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Crowns of Martyrdom

Prudentius, tr. Thackeray, 1890; selections

Chapter 13

CYPRIAN was born in Afric’s land, to light all lands beside:¹
Of Punic lineage; but the whole world’s ornament and guide.
His country claims his martyrdom; his loving words are ours;²
His life-blood sank in Libya’s sands; but his discourse hath powers
To pass all shores unaided, to survive, and conquer death.
So long as Christ vouchsafes to men to draw this earthly breath,
So long as any volume, any sacred script shall be,
Thee, Cyprian, all who love their Lord shall read, and learn of thee.
The Spirit of God, the same that taught the prophets how to teach,
Came down from Heaven to water thee with springs of living speech.
O savour strange! O lucency of language passing snow!
How are our wills attempered by thy celestial flow!
How dost thou kindle all our frame, transpierce us to the heart,
Making us feel God present in our most inward part!

Father, declare whence this Thy gift, and why Thou gavest it.
There needed an interpreter of apostolic writ;³
A voice of eloquence was raised, a voice to instruct mankind,
A handmaid to the scrolls of Paul—such that the untaught mind
Might the more fully apprehend, through training that sufficed,
The fear of God—the mysteries and the deep things of Christ.
A youth there was well practised in the works of the unjust,⁴
In witchcrafts and adulteries, in blasphemy and lust;
The frenzy of his wantonness Christ all at once repressed,
Scattered the darkness, and expelled the fury from his breast;
Filled it with love of His own self, taught him the one true creed,
And gave him grace to be ashamed of each unworthy deed.
Now is he changed, in face, in garb; his cheeks, so smooth and fair,⁵
Put sadness on, and shortened are the love-locks of his hair;
Christ’s doctrine and His righteousness are now his only scope;⁶⁷
His talk is chaste, his walk correct; he seeks the Christian’s hope.
Thus by desert found worthiest, he goes from strength to strength,
Becomes a teacher, and assumes the bishop’s chair at length.

Gallienus and Valerian were seated on the throne;
They made a law, all those should die who ventured God to own.
Many an unclean sacrifice was ordered;⁸ Cyprian sought
To animate the people, that none should fail in aught,
Or falter from his high reward: “Short is the pang,” said he,
“Unending is the recompense which God declares shall be,
Glory and everlasting day—no ills beyond the grave—
Brief anguish is not grievous, when a rest awaits the brave.”
Himself will be the foremost to dare the mortal pain;
He who would see Christ face to face may follow in his train.
Thus having roused their zeal for Christ with words of heavenly fire,
He first of all is seized and bound by the proconsul’s ire.
There is a vault at Carthage deep hidden from the day,⁹
Where Cyprian, darkling and in chains, did to the Father pray:
“Almighty God, the Father of Jesus Christ our Lord,
Maker of all things—and Thou, Christ, who by Thy potent word
Didst form man, whom Thou lovest, and wouldest not should die,
I, who was once beslavered with the serpent’s poison—I,
Whom Thou didst pity and assoil from frailties of man’s flesh
And bid to be Thy servant—I, Cyprian, born afresh,¹⁰
Put on the new, put off the old; Thou didst my guilt efface.
If Thou couldst purge the sinful breast by Thy effectual grace,
Visit the darkness of this prison; undo the body’s chain;
Release my soul, and let me as a sacrifice be slain.
Suffer not that compassion should appease the judge’s frown,
Or that the tyrant’s rage should cease, and rob me of my crown.
Grant, too, that of thy flock I ruled no one may slothful be;
That none for any pains of death stumble or fall from Thee;
So I may render back full tale those whom Thou gavest me.”
His prayer was heard. On Carthage the Spirit straightway came,
Wakening a keener courage, kindling an inner flame,
A pressing forward towards the mark, for their high calling’s prize,
A rapture of desire to win the glories of the skies;
Bidding them neither flinch nor quail, nor be by pain subdued:
“Be wise in Christ, hold fast the faith, resisting unto blood.”

The tale is told, that in the ground command was given to sink
A hollow, filled with seething marl well nigh unto the brink;
Round it the baked stones vomit fire; snow-white the lime-dust gleams;
Scorching the touch, and deathful the odour of the steams.
Hard by they rear their altar. Each Christian is to bring
A grain of salt, or entrails for a burnt-offering:¹¹
Else let him leap into that pit! A host at once rush on;
The dusty deep devours them at once, and they are gone;
White are their corpses in the clay, white are their souls on high,
And Massa earns her name of “white” for evermore thereby.¹²

But Cyprian, who rejoiced the more to see his people’s day,¹³
Stands obvious to the violence of the proconsul’s sway.
Asked his condition—“Worshipper am I,” said he, “of One;¹⁴
And minister in holy things of Jesus Christ His Son.”
“Enough of witness,” cried the judge; “the rebel stands confessed;
Thascius denies Jove’s thunder; let the headsman do the rest;
Let the enemy of the images be punished with the sword.”
He sings his hymn of triumph, and gives thanks unto the Lord.
All Africa in sadness mourned for her hero lost,
Whose doctrine was her ornament, whose eloquence her boast;
Then builds his tomb with weeping, and hallows his remains.
—Cease to bewail his virtues; in Heaven above he reigns;
Nor less is present in the world, nor quits these earthly courts,
But still discourses, prophesies, instructs, expounds, exhorts;
Nor sways the Libyan tribes alone; both East and West retain
His memory; he kindles Gaul, passes the British main,
Watches o’er Italy, and sows the seed in furthest Spain.
Doctor and Martyr, he fulfils the duties Heaven assigned,
A teacher here, a fountain there of graces to mankind.

George Young.

Notes

It is unnecessary to dwell at any length on the life of one so well known as the Bishop of Carthage. The Decian persecution, A.D. 249-251, the object of which was not so much to inflict death on the Christians as to force them to recant, is called by Milman the birth-epoch of Latin Christianity and Cyprian its true parent. In this persecution Fabianus suffered, the first martyr-bishop of Rome whose death rests on certain testimony, and the first (it is worth noticing) who had the Acts of Martyrs regularly collected and recorded. Decius died in 251, and under Valerian, in 258, the persecution was renewed, and in that year St. Cyprian was beheaded on Sept. 14th, at a place four miles from Carthage. “Many martyrs,” says St. Augustine, “had preceded Cyprian, whom by his burning words of exhortation he had inflamed to conquer the evil one; and right it was that those whom by his truth-speaking eloquence he had sent before him to death, he should follow by his own intrepid martyrdom” (Serm. 309). It was in the chapel of St. Cyprian that Monica spent the night in prayers and tears before Augustine set sail for Italy. Prudentius in this poem follows and abridges St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and Lactantius. The African and Spanish Churches kept up a close connection with each other, as we see from St. Augustine’s “Sermons,” and this, together with the wide-spread fame of Cyprian, accounts for Prudentius devoting a poem to his memory. In the Mozarabic Missal and Breviary his festival is noted to be celebrated. St. Cyprian was held in special honour in Spain, in consequence of his synodical letter (Ep. lxvii.), addressed to the presbyter Felix and the people of Legio (Leon) and Asturica (Astorga), in Hispania Tarraconensis, and also to the deacon Laelius and the people of Emerita, on the case of two bishops, Basilides and Martialis, who had compromised their Christian fidelity.
The metre is a continuous series of lines the same as the first line of the previous hymn (technically called the Fourth Archilochian κατὰ στίχον). This and the next hymn are the only instances of a lyrical poem in Prudentius not composed in strophes or distichs.
P. 160. amore et ore noster. He claims him as belonging also to Spain, from the church and episcopal see named after St. Mary and St. Cyprian, at Legio.
P. 162. Executor. The sense of “expounder,” “interpreter,” seems to be confined to this passage. Executio, meaning a discussion, is used both by Pliny the Younger and by his uncle. Cyprian’s “Treatise against the Jews” abounds in quotations from and applications of texts in the Epistles.
Unus erat iuvenum, &c. In their early career Cyprian, Tertullian, and Augustine were all alike more or less corrupted by the vices of their countrymen. Perhaps the abhorrence with which St. Cyprian and St. Augustine speak of their youth when looking back on it in the Gospel light, may be not wholly free from exaggeration.
transit in severam. His personal appearance is thus described in the second of the three accounts given of him in Ruinart’s “Acta”: “His countenance was grave, yet cheerful; he was free at once from a forbidding austerity of manner and from over-familiarity. He steered between the two so exactly, that it was hard to say whether he more deserved to be loved or feared, and you would say that he equally deserved both. His style of dress was of the same quiet and sober character.”
His only scope. Cf. Cowper’s “Conversation”—
“Christ and his character their only scope,
Their object and their subject and their hope.”
Vivere iustitiam. Cf. “severum vivitur,” p. 20.
sacrari. In the “Passio Romani” the word occurs twice in this unusual sense, of “sacrificing.”
P. 164. abdicata soli, “cast off” or “banished from.” Cf. “a reliqua natura abdicatos” (Pliny, Hist. Nat., ii. 63).
P. 166. fĭo, chārismate, invidiā mitescere, and, below, idŏlorum. See Introduction, Part III., Metre, p. lxvii.
P. 168. Salis aut micam iecur aut suis. So in Peristephanon, iii. 122, on Eulalia.
Candida Massa. St. Augustine says of these martyrs at Utica: “Massa ob numeri multitudinem Candida ob causae fulgorem” (Serm. 306).
P. 170. Thascius. The original heathen name of Cyprian; at his baptism he added the name of Caecilius, after a presbyter who had influenced his conversion. For diem the reading fidem has been conjectured. See however the note in p. 215.
Unicultor. One of many compound words peculiar to Prudentius, like Cunctiparens, Lucisator, Verbigena.