Two
years later the Council of Nicaea met to utter its verdict on the
Arian controversy and to establish the terms of the orthodox symbol. A
generation later Julian took up the reins of empire and commenced his
quixotic and fruitless attempt to revive the glories of Paganism.
Athanasius died in 373: but fourteen years later Augustine, his successor
in the championship of the faith, was baptized, and in 395, at the death
of Theodosius, when the Empire was divided between Honorius and Arcadius,
he became Bishop of Hippo, and was marked out by his saintliness and
learning as the leader of the Western Church, which he shaped by his
splendid ideal of the _Civitas Dei_ into unity and stability, when
the secular empire was falling into decay.

We know little more of the life of Prudentius than he himself has
disclosed. The _Preface_, which stands as an introduction to his poems,
is a miniature autobiography of great interest. M. Boissier in his _Fin du
Paganisme_ calls it _melancolique_: though it is rather the retrospect
of a serious and awakened, but not morbid, conscience. Prudentius views
his past years in the light of that new spiritual truth to which he has
opened his soul. We gather that he received a liberal education and was
called to the bar. We need not misunderstand the allusion to the
deceitfulness of the barrister life, seeing that the ordinary arts of
rhetoric stand condemned by his recently adopted ethical standard. He held
two important judicial posts and was promoted to a high position, probably
in the civil service and not outside the limits of his native province, the
_provincia Tarraconensis_.

He speaks of himself as having reached the age of fifty-seven, which
brings us down to 405, and as intending to consecrate his remaining years
to the poetic treatment of religious subjects. When and how he became a
Christian we do not know, and it were vain to guess, although the
suggestion that he may have owed his conversion to the influence of some
Christian family of his acquaintance is at least interesting. It is
unlikely that he took up poetry for the first time in his old age. His
mastery of all kinds of metre--heroic and lyric--prove the practised hand.
The probability is that in the years of repose after a busy career his
desire to redeem an unspiritual past suggested for the exercise of his
natural gifts a field hitherto unoccupied by any of the writers of his
age. Why not consecrate his powers to the ta