Prudentius[9] devoted much capable and dignified verse in many meters and in several distinct literary forms entirely to the service of religion. The _Psychomachia_, in some nine hundred hexameters, is an allegory of the soul’s warfare. Such description as that which introduces Avarice[10] handed on from Roman antiquity to the middle age the poetic habit of presenting personified abstractions by appropriate costume, gesture, and speech. The habit is allegory in its most obvious form; the method is the descriptive ecphrasis[11] transferring to poetry the rhetorical doctrine of appropriateness. It is the method of Martianus Capella in the same age and of Alain de Lille in the thirteenth century.[12] Reviewing his life in the preface to the _Days_ (_Cathemerinon_), Prudentius seeks a poetry proper to his old age in hymns. Hymnis continuet dies, Nec nox ulla vacet, quin Dominum canat. The twelve poems that follow, cast in nine different measures, are lyric reflections on the daily recurrences of cockcrow, food or fast, lamplighting, sleep; or on the festal recurrences of Christmas or Epiphany. They are poems of some length, not hymns in the specific sense to which the word was soon limited. But stanzas selected from them were combined to make the Breviary hymns for Lauds on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and for the feasts of the Holy Innocents, the Epiphany, and the Transfiguration. Almost equally familiar in the middle age was the _Corde natus_[13] hymn taken from the ninth poem. The _Crowns_ (_Peristephanon_) is a group of fourteen poems commemorating martyrs. Some are even longer than those of the preceding group; and the narrative of St. Romanus extends to eleven hundred iambic trimeters in five-line stanzas. Other lyric stanzas are pressed into the service of narrative, as well as the better adapted hexameter and elegiac. There is little narrative movement. What Prudentius sought was detailed description, the making of martyrdom vivid. This, rather than the vogue of _declamatio_,[14] explains a certain diffuseness and the violence of many physical horrors of torture and execution. His descriptive habit is utterly different from Claudian’s. That he was not thinking of rhetoric seems sufficiently evident from his ignoring the recipes of encomium.[15] The remaining verses of Prudentius, nearly four thousand hexameters, more than one-third of his work, present theology by exposition and argument.[16] The main work of Sedulius[17] is a hexameter paraphrase of the Bible; but he is better known for his _Carmen paschale_ because this gave to the Breviary two hymns.[18] Its rimes suggest increasing inclination toward regularity, forecasting the time when what the ancient prosody felt as a device of style was to become a device of composition, a recognized method of emphasizing words and of making stanzas.