¹ On the importance of the fourth-century martyr cults for emphasizing continuity with the pre-Constantinian church, see Markus, R.A., The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), 90–5Google Scholar. On the processes by which the martyrs' traditions were retrospectively constructed, see Grig, L., Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Castelli, E.A., Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

² See Bastiaensen, A.A.R. et al. , Atti e passioni dei martiri (Milan, 1987)Google Scholar.

³ Literally a container for scrolls, scrinium was the name given to the different offices of the imperial chancellery: the scrinium epistulorum, responsible for correspondence; the scrinium libellorum, responsible for legal documents; and the scrinium memoriae, responsible for petitions. From Prudentius' claim that the emperor ordered him to stand ordine proximo (‘in nearest rank’, Praef. 21), biographers have inferred that he served as proximus scriniorum: see Lana, I., Due capitoli Prudenziani: la biografia, la cronologia delle opere, la poetica (Rome, 1962), 12–16Google Scholar; Palmer, A.M., Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford, 1989), 27Google Scholar. Recently, Coşkun, A., ‘Zur Biographie des Prudentius’, Philologus 152 (2008), 294–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 305, has expressed scepticism, suggesting that the poet, ‘präzise Amtstitel aus stilistischen und konzeptionellen Gründen vermied’.

⁴ As well as those from Perist. 1, discussed below, there is a further example at the conclusion of Perist. 10: here, the prefect Asclepiades documents his punishment of the martyr Romanus in a series of scrolls, which he submits to the emperor Galerius (10.1111–15). Prudentius claims that, while these official documents will deteriorate and perish over time, the martyr is ‘an immortal page inscribed by Christ’ (inscripta Christo pagina immortalis, 10.1119). On the hagiographical paradox of commemorating the saints' actions, which are by their nature immune to being forgotten, see Castelli (n. 1), 134–5.

⁵ This is a feature that Joseph Farrell has observed, albeit in a different form, in the Latin poetry of the first century b.c.: namely, a ‘concern that material texts, precisely because they are material, expose their contents to degradation, corruption, and destruction in ways that render them consummately impermanent’: Farrell, J., ‘The impermanent text in Catullus and other Roman poets’, in Johnson, W.A. and Parker, H.N. (edd.), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2009), 164–85Google Scholar, at 165.

⁶ The text for Prudentius' works is Bergman, J., Aurelii Prudentii Clementis Carmina, CSEL 61 (Vienna, 1926)Google Scholar. All translations are my own.

⁷ The image of the liber caelestis, which also appears at Perist. 4.171, may be taken from Jesus' address to the 72 disciples at Luke 10:20; see also Rev. 13:8, 17:8. On the textual metaphors in the Peristephanon, see Curtius, E.R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Trask, W.R. (Princeton, NJ, 1953), 311–12Google Scholar; Thraede, K., Studien zu Sprache und Stil des Prudentius (Göttingen, 1965), 79–140Google Scholar; Ross, J., ‘Dynamic writing and martyrs' bodies in Prudentius' Peristephanon’, JECS 3 (1995), 325–55Google Scholar.

⁸ See Shaw, B.D., ‘Body/power/identity: passions of the martyrs’, JECS 4 (1996), 312Google Scholar: ‘It was these institutional forces – an organizational apparatus, a program of education, policing functionaries, a body of servitors, pervasive writings and records, an hierarchical membership and officialdom – that remembered, conferred and supported public identities, classified, and, not inconsequentially, made enduring life and death decisions that were successfully enforced.’

⁹ Evidence from the manuscripts suggests that the poem designates the baptistery in Calagurris: see Lavarenne, M. (ed.), Prudence, t. 4: le livre des couronnes (Peristephanon liber); Dittochaeon; Épilogue (Paris, 1963), 106Google Scholar. There are further references and detail on the poem's genre in Schetter, W., ‘Prudentius, Peristephanon 8’, Hermes 110 (1982), 110–17Google Scholar.

¹⁰ On the origins and history of the use of elegy as a metre for Latin verse inscriptions, see Ramsby, T.R., Textual Permanence: Roman Elegists and the Epigraphic Tradition (London, 2007), 21–9Google Scholar.

¹¹ For a comparable address in the second-person plural, see e.g. CLE 799: uos qui transitis, nostri memores rogo sitis. On the ‘wayfarer’ motif, see Lattimore, R., Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana, IL, 1942), 230–7Google Scholar; its influence on Roman elegy is discussed by Yardley, J.C., ‘Roman elegy and funerary epigram’, EMC 40 (1996), 267–73Google Scholar, at 272–3.

¹² Pagan epitaphs in Latin commonly express uncertainty about the afterlife, or even deny its existence altogether: see Lattimore (n. 11), 59–65, 78–82.

¹³ On the fear of oblivion as a motivation of the Roman ‘epigraphic habit’, see Woolf, G., ‘Monumental writing and the expansion of Roman society in the early Empire’, JRS 86 (1996), 22–39Google Scholar, at 32. Woolf's article adds nuance to the argument of MacMullen, R., ‘The epigraphic habit in the Roman Empire’, AJPh 103 (1982), 233–46Google Scholar. On the ways in which new Christian identities were asserted in fourth-century inscriptions, see Trout, D.E., ‘Inscribing identity: the Latin epigraphic habit in Late Antiquity’, in Rousseau, P. (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Malden, MA, 2009), 170–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ On the importance of Ausonius as a model in Prudentius' poetry, see Charlet, J.L., L'Influence d'Ausone sur la poésie de Prudence (Aix-en-Provence, 1980)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The text for Ausonius is Green, R.P.H. (ed.), Decimi Magni Ausonii: Opera (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar. This consolatory motif of death coming even to things made of stone, which is derived from Sulpicius' letter to Cicero (Fam. 4.5), is also found in the late antique elegy of Rutilius Namatianus (De red. 1.413–4).

¹⁶ E.g. Enn. Ann. 16.404–7 Skutsch; Hor. Carm. 3.30.1–5; Ov. Met. 15.871–9. See the discussion of all these passages in Fowler, D., ‘The ruin of time: monuments and survival at Rome’, in Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford, 1999), 193–217Google Scholar.

¹⁷ In Prudentius' polymetric collection, elegiacs (Perist. 8 and 11) and iambic dimeters (Perist. 2 and 5), are the only metrical forms to be used more than once.

¹⁸ As well as Ramsby (n. 10), see Dinter, M., ‘Inscriptional intermediality in Latin elegy’, in Keith, A. (ed.), Latin Elegy and Hellenistic Epigram (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011), 7–18Google Scholar; Houghton, L.B.T., ‘Epitome and eternity: some epitaphs and votive inscriptions in the Latin love elegists’, in Liddel, P. and Low, P. (edd.), Inscriptions and Their Uses in Ancient Literature (Oxford, 2013), 349–64Google Scholar.

¹⁹ This process is more precisely designated by the term ‘intermedial connection’, which, according to Dinter (n. 17), 9, ‘describes a way to constitute meaning through the (actual) connection, which a medial product (in our case texts) can form with the product of another medium or a medial system itself …. As texts remain the sole medium that is present, however, elements and structures of other media or another medium are thematised, simulated and, as far as possible, reproduced with the means specific to texts.’

²⁰ Grig, L., ‘Competing capitals, competing representations: late antique cityscapes in words and pictures’, in Grig, L. and Kelly, G. (edd.), Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), 31–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 37, has recently argued that, in other late antique depictions of Rome, the city was ‘evoked as more than the sum of its parts, as more than an assemblage of marvellous monuments, each resisting iconic reduction’. I will show in what follows that Prudentius' Roman martyrs, in a very particular sense, comprise more than the remains of their surviving monuments.

²¹ On Prudentius' ‘Romreise’, and its dating to 401/2, see Coşkun (n. 3), 307–14.

²² On the allusion to Ov. Fast. 5.260, see Palmer (n. 3), 136. Although the martyrs' shrines were generally located beyond the city walls, Prudentius' poem provides important testimony for the way in which these ‘Christianized’ suburban areas were integrated into the city proper in the course of the fourth century. See Curran, J.R., Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 2002), 153–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ At C. Symm. 2.298–9, Prudentius uses the casa Romuli as an illustration of how far Roman society has departed from its original customs. On the significance of the hut in earlier Roman literature, see Edwards, C.E., Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge, 1996), 32–43Google Scholar.

²⁴ On Troy as the archetypal city of ruins, see Edwards (n. 23), 62–6. In Perist. 2, as Palmer (n. 3), 136–7, notes, the martyr Lawrence calls in similar terms for a Christianization of Rome, urging the city to renounce pagan religion, its error Troicus (2.445), so that ‘Romulus may become one of the faithful’ (fiat fidelis Romulus, 2.443). On the (vexed) topic of Roman patriotism and Christian faith in Prudentius' poetry, see Pietsch, C., ‘Aeternas temptare vias: zur Romidee im Werk des Prudentius’, Hermes 129 (2001), 259–70Google Scholar, with references.

²⁵ See e.g. Perist. 9.53, 10.1120.

²⁶ As Roberts, M.J., Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993)Google Scholar, 150 has pointed out, the word apex also appears in Aulus Gellius (NA 17.9–15) with reference to a Spartan technique of sending self-eradicating secret messages.

²⁷ The text is that of Ferrua, A. (ed.), Epigrammata Damasiana (Rome, 1942)Google Scholar; for the inscription, see id., Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae, vol. 7 (Vatican City, 1980)Google Scholar, no. 19932. In addition, see Bertonière, G., The Cult Center of the Martyr Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina (Oxford, 1985), 27–8Google Scholar.

²⁸ The historical background of Damasus' elogium has been treated in some detail by Brent, A., Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension before the Emergence of a Monarch-bishop (Leiden, 1995), 368–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Damasus, whose own authority was subject to challenges from various schismatic groups during his papacy, appears to have used these martyrial elogia to emphasize the importance of concord and orthodoxy within the Church: see Sághy, M., ‘Scinditur in partes populus: Pope Damasus and the martyrs of Rome’, EME 9 (2000), 273–87Google Scholar. On the manipulation of the past in Damasus' programme of commemoration, see Trout, D.E., ‘Damasus and the invention of early Christian Rome’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 3 (2003), 517–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Kaesser, C., ‘Narrating disiecta corpora: the rhetoric of bodily dismemberment in Prudentius, Peristephanon 11’, in Liveley, G. and Salzman-Mitchell, P. (edd.), Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story (Columbus, OH, 2008), 223–40Google Scholar.

³¹ The execution also recalls the punishment of Mettius, the Alban leader who was tied to horses and dismembered after betraying the Romans in battle (Livy 1.28.9–11). In Prudentius' description of ‘the tips of the rocks dripping … and purple stains daubed upon the thorn-bushes’ (rorantes saxorum apices … | purpureasque notas uepribus inpositas, 11.127–8), he draws a direct parallel between Hippolytus' death and that of Mettius, as depicted by Virgil on the shield of Aeneas (sparsi rorabant sanguine uepres, Aen. 8.645).

³² On the formal features of the elegiac couplet, see Luck, G., The Latin Love Elegy (London, 1969 ²), 28–30Google Scholar; Kenney, E.J., ‘Ovid's language and style’, in Boyd, B.W. (ed.), Brill's Companion to Ovid (Leiden, 2002), 27–89Google Scholar, at 30–4, 48–56.

³³ The difference between elegiac and hexameter narrative has been most thoroughly examined in relation to Ovid's Fasti and Metamorphoses: the classic discussion is Heinze, R., Ovids elegische Erzählung (Leipzig, 1919)Google Scholar, with important qualifications by Hinds, S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone (Cambridge, 1987), 99–134Google Scholar. The question has been addressed again, with closer attention to issues of metre, in Morgan, L., Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010), 345–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Ramsby (n. 10), 5–9, makes a theoretical distinction between embedded inscriptions and artistic ekphrases in Augustan elegy, arguing that the poets tend to present the text of the inscriptions without describing its physical material or surroundings. Nonetheless, the example of Prudentius' poem, in addition to that of Ausonius' epigram, suggests that (in Late Antiquity at least) the difference between an ‘inscriptional’ poem and a poetic ekphrasis of an inscription was minimal.

³⁵ On the historical existence of the Hippolytus portrait, see Testini, P., ‘Di alcune testimonianze relative a Ippolito’, in Ricerche su Ippolito: Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’ 13 (Rome, 1977), 45–65Google Scholar, at 56–8; Bertonière (n. 27), 41–3. Grig (n. 1), 127–34, discusses the relationship between some of Damasus' inscriptions and visual artworks that may have been set up nearby.

³⁶ Roberts (n. 26), 155–6. On apices (11.127) and notae (11.128) as ‘Schreibmetaphern’, see Thraede (n. 7), 126.

³⁷ Roberts (n. 26), 156, comments: ‘The process is like that of reading inscriptions, in which an intelligible text must be pieced together from the constituent strokes (apices) of which the whole is made up, and that in isolation are incapable of communicating meaning.’ Also relevant, perhaps, is Cicero's story (De or. 2.351–4) of how Simonides invented mnemotechnics by identifying the dismembered bodies of Scopas' dinner guests according to the places in which they were found.

³⁸ See Most, G.W., ‘Disiecti membra poetae: the rhetoric of dismemberment in Neronian poetry’, in Hexter, R. and Selden, D. (edd.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York, 1992), 391–419Google Scholar.

³⁹ Cent. Nupt., Ausonius Paulo sal. 24–8: accipe igitur opusculum de inconexis continuum, de diuersis unum, de seriis ludicrum, de alieno nostrum, ne in sacris et fabulis … mireris … Virbium … de Hippolyto reformatum (‘So take my little piece: continuous from unconnected parts; one from separate parts; playful, from serious parts; mine, from another's parts. You will no longer marvel, in the mysteries or in tales, at Virbius, restored from Hippolytus’).

⁴⁰ See e.g. another native of Prudentius' Calagurris, Quintilian (Inst. 9.2.40): illa uero, ut ait Cicero, sub oculos subiectio tum fieri solet cum res non gesta indicatur sed ut sit gesta ostenditur, nec uniuersa sed per partis: quem locum proximo libro subiecimus euidentiae (‘As for what Cicero calls subiectio sub oculos, this happens when, instead of stating that an event took place, we show how it took place, and not as a whole but in parts: in the last book I classified this under euidentia’). On the importance of detailed description (leptologia) in late antique poetics, see Roberts, M.J., The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ On Prudentius' rhetorical training, and his legal career, see Praef. 8–9, 14–15.

⁴² Miller, P. Cox, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia, PA, 2009), 87–9Google Scholar, has suggested that the concept of enargeia was central in shaping Augustine's ideas about the veneration of martyrs relics.

⁴³ For the text, see Scriptores minores Galliae, S. IV–V: CCL 68 (Turnhout, 1985), 84Google Scholar. The translation is that of Clark, G., ‘Victricius of Rouen: praising the saints’, JECS 7 (1999), 365–99Google Scholar. On Victricius and Prudentius, see Roberts (n. 26), 191–2.

⁴⁴ See Kaesser, C.A., ‘The body is not painted on: ekphrasis and exegesis in Prudentius, Peristephanon 9’, Ramus 31 (2002), 158–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, together with Roberts (n. 26), 132–41.

⁴⁵ Hippolytus' persecutors devise the manner of his execution in specific imitation of the mythological Hippolytus: ‘ergo sit Hippolytus’ (‘then let him be Hippolytus’, 11.87), says the inquisitor, on learning the martyr's name. Palmer (n. 3), 189–91, discusses the comparisons with Seneca's tragedy. Malamud, M.A., A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 83–93Google Scholar, proposes some broader parallels with the Hippolytus myth.

⁴⁶ Rohmann, D., ‘Vicious virtues: the aesthetics of violence in Prudentius’, in Heilen, S. et al. (edd.), In Pursuit of Wissenschaft: Festschrift für William M. Calder III zum 75. Geburtstag (Hildesheim, 2008), 379–91Google Scholar, at 383–5, notes that, for Christian authors like Prudentius, as for pagan authors, the dismemberment of body parts was thought to prevent the soul from resting after death.

⁴⁷ In addition to Ausonius' comments on the Cento Nuptialis, which I have noted above, Prudentius' contemporary Marcellus Empiricus makes the same comparison in the preface to his treatise De medicamentis. I owe this reference to Aaron Pelttari.

⁴⁸ unde etiam templo Triuiae lucisque sacratis | cornipedes arcentur equi, quod litore currum | et iuuenem monstris pauidi effudere marinis (‘whence horn-footed horses are prohibited from the temple of Diana and her sacred groves, because they, frightened by sea monsters, spread out both chariot and youth along the shore’).

⁴⁹ This aspect of the myth is also represented by Ovid, Met. 15.492–546.

⁵⁰ That is, pace Malamud (n. 45), 91–2, who argues that, ‘In the Hippolytus poem, Prudentius has done exactly what the emperors condemn pagan artists for doing. He has drawn from mythology, from classical poetry, and from painting and has recombined the various elements into his own poetica fabula, describing a new hero worshipped by the people’. Likewise Viscardi, G., ‘La vision du martyre de saint Hippolyte ou la mortification transfigurée: Prudence, Peristephanon 11’, Latomus 56 (1997), 360–81Google Scholar, at 371 n. 56: ‘Notre but est précisément de démontrer comment, dans l'esprit de Prudence, le prêtre chrétien s’éloigne du heros antique'.

⁵¹ Archaeological excavations have, in fact, revealed evidence of a late antique martyrium of Hippolytus at Portus (modern Fiumicino) – although it is unclear whether this is the same Hippolytus whose Roman shrine is described by Prudentius.

⁵² See Fontanier, J.M., ‘Christus imago Dei: art et christologie dans l'oeuvre de Prudence’, RecAug 21 (1986), 130–1Google Scholar.

⁵³ See Malamud (n. 45), 86. On the importance of narrative register in indicating the difference between poetic narrative and poetic ekphrasis, see Laird, A., ‘Sounding out ekphrasis: art and text in Catullus 64’, JRS 83 (1993), 18–30Google Scholar, at 29–30.

⁵⁴ Kaesser (n. 30), 263.

⁵⁵ Laird, A., ‘Ut figura poesis: writing art and the art of writing in Augustan poetry’, in Elsner, J. (ed.), Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996), 75–102Google Scholar, at 97, has shown that, for ancient writers, ‘the relation between visual art and narrative texts probably did not present any theoretical difficulty … a description of a visual representation of an event would be narratable in the same way as the event itself’.

⁵⁶ A relevant example is Virgil's ekphrasis of Aeneas' shield, which is described as a non enarrabile textum (‘a composition impossible to narrate’, Aen. 8.625). The fourth-century Servius commentary explains ad loc. that Virgil wanted ‘all of Roman history’ (omnem Romanam historiam) to be described on the shield, but ‘recounts a few things in parts’ (carptim tamen pauca commemorat) and ‘did not describe them all together’ (nec tamen uniuersa descripsit). On these comments, see Laird (n. 55), 77–86. On the importance of the shield ekphrasis to Prudentius' poem, see Witke, C., ‘Recycled words: Vergil, Prudentius and Saint Hippolytus’, in Rees, R. (ed.), Romane Memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century (London, 2004), 128–40Google Scholar, at 134–5.

⁵⁷ See Brown, P., The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, IL, 1981), 42–3Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ As Brent (n. 28), 380, notes, 13 August was also the date of the festival commemorating the incorporation of Italian allies into the Roman Federation, thus adding further emphasis to the theme of unity.

⁵⁹ On elegy's apparent ‘loss of identity’ in Late Antiquity, see von Albrecht, M., A History of Roman Literature: From Livius Andronicus to Boethius (Leiden, 1997), 1299Google Scholar.