THE POETESS PROBA 299

is not the impediment it is alleged to be to his wife's composition of a poem about the civil war. His role under the usurper was ambiguous, permitting a case to be made, if need arose, for his loyalty to the legitimate emperor ; and the political will and circumstances existed, in Constantius' visit to Rome and his relations with the aristocracy there, to make a poem about the recent war and its successful culmination both acceptable and opportune.

IV

I mentioned earlier without pursuing it, that one of the inscriptions attesting the husband of the poetess Proba, Clodius Celsinus Adelphius, praefectus urbi in 351, was from the church of St. Anastasia in Rome. Now lost, the inscription was recorded by antiquarians in the late sixteenth century, and described as written on a column at the high altar of the church ; "in columna ad altare maius S. Anastasiae" {CIL 6. 1712)36. When again recorded in the early eighteenth century it was in the Villa Borghesi. There is no reason why the inscription should not have been removed from that much-altered and at times dilapidated church, while the form of the inscription itself, set out in 28 short lines, each of between one and four letters, arranged down the length of the column, might even suggest the possibility that it was the column itself, as an attribute of some larger structure to which it belonged (such as an altar canopy) that was dedicated by Adelphius - along, no doubt, with the now forgotten donations of others. Since the column is unlikely ever to be found, nor any different account of its origins made available from that which we possess, it seems worth while to set out some, admittedly conjectural, implications.

In view of its later neglect and obscurity, the early significance of St. Anastasia in the liturgical life of the Roman church is worth some emphasis 37.