Rott Classics: Eugippius

If you read Latin and have a Kindle, why not buy Eugippius’s Life of St Severinus here?

Rott Publishing is I and a partner. The editor of Rott Classics (late antique Latin texts for the Kindle) is Adrian Murdoch. Other texts and other series will follow.

Here’s why you should read Eugippius. (Read Adrian’s introduction. The book contains the Life and some short related texts.)

Severinus was born in southern Italy or perhaps in still-Roman Africa c 410, the year Alaric sacked Rome. We are told almost nothing about his early life, though he was high-born.

In the 450s he arrives in Noricum Ripense, roughly modern Austria (Ripense referring to the banks of the Danube). Pagan Huns and Arian Germanic tribes (most of the local population was Nicene) have ravaged the country. Few Romans remain. “The overwhelming impression,” writes Adrian, “is one of poverty, starvation and increasing isolation.”

He works as a preacher, philanthropist, organiser, diplomat, founder of monasteries. “At no point,” Adrian points out, “did Severinus have any formal authority for what he did, either within the church or more broadly in civil society”.

He dies in 482 at his abbey at Favianae in Noricum (modern Mautern), singing Psalm 150.

His biographer Eugippius is with him in Noricum and takes his body by horse-drawn wagon to Odoacer’s Italy.

Eugippius founds a new monastery on the site of the Castellum Lucullanum in Naples and buries him there. The castle had been built by a first-century patrician and was the place to which Romulus Augstulus had been exiled in 476. It is even possible that Augustulus became a monk under Eugippius. Adrian’s The Last Roman tells the full story.

We are named after Hans Rott (whom else?), a Viennese composer and uncanny anticipator of Mahler who died insane aged twenty-five in 1884. He was taken to an asylum after causing trouble on a train which he believed Brahms was trying to dynamite.

Mommsen in the Scriptores Rerum Germanicorum is the textual arbiter in this Rott text.

Try it on the Kindle and enjoy reading something different: it is short and absorbing.

Rott will provide clean and accurate texts of ancient and modern works that are not easily available online. Or if they are, are not always clean, continuous and accurate or are not for the Kindle.

We will be the only new-style provider of out-of-copyright material for mobile devices that knows the difference between dumb and smart quotes – between straight inverted commas or quotation marks and those shaped like 6s and 9s. I mention this in passing.

Toynbee refers to Severinus twice in A Study of History.

In an age in which the hollow futility of the secular Fasti Triumphales engraved in stone on the Capitol was being mercilessly exposed by the ultimate military and political bankruptcy of the Roman body politic, the Church was given the opportunity to celebrate some of the most astonishing of the triumphs of Christian Gentleness. Through this power which worked so mightily upon the men of violence, just because it was of a different order from the force which they exercised and understood, we see a Pope Leo turning back an Attila from his march on Rome when he had already reached the banks of the Mincio from the banks of the Danube and had demonstrated upon Rome’s daughter Aquileia the atrocities which he intended to inflict upon Rome herself. We see a Saint Severinus coming to the rescue of Upper Danubian provinces that had been deserted by the Imperial Army and the Imperial Civil Service, and going about his Master’s [God’s] business – defenceless, intrepid, and unscathed – inter gladios barbarorum: making Gibuld king of the Alemanni tremble in his presence as he had never trembled in battle; deterring Fera king of the Rugians from carrying into captivity the refugees of Lauriacum; and giving his blessing to the young Odovacer. [Footnote: Eugippius: Vita Sancti Severini, chaps. 1, 19, 31, and 7.] And we hear the voice of a Saint Remi answering a (sic) Clovis’ request for baptism with his “Mitis depone colla, Sicamber”. [Footnote: Gregory of Tours: Historia Ecclesiastica Francorum, Book II, chap. 31.]

“Bow down thy neck, O Sicambrian.” The Sicambri were a Germanic people who became merged into the Franks. The Franks were the only Germanic barbarians who invaded as pagans.

And:

In Diocletian’s army the Christian contingent was already so large, so conspicuous, and so influential that the persecution launched in A.D. 303 was directed against Christianity in the Army in the first instance. The Army was, in fact, the testing ground of the issue between the Imperial Government and the Church. The strength of the Christians in the Army even in the West, where at the opening of the fourth century the percentage of Christians in the population was very much lower than in the contemporary East, is indicated by Constantine’s manifesto in the Church’s favour in A.D. 312, on the eve of the critical battle at the Milvian Bridge. The future pioneer of Christian monachism, the Egyptian Pachomius, was converted to Christianity as a soldier in the expeditionary force with which Constantine was then marching against Maxentius. The completeness of the eventual identification of Church and Army in an age when the names “Christian” and “Roman” had become virtually synonymous is symbolized in the record that, when, in the fifth century, the flood of barbarian invasion finally engulfed the Upper Danubian limes, and the last unit of local limitanei dissolved, their commanding officer found alternative service as a bishop. [Footnote: Eugippius: Vita Sancti Severini, chap. iv, § 2, and chap. xx, § 1, cited by Grosse, op. cit., pp. 269-70.]

Grosse is

Grosse, R.: Römische Militärgeschichte von Gallienus bis zum Beginn der Byzantinischen Themenverfassung (Berlin 1920, Weidman) [...].

Paul the Deacon, in his History of the Lombards, mentions the monastery founded by Severinus at Eiferingen, at the foot of the Kahlenberg, not far from Vienna:

“In these territories of the Noricans at that time was the monastery of the blessed Severinus, who, endowed with the sanctity of every abstinence, was already renowned for his many virtues, and though he dwelt in these places up to the end of his life: now however, Neapolis keeps his remains.”

Translation by William Dudley Foulke. The only contemporary source apart from Eugippius that mentions Severinus is the Vita beati Antonii by Magnus Felix Ennodius, bishop of Pavia. This is St Anthony the Hermit, who was a protégé of Severinus.

If you need an English text of Eugippius (George W Robinson), go here.

The feast day of St Severinus is January 8.

The name of this image at Wikimedia Commons is Miracolo San Severino: a brief look at Eugippius does not explain to me what it refers to. Nor are we told where this painting is: I suppose in or near Naples.

A Study of History, Vol V, OUP, 1939

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)