poetry.’ It is time for Prudentius to return to the canon of major Latin poets. Erasmus says he would rather read one ode of Prudentius than a whole shipload of verses by Pontano. Praises for Prudentius from the great figures of the Renaissance could be multiplied, but perhaps H. W. Garrod, in his introduction to the Oxford Book of Latin Verse, is Prudentius's most surprising and effective advocate. He says not only that ‘Prudentius counts’, but that ‘The author whose exclusion I most regret is Prudentius’, and that he excludes him despite being aware of the ‘brief but brilliant Renaissance of the fourth century’. This is the same Garrod who seems to show such glee as he dismisses Juvenal, who ‘wants two qualities essential to great poetry – namely truth and humanity’; Persius, who ‘in the Prologue to his Satires, excluded himself from the company of the great poets’; and the Sermones and Epistulae of Horace (‘Horace himself would have known them to be out of place’). Garrod was not diffident in his judgements (he also excludes Ovid's Metamorphoses, but with less fanfare), and a century has passed since they were made, but it is valuable to cite them because they tell us, from an unexpected quarter, what Prudentius is worth.