O'Daly looks at Prudentius' lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, and how they achieve a remarkable creative tension between the two worlds that determined Prudentius' culture: the beliefs and practices, sacred books, and doctrines of Christianity and the traditions, poetry, and ideas of the Greeks and Romans.

Gerard O'Daly is Emeritus Professor of Latin at University College London. His research has focused on literature and ideas in late antiquity and he has written books on Plotinus, Augustine, and Boethius, before turning more recently to Latin poetry of the fourth and fifth centuries AD.