The Psychomachia

The Psychomachia stages its argument as a sequence of single combats, each pitting a virtue against a matching vice, and each combat ends the same way, virtue victorious, vice destroyed. Faith, unarmored, defeats Cult of the Old Gods, the poem's opening combat and its clearest statement of the poem's stakes, since idolatry rather than a moral failing is the first enemy dispatched. Chastity beheads Lust, who has just cast a firebrand meant to overwhelm her. Patience stands motionless while Wrath exhausts herself against an armor of endurance, then Wrath falls on her own sword in despair, the poem's one vice that is undone by doing nothing at all. Humility beheads Pride after Pride, riding a horse named Ostentation, falls into a pit that her own ally Deceit dug and concealed, whereupon Hope finishes what Humility's blow began. Sobriety, Good Works and Concord win the remaining combats against Indulgence, Avarice and Discord, and after the last vice falls, the virtues raise a temple to Concord within the redeemed soul and Wisdom takes her throne inside it. Each combat is built from the same three part shape, a taunt or temptation from the vice, a moment where the outcome seems uncertain, and a sudden violent reversal in the virtue's favor, a pattern later medieval allegory borrowed wholesale along with the poem's central device of dressing an abstract moral quality as a fighting warrior woman.

Prudentius, full name Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, was a Latin Christian poet born in 348 in the Roman province of Hispania who was still alive after 405, the presumed range for the Psychomachia's composition, making it a work of his later years rather than an early exercise. Its influence on medieval literature and art is difficult to overstate. Manuscript copies of the poem were frequently illustrated, and those illustrations, showing personified virtues in Roman armor fighting personified vices, established a visual vocabulary for allegorical combat that recurs across medieval art, from cathedral sculpture programs pairing named virtues and vices on opposing sides of a portal to painted cycles in later centuries. As a literary model, the poem stands behind the whole later medieval tradition of staging moral conflict through personified abstractions, including works such as the Romance of the Rose in France and Piers Plowman in England, both of which return to a technique the Psychomachia had already worked out roughly eight hundred years earlier as narrative poetry in its own right rather than as commentary or treatise. Its own title supplied later criticism with the word psychomachia as the name for this kind of inner battle allegory wherever it recurs afterward, an unusual case of a single poem naming the entire genre it founded.