The literary traditions of Seneca, Lucan, and their brethren, passed through the hands of mediocrities like Pomponius Mela and Columella, to be delivered to Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, who gave a rendering of the gospels, wherein the Virgilian hexameter is aped with a certain provincial vigour. Minor poets, not lacking in marmoreal grace, survive in Baron Hübner's _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum_. Among the breed of learned churchmen shines the name of St. Damasus, first of Spanish popes, who shows all his race's zeal in heresy-hunting and in fostering monkery. The saponaceous eloquence that earned him the name of _Auriscalpius matronarum_ ("the Ladies' Ear-tickler") is forgotten; but he deserves remembrance because of his achievement as an epigraphist, and because he moved his friend, St. Jerome, to translate the Bible. To him succeeds Hosius of Córdoba, the mentor of Constantine, the champion of Athanasian orthodoxy, and the presiding bishop at the Council of Nicæa, to whom is attributed the incorporation in the Nicene Creed of that momentous clause, "_Genitum non factum, consubstantialem Patri_." Prudentius follows next, with that savour of the terrible and agonising which marks the Spagnoletto school of art; but to all his strength and sternness he adds a sweeter, tenderer tone. At once a Christian, a Spaniard, and a Roman, to Prudentius his birthplace is ever _felix Tarraco_ (he came from Tarragona); and he thrills with pride when he boasts that Cæsar Augusta gave his Mother-Church most martyrs. Yet, Christian though he be, the imperial spirit in him fires at the thought of the multitudinous tribes welded into a single people, and he plainly tells you that a Roman citizen is as far above the brute barbarian as man is above beast. Priscillian and his fellow-sufferer Latrocinius, the first martyrs slain by Christianity set in office, were both clerks of singular accomplishment. As disciple of St. Augustine, and comrade of St. Jerome, Orosius would be remembered, even were he not the earliest historian of the world. Like Prudentius, Orosius blends the passion of universal empire with the fervour of local sentiment. Good, haughty Spaniard as he is, he enregisters the battles that his fathers gave for freedom; he ranks Numancia's name only below that of the world-mother, Rome; and his heart softens towards the blind barbarians, their faces turned towards the light. Cold, austere, and even a trifle cynical as he is, Orosius' pulses throb at memory of Cæsar; and he glows on thinking that, a citizen of no mean city, he ranges the world under Roman jurisdiction. And this vast union of diverse races, all speaking one single tongue, all recognising one universal law, Orosius calls by the new name of Romania.