Aeneas at the cross

In his study of Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (73-5), James Garrison describes how Prudentius depicts the conversion of Rome to Christ while maintaining its fundamental Romanitas . Pietas , that original Roman virtue transferred from Troy, indicates both the continuity and discontinuity.

“To connect Roman history with the scriptural narrative,” he writes, “Prudentius elaborates Latin pietas by reference to Hebraic legend, beginning with Genesis 4. Cain is the type of impietas in contrast to the pietas of Abel. By his sin ( caedes impia ) Cain is linked to the criminal figures of later biblical history, most notably Absalom . . . .

“Here the contrast between ‘ pietas ’ and ‘ sanguinis arma ’ is defined by the overlapping contexts of parricide and rebellion. To the authority of father and king Prudentius adds that of God by describing David as ‘ periturae et virginis auctor .’ Against this triple authority stands Absalom, whose condemnation is sealed in a phrase that further identifies David with the fabled pelican: ‘ Abessalon lacerans pia viscera ferro .’ The multiple violations committed by Absalom make him a model of impietas analogous to Cain, just as their victims are both types of Christ. As this pattern of contrast is also taken to express the opposition between God’s chosen people and their enemies, it can be easily modulated into one between Christians and their pagan persecutors – until the conversation of the empire under Theodosius. At this moment the division of the world into impii and pii becomes a division in time between past and present, as the emperor and descendant of Aeneas bows before the cross: ‘ iam purpura supplex / sternitur Aeneadae rectoris ad atria Christi/ vexillumque cruces summus dominator adorat .’”

In Contra Symmachum , Rome acknowledges the improvement: “Personified Roma herself acknowledges this historical pattern in an address to the sons of Theodosius. In her speech impious past yields to pious present, the ‘ miserum . . . saeculum ’ of Jove, cruelty, and bloodshed to a new age identified with ‘ cultus . . . Christi .’ The rejoicing that follows conversion proclaims the poem’s essential Romanitas : The fathers, old Catos all, are ready to add a robe of holiness to their white togas, while shedding their pagan priestly garments.

In this scene, pietas remains the defining virtue of Rome, though it is given a new focus: “The new age does not jeopardize class privilege, does ont threaten the power of the empire, does not even revise the contemporary vocabulary of power . . . . Devotion to the Christian God is expressed by allegiance to the Christian emperor. The Christian and Roman contexts that coalesce around ‘ pietate ’ serve to underline the basic argument of the poem: Rome is now a Christian empire, secure in its future if all citizens follow the religion of the emperor.”

Aeneas at the cross means the sacralization of Rome’s existing social order, and an unquestioning loyalty to Constantine’s successors. For Prudentius, it means Constantinianism in very much the sense that Yoder and Hauerwas use the term.