Reading Sin in the World

Prudentius is one of the major Latin poets of antiquity. A Christian living and writing in Spain in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, he was thoroughly imbued with the whole tradition of Latin poetry. The Hamartigenia is a didactic poem exploring the origins of evil and how it operates in the world. It is full of echoes and reworkings of earlier poems by Lucretius, Virgil and others, but ...