2

Modeling the Living Martyr: Witness in and Through Poetry

As death is de-emphasized, problematized, and re-imagined in Prudentius’s poetry, the notion of witness emerges to take its place as the signal and central feature of martyrdom. Prudentius centers acts of witnessing in these poems, highlighting the role of witness in catalyzing faith and further martyrdoms. He depicts his martyrs as visible and tangible testaments to the glory and truth of Christ, who act as witnesses in every sense of the word—they observe their truth, testify about it, and enact it. Ultimately, Prudentius encourages his readers to engage with texts—both scriptural texts and with his own poetry—in their capacity as witnesses themselves so that his readers can, by engaging with textual witnesses, enact their own martyrial witness, even without death.

In this chapter, I elaborate on the role of witness in the Peristephanon, first exploring themes of witness in the text and then illustrating Prudentius’s martyrial agenda through a close reading of an ekphrasis in Peristephanon 10. Through this discussion and analysis, I argue that the overall effect of Prudentius’s dissociation of martyrdom from death is to configure it instead as something that can be part of a Christian life—accessible to all Christians, even after the end of persecution. As Ellen Muehlberger writes in her discussion of Gregory of Nyssa’s characterization of his sister Macrina as a martyr:

This is the central paradox of late ancient Christianity: long after the conditions that first created the concept of a Christian martyr had disappeared, Christians persisted in thinking about themselves, their positions in culture, and the futures that awaited them through the lens of martyrdom.¹

In order to close this gap between expectation and experience, Gregory offered the model of brave suffering; Prudentius, for his part, offers witness.

The witness I want to recover in Prudentius’s poetry operates on three levels: the level of observation; the level of testifying about what one has observed; and then, finally, the level of refiguring what one has observed or, to put it another way, acting in such a way that one becomes, oneself, the object of observation. Witnesses observe by seeing (or hearing, touching, etc.), and then witness to what they have observed by testifying (by speech, action, or some other means) to what they have seen, finally becoming the witnessed, the basis for other people’s observations, the object of others’ witness. At this last stage, the witness serves as ground-zero, so to speak, for the witness of others. In shorthand, this tripartite understanding of witness can be described by the designations “observing witness,” “testifying witness,” and “enacting witness.” The value of this witness in Christianity is that it rehearses the verdict of Christianity’s truth while simultaneously providing more opportunities for witness. The martyrs’ triumphs and miracles confirm the validity of the Christian faith, while they also, by refiguring that truth in an observable way, form the basis for future witness, expanding the repertoire of truth and creating a web of witness that provides a support structure for a Christian worldview. In Christian martyrdom, the martyr typically refigures Christ for onlookers. He re-enacts the advent of Christ on earth, and in doing so both affirms the reality of what transpired with Christ in the past and also re-presents the events to his contemporaries. The collapse of time and of witness, of old and new miracles, enables the onlookers to expand the type and number of signifiers to which they respond in confirming the truth of Christ. The martyr himself can now be imitated, while his imitator will still be imitating both the martyr and Christ.

Witness forms the foundation of Prudentius’s martyrial edifice in three primary ways. First, the poet emphasizes witness language and acts of witness—of observing, testifying, and enacting witness—within the texts themselves. Second, Prudentius encourages the reader herself to witness, that is, to become a witness herself in all three forms by interacting with the text: observing—actually seeing and hearing—what the text depicts; testifying herself what the text asserts; and enacting witness of her own—becoming a new object of witness for others by transforming in response to the text. Third, Prudentius configures the text itself (that is, both sacred Scripture and his own poetry) as witness, as observable testimony that can help readers enact their own martyrdoms. This not only ensures that future generations of Christians will not be bereft of martyrs and martyrdoms to observe (since they possess these texts) but also opens up the reality of martyrdom to them, allowing them to enact their own witnesses in their own historical contexts.

TECHNIQUES OF EXEGETICAL POETRY

In this chapter, I aim to show that Prudentius seeks to transform his reader into a witness and a martyr. Such an argument is premised not on the actual transformation of the reader—something we would be hard-pressed to evaluate 1600 years on—but on what we understand the author’s expectations of the reader would have been—that is, how the reader would have been expected to respond to and engage with the text. As I noted in the Introduction, the knowledge we glean from these expectations about the spiritual horizons of our historical subjects is important for illuminating their possible worldviews. I discussed the idea of exegetical poetry in the last chapter, along with some of the techniques that late ancient authors (including Prudentius) used in their attempts to transform the reader. Here I want to clarify a few further strategies that Prudentius employs: internal modeling, effective interpretation, and visually and aurally vivid rhetoric.

When attempting to ascertain how Prudentius wanted his readers to react to his poetry, we can gain much from observing how the characters within his texts (including the narrative voice itself) react to the events transpiring within the poem. This internal modeling (internal because it is internal to the poem) occurs when the poet’s characters demonstrate “appropriate responses” to depicted phenomena, guiding us in our emotional processing. For example, Prudentius inserts a narratorial shudder of horror—miserabile visu!—at the image of the martyr Cassian being pricked to death by his students’ styli, ensuring that his readers share in his visceral appreciation for the martyr’s torment.² When, as I discuss below, we are invited to watch Vincent’s release from prison, we are also guided in our response to that image by the community’s depicted response to Vincent’s mutilated (but still living) body.

In addition to this internal modeling (or, rather, as a more elaborate form of it), we can see Prudentius employing what I call “effective interpretation,” moments when characters within the text interpret what they are seeing or experiencing, with that interpretation having an effect in the world of the poem. This models for the reader the power of interpretation and demonstrates that, just as the poetic character can change the world they live in and their relationship to it, so too can the readers change their world and their place in it by interpreting correctly what they see, experience, or read. In essence, for Prudentius, true martyrdom requires effective interpretation.

Finally, Prudentius, along with his contemporaries, firmly believed that both the aural and visual sensory realms could be replicated through text. Hearing could be achieved through the use of dialogue, word-play, and poetic elements such as meter and rhyme, while the underlying orality of literature in the ancient world—particularly the fact that most readers read aloud, even to themselves—made hearing almost a necessary component of any reading. Meanwhile, sight could be achieved through literary techniques such as ekphrasis, the literary device of vivid description.

Prudentius and his contemporaries believed that replicative hearing could be achieved through text. It almost goes without saying that the aural qualities of poetry are inherent to their aesthetic and persuasive powers. Extended onomatopoeia, whether via word choice or through alliteration, is a frequently used vivifying tool, as it forces the reader to recreate in her own voice the noises that would be occurring in the scene the text describes. This same effect can also be accomplished through rhythm and meter, using spondaic lines to signify steady, booming noise. This is also the effect, as I mentioned above, of using direct speech, rather than reported, when recreating dialogue between characters. Readers are forced to recreate and re-enact the speech of the characters as they are reading the text.

Late ancient authors also firmly believed that sight could be achieved through the words of a text. The characteristic method for this feat was ekphrasis.³ The definition of the term from the Rhetorica ad Herennium that became “canonical” in Late Antiquity defined ekphrasis as “when an event is so described that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass before our eyes.”⁴ The device’s defining feature was its characteristic quality of enargeia or vividness.⁵ Thus objects of ekphrasis could be works of art and architecture, as modern readers are accustomed to seeing, but they could also be people, places, times, and events.⁶ An ekphrasis could consist of a single suggestive word or an entire, stand-alone narrative, but the characteristic feature was that ekphrasis achieved the illusion of “bringing the subject before the eyes.”

The illusion was intended to be persuasive; ancient students of rhetoric were trained to employ ekphraseis to make their arguments more effective. To demonstrate, rather than assert, the truth of their case, orators would create verbal pictures that bore the same emotional and evidentiary weight that a bloody cloak or bit of bone brought into a courtroom might achieve.⁷ Using this visual immediacy to turn hearers and readers into spectators, authors and orators appear to have felt that they had a fair amount of control over the images their words would conjure in the minds of their audience.⁸ They could therefore ensure that the audience retained the appropriate message, absorbing the spectacle in the appropriate manner and isolating the intended meaning of the spectacle from among “the matrix of alternative possibilities.”⁹ The persuasive aspect of ekphrasis did not disappear when used in poetry or history rather than oratory.¹⁰ It could cultivate images in listeners’ minds and involve them in an argument; it was understood to be capable of serving as proof, eliciting emotional responses, and leading to action.¹¹ All these uses combine to make ekphrasis a valuable pedagogical tool, conveying information and inciting change. It presents a moment of rupture, where the mind’s gaze is momentarily refocused onto a new object, and thus it not only grabs the audience’s attention and serves to add visual immediacy and import to the object being described¹² but also signals to the audience that this object requires more attention in order to be processed.¹³

Visuality is key, and ekphraseis often compound and are signaled by other visual cues that serve to vivify the events described. In an attempt to represent the immediacy of the events described, Prudentius, in what is a standard move for authors introducing ekphraseis, slips in and out of the present tense while depicting his martyrs and their torments.¹⁴ He also hints to his readers the need for visualization by foregrounding the role of sight within the narrative. For instance, in the poem I discuss in the latter half of this chapter, Peristephanon 10, the son is tortured, rather than the mother, because the prefect wants to exploit the mother’s sight in order to torment her fully: “The parent’s eyes will be punished more cruelly / than if the bloody claws despoil her limbs.”¹⁵ Later, Prudentius himself highlights the visual component when, in explaining the executioner’s tears, he, in the voice of the narrator, asks, “What rock would be able to endure that sight, what stiffness of bronze or of iron would be able to bear it?”¹⁶ This sort of authorial interruption is another standard rhetorical technique designed to force audience engagement and signal ekphrasis.¹⁷ Prudentius, finally, also promotes visualization by employing direct speech, rather than reported speech, when his characters talk.¹⁸ This tactic, while it primarily serves to revivify the martyr through aural means, also serves to enhance the visual by offering a soundtrack to the scenes playing out before the readers’ eyes and by completing the reality of the moment’s re-presentation.

In highlighting these various techniques and strategies of persuasion, my intention is to showcase the sorts of tools Prudentius accessed in his project of rendering text effective as a means of conveying and experiencing various forms of witness. What I hope to show in the following pages is that Prudentius sought to employ this function of texts to make his readers into martyrs.

WITNESS IN THE PERISTEPHANON

Prudentius emphasizes witness throughout the Peristephanon, but I will focus discussion primarily on the poems we examined in Chapter 1, both to keep the discussion manageable and to illustrate that Prudentius touts the role of witness in the very same poems (and with reference to the very same martyrs) that most problematize the role of death. I first discuss the use of witness language (testis and related words) in the text and then focus on three categories of witness that emerge most prominently in these poems: witness by being seen, witness by speaking and being heard, and the role of the text itself as witness. Throughout these discussions, I will be engaging with the tripartite concept of witness I highlighted above.

Language of Witness

At times, Prudentius uses the word testis (“witness”) interchangeably with the term martyr. Many of Prudentius’s readers and anticipated audiences would have been familiar with the etymological roots of martyr either through their own familiarity with Greek or through their experience of preachers, like Augustine (see Chapter 5), who made the connection explicit for wider audiences. It would, then, be quite easy to understand Prudentius’s use as a case of the poet using synonyms for stylistic reasons without much further thought—in which case we should not make too much of his word choice. But the predominant use of testis and its related words in Prudentius is, in fact, as a signifier of observation and testimony. What this means is that when Prudentius chooses to use testis as a synonym for martyr, the valences of testimony and witness linger: the martyr is a witness, and witnessing is crucial for martyrdom.

Prudentius elides the terminology of martyrdom and witness at several points within the Peristephanon. As he weighs the number of Caesaraugusta’s martyrs alongside the counts of other renowned cities in Peristephanon 4, Prudentius writes: “Some few [cities] / will find favor with one, three or two, / or maybe even five witnesses to Christ.”¹⁹ He then goes on to contrast those paltry few with Caesaraugusta’s noble eighteen. Since he is evaluating the cities based on the number of their martyrs rather than on the quality of their martyrs or any other point of comparison, testis Christi here is unequivocally a synonym for martyr. In Peristephanon 5, Prudentius similarly describes Vincent as an “indomitable witness” who shines brightly in heaven in robes all the brighter for being washed in blood.²⁰ In Peristephanon 1.21–22, among the first lines a reader would encounter upon engaging with Prudentius’s martyr poems,²¹ Prudentius’s use of the term testis to refer to a specific type of witness by martyrdom is highlighted by his choice to repeat the word, in the same grammatical form, immediately. Prudentius uses this anadiplosis to emphasize testibus, repeating it as he describes the subjects of the poems that follow: “Good Christ denies nothing, ever, to his witnesses, / witnesses whom neither chains nor harsh death terrify.”²² In these cases, the martyrs, like the terminology used to describe them, are wholly subsumed into the idea of witness.

But testis does not, for Prudentius, lose its original meaning of witness. In every other poem, the word and its cognates relate simply to observing and testifying. It is often used to refer to some divine knowledge or supernatural revelation, but it is also used for simple acts of sight or attestation. In these latter instances, the witnessing is even occasionally done by distinctly uninspired actors—such as the Shades who observe Roman sacrificial rituals, the inscriptions attesting the construction of Roman temples, or even the persecutors themselves, who witness various elements of the Christian community or the martyr’s miracles while remaining unmoved.²³ But Prudentius usually does treat the act of witnessing, of testifying to truth, as privileged: God and nature are observers of human success and failure, while Christ, the Holy Spirit, the apostles, Moses, the magi, ordinary Christians, and even the Milvian Bridge (among others) all act as witnesses testifying to God’s truth either by their actions or by their words.²⁴ Some things act as witnesses by sole virtue of existing, standing as visible traces testifying to higher truths. The ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah, for instance, remain as reminders of hellfire, while all nature stands as witness to God’s creation—observable proof of divine control of the world.²⁵ Even the stones in the Jordan stand, twelve in number, as witnesses to the number of the disciples.²⁶ In these uses of testis and its verbal cognates, the act of testifying is foremost.

This continued use of testis to signify some form of witness makes it all the more clear that Prudentius’s use of the term as a synonym for martyr is part of a deliberate argument to emphasize the witnessing capacity of the martyr. Indeed, we can understand the martyr who is described as testis in Prudentius to be engaged in an enacting witness, complementing the observing witness of sight and the testimonial witness of the people and objects Prudentius identifies as offering evidence to God’s truth. When Prudentius calls his martyrs “witnesses,” he is establishing that he sees the martyr’s function as witness to be paramount and that he intended for his readers to draw the same conclusion.

Seeing and Being Seen: The Martyr and the Audience as Observers

Prudentius’s high estimation of the power of witness is further apparent when we consider the wealth of sight and seeing language he uses in these poems. Through the poet’s linguistic and narrative choices, martyrs are established both as seeing observers and as enactors of witness worthy of being seen, while the visual components of the text and the vision-centered arguments of the text render the text itself a testifying witness and an enacting witness. Prudentius emphasizes the act of seeing, uses language that highlights the visual, and makes narrative choices that highlight sight. The overwhelming presence of visual language signals to the reader that witness by sight is, in fact, an essential component of martyrdom.²⁷ To illustrate the many levels at which sight is operating in Prudentius’s work, I will examine Prudentius’s treatments of Quirinus, Encratis, and Vincent in turn.

In the case of Quirinus, Prudentius emphasizes the martyr’s power to share the gift of true and accurate seeing. Within the first few lines of the poem, for instance, Prudentius describes the Siscian bishop as having “illuminated the Catholic faith” through his death.²⁸ This idea that Quirinus enables the sight of others is borne out in the description of his execution and miraculous floating, which offers an example of how he shone light on the faith. Prudentius describes Quirinus first as being seen by his flock and then as seeing them seeing him:

The terrified flock watches their teacher

from the ground, at a distance,

for the people of Christ

had closed around the windings of the riverbanks

in a compressed battle line.

But Quirinus, floating,

cast his face around, and alas! sees his own [people]

frightened by his example.”²⁹

The fact of sight is emphasized here—the watching being done by the people of Christ is evocatively (indeed, as I shall soon discuss, ekphrastically) described, and then Quirinus’s own act of seeing is emphasized by the narrative framing (“he cast his face around”) and the emotional exclamation (“alas!”). But having seen the way that the crowd was seeing him, Quirinus realizes that his flock seems to be seeing and understanding his ordeal incorrectly. He offers a comforting speech, whose words Prudentius reports rather than recreates: “[Quirinus] strengthens their pious hearts, / plying them with soothing words / lest such things terrify any of them / or that constant faith might falter / or think that dying is a punishment.”³⁰ Correcting their sight (or, at least, their understanding of what they were seeing), Quirinus enables their faith: comforting them, teaching them the true meaning of death, and encouraging them to adhere steadfastly to faith. By acting to direct their response, moreover, Quirinus delays his own death—he needs to float if he is to deliver a sermon. This miracle confirms for onlookers and for readers what Quirinus has articulated in his speech, namely, that death means something different for the pious Christian, for whom death can be a reward and a way to “illuminate the Catholic faith.” In this poem, then, Quirinus crucially acts as an observer, seeing the crowds and correctly assessing their waywardness. The in-text audience, the crowd, is also composed of observers, whose sight (seeing Quirinus in the water) facilitates his miraculous testimony, which they also observe and which results in their faith being “illuminated” or made visible. The circle of sight Prudentius creates here highlights the fact and features of witness. It teaches, first, that witness can play an essential role in martyrdom and, second (and perhaps more crucially), that observers must correctly interpret what they see if their witness is to be effective in bolstering their faith.

There is another act of seeing that is important here: that which is accomplished by the reader through Prudentius’s ekphrasis. When Prudentius describes the people of Christ “crowd[ing] around the curves of the riverbanks” and forming a “compressed battle line,” he is offering us, the readers, extra physical details and resonant metaphors that render the image vivid to us. For example, using a noun, sinuamen, to describe the twists of the river rather than using an adjective forces readers to consider the physical space in which the crowds were gathered. The use of the military metaphor, as well, evokes remembrance of a familiar sight. We also get a sense of the emotional electricity in the air, as the crowd is described as both pauidi and trepidos. Prudentius is doing all he can to ensure that we, the readers, see the crowds. And then he turns to Quirinus, who sees (uidet) exactly the same thing. We, the readers, share Quirinus’s view here, seeing alongside him and becoming identified, through sight, with the martyr. We also share an emotional experience of sight with Quirinus when Prudentius includes an exclamation of distress (heu!) in his description of Quirinus’s reaction to his flock’s response to his ordeal. This can simultaneously be read in multiple ways: as the narrator’s voice interjecting, teaching the readers how to respond to the crowd’s misjudgment of the scene; as Quirinus’s interjection, offering the reader “direct access” to the martyr’s emotional state; and as an imposition of an emotional reaction on the reader—that is, this is the reader’s exclamation—for the readers to feel themselves in sympathy with the martyr. Thus the readers are here being instructed in how best to respond to their observation of the crowds, and in this response the readers are meant to re-enact Quirinus’s own experience as their own observations. In other words, the act of sight not only leads to the correction and instruction of the in-text audience; but it also becomes a means through which the reader establishes an affective identity with the martyr by seeing alongside him.

In Prudentius’s depiction of Encratis, sight is foregrounded as the ultimate guarantor of her martyrdom’s reality and validity. When Prudentius tells the reader of Peristephanon 4 that part of Encratis’s liver had been torn out, such that “pale death had something of yours / with you also living,” he seems to be (as I discussed in the last chapter) offering readers skeptical of living martyrdom a form of death to help persuade them of its possibility.³¹ But witness reasserts itself as the signal feature of martyrdom in the way that Prudentius frames this concession: the stanza begins with Prudentius’s narrator claiming that “We saw” (uidimus) it happen.³² In order for this partial death to furnish proof of martyrdom, it had to be seen. As the first word in the stanza, this notion of sight sets the tone for the episode so that even when the passage acknowledges a concrete role for death in Encratis’s martyrdom, that role is subordinate to the primary act of seeing and being seen. This language of sight is even more captivating because it presentizes something long past—it is as if it is saying, “We, in the here and now, speaking to you, dear readers, saw this event ourselves.” Just as Encratis’s survival was described in emphatically presentizing terms (remember the repetition of uiuis in lines 116 and 117), so too, here, is her experience rendered temporally proximate—if “we” saw her liver torn and thrown off, it must have happened relatively recently. In fact, however, Encratis would have undergone her torture a full century before Prudentius’s writing. Pierre-Yves Fux suggests that Prudentius is talking about encountering a relic,³³ but I think it far more likely that the poet is engaged in a presentizing project with the aim of bringing both Encratis’s witness and the text’s witness to the reader’s attention. Fux deals with Prudentius’s use of the present tense in the poem by terming it “anachronism” to “exprime l’étrangeté de la situation”³⁴ of the living martyr—beyond this he offers little as to what Prudentius’s affective or didactic aims might be: why is “strangeness” to be sought after here? But if we discard the idea that Prudentius is using uidimus to refer to a relic, we can instead consider that all presentizing elements here are part of Prudentius’s advocacy for the idea of witness as central to martyrdom. Each of the present-tense verbs in the passage relates to some type of witness:

You . . . live (uiuis) on in the world.

You live (uiuis), and you retrace (retexis) your punishments one by one. . . .

You narrate (narras) how the foul wounds

left bitter furrows. . . .

The full punishment crowns (coronat) you, martyr,

just as though destroyed.

We saw (uidimus) that a part of your liver,

torn off by oppressing claws, lay far away.³⁵

The uiuis refers to enacting witness, as does the coronat, while the retexis and the narras represent testifying witness. Observing witness is signaled by the uidimus, which foregrounds the role of the act of sight, though here it is the now-present narrator, rather than Encratis, who has done the observing. Sight, in Encratis’s story, plays a small but pivotal role in helping Prudentius make his argument about martyrdom.

By contrast, sight is persistently, emphatically, and even redundantly centered as crucial for martyrdom in Vincent’s narrative. Even Christ himself, the imitator’s object, is described in witness-centered terms: the angels validate Vincent’s sufferings by saying that Christ has seen them, that Christ is spectator.³⁶ Christ is acting as the observing witness through sight, rather than by any other form of knowing, and the object of his sight is the enacted witness of Vincent. Moreover, this role of spectator has already, within the poem, been adopted by Vincent, whose own seeing is emphasized. After a brilliant flash of light shines in his prison cell and his leg clamps miraculously fly off, Vincent “realizes / that . . . Christ, the giver of light, is present,” and then he sees (cernit) the potsherds clothe themselves with soft, nectar-scented flowers.³⁷ The martyr’s own observation, his own perception, is twice highlighted here, as Vincent recognizes Christ and sees (and smells!) the flowers that signify his preliminary ascension to paradise. Sight here forms a point of connection and identification between Christ and the martyr.

But there is another character within the poem who is transformed by the act of observing. Prudentius’s narrator recounts Vincent’s jailer having an experience of sight strikingly parallel to Vincent’s, as he presses his eye to the cracks in the martyr’s door only to see the martyr walking around, unshackled and singing, in a cell filled with blooming potsherds. We find out later that this experience prompted his conversion.³⁸ Michael Roberts has pointed to these lines as a doublet signifying Prudentius’s intentional parallel between the martyr’s sight and the jailer’s, emphasizing both the martyr’s perspective and the outsider’s.³⁹ This doubling serves to verify or attest to the veracity of the martyr’s story. But there is yet more going on here: the poet describes the jailer’s sight in far more pointed terms than Vincent’s, emphasizing the presence of light and illumination while also stressing the physicality and intention of the jailer’s looking:

. . . Light within

broke through the closed doors

and the delicate splendor of the hidden light

was projected through the chinks.

While astonished at this, the terrified

guardian of the dark doorway,

for whom the nightlong task had been

to guard the deadly house,

heard the very sweet song

of the martyr’s psalmody,

to which the hollow room returns

a likeness of a comparable voice.

Trembling, he then looks in,

his eye pressed as much as possible

to the posts to enter through

the close-pressed joints.

He sees the scatterings of potsherds

blooming with many flowers

and that very man, with shackles burst,

walking around singing.⁴⁰

Prudentius is here emphasizing this secondary witness, going into exceptional detail about the act of an unsympathetic bystander observing the martyr. The message is subtle but clear: if this observer can be transformed from persecutor into Christian by the act of witnessing, other observers (that is, the readers) can also find themselves transformed by observing the martyrs, by reaching with their eyes to seek out the experience of the martyr. The role of sight as the key required feature of vicarious martyrdom is confirmed by the way the jailer’s story is repeated twenty lines later, just before Vincent dies:

Then the keeper of the prison

and door-keeper of the chains,

as the age-old witness tells it,

suddenly believed in Christ.

This one had seen,

with the bolts fastened,

the closed space of dense fog

glitter with the splendor of otherworldly light.⁴¹

This emphatic, distilled retelling of the jailer’s act of witness retains only two elements of the original telling: the jailer’s sight of the heavenly light; and the obstacles to that sight, that is, the fastened bolts and dense fog in the cell. The jailer nonetheless sees successfully and becomes Christian as a result. Prudentius thus communicates to his readers that while the remove between observer and observed may be wide, it is nonetheless surmountable.⁴²

In addition to using Vincent’s story to describe those who see effectively and thus move closer to martyrdom, Prudentius invites the reader to participate in the act of seeing, just like the jailer, the martyr, and Christ the spectator himself, when he describes the scene where Vincent’s community comes out to care for and venerate him. Prudentius introduces the action of the townspeople with cerneres (“you [sing.] might see”),⁴³ and so the reader—the singular, personal, individual reader—becomes involved as the viewer, rather than the reader, of this display of affection and veneration. The word introduces both the concept of sight and the action of sight, as the reader is prompted to visualize, in his mind’s eye, the scene Prudentius depicts.

In each of these poems, the observing witness of sight is configured as central to martyrdom—indeed, as making martyrdom possible. Characters or narrators within the poems model the effectiveness of observing witness, and the audience shares in this witness by “seeing” through ekphrasis and other textually visual means. Like the jailer at Vincent’s door, they have been offered a chance to undergo transformation through visual observation (in this case, textually effected visual observation). If sight is central to martyrdom, and Prudentius’s poems allow readers to see martyrs in action, Prudentius is thus offering his readers the materials through which they might become martyrs themselves.

Speaking and Being Heard

Witness is not only accomplished by sight; speaking and hearing both feature prominently in these poems as major components of witnessing. The martyrs testify with their words as well as with the spectacles they create, while observers witness by hearing the testimony of the martyrs. Just as Prudentius emphasizes visuality as a means of establishing identification with the martyrs he depicts, he also emphasizes speech. Most noticeably, he constructs lengthy speeches for his martyrs and inserts them into his poems in narratively powerful ways. Additionally, he chooses to include and to linger on miraculous speech acts. Finally, and most subtly, he creates a substrate in which references to hearing, gossip, and reported speech are woven together to undergird and support the lesson that offering spoken testimony is an effective means of achieving martyrdom.

The speeches of the martyrs, as Michael Roberts and others have noted, far outshine even the manner of their deaths in Prudentius’s presentation, both in terms of length and in terms of emphasis. While in the Peristephanon the martyrs’ deaths (as opposed to their torments) are reported quickly, often almost as an afterthought,⁴⁴ their speeches are long and lingering, comprising the bulk of the verse in several of the poems and forming the focal points of several more.⁴⁵ Verbal confrontation and interaction drive and dominate Prudentius’s martyr narratives. For example, Quirinus’s speech itself accounts for thirty lines of a ninety-line poem, while a further five lines are devoted to the speech Prudentius does not relate in Quirinus’s voice.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Peristephanon 12, describing the passions of Peter and Paul, is entirely composed of a dialogue between two pilgrims. Romanus, the protagonist of Peristephanon 10, speaks for more than half of the exceptionally long poem, giving proper declamations and lengthy retorts that comprise 614 of its 1140 lines.⁴⁷ His death, by comparison, is related in one and a half lines and is brief almost to the point of absurdity: the still-speaking martyr is thrown into prison, where “a wicked lictor strangles his neck with a cord.”⁴⁸

As we shall see, the length of these speeches is but one manifestation of Prudentius’s emphasis on speech: even when the martyrs are not speaking, the martyr’s speech is frequently the focus of the poet’s or the persecutor’s commentary. The first twenty-two lines of Peristephanon 10 deal with the ability of the poet to speak through his poetry—an ability that is granted by God if the poet takes the martyr as model.⁴⁹ Asclepiades, Romanus’s antagonist, remarks again and again that the martyr’s speech must be stopped, going so far as to order Romanus’s cheeks gouged and his tongue excised from his mouth.⁵⁰ A decent opportunity for speech is also granted to the doctor, who must defend his work after Romanus’s continued oratory raises suspicion about whether the surgery had been performed correctly:

The doctor refutes this charge with the truth:

“Plumb now the cave of his throat

and bring the curious thumb around within the teeth.

Or inspect the open swallowings,

lest anything remains which governs breath.

. . .

It’s for him to know which god suggests words to him.

I do not know how a muted man is speaking.”

With these words, Aristo cleared himself.⁵¹

Here we have an example of verification by the witness of sight, sound, and even touch, as the doctor invites Asclepiades (alongside the reader) to look into Romanus’s mouth and examine it with his own fingers to prove that the tongue is missing, all while the martyr’s words continue unabated as evidence to the contrary. The invitation is to look and to touch, but ultimately, it is the doctor’s speech that ultimately vindicates him. All of this supports the importance of speech to the poem’s projection of truth and underscores Prudentius’s desire to emphasize speech: even when the martyr is not speaking, the other characters are discussing his speech.

Speech is at the heart of Quirinus’s martyrdom, as Prudentius depicts it: it is the means by which he makes manifest his martyrdom to his parishioners and to Prudentius’s readers. The speech he is reported to have offered to his parishioners, which corrected the way they were seeing him and interpreting his trials, enabled him to act as a witness to Christ’s triumph. But his speech chastising Christ for delaying his death—depicted via direct, rather than reported, speech—ensures his reception as martyr both by demonstrating his parrhesia and by forcing Prudentius’s readers to replicate it as they read. Parrhesia, the bold speech Quirinus demonstrates, had a dual meaning in Antiquity; it meant both the ability of a free citizen to “raise one’s voice freely” (often in criticism of those in power)⁵² and also the ability to communicate with and demonstrate persuasion with God. These became mutually dependent in Late Antiquity, particularly in the case of the martyrs, as Claudia Rapp notes: “The boldness of speech displayed by the martyrs during their last days on earth thus resulted in their enduring parrhesia in heaven.”⁵³ Quirinus’s parrhesia, however, blurs the lines between the two meanings, between the earthly and the heavenly parrhesia. He is speaking truth to power and critiquing that power, but that power is no secular authority—it is God himself. Quirinus’s speech is, ultimately, respectful, but it is nonetheless a criticism. He is reminding God of what God already knows and politely requesting a different course of action. And God listens. Not only, then, do we have evidence of free communication with God, but we also see that Quirinus is persuasive. His speech has a visible, calculable result in the natural world of those witnessing his martyrdom within the poem—this is the “effective interpretation” I noted above, which Prudentius models in his poems to teach his readers how they themselves should interpret their worlds in order to become martyrs themselves.

It is significant that Quirinus’s address to Christ appears in direct speech rather than in indirect or reported speech similar to that which conveys his consolation to his parishioners. The difference in dramatic effect between noting that a speech has been or is being made vs quoting that speech parallels the difference between saying and doing, particularly in Late Antiquity where reading was typically done aloud. Direct speech in this setting has the vivifying effect of forcing the reader to re-enact the speech performance of the character speaking.⁵⁴ This difference in speech quality—the fact that this speech, as opposed to the first, forces the reader to mirror Quirinus’s boldness of speech—further highlights the importance that Prudentius places on the speech of the martyr. Finally, this speech is, as far as our sources can tell us, original to Prudentius. None of the other sources mention it, though they do note his miraculous floating speech to his parishioners.⁵⁵ Prudentius, then, has, as far as we can tell, invented this scene and speech as a way to solidify Quirinus’s authority on multiple fronts, showing him to have both parrhesia and intercessory power. Quirinus’s status and power as a martyr are displayed, in Peristephanon 7, through speech and its several witnesses.

For Vincent, too, speech is central to his martyrdom. His first offense, the action that precipitates his trials and torments, is speech (Peristephanon 5.44). The ensuing dialogue reinforces that fact, as Vincent’s speech enrages Datian, and the persecutor orders his mouth to be stopped (Peristephanon 5.93–100). In fact, the dialogic antagonism between Datian and Vincent forms the backbone of this narrative, as Vincent’s taunts escalate the level of torture to which he is subjected. Aurality finds emphasis as well: through the angel’s speech, which forms the centerpiece of Vincent’s prison sequence and states unequivocally his attainment of martyr status; through the song and psalmody that help draw the jailer’s eye toward the prison door; and through the emphasis on rumor and report we see when Datian hears of Vincent’s survival in prison—his ears are filled with Vincent’s miracles.⁵⁶

Finally, when extolling Encratis, Prudentius highlights her unique ability to recount the experience of martyrdom as the reason that her survival of her own death garners her so much honor:

You live, and you retrace your punishments one by one,

and preserving the spoils of hewn flesh,

you narrate how the foul wounds

left bitter furrows.⁵⁷

The verbs vivis and narras frame the stanza, forming a parallel that helps emphasize why her survival is so important. Both retexens and narras again point to the benefit of survival: you can recount and narrate what has happened to you, continuing to bear witness even after the torment has ended.⁵⁸

Another technique Prudentius used to emphasize the power of testifying witness was to enmesh the act of speaking and the performance of miracles. In several poems, speech comprises all or part of the miracle the text is recounting. These miraculous speech acts serve to enable the martyr to testify both through speech and through the demonstrably superhuman power they reveal the martyrs to possess. To offer just three examples: Quirinus speaks while floating miraculously, as we have noted, with his speech enabled by the miracle of his delayed death; Romanus continues to speak despite losing his tongue; and the child martyr who is interrogated and slaughtered during Romanus’s passio (whom we will encounter later in this chapter) speaks despite being, quite literally, a child who cannot speak, an infans. Speech and speaking, that is to say, testifying witness, is in these cases absolutely inseparable from the miracle of martyrdom.

Undergirding all of these more overt emphases on speech and speaking is a subtler, structural emphasis on speech being heard. References to hearing, gossip, and reported speech pervade the poems, as do rationales for speaking, which frequently serve as drivers of the plot and as authorial conceits for writing, for the authority to write, or for the veracity of the things written. This web of subtle references to speaking and hearing helps identify speaking as an effective form of witness. Peristephanon 4, for example, is preoccupied with verbal praise, enjoining its reader to “sing psalms,” “speak forth Successus, sing Martialis,” “let your song celebrate Urbanus,” “let the song resound Julia and Quintillian,” “let the chorus sound Publius and retell the triumph of Fronto,” and “let eager praise cultivate afresh your triumph, Apodemus.”⁵⁹ Prudentius writes of four more martyrs that their names should be exalted, even if they refuse his meter (Peristephanon 4.162), and that all eighteen martyrs, plus the four more he has added, will have their names recited to Christ, first by Prudentius through his poem, and then by an angel, face-to-face with the Father and Son (Peristephanon 4.169–176). Recitation and vocalization of these names provide a connection to Christ, a worshipful mimicry of angelic duty, in which Prudentius, through simple imperatives, hortatory subjunctives, and narrative modeling, encourages his readers to participate. Additionally, in arguing for Gaius and Crementius’s inclusion in the canon of martyrs, Prudentius uses not words of forgetting or remembrance or of dishonor or honor but, rather, the language of speaking. He says that we must name them and “not be silent.”⁶⁰ Meanwhile, in Peristephanon 5, we see reports being granted the value of truth. Prudentius uses common report (fertur, 5.248) to describe Vincent’s prison as a veritable Hades and also to offer credence to the report of the jailer’s conversion (ut fert uetustas conscia, 5.347). Hearing and report again become plot drivers when Datian gets wind of what is going on in Vincent’s cell, and, as we have seen, his ears grow full of Vincent’s miracles (Peristephanon 5.325). And for Quirinus, the report of his illustrious end is mentioned at the start of the poem, in the second stanza, and is situated such that it largely justifies the rest of the poem. Quirinus is described as a man of manifest merit who “is said to have illustrated / the Catholic faith through his death.”⁶¹ In all these examples, we see speaking, reporting, and hearing holding truth value.

In these poems, then, martyrs become martyrs by offering their speaking witness, and observers connect to the truths the martyrs advocate by aurally observing their testimony, that is, by hearing. By reading aloud the poems in which the martyrs speak, the reader can re-enact the martyr’s crown-meriting actions, identifying with the martyrs themselves. Observing witness, testifying witness, and enacting witness work together to generate more martyrs.

But this is a big claim to make. It is one thing to argue that Prudentius seeks to influence his readers and inspire them to adopt the self-forming techniques the poet advises; it is a whole separate beast to argue that Prudentius thinks that the world of the reader and the world of the text can be so thoroughly intertwined as to eliminate experiential and narrative boundaries between the two. But we see this very rupture occurring in Peristephanon 5, when Prudentius speaks, in the voice of the poet, to one of his characters. He asks Datian a rhetorical question: “But what, oh obstinate tyrant, / will mark the end / of this impotence? / Will no limit break you?”⁶² This apostrophe would be unremarkable except for the fact that Datian, stunningly, responds to the narrator’s query, breaking the fourth wall to exclaim: “None! I will never give up!”⁶³ This metalepsis demonstrates the profound power of speech to transcend ontological frames: it is speech that penetrates from the world of the narrator into the world of the narrated, that collapses the “present” of the narrator with the past he had been describing, and that, ultimately, with the reader’s recitation of the poem, elides any distance between the time and reality of the poet and the time and reality of the reader.⁶⁴

It is no wonder that speech is accorded so much power in Prudentius’s poems: He himself seems to have understood his poetry to be a means of communicating with God. Just like believers’ petitions at martyr shrines, Prudentius describes his poetry being heard by God:

Oh glory of Christ,

listen to an unsophisticated poet

as he confesses the sins of his heart

and puts his deeds in writing.

I am unworthy, I know and own,

that Christ himself should hear me;

but through the intercession of the martyrs,

a cure may be attained.⁶⁵

As Jill Ross notes about this passage, “Prudentius, although referring to his poetic activity, attributes conventional qualities of orality to his poems (audi, exaudiat), and thereby betrays an attitude that views writing as a kind of indirect speech that will reach the ears of Christ.”⁶⁶ We see this same theme at the close of Peristephanon 5, when Prudentius entreats Vincent to “hear the voices of the praying” and to become their spokesperson before the Father’s throne, which will help convince Christ to “lend a favorable ear” to the entreaties of his people.⁶⁷ And Quirinus’s request of God that he be allowed to die is, after all, granted. The very first poem in the Peristephanon describes how praying at the shrines of the martyrs brings solace and salvation: the martyrs hear all petitions, not suffering a murmur to be lost, and carry the words on to God’s ears. “They hear, and immediately bear [them] to the ears of the eternal king.”⁶⁸ That God has ears, and that speech is an effective way to communicate with him, is a recurring theme in the Peristephanon.⁶⁹

Unthwarted Witness

One way to test the hypothesis that witness is central to Prudentius’s idea of martyrdom is to examine the opposite case: where is witness avoided? Where is witness in some way thwarted? In the Peristephanon, Prudentius includes many instances of persecutors attempting to hide or quash the martyr’s witness. In every case, these attempts to hide the martyr’s testimony or enactment fail, spectacularly and dramatically. Indeed, the fact that Prudentius configures his villains as knowing that witness should be guarded against is evidence that the poet wanted witness to be an object of consideration within and beyond the text. But the fact that the persecutors are continually baffled in their efforts to hide the martyrs’ testimony and enactment serves to further that same knowledge: witness is powerful, and when God approves of the witness being given, nothing can hinder it. This happens frequently throughout the Peristephanon, but perhaps most spectacularly in Vincent’s case.⁷⁰

In this narrative, Datian attempts to deprive the Christian community of a body to venerate, thinking that without this evidence his power will be diminished,⁷¹ but Vincent’s body turns out to be immune both to violent dissolution and to being hidden. Datian leaves the corpse to be ravaged by animals, but, as we have seen, to no avail. His next order betrays his overwhelming desire to hide the visible evidence of the martyr: he orders not just that Vincent be buried at sea but that he be doubly enclosed in a burlap sack and tied to a stone so he would unquestionably sink; he also orders the soldiers carrying out the orders to travel so far from shore that they are no longer in sight of land (Peristephanon 5.457–464). Of course, Vincent’s body floats back to shore and, ultimately, to precisely the veneration Datian had sought to prevent.

Vincent’s body is un-hideable, and it is because of this visible resiliency that Vincent earns his second martyrial crown. This is one of the features of Vincent’s martyrdom that most calls into question the role of death as a necessary signifier of martyrdom—Vincent’s body is death-less (because already dead). It only signifies through its visible, supernatural power. The only way that it accomplishes its martyrdom is by providing further witness, further proof to the eyes of beholders and believers. Vincent’s second martyrdom is earned entirely by his body’s enacting witness.

Observing Testimony, Enacting Witness

Witness is clearly of singular importance for Prudentius’s account of martyrdom. But why? The answer may be found in the way that Prudentius frequently configures witnessing the martyrs and their miracles as generating belief and acting as a catalyst for Christian conversion. Prudentius pointedly and repeatedly depicts the Christianizing effect of the visibility and/or aurality he highlights. We have already seen this once in the Vincent narrative: when the jailer witnesses Vincent’s prison-cell paradise and is converted. But it is acknowledged as well elsewhere in the Peristephanon, as well as in Quirinus’s poem and once again in Vincent’s.

The power of witnessing miracles pervades the Peristephanon. In the very first poem, the tokens of the martyrs fly heavenward, with all the bystanders and even the executioner seeing their flight and reacting with amazement. The executioner appears to be converted, as he “halting, stays his hand and grows pale,” but he ultimately follows through with his swing not out of hatred or duty to his occupation, but “lest their glory perish.”⁷² The miraculous endurance and libertas displayed by Lawrence in Peristephanon 2 persuade Rome’s “leading men” to “embrace Christ” and prompt the Roman people to give up their shrines and run “to the seat of Christ.”⁷³ At Eulalia’s death, her spirit flies forth from her mouth in the form of a bird; the executioner who sees this is obstupefactus and attonitus and runs away in horror of what his hand had done.⁷⁴ While this is not a conversion in the strictest sense, it is clear that he has seen something of the truth of Eulalia’s espoused Christianity, recognizing that his orders had been in error. In Peristephanon 6, the governor’s attendant sees the trio of martyrs ascending to heaven and shows the sight to the governor’s young daughter, who then knows, along with the attendant, that “those whom [the governor] had killed in the marketplace lived on in heaven. / These things then virginity deserved to see openly, / through clarity, while her father remained blind.”⁷⁵ Moreover, those who ought to see miracles but do not (such as the governor in Peristephanon 6, Datian, or Asclepiades in Peristephanon 10) are characterized either as blind or as so animalistic that they cannot see what most humans can.⁷⁶ Such stories appear interspersed throughout the poems, and they help build the case that, for Prudentius, seeing is believing.

Just as Vincent is able to inspire the conversion of the prison guard by witnessing to the truth of Christ, so too does Prudentius point to the possible conversion of the savage soldier tasked with taking Vincent’s body to sea. His name, “Eumorphio” or “well-formed,”⁷⁷ screams for a conversion story: it is a programmatic name, not the name of a villain. That no conversion occurs within the narrative does not detract from the expectation of it that Prudentius has planted in the reader by focusing on the name, devoting a whole line to its establishment (Eumorphio nomen fuit, 5.466). The last we see Eumorphio, he is standing on the boat, marveling with the other boatmen at the body floating lightly over the waves back to Spanish shores (5.493–496). We have here witness and amazement, which is not too large a step from conversion, at least as we have seen Prudentius configuring it: this type of witness is the intended result of the body’s miracles.

The Christianizing property of miracle-witness also plays a role in Prudentius’s treatment of Quirinus. While rejecting his own miraculous floating, Quirinus concedes that the event does, in fact, have utility. He asserts: “Now your reputation is fulfilled / and the power of your name revealed, / through which Gentile numbness grows dull.”⁷⁸ Miracles, here, serve to demonstrate God’s power, to confirm what the Christian community already knows by visual demonstration in the present, but they also serve to demonstrate that truth to new audiences. Miracles dumbfound skeptics and force them to recognize claims counter to their own accepted truths. Even though Quirinus generally rejects modern-day miracles—he objects to his own continued miraculous floating on the grounds that there’s nothing new in it and that it adds nothing to the glory of God—Prudentius is offering here, through the martyr himself, a concession to miracles’ continued utility.

The Text as Witness

A final component in Prudentius’s construction of martyrdom as witness is his configuration of the text itself as a witness. Indeed, as Jill Ross writes, “Prudentius sees his own corpus of poetry as a transmuted form of the martyrs’ divine body-texts, and therefore as capable of exercising the same mediatory function.”⁷⁹ The text serves as the testifying witness, communicating the truth to others and enabling the witness (in all forms) of the reader. As a physical document, it engages the haptic, visual, auditory, and olfactory senses of the reader, providing observational data. As a text comprising words intended to be spoken, either silently or aloud, it enables observational witness (as the reader sees and hears the words read aloud in her mind), testimonial witness (as the reader repeats the words spoken by and about the martyrs), and enacting witness (as the reader, in reading the direct words of the martyr, re-vivifies that martyr). In addition, as a vehicle for vivid description, the text enables the reader to see, in her mind’s eye, the events unfolding—and so the text once again provides fuel for the reader’s (now viewer’s) observing witness. And ultimately, by recreating the presence of the objects described, the text allows the reader to experience the drama of martyrdom firsthand, in her own visceral reactions to the episodes and torments detailed in the text; readers suffer alongside the martyrs depicted and thus enact their own martyrdoms.

Prudentius is intent on conveying this aspect of texts, their life beyond the page. He consistently, as we have seen, depicts the act of writing as a vehicle for speaking or confessing to God, and he sees the stringing-together of verses as akin to weaving crowns of his own in praise of God.⁸⁰ The text is more than text. It is material, to be offered at the tombs of the martyrs. It is voice, to be offered up to the ears of God. It is body, acting as a mimetic double of the martyr’s body and equally capable of mediating between this realm and the next.⁸¹ Text is testimony, re-presenting (making present again) reality for observers by recording and recreating what “really” transpired and by explaining what ought to be believed. In the Hamartigenia, for instance, Prudentius describes the roots of Christian belief in God by pointing to God’s presence in Scripture: “we . . . have now seen the Lord twice, in books and in body, / before by faith and soon after face-to-face in flesh and blood.”⁸² With faith, then, text becomes so real that it parallels physical reality. Christ was present once in text and later in the flesh, and the believer has seen him both times.

In Peristephanon 4, Prudentius introduces the “text as witness” trope simply by calling attention to the fact of the text, that is, by drawing the reader’s notice to the fact that she is reading a poem. He interrupts his praise of the martyrs to declare that he must violate the meter of his poem in order to accommodate their names, and then he comments that “the concern to speak about the saints is never wicked or coarse. . . . Love of their golden names makes light of the laws of poetry.”⁸³ This digression, both from the meter of the poem and from the subject immediately at hand, enables Prudentius to highlight the role of text. He goes on to say that the names of the martyrs whom he had found so difficult to contain in verse are written in the book of heaven, awaiting angelic recitation to Christ, who would then bestow divine favor on Caesaraugusta.⁸⁴ Immediately following the irruption of the fact of the text into the mind of the reader, recollecting her to the knowledge that the text is acting as mediator of the witness she is receiving from the martyrs, Prudentius inserts the notion that the text itself will stand before Christ, that the names read aloud to him will suffice for his intercession.

In Vincent’s case, the text appears as witness twice, first in the martyr’s refusal to hand over the Christian sacred books to the persecutors, and then in an interruption, the metalepsis noted above, in which the crazed persecutor responds to the narrator’s apostrophe. Prudentius highlights the role of texts as witnesses both in Datian’s request for the books to be burned and in Vincent’s defiant reply. Datian pleads:

At least reveal the hidden pages

and obscure books

so that the crooked-sowing sect

is burned with just flames.⁸⁵

Datian identifies texts as dangerous because they spread the seed of Christianity, though he mistakenly identifies them as hidden. Vincent demonstrates exactly how un-hidden Christian sacred texts are, however, by making repeated references to episodes from those very books in his reply. These books are dangerous precisely because they are not hidden, because they remain as witness to events in Christian history. Vincent tells the persecutor that, for desiring to burn the inspired books of God, Datian himself will be the one to burn. To convince him of this, Vincent refers to Scripture:

You see the tell-tale embers

of Gomorrah’s crimes,

nor does the ash of Sodom lie hidden,

an eternal witness to death.

This exemplar is yours, serpent,

the soot of sulphur

and pitch mixed with tar

which will soon ensnare you deep in hell.⁸⁶

He emphasizes first the act of seeing, of observing the indices that remain to tell the story. This seeing, however, only comes from reading Scripture.⁸⁷ Vincent is assuming that by engaging with the inspired text, visual witness can be achieved. He then identifies Sodom’s ashes as an eternal witness, and yet, again, this is a witness only to be found in Scripture. Concluding with the concept of an exemplar and linking Datian with the serpent, Vincent brings the witness of the text into the future. The text of Scripture records the past, testifies in the present, and encompasses the future as well, witnessing to what will be. Both Datian’s fear of the power of the text and Vincent’s affirmation of the value of the text confirm the idea that text can be witness. The text of Scripture, for Prudentius, is a witness in its own right.

The second instance in which text as witness comes to the foreground in this poem is when Prudentius asks a rhetorical question and Datian answers. Though I have used this as an example of the power of speech in Prudentius’s poetics, it is also an example of the text drawing attention to itself as a text precisely because of the jarring nature of the broken boundary. Prudentius ruptures the boundaries between the time of the persecutor and the time of the poet, between the text and its creator, and between the reader and the worlds of both the poet and the poem’s setting, but in doing so, in blurring those boundaries, the poet calls attention to the medium through which those boundary-crossings occur.

Finally, in Quirinus’s story we can see Prudentius using the trope of “text as witness” to argue for the efficacy of textually conveyed miracles. In the final lines of Quirinus’s speech admonishing Christ for grandstanding, Prudentius has the bishop describe the power of God as having been “published” (prodita) by the miracle he has just performed in allowing Quirinus to float: “Now your reputation is fulfilled / and the power of your name published, / through which Gentile numbness grows dull.”⁸⁸ The verb prodo, which generally means “bring forth,” is also used by Prudentius’s progenitors and contemporaries to mean “to publish.”⁸⁹ This small reference to God’s miraculous power as a publication—and of that publication as a witness that has the power to convert!—is the culmination of the argument Quirinus makes in his speech (and that Prudentius makes in undermining Quirinus’s speech) that a text can be sufficient witness to God’s power.

Remember, Quirinus’s speech begins with an admonition to Christ, in which the martyr asks, in essence, “What is the use of new miracles when we have record of earlier miracles in our sacred texts?” The martyr states bluntly, “In no way is this glory for you / Either unusual or new, / To trample on a raging sea / And stop a rushing river.”⁹⁰ This is a challenge to Christ and to the reader to defend the repetition of miraculous events. We all already know, Quirinus points out, that God can make people walk on water and can control the direction of rivers—what glory can repetition add, what novelty, when we already have all the evidence we need of God’s power in Scripture? With this speech, Quirinus is calling into question the necessity of all present-day miracles and is asserting the sufficiency of texts to display and convey divine power. Shouldn’t we know what God is capable of through Scripture alone? Present-day miracles add nothing to the glory of God, at least not for those who have faith in Scripture. We do not need to see something physically with our own eyes to know that it is possible because we can trust the images we find in sacred texts. Text is just as good as reality, as far as faith is concerned. Scriptural text, he argues, is a sufficient witness. We have all the witness we need; no new miracles, and no new spectacles of martyrdom, are required.

And yet Quirinus says all this in the middle of a miracle. He makes this argument while enacting a post-biblical miracle, which is lending him both the opportunity and the authority to question the value of those very same miracles. Reassuring God that faith and glory do not depend on the performance of miracles takes on a different character when the ability to make that statement in the first place is dependent on an ongoing miracle. We watch Quirinus attempt to navigate the relative value of (and possible gaps between) reality and representation. Quirinus verbally supports the reality value of Scripture and questions the necessity of visual confirmation, even though his current circumstance undercuts his words and speaks to the continued value of eye-witnessed miracles.

We, however, are watching Quirinus’s struggle through a poem, through the lens of a text describing a miracle that has, according to Prudentius’s rendering of Quirinus’s speech, been “published”—in reality and in text—as evidence of God’s power. The same irony and paradox—that the denial of value is enabled by the very thing being devalued—are present here. On the one hand, the poem discounts itself as the representation of a martyr who requires no representation and as an addition to Scripture, which requires no further evidence. On the other hand, the poem simultaneously affirms itself, first by presenting the martyr (a martyr whose authority is bolstered because he knows he’s not adding anything to Scripture), second by being the textual substitute for the martyr, who is not physically visible in the present day, and finally by offering (again paradoxically) an argument for the sufficiency of prior textual witness. Despite the tension between representation and the argument for non-repetition, the existence of the text highlights both the value of this text and the object of its representation, rendering both (contrary to Quirinus’s argument) important. The conclusion to which Prudentius ultimately forces his readers is that, in the case of both Scripture and martyrdom stories, the text can serve as a sufficient witness, bringing truth-confirming miracles to new audiences—that is, to readers who, like Quirinus, can enact martyrdoms of their own by engaging with the text.

Prudentius understood his writing on the martyrs to be witness, with the same capabilities for mediating subsequent witnesses as the martyrs themselves. But does this mean that he understood the text to be a martyr in some way? Perhaps. He did, after all, have an extremely ambitious sense of what text could accomplish. And we have already seen Vincent’s lifeless body acting as a witness and earning the martyr a second crown. But the more important point here (and one reason I think Prudentius would actually assert a difference between witness and martyrdom, such that all martyrdom is witness, but not all witness is martyrdom) is that, on my reading, Prudentius is arguing for a martyrdom that relies on engagement with witness, on experiencing witness, in addition to enacting it. In his advocacy for a living martyrdom of witness, he is looking to affect the lived experiences and habitus-construction of his audience members. No matter how martyrial texts are, they cannot be agents in the same way—they cannot have the experience of witness.

To illustrate what I mean about Prudentius’s texts generating the experience of witness for his readers, I would like to turn to Peristephanon 10.

PERISTEPHANON 10: MODELING THE LIVING MARTYR

In Peristephanon 10, Prudentius actually models how one can achieve martyrial witness through interpretation and understanding rather than through death. He does so by means of an ekphrasis featuring two anonymous characters, a child and his mother, whose story appears as an interruption of the deacon Romanus’s passio. Prudentius does not explicitly call either the child or the mother a martyr, but he clearly configures both as such, using them to teach his readers how to cultivate a martyrial worldview that would enable them to become martyrs themselves.⁹¹ The mother, in particular, is a model for the reader. While there is no violence done to her body by direct physical assault, she nonetheless becomes a martyr by insinuating herself into her son’s martyrdom—she intervenes to enable her son’s martyrdom by interpreting Scripture for his benefit and includes herself within those interpretations, ultimately becoming, without any physically inflicted suffering of her own, a martyr herself.⁹² She is marked as an observer, a testifier, and an enactor of God’s truth, and, in Prudentius’s rendering, she makes both herself and her son into martyrs.

Their story begins with Romanus. As part of his diatribe against paganism, Romanus asserts that inborn human understanding acknowledges the truth of Christianity.⁹³ To prove his point, Romanus challenges the prefect Asclepiades to interrogate a child from the crowd. The prefect chooses a small boy, barely weaned and described as an infans, who declares that “whatever it is that men call ‘God’ / must be one and the only one of the one. / Since Christ is thus, Christ is the true God. / Even children do not suppose that there are many sorts of gods.”⁹⁴ The appalled prefect asks who taught him to say such things, and the child answers, “My mother, and God through my mother.”⁹⁵ Asclepiades then orders that the child be tortured and the mother forced to watch so that she will suffer more: “The parent’s eyes will be punished more cruelly / than if the bloody claws despoil her limbs.”⁹⁶ Undergoing graphic abuse that draws tears from even his executioners, the child cries out for water, using precisely the same language of thirst that Jesus used in John.⁹⁷ Up to this point, his mother, the only dry-eyed spectator in the crowd, has been watching silently, her “brow shining with calmness and joy” through the torture that was meant to pain her vicariously;⁹⁸ she now takes this opportunity to speak. She admonishes her son for complaining, reminds him that Christ awaits him if he suffers well, and finally encourages him to imitate biblical instances of sacrifice and martyrdom that typologically mirror Christ’s own passion. Heartened by her speech, the child begins to laugh at the violence being done to his body. Asclepiades, furious, orders him killed. The child is handed back to his mother, who carries him to the slaughter, bids him farewell, and sings a Psalm of David as he is beheaded. The last the reader sees her, the mother is clutching her son’s severed head to her chest.

The child in this story is clearly depicted as a martyr. He witnesses by speaking and testifying about the truth of Christ and also by enacting witness, re-presenting Christ for onlookers.⁹⁹ And, of course, he dies in the process and so conforms to the familiar, death-centered definition of martyrdom that many readers, both ancient and modern, have come to expect. Nonetheless, Prudentius never labels the child as a martyr—an important reminder that scholars examining the phenomenon of martyrdom cannot be limited by explicit categorization.

But there is one sense in which the child fails as a martyr: he reacts negatively to his torture. Even as he is at his most Christ-like, even as he is repeating the very words of Christ in his suffering, the child is failing as a martyr because martyrs, according to late ancient convention, are not supposed to appear to suffer. As we know from the work of Stephanie Cobb, ancient readers would have expected and drawn inspiration from the impassibility of the martyr—the martyr’s divine deliverance from physical suffering was proof of the truth of their message and their connection to God.¹⁰⁰ Prudentius typically upheld this expectation: this episode is the one and only time any of his martyrs evinces a negative reaction to bodily injury.¹⁰¹ The child’s cries of thirst upend the script Prudentius’s audiences would have come to expect of a martyr. Though marked for death and signified as a martyr several times over, the child does not fit the role and will not succeed in becoming a martyr. Not, that is, until his mother intervenes to correct him and make him a witness.

The mother makes her child into a witness by asking him to focus on becoming an observer: to make “the desire to see Christ” the “one fire that burns” in his “soul and marrow” (emphasis mine).¹⁰² Then, to help him do this, she offers scriptural witnesses—vivid examples from the text of the Bible—as objects of observation and engagement. Each of these examples relates to the child’s current predicament, with children suffering in front of or at the hands of their parents: the massacre of the innocents at Bethlehem, the binding of Isaac in Genesis, and the story of the seven Maccabean martyrs and their mother. Through her interpretational activation of these stories, particularly the way she makes them both vivid and relevant to her son’s situation, the mother helps her son enact his own martyrial witness, that is, his own performance and re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice.

The mother renders her retellings of these biblical stories vivid by emphasizing the sensory and the evocative. In her first example, that of the massacred innocents at Bethlehem, the mother declares:

This, this is now the chalice that you must drink, my son,

that a thousand little ones in Bethlehem drank;

heedless of milk and forgetful of the breasts

Youth, restored by cups first bitter, then soon after sweet,

consumed the honey of blood.¹⁰³

Marking the “chalice” that must be drunk with a doubled demonstrative hic, the mother offers a concrete reality in the present moment, one that is connected to the past—the mother tells the story as if it should be familiar to her son, something she has told him in the recent past; and of course the story she is recounting is of a massacre that occurred in the more distant past. But the imagery of thirst and how it can be quenched is also telling: not only does it address her son’s cries of thirst during his torture but it also centers the sense of taste, such that the child’s request for water is answered with an imaginary offering of milk and honey. The children in Bethlehem forget their milk in favor of the sweet honey into which their blood has been transformed, but both of these tastes are activated in the child’s (and the reader’s) imagination. Also evocative is the imagery of the innocents being papillarum immemor, heedless of the breasts from which they had been nursing. Readers would no doubt have been familiar with the jealousy that nursing infants display toward other infants who would share their nurses’ breasts—Augustine cannot have been the only contemporary of Prudentius’s to notice this, and, indeed, he asks, “Who doesn’t know this?”¹⁰⁴ Additionally, this passage is rendered vivid through the mother’s insistent use of presentizing particles: though the verbs are in the perfect tense, Prudentius has her intersperse words such as nunc and mox and deinde to ensure that the example is seen in real time.

In moving to the story of Isaac’s sacrifice, the mother adds sound, sight, and speaking to her son’s sense-heavy remembrance of scriptural exemplars.

You know, as I have often said, when you would make sport of the one teaching

And offer signs of chattering words,

That Isaac was his father’s only little one,

Who, when he, about to be sacrificed, saw the altar and the sword,

Willingly offered his neck to the old man sacrificing.¹⁰⁵

The child knows these lessons because the mother has often spoken them; the “signs of babbling words” that the child offers in playful response likewise illustrate the foregrounding of speech and sound. Isaac’s ability to see the sacrificial tools (the altar and the sword) and discern his father’s intentions is similarly telling here: sight enables understanding, which facilitates Isaac’s action, as the Prudentian mother depicts it, of assenting to his father’s plans to kill him.

The way that the mother describes Isaac, in addition, facilitates her son’s enacting witness—the mother’s account of Isaac is artfully constructed to highlight similarities between the child and Isaac on the one hand, and Christ and Isaac on the other; the end result is a christomimetic Isaac whom the child is already in the process of imitating. In the mother’s rendition of Isaac, we see a lone small child—an only child—precociously ascertaining not only that someone he trusts is about to kill him but also that this sacrifice is worthy of his full acquiescence; he sees the instruments of his demise and nonetheless willingly submits himself to their pain. The mother highlights and emphasizes the only-child status of Isaac in a way that recalls the fact that her son, the child martyr, is also an only child, which we learn later in the mother’s speech.¹⁰⁶ The parental culpability for the child’s suffering is also equivalent: Isaac is targeted for sacrifice as a test of Abraham’s faith, while it is on account of his mother’s teaching that the child in Peristephanon 10 is being punished. And, of course, the child’s situation requires behavior similar to what the mother asserts Isaac’s had been: despite being extremely young (she refers to him as paruulum), Isaac had been willing and able to cooperate in his own destruction by carrying the wood for his own sacrifice—an action through which Isaac acts as a clear Christ-type.¹⁰⁷ The mother describes an Isaac who prefigured Christ and to whom the child martyr can look for guidance; the child is never instructed to imitate Christ, but nevertheless he can refigure Christ by imitating the Isaac described by his mother.

The child’s imitation of this christomimetic Isaac becomes identification with the biblical model, a full enacting witness, as a result of his mother’s interpretation. Hearing his mother’s speech, the child begins to laugh at his tortures, establishing a firm link to Isaac, whose name, Genesis reports, means laughter.¹⁰⁸ It is this laughter that Prudentius uses to signal the child’s assumption of the martyr’s role: he becomes Isaac, and thus a true witness of Christ. He welcomes his martyrdom, all pain (or appearance of pain) gone, truly becoming the willing victim, enacting a witness to Christ as a direct result of his mother’s teaching him how to properly observe the witnesses of Scripture. She has successfully translated, for her son, textual witness to enacting witness through observing witness.

In the mother’s final exemplary biblical witness for her son, the story of the seven Maccabean brothers who were slaughtered in front of their mother by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the mother uses ekphrasis to help her son (and the readers) see the brothers’ witness. The Prudentian¹⁰⁹ mother depicts the Maccabees’ mother as the struggle’s protagonist, emphasizing what she had seen:

The parent saw, in person, those very instruments

of her sons’ deaths and was unmoved;

she rejoiced whenever either the frying pan sizzling

with oil scorched the roasted adolescence (puberem)

or when a fierce impression of plates burned one of them.¹¹⁰

By emphasizing the Maccabean mother’s sight and the way she processed what she saw, the Prudentian mother primes the child (and the reader) to see alongside the Maccabean mother as she watches her sons’ torments and executions, which are described in graphic, evocative detail. In the passage above, for instance, the torments are not simply listed but given additional description—the pan sizzles with oil; the bodies of her sons are described as roasted, scorched, and (highlighting their vulnerability) adolescent; and the impression of the burning plates is fierce. These additional details provide visual and affective cues as well as aural and olfactory enhancements for the events being brought before the eyes of the reader or listener. We see a similar ekphrasis in the Prudentian mother’s description of the Maccabees’ further tortures:

The torturer had yanked the hair and the skin of his head

from the front, so that the skull laid bare of its covering

all the way up to the neck might dishonor the head;

she, however, cried: “Endure! A crown will clothe

this head in jewels from a royal diadem.”¹¹¹

The description of this horrific flaying is minute and precise, offering readers and listeners enough detail—particularly in terms of the direction of skin loss, the extent of the damage, and the visibility of the skull afterwards—to envision the event and conjure it in the mind’s eye. But once again, it is the Maccabean mother’s interpretation that the Prudentian mother centers here, as the Maccabean mother offers an alternate ekphrasis for her tormented son to envision—the crown, the gems, and the royal diadem that will clothe him should he endure. In the Prudentian mother’s retelling, the Maccabean mother’s ekphrasis helps her son withstand his tortures, just as the Prudentian mother is hoping her ekphraseis will help her own son. Of course, the child martyr is the primary audience for both his mother’s ekphraseis and the nested ekphrasis of the Maccabean mother—the diadem she describes and the advice she gives are for his sake, too.

Following his mother’s speech, the child in Peristephanon 10 is able to enact his witness, laughing in symbolic mimesis of the Christ-like Isaac and enduring his tortures stoically and willingly, both like the Isaac of his mother’s retelling and like Christ. As he is being carried to his execution, Prudentius describes him as the lamb, the “first-born offspring chosen from the sheepfold and purer than the rest,”¹¹² which Abel offers to God; in this, the child is clearly being likened to Christ, who is himself depicted as the “lamb of God” in the Gospel of John. Having been taught how to observe the world of Scripture by the testimony of his mother, he is able to enact it himself. This is an example of effective interpretation: interpretation that has effects in the world of the interpreter. The mother offers an intermeshed interpretation of the scriptures and her son’s experiences as they relate to the scriptures, with the result that the child comes more into line with the text of the scriptures. Prudentius is showing, as he did with Quirinus (when he corrects the interpretations of the crowds on the riverbank), that true understanding of the things we observe (whether by sight, or by reading, or by experience) is necessary for them to become witnesses to Christian truth.

To achieve this understanding requires interpretation; it is the mother’s interpretive intervention that secures her son’s martyrdom. In other words, in order to become a true martyr, the child must “read” his own experience correctly. Dying for Christ, imitating his death even down to his request for water, would not count as martyrdom or true witness unless the would-be martyr understood himself to be acting within a matrix of Christian action, as an imitator of Christ; the martyr must be cognizant of the testimony he is giving. The mother’s intervention and interpretation make the child’s awareness possible. Armed with his new understanding that he is refiguring Christ and imitating biblical Christ-types, the child succeeds in his witness. Within the poem, then, we see the outcome of effective interpretation: the world of the interpreters is shaped by their interpretations. The mother is acting as exegetical poet, offering an interpretation, a new way of understanding, and hoping to incite a change in her audience.

But the mother’s interpretation does more than secure her son’s martyrdom; it secures her own. And this is where we can see Prudentius truly modeling for his readers how they, too, can become martyrs. After all, the child martyr is killed by his persecutors; he has clearer situational similarities to Christ and other martyrs than Prudentius’s contemporaries might in the absence of official persecution. But the mother is not killed: Prudentius does not describe her dying, and there is no indication that she is about to. Indeed, the last we see her, she is depicted triumphantly, holding the globus of her son’s head in her arms, having stretched out her cloak to catch it as he is beheaded.¹¹³ Prudentius’s word choice is deliberate here: in all of his work, the word globus appears ten times. In four instances, it refers to large crowds of people; in five, it refers to celestial bodies—the sun, moon, and stars.¹¹⁴ The last reference is here, to the child’s severed head. Describing the child’s head in such unusual terms would have conjured the usual power-imbued connotations of globus. Therefore, when the mother catches her son’s head in her outstretched hands, she becomes, as a result of his martyrdom, more than herself—she becomes an image of divine power. She provides a witness to Christ for onlookers and for the reading audience. Thus, even though she does not die, even though she is only a spectator to (and the one least moved by) the death of her son, even though her suffering is not physically inflicted, the mother still provides a Christ-object for the seeing witness of others; she is still a witness to Christ, which is to say, a martyr.¹¹⁵

But how does the mother enact this witness? She has chosen (or, Prudentius has chosen to place in her mouth) only examples that include a sacrificing parental figure with whom she can identify. And in each of her recountings, even as she is highlighting their applicability to her son and making them visible as exemplars to her child, she simultaneously highlights the parental figures that are analogous to her own situation. For example, the mention of papillarum in her retelling of the massacre of the innocents highlights her own involvement in her son’s ordeal: Prudentius could have had the mother speak only of the milk the Bethlehem babies were deprived of, but instead, he has her emphasize the act of nursing. In the Isaac example, the mother emphasizes her own role in educating and guiding her son and establishes a parallel between herself and Abraham as individual parents endangering the temporal well-being of their children. Her engagement with the Maccabean martyrs is far more extensive and overt. She presents the narrative of these martyrs and their mother in such a way that the mother is a more central example of sacrifice than her sons. Rather than calling the seven young men brothers, for instance, she calls them “seven sons issued forth from one mother.”¹¹⁶ And while 2 Maccabees relates that “the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly” (7.5), the mother’s retelling of this story only includes the exhortations of the Maccabean mother. The Maccabean sons seem to fade into the background in this retelling in order to give more prominence to their mother. The focus is not on how the sons suffered but, rather, on how their mother reacted to their torments, and it is she, not her sons, who triumphs: “With these encouragements the parent, spurring the Maccabees, / conquered and subdued the enemy seven times; / As many times as she bore children, so many times is she renowned for her triumphs.”¹¹⁷ The Maccabean mother’s ability to endure watching her sons be tortured and killed without being moved is remarkable, and she even goes so far as to see their suffering in a positive light. For such endurance, the mother in Peristephanon 10 accords the Maccabean mother, and not her sons, the triumph of martyrdom. Furthermore, the mother in the Maccabean story does actually die after her sons are all killed, according to 2 Maccabees. And yet the Prudentian mother does not mention her counterpart’s death; instead, she locates the source of her triumph in her fortitude at losing all her sons. In relocating the sacrifice from the martyr (sacrificing himself) to the parent (sacrificing her child/children), the mother of Peristephanon 10 creates a space for her own martyrdom within her son’s.

As we saw above in our discussion of the way that Prudentius renders the mother iconographically analogous to a triumphant Christ, Prudentius makes clear that the mother is enacting a martyrial witness. Indeed, he also describes her as Abel (another Christ-figure) as she is carrying her son to the executioner.¹¹⁸

But he also demonstrates that this enacting witness is the product of both observing witness and testifying witness by the way that he depicts her re-presenting other biblical witnesses and Christ figures: she becomes the Maccabean mother through her seeing and her speaking; she becomes David by her singing. In the latter example, the mother sings a passage from Psalm 115 while her son is killed.¹¹⁹ This recitation aurally identifies the mother with David, but also with Christ, whom the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all depict as reciting from the Psalms as he prepares to die. In the former example, we can see that as the mother retells these stories for her son, she becomes more and more like the Maccabean mother. After she is done relating the story of the Maccabees, the Prudentian mother says some general words of comfort and encouragement to her son, employing the very same topics that the Maccabean mother used to comfort and encourage her sons. In 2 Maccabees, the mother reminds her youngest son of the debt he owes her: “I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point, and have taken care of you” (7:27). She also evokes God’s role as giver of life, calling to mind her son’s other debt: “I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath” (7:22). The speech of the Prudentian mother in the passion of Romanus is strikingly similar:

Through the faithful vessel of this womb,

through the hospitable hearth of twice five months,

if the nectar of our breast was sweet to you,

if the lap soft, if the infancy pleasing,

stand firm and proclaim the author of these gifts.

By what art you began to live within us,

and even from what nothingness your body came, I know not;

only your animator and creator knows.

Be devoted to him, whose gift you were born;

you would do well to pour back into the giver what he gave.¹²⁰

The duration of pregnancy, the mystery of life, the joys of infancy, and the dual debt to mother and God all shine through here in direct parallel with the words of the Maccabean mother. Even outside the context of explicitly attempting to quote the Maccabean mother, therefore, the mother in the Peristephanon is refiguring the biblical event. She is speaking as that earlier mother, collapsing time and circumstance, using her testimony to enact a martyrial witness.

This transformation from spectator to martyr is possible only through the mother’s use of effective interpretation, which requires that she understand herself to be a witness to Christ—that is, it requires that she see herself as Christ-like and the world around her as fodder for her Christ-comparison. The mother attains her own martyrdom through her readings of passages from the Hebrew Bible. She employs images and narratives capable of referring at once to herself, to her son, and to Christ. She then manipulates those images and narratives so that they speak more closely to her own experiences. This way of thinking enables her to embody the pre-incarnation characters whose stories she has re-imagined. Armed with this similarity to prefigurements of Christ, she also attains, according to Prudentius’s depictions of her at the conclusion of the episode, a greater similarity to Christ.

Notably, in her many configurations of identification with biblical figures, the martyrial mother never mentions Christ. While she seems to follow her own advice to her son and maintains a “single-minded yearning”¹²¹ for Christ, all of her and her son’s resemblances to Christ are mediated or enhanced by episodes that pre-date the crucifixion and that are linked to Christ only typologically. It is this expansion of available Christ-images, along with the importance of correctly interpreting them as Christ-images and including the self in the retelling, that Prudentius aims to teach. Prudentius here advocates using the images made available through “Old Testament” prefigurations to think of oneself as Christ-like.¹²² In the same way that Prudentius claims these types for Christ, so too can his readers claim their own experience—and their experience of reading his poems—for their own Christian witness.

As Prudentius constructs it, the mother’s obvious success in refiguring Christ in herself and encouraging her son to do the same makes her a fitting role model for the fifth-century Christian. Although Prudentius explicitly labels neither the child martyr in Peristephanon 10 nor his mother as “martyr,” both refigure Christ through interpretation and imitation of scriptural passages that serve as Christ-types. She is a martyr who does not die, modeling for others how to live as a martyr. Through her interpretation of her own situation in the context of her son’s martyrdom—in other words, through her enforcement of a worldview in which both she and her son refigure Christ—she witnesses Christ without suffering the martyr’s expected fate.

The major difference between the mother and Prudentius’s reader is that, while the mother can ground her interpretation on the experience of watching someone being executed for his faith, the fifth-century Christian reader of the poem cannot. He or she can only read about it. But as we have seen, late ancient authors understood that text could conjure up reality. We have also seen that Prudentius privileges and emphasizes the various forms of witness, asserting their power and continued utility to cross boundaries—between disbelief and belief as well as between text and reader. What we have here in this episode is an instructive ekphrasis that turns readers into knowledgeable spectators, fusing reader and text and merging the world of the text with the world of the viewer. Readers can be participants in the martyrdom they are reading.

In this expanded venue, comprising text and reality, this moment of merging, the mother demonstrates the audience’s capacity for martyrdom, if they follow both her method of interpretation and the advice she gives her son. She is the one who, while guaranteeing her own martyrdom, makes her son’s martyrdom “stick” by enabling him to understand his suffering in relation to Christ. Her success highlights the power of this method of textual interpretation to share with others her identification with Christ, that is, to enable them to participate in her Christ-centered worldview. She makes martyrs of herself and her son—could she not extend the favor to the reader as well? Her words to her son, exhorting him to bear certain examples in mind, are also meant for the reader; they are an invitation for all and sundry to try on her Christ-colored glasses. Although the readers are not at the moment undergoing physically inflicted torture, they are led by the mother’s interpretive example as well as by her words of encouragement to observe martyrdom in the world around them and in Scripture; to testify, as she has done, to the truth of her observation; and to enact, again as she has done, their own witnesses of martyrdom.

THE MARTYRDOM OF WITNESS

Returning to the “central paradox of late ancient Christianity,”¹²³ the persistent martyrial lens, we recall that Gregory of Nyssa redefined martyrdom as brave suffering in order to make sense of martyrdom in the un-persecuted present. What Prudentius did in his Peristephanon served a similar function, although his solution involved not physically inflicted suffering but, instead, a new form of processing experience, of understanding and interpretation. Prudentius, in effect, advocated a new Christian worldview that would allow his readers to understand themselves as martyrs.

To see typological connections to Christ in every experience, to place oneself in the center of a matrix of Christ-types and refigurations, and to order reality according to that frame, is to participate in a Christian épistémè. By implanting filters to knowledge and imposing a particular lens on reality, pedagogical ekphraseis and exegetical poetry could inculcate a new or altered worldview, one firmly and emphatically bounded by Christ and made possible by cultivating a new, martyrial worldview.

But how do these newly created martyrs of witness, these transformed readers, compare to the original martyrs, the objects of their textual witness? Do they have posthumous power? Can they offer witness to others as the texts had offered it to them? Did Prudentius intend for his new army of reader-martyrs to achieve the same level of veneration as the martyrs whose narratives inspired his poetry? Could they, too, safeguard a pious city? Or inspire poetic retellings themselves? We do not know, and we cannot know. Prudentius comes as close as he can to writing a poem about one such martyr in relating the mother’s role in Peristephanon 10. But he leaves us with no clear sense of the mother’s life after her martyrdom. Does she sit around and recount her experience like Encratis, perhaps? Perhaps she is even venerated by her community as Encratis was, or like Vincent. Perhaps, like Quirinus, her ability to speak under dire circumstances and to correct the misapprehensions of onlookers became part of her martyrial legend. Prudentius does not say, and there is no evidence that Spain ever saw her venerated as a martyr, though both Romanus and her son were featured in the Mozarabic liturgy (her son is sometimes identified as Barilas or Barylas). But ultimately, it does not much matter: if martyrdom is witness and can be achieved through witness, and witness can be achieved through effective interpretation, then what characterizes the living martyr’s existence and significance is not whether they are understood by others to be martyrs, but their own experience of interpreting themselves into martyrdom and experiencing that martyrdom for themselves. Whatever a late ancient reader of Prudentius might be observing, the experience of transforming observation into enactment through effective interpretation is what characterizes the martyr’s existence. One would not, simply by reading these poems, automatically become a martyr. But by observing the images they proffer and modeling one’s worldview on them, as did the mother in Peristephanon 10, Christians would be participating in the narrated martyrdoms and opening up the possibility of their own. For historians seeking to enhance our picture of the lived experience of Christianity in Late Antiquity, we must incorporate this understanding of a martyrial worldview into our assessments of late ancient spiritual horizons: even if the days of Christians dying for their faith had passed, the age of Christian martyrdom, Prudentius established, was not yet over.

Notes

1. Ellen Muehlberger, “Salvage: Macrina and the Christian Project of Cultural Reclamation,” Church History 81, no. 2 (2012): 281.

2. Peristephanon 9.13 (CCSL 126, 326). See also Grig, Making Martyrs, 113, as well as the famous example of Asterius of Amaseia describing his own tears upon viewing scenes from Euphemia’s martyrdom (Asterius, Ekphrasis on Saint Euphemia, ed. François Halkin, in Euphémie de Chalcédoine: Légendes Byzantines [Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1965], 4–8).

3. The term ekphrasis has come, in modern scholarship, to denote, specifically, “a description of a work of art.” Ruth Webb, in Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), demonstrates that this emphasis on subject, rather than effect, as a defining characteristic is a modern, largely twentieth-century development born of a dual process of restriction and expansion in meaning and referent which removed the ekphrasis from its rhetorical context and located it as a primarily poetic phenomenon (28–37). Webb maintains that this development has been fruitful, “in particular in encouraging interdisciplinary exchanges between classical scholars and specialists in other periods of literature and, to some extent, between literary scholars and historians of art and archaeologists” (11), but that the ancient meaning needs to be acknowledged and understood if we are to properly understand what ancient authors sought to accomplish and how they thought communication worked. Even with this description, the ability to represent the visual in words comes to the fore. But in Antiquity, the definition was both broader and more singularly devoted to the notion that description could engender visual presence. “The purpose,” as Heinrich Lausberg summarizes, “is enargeia” (Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton [Leiden: Brill, 1998], §810 in §1133).

4. Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 39.

5. Webb, Ekphrasis, 8–9.

6. Anne Rogerson uncovers, for instance, an ekphrasis in Vergil’s description of Ascanius on the battlefield, while Rebecca Langlands notes the ekphraseis of sex-changing bodies in Ovid and Diodorus Siculus (Rogerson, “Dazzling Likeness: Seeing Ekphrasis in Aeneid 10,” Ramus 31, no. 1–2 [2002]: 51–72; Langlands, “Can You Tell What It Is Yet? Descriptions of Sex Change in Ancient Literature,” Ramus 31, no. 1–2 [2002]: 91–110).

7. See Webb, Ekphrasis, 90. See also Frank, Memory of the Eyes, 17.

8. Webb, Ekphrasis, 107.

9. Don P. Fowler, “Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis,” The Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 27.

10. Webb, Ekphrasis, 129.

11. See Webb, Ekphrasis, 153.

12. See the discussion of ekphrasis, enargeia, and evidentia in Grig, Making Martyrs, 111–112. Also see Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 38–41; and Simon Goldhill, “The Naïve and Knowing Eye: Ecphrasis and the Culture of Viewing in the Hellenistic World,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, eds. Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 197–223.

13. Roberts, The Jeweled Style, 64–65. The recognized centrality of ekphrasis as well as its insistence on the reader’s attending to every last detail are both central to my argument.

14. See Lausberg, Handbook, §814 on translatio temporum.

15. Peristephanon 10.694–695 (CCSL 126, 354): Oculi parentis punientur acrius, / quam so cruentae membra carpant ungulae.

16. Peristephanon 10.701–702 (CCSL 126, 354): Quae cautis illud perpeti spectaculum, / quis ferre possit aeris aut ferri rigor?

17. See Lausberg, Handbook, §759–765.

18. See Lausberg, Handbook, §814; §817.

19. Peristephanon 4.49–51 (CCSL 126, 287–288): Singulis paucae, tribus aut duobus, / forsan et quinis aliquae placebunt / testibus Christi prius hostiarum / pignere functae.

20. Peristephanon 5.11 (CCSL 126, 294): quam testis indomabilis. Prudentius also uses testis to mean martyr elsewhere in the Peristephanon: see 2.505–508 (CCSL 126, 274): Dum daemon inuictum dei / testem lacessit proelio, / perfossus ipse. concidit / et stratus aeternum iacet; and 8.9–10 (CCSL 126, 325): Ante coronati scandebant ardua testes / atria, nunce lotae celsa petunt animae.

21. Fux, Les Sept passions de Prudence, 88. In all of the surviving manuscripts (with one exception), Peristephanon 1 appears first among the collected shorter poems. Peristephanon 10, widely recognized to be a separate composition, occasionally appears earlier.

22. Peristephanon 1.21–22 (CCSL 126, 252): nil suis bonus negauit Christus umquam testibus, / testibus quos nec catenae dura nec mors terruit.

23. Contra Symmachum 2.1107; Contra Symmachum 1.249–250; Peristephanon 2.74 and 10.996. We also see it used in a way that shadows the legal sense of the term: Christ is the testator in Cathemerinon 12, for instance, to whose will the apostles are witnesses (Cathemerinon 12.85ff); in the Apotheosis, Joseph acts a witness to Mary’s virginity (Apotheosis 602); and in Contra Symmachum and Peristephanon 3, an atheist malefactor and the maiden Eulalia, respectively, act secretively, sine teste (Contra Symmachum 2.174; Peristephanon 3.43).

24. God appears as testis in Cathemerinon 2.109 (and as spectator in 2.105); nature appears as witness in Cathemerinon 2.27, when the light of day becomes witness to shameful things (Sol ecce surgit igneus; / piget pudescit paenitet / nec teste quisquam lumine / peccare constanter potest); the Tiber is described as witness to Peter and Paul’s executions, Peristephanon 12.9. The Milvian Bridge merits inclusion in this category because it, as Prudentius recounts the tale, aided in the Christian overthrow of the usurper Maximian by jettisoning him from its span (Contra Symmachum 1.485).

25. Peristephanon 5.196; Cathemerinon 9.8.

26. Tituli Historiarum 15.

27. Sight also comes into the foreground at times by reference to its absence. Prudentius describes, for instance, Vincent’s prison as a place of blindness, which is only remedied by the martyr’s encounter with the angels: “The blindness of the prison / shines with the splendor of light” (Peristephanon 5.269–270 [CCSL 126, 303]: Nam carceralis caecitas / splendore lucis fulgurate).

28. Peristephanon 7.6–10 (CCSL 126, 321): Hic sub Galerio duce / qui tunc Illyricos sinus / urgebat dicionibus, / fertur catholicam fidem / inlustrasse per exitum.

29. Peristephanon 7.31–38 (CCSL 126, 322): Spectant eminus e solo / doctorem pauidi greges; / nam Christi populus frequens / riparum sinuamina / stipato agmine saepserat. / Sed Quirinus ut eminens / os circumtulit heu suos / exemplo trepidos uidet. Note the play on eminus/eminens here, which underscores the visuality and draws these two stanzas together in closer conversation: Quirinus meets his congregation’s distant (eminus) vision with his own visible rising (eminens) above the waters. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out this punning parallelism.

30. Peristephanon 7.41–45 (CCSL 126, 322): confirmat pia pectora / uerbis mitificis rogans / ne quem talia terreant / neu constans titubet fides / aut poenam putet emori.

31. Peristephanon 4.139–140 (CCSL 126, 291): mors habet pallens aliquid tuorum / te quoque uiua.

32. Peristephanon 4.137–140 (CCSL 126, 290): Vidimus partem iecoris reuulsam / ungulis longe iacuisse pressis, / mors habet pallens aliquid tuorum / te quoque uiua.

33. Fux, Prudence et les Martyrs, 141.

34. Fux, Prudence et les Martyrs, 138.

35. Peristephanon 4.116–138 (CCSL 126, 290–291): uiuis in orbe. / Viuis ac poenae seriem retexis. . . . taetra quam sulcos habeant amaros / uulnera narras. / . . . / plena te, martyr, tamen ut peremptam / poena coronat. / Vidimus partem iecoris reuulsam / ungulis longe iacuisse pressis.

36. Peristephanon 5.297.

37. Peristephanon 5.274–280 (CCSL 126, 303–304): Agnoscit . . . christum datorem luminis. / Cernit deinde fragmina / iam testularum mollibus / uestire semet floribus / redolente nectar carcere.

38. Peristephanon 5.348.

39. Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 88: “Events are viewed from within, from the perspective of the martyr (cf. agnoscit, 273 and cernit, 277), and from without (cf., especially 321–324, a doublet of 277–280).”

40. Peristephanon 5.305–324 (CCSL 126, 304–305): sed clausas fores / interna rumpunt lumina / tenuisque per rimas nitor / lucis latentis proditur. / Hoc cum stuperet territus / obsessor atri liminis, / quem cura pernox manserat / seruare feralem domum, / psallentis audit insuper / praedulce carmen martyris, / cui uocis instar aemulae / conclaue reddit concauum. / Pauens deinde introspicit, / admota quantum postibus /acies per artas cardinum / intrare iuncturas potest. / Vernare multis floribus / stramenta testarum uidet / ipsumque uulsis nexibus / obambulantem pangere.

41. Peristephanon 5.345–352 (CCSL 126, 306): Tunc ipse manceps carceris / Et uinculorum ianitor, / Ut fert uetustas conscia, / Repente Christum credidit. / Hic obseratis uectibus / Densae specum caliginis / Splendore lucis aduenae / Micuisse clausum uiderat.

42. Roberts discusses this episode: “The juxtaposition implies at a certain level of generality an equivalence between the conversion of an individual Christian and the victory of the martyr” (Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 89).

43. Peristephanon 5.334 (CCSL 126, 305). Though cerneres can be taken impersonally (“one might see”), the effect is the same: by choosing a seeing word and singling out a viewer, Prudentius is calling attention to the reader’s act of seeing. We must also not forget that idiomatic language can always be recalled to its constituent parts. In the same way that the English impersonal “you” always runs the risk of being mistaken for a particular “you,” so to does the personal “you” haunt the Latin impersonal.

44. Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 74.

45. Robert Levine, “Prudentius’ Romanus: The Rhetorician as Hero, Martyr, Satirist, and Saint,” Rhetorica 9, no. 1 (1991): 5–38.

46. Peristephanon 7.56–85; 41–45.

47. Peristephanon 12.96–107, 123–390, 426–445, 459–545, 562–570, 585–660, 801–810, 852–855, 928–960, 1006–1100. And, of the 526 lines during which Romanus is not speaking, 70 of those relate the words of an anonymous Christian woman (whom we shall shortly encounter) exhorting her child to martyrdom (721–790).

48. Peristephanon 10.1108–1109: elidit illic fune collum martyris / lictor nefandus.

49. Peristephanon 10.1–22.

50. Peristephanon 10.396–400, 547–555, 891–895, 911–925, 961–967, 1101–1105.

51. Peristephanon 10.981–1001 (CCSL 126, 364): Veris refutat medicus hanc calumniam: / “scrutare uel tu nunc latebras faucium / intraque dentes curiosum pollicem / circumfer haustus uel patentes inspice / lateat ne quidquam quod regat spiramina. . . . Sciat hic quis illi uerba suggillet deus. / Ego unde mutus sit disertus nescio.” / His sese aristo purgat.

52. Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 267.

53. Rapp, Holy Bishops, 268.

54. Lausberg, Handbook, §814; §817.

55. Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs, 236–237.

56. On the angel’s speech, see Peristephanon 5.285; on the songs that attract the jailer, see Peristephanon 5.313; on Datian’s ears being filled with Vincent’s miracles, see Peristephanon 5.325–328.

57. Peristephanon 4.117–120 (CCSL 126, 290): Viuis ac poenae seriem retexis, / carnis et caesae spolium retentans / taetra quam sulcos habeant amaros / uulnera narras.

58. Roberts goes so far as to say that Encratis has become her own martyrologer, usurping that role from Prudentius (Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 57).

59. Peristephanon 4.148–160 (CCSL 126, 291–292): pangere psalmis. / Ede successum, cane martialem, / mors et vrbani tibi concinatur, / iuliam cantus resonet simulque / quintilianum. / Publium pangat chorus et reuoluat / quale frontonis fuerit tropaeum, / quid bonus felix tulerit, quid acer / caecilianus, / quantus, euoti, tua bella sanguis / tinxerit, quantus tua, primitiue, / tum tuos uiuax recolat triumfos / laus, apodeme.

60. Peristephanon 4.181 (CCSL 126, 292): nec enim silendi.

61. Peristephanon 7.9–10 (CCSL 126, 321): fertur catholicam fidem / inlustrasse per exitum.

62. Peristephanon 5.429–432 (CCSL 126, 308–309): sed quis, tyranne pertinax, / hunc inpotentem spiritum / determinabit exitus? / Nullusne te franget modus?

63. Peristephanon 5.433 (CCSL 126, 309): nullus, nec umquam desinam.

64. On Prudentius’s project of fusing text and reader, see Pelttari, The Space that Remains, 90–96, as he describes the ways that Prudentius requires his reader to “[engage] in his or her own personal psychomachia” (96). On the collapse of time in these poems, see Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of Martyrs, 193, who builds on Eliade’s insights about sacred time to explain Prudentius’s aim of bringing the martyr’s passio into the present via the text. This time-collapse could, I think, occur at any moment of the poem’s reading, but Cillian O’Hogan is right to point out that the collapse of time is not wholly atemporal: even this experience of time-collapse would have been focused around the specific temporalities of annual martyr feasts within the Christian liturgical calendar (Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity, 84–94).

65. Peristephanon 2.573–580 (CCSL 126, 277): O Christi decus, / audi poetam rusticum / cordis fatentem crimina / et facta prodentem sua. / Indignus, agnosco et scio / quem Christus ipse exaudiat, / sed per patronos martyras / potest medellam consequi.

66. Jill Ross, “Dynamic Bodies and Martyrs’ Bodies in Prudentius’ Peristephanon,” 327.

67. Peristephanon 5.545–549 (CCSL 126, 312–313): Adesto nunc et percipe / uoces precantum supplices, / nostri reatus efficax / orator ad thronum patris!; Peristephanon 5.557–560 (CCSL 126, 313): miserere nostrarum precum, / placatus ut Christus suis / inclinet aurem prosperam / noxas nec omnes inputet.

68. Peristephanon 1.16–18 (CCSL 126, 252): Tanta pro nostris periclis cura suffragantium est, / non sinunt inane ut ullus uoce murmur fuderit; / audiunt statimque ad aurem regis aeterni ferunt.

69. We saw this in Peristephanon 4.173–176, as well as 3.75 and 5.558–560, and in almost every poem, the notion that the martyr hears and conveys the petitioners’ messages to Christ is present.

70. For other moments, see Peristephanon 1.75–84 and Romanus’s continued speech in Peristephanon 10.

71. Peristephanon 5.389–392 (CCSL 126, 307): Iam nunc et ossa extinxero, / ne sit sepulcrum funeris, / quod plebs gregalis excolat / titulumque figat martyris.

72. Peristephanon 1.92–93 (CCSL 126, 255): manum repressit haerens ac stupor oppalluit / sed tamen peregit ictum, ne periret gloria.

73. Peristephanon 2.489–500 (CCSL 126, 274): Vexere corpus subditis / ceruicibus quidam patres / quos mira libertas uiri / ambire Christum suaserat. . . . Refrixit ex illo die / cultus deorum turpium; / plebs in sacellis rarior, / Christi ad tribuna curritur.

74. Peristephanon 3.173–174: obstupefactus et attonitus / prosilit et sua gesta fugit.

75. Peristephanon 6.126–128 (CCSL 126, 318–319): caelo uiuere quos forum peremit. / Haec tunc uirginitas palam uidere / per sudum meruit parente caeco.

76. Peristephanon 6.128; and see 10.961–963 (CCSL 126, 363): Horror stupentem persecutorem subit / timorque et ira pectus in caliginem / uertere. Nescit, uigilet anne somniet. In Peristephanon 5, Datian is figured as animalistic, hissing out words like a serpent (anguina . . . exsibilat, 176), losing bodily control so much that he is foaming at the mouth (201–204), being depicted again as a serpent (381), and supplanting the savageness of animals with his own cruelty (434–437).

77. Or, as I like to read it, “Changing for the better.”

78. Peristephanon 7.76–78 (CCSL 126, 323): Iam plenus titulus tui est / et uis prodita nominis, / quam gentilis hebet stupor.

79. Ross, “Dynamic Bodies,” 354.

80. Cathemerinon 3.28 (CCSL 126, 12): sertaque mystica; 3.30 (CCSL 126, 12): laude dei redimita.

81. Ross, “Dynamic Writing.” Because of the poem’s mediatory power (326), “the very act of writing embodies martyrdom” (351).

82. Hamartigenia 217–218: Sed nos qui dominum libris et corpore iam bis / uidimus, ante fide mox carne et sanguine coram.

83. Peristephanon 4.161–168 (CCSL 126, 291–292): Quattuor posthinc superest uirorum / nomen extolli renuente metro, / quos saturninos memorat uocatos / prisca uetustas. / Carminis leges amor aureorum / nominum parui facit et loquendi / cura de sanctis uitiosa non est / nec rudis umquam.

84. Peristephanon 4.169–172ff. (CCSL 126, 292): lenus est artis modus adnotatas / nominum formas recitare Christo, / quas tenet caeli liber explicandus / tempore iusto.

85. Peristephanon 5.181–184 (CCSL 126, 300): saltem latentes paginas / librosque opertos detege, / quo secta prauum seminans / iustis cremetur ignibus.

86. Peristephanon 5.193–200 (CCSL 126, 301): Vides fauillas indices / gomorreorum criminum, / sodomita nec latet cinis / testis perennis funeris. / Exemplar hoc, serpens, tuum est, / fuligo quem mox sulpuris / bitumen et mixtum pice / imo inplicabunt tartaro.

87. While one could argue that Vincent is telling Datian to go and really have an in-person look at the ashes of the cities, the complete mystery (then and now) of the location of Sodom and Gomorrah would have made that impossible; more to the point, without familiarity with Jewish and Christian scriptures, a Roman would have no notion of the cities’ significance, and their ashes would, consequently, be meaningless.

88. Peristephanon 7.76–78 (CCSL 126, 323): Iam plenus titulus tui est / et uis prodita nominis, / quam gentilis hebet stupor. The word serves the same function in Vincent’s narrative when Prudentius describes the light from the prison cell breaking through the door-slats to reach the eyes of the soon-to-be-converted jailer: “Light within / broke through the closed doors / and the delicate splendor of the hidden light / was published through the chinks” (Peristephanon 5.305–308 [CCSL 126, 304]: sed clausas fores / interna rumpunt lumina / tenuisque per rimas nitor / lucis latentis proditur).

89. Prodo is often used in this sense by Prudentius’s progenitors (including Cicero, Columella, Varro, and Livy) as well as his contemporaries (including Augustine, Arnobius, and Claudianus Mamertius). See the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, cols. 1621–1622.

90. Peristephanon 7.52–55 (CCSL 126, 322): “Haudquaquam tibi gloria / haec est insolita aut nova / calcare fremitum maris / prona et flumina sistere.

91. For a fuller discussion of this episode than what follows, see Diane Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview: Prudentius’s Pedagogical Ekphrasis and Christianization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 7, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 131–158.

92. It should be noted that this dichotomy of “actual” vs. “vicarious” suffering is a false one: whether violence is physical or psychological, physical responses result. As Vasiliki Limberis noted (following Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment [New York: Norton, 2000], 56–57) in “Making the Body Remember: Violence in First Invective Against Julian the Emperor by Gregory of Nazianzus,” a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature, Boston MA, November 2008: “‘Emotions, though interspersed and named by the mind, are integrally an experience of the body.’ Hence anger results in muscular tension; disgust in nausea; fear in a racing heart, trembling body, and shaking extremities; and shame in rising body heat and visibly turning red.” It is this fluidity of the physical and the psychological that enables the dynamic of expanded martyrdom I discuss below.

93. Peristephanon 10.653–654.

94. Peristephanon 10.672–675 (CCSL 126, 353): est quidquid illud quod ferunt homines deum, / unum esse oportet et quod uni est unicum. / Cum Christus hoc sit, Christus est uerus deus. / Genera deorum multa nec pueri putant.

95. Peristephanon 10.680–681 (CCSL 126, 353): “Quis auctor,” inquit, “vocis est huius tibi?”/ Respondit ille: “Mater et matri deus.”

96. Peristephanon 10.694–695 (CCSL 126, 354): Oculi parentis punientur acrius, / quam si cruentae membra carpant ungulae.

97. Prudentius writes: “The little one exclaimed that he was thirsty / (the intensity of the burning breath amid his tortures drove this out, / that he should seek a drink of water)” (Peristephanon 10.716–718 [CCSL 126, 354]: Sitire sese paruus exclamauerat / [animae aestuantis ardor in cruciatibus / hoc exigebat lymfae ut haustum posceret]). This request mirrors Jesus’s statement on the cross in John: “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). The verb the child uses, sitire, is also the verb used in all extant renderings of the scene in the Vetus Latina.

98. Peristephanon 10.711–712 (CCSL 126, 354): At sola mater hisce lamentis caret, / soli sereno frons renidet gaudio.

99. For a fuller discussion of the child’s Christ-imitation, see Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 143–144.

100. L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

101. For a fuller discussion of the ways in which Prudentius negotiates the pain of his martyrs, see Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 144–145.

102. Peristephanon 10.731–735 (CCSL 126, 355): Venies ad illud mox fluentum, si modo / animo ac medullis solus ardor aestuet / uidere Christum, quod semel potum adfatim / sic sedat omnem pectoris flagrantiam / vita ut beata iam sitire nesciat.

103. Peristephanon 10.736–740 (CCSL 126, 355): Hic hic bibendus, nate, nunc tibi est calix, / mille in bethleem quem biberunt paruuli; / oblita lactis et papillarum inmemor / aetas amaris, mox deinde dulcibus / refecta poclis mella sumpsit sanguinis.

104. Augustine, Confessiones 1.7.11: quis hoc ignorat?

105. Peristephanon 10.746–750 (CCSL 126, 355–356): Scis, saepe dixi, cum docenti adluderes / et garrulorum signa uerborum dares, / isac fuisse paruulum patri unicum, / qui, cum inmolandus aram et ensem cerneret, / ultro sacranti colla praebuerit seni.

106. Peristephanon 10.779–780 (CCSL 126, 357): Me partus unus ut feracem gloriae, / mea vita, praestet, in tua est situm manu. Though Abraham did have two sons, Ishmael is overlooked in Genesis 22:2 and by the mother in her rendering of Isaac.

107. For the paradox of the mother using both the image of the infantile Isaac and the image of the robust Isaac who carried the wood for his pyre, see Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 147.

108. Though he uses a different word, Prudentius elsewhere notes Isaac’s connection to laughter, recalling Sarah’s laughter upon hearing she would conceive. In Psychomachia, Praef. 49 (CCSL 126, 150), he describes Sarah as herede gaudens et cachinni paenitens, or “rejoicing at an heir, while repenting of her derision.” In Peristephanon 10.791–793 (CCSL 126, 357), the word is rideo, which bears less of a sense of mockery/derision than cachinnare, but the image is, nonetheless, the same.

109. Because neither the child martyr’s mother nor the Maccabean mother has a proper name, I am referring to the child martyr’s mother as “the Prudentian mother” for this analysis for the sake of clarity. Of course, both the mothers are equally Prudentian, that is, they are equally generated through Prudentius’s poetry. But as Prudentius offers his description of the Maccabean mother through the eyes and interpretation of another one of his characters, by which interpretation we are supposed to learn more about the narrating character, I am using “Prudentian” to describe this primary person.

110. Peristephanon 10.756–760 (CCSL 126. 356): Videbat ipsos apparatus funerum / praesens suorum nec mouebatur parens / laetata quotiens aut oliuo stridula / sartago frixum torruisset puberem / dira aut cremasset lamminarum inpressio.

111. Peristephanon 10.761–765 (CCSL 126, 356): Comam cutemque uerticis reuulserat / a fronte tortor, nuda testa ut tegmine / ceruicem adusque dehonestaret caput; / clamabat illa: ‘patere, gemmis uestiet / apicem hunc corona regio ex diademate’.

112. Peristephanon 10.828 (CCSL 126, 358): ut primitivum crederes fetum geri / Deo offerendum sancti Abelis ferculo, lectum ex ouili, pruiorem ceteris.

113. The globus was a Roman symbol of rule and power that persisted into the Christian era and was later used, adorned by a cross, to symbolize Christ’s dominance over the cosmos. Roman art and coinage often featured the globe, cradled in the hand of a god or emperor, resting at the figure’s feet, or beneath and supporting the portrait. Such depictions made the argument “that the god or emperor both cared for and controlled the cosmos.” Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 299. In the Christian context, the globus cruciger appeared on coins shortly after the year 400. On the globus more generally, as it came to be understood as a conventional symbol of power, see Steven Ernst Hijmans, “Sol: The Sun in the Art and Religions of Rome” (PhD diss., Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2009), 72.

114. For crowds of people, see Psychomachia 172 and 662; Contra Symmachum 2.508; and Peristephanon 13.85. For celestial bodies, see Cathemerinon 9.15 and 12.30; Contra Symmachum 1.313; and Peristephanon 10.537 and 10.844. It is worth noting that both prior uses in this very same poem refer to celestial bodies.

115. In light of the discussion above about the martyrs’ pain, the mother’s serene appearance and evident composure also indicate her martyr status. Suffering untold anguish while evincing nothing but calmness and joy is a hallmark of martyrdom.

116. Peristephanon 10.752 (CCSL 126, 356): una matre quod septem editi.

117. Peristephanon 10.776–778 (CCSL 126, 356–357): His Maccabeos incitans stimulis parens / hostem subegit subiugatum septies, / quot feta natis tot triumfis inclyta.

118. Peristephanon 10.828–830 (CCSL 126, 358): ut primitiuum crederes fetum geri / deo offerendum sancti Abelis ferculo, / lectum ex ouili, puriorem ceteris. Abel has often been read as a prefiguration of the good Christian, who sacrifices to God and who is himself a sacrificial object: Hebrews cites him as an example of one who is approved by God because of his faith (Heb. 11:4). In addition, in his role as “keeper of sheep” (Gen. 4:2), Abel bears likeness to Christ, who describes himself as “the good shepherd” who “lays down his life for his sheep” (John 10:11).

119. Peristephanon 10. 839–840 (CCSL 126, 359): pretiosa sancti mors sub aspectu dei, / tuus ille seruus, prolis ancillae tuae.

120. Peristephanon 10.781–790 (CCSL 126, 357): Per huius alui fida conceptacula, / per hospitalem mense bis quino larem, / si dulce nostri pectoris nectar tibi, / si molle gremium, grata si crepundia, / persiste et horum munerum auctorem adsere! / Quanam arte nobis uiuere intus coeperis / nihilumque et illud unde corpus nescio, / nouit animator solus et factor tui. / Inpendere ipsi, cuius ortus munere es, / bene in datorem quod dedit refuderis.

121. Peristephanon 10.732 (CCSL 126, 355): solus ardor.

122. In the preface to his Psychomachia, Prudentius clarifies the relationship between Christ-types from the Hebrew Bible and the Roman Christian reader. He says, in his own authorial voice, that the stories from the Bible that pre-dated Christ’s incarnation and representation in the New Testament have been written as guides; they are lines “drawn beforehand as a model/ which our life might reinscribe by a guided foot” (Psychomachia, Praef. 50–51 (CCSL 126, 151): Haec ad figuram praenotata est linea / Quam nostra recto uita resculpat pede), and their ultimate purpose is to help inculcate a Christian consciousness: “Then Christ himself . . . will enter the humble abode of the modest heart, showing it the honor of entertaining the Trinity” (Psychomachia, Praef. 59–63 (CCSL 126, 151): mox ipse Christus . . . / paruam pudici cordis intrabit casam / monstrans honorem trinitatis hospitae). This concept of praenotata, or “having been written or inscribed beforehand,” appears here in the Psychomachia and then in only one other instance in all of Prudentius’s work: in Peristephanon 10.629, just before the episode of child martyr, as Romanus explains that Christianity is not a new religion but that the cross had been present beforehand, prefigured in prior events recorded in the Hebrew Bible.

123. Muehlberger, “Salvage,” 281.