Flavius Merobaudes was a 5th-century

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

rhetorician and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

. Merobaudes was a Roman of

Frankish Frankish may refer to: * Franks, a Germanic tribe and their culture ** Frankish language or its modern descendants, Franconian languages, a group of Low Germanic languages also commonly referred to as "Frankish" varieties * Francia, a post-Roman ...

origin who was raised in Spain, and likely was a descendant of the famous general of the same name who flourished during the fourth century.Bachrach, Bernard S. (University of Minnesota. Center for Early Modern History). ''City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective''. Cambridge University Press (2000), p. 19

He was the official laureate of

Valentinian III Valentinian III (; 2 July 41916 March 455) was Roman emperor in the Western Roman Empire, West from 425 to 455. Starting in childhood, his reign over the Roman Empire was one of the longest, but was dominated by civil wars among powerful general ...

and Aetius. Until the beginning of the 19th century he was known only from the notice of him in the ''Chronicle'' (year 443) of his contemporary Hydatius, where he is praised as a poet and orator, and mention is made of statues set up in his honour. He was part of Aetius army that campaigned in the Alps. In 1813 the base of a statue was discovered at

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

, with a long inscription belonging to the year 435 ( CIL vi. 1724) upon Flavius Merobaudes, celebrating his merits as warrior and poet. Ten years later, B. G. Niebuhr discovered some Latin verses on a

palimpsest In textual studies, a palimpsest () is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse in the form of another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid ski ...

in the monastery of St Gall, the authorship of which was traced to Merobaudes, owing to the great similarity of the language in the prose preface to that of the inscription. Formerly the only piece known under the name of Merobaudes was a short poem (30

hexameter Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek as well as in Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of s ...

s) ''De Christo'', attributed to him by one manuscript, to

Claudian Claudius Claudianus, known in English as Claudian (Greek: Κλαυδιανός; ), was a Latin poet associated with the court of the Roman emperor Honorius at Mediolanum (Milan), and particularly with the general Stilicho. His work, written almo ...

by another; but Ebert is inclined to dispute the claim of Merobaudes to be considered either the author of the ''De Christo'' or a Christian. The Panegyric and minor poems have been edited by Niebuhr (1824); by

Immanuel Bekker August Immanuel Bekker (21 May 17857 June 1871) was a German philologist and critic. Biography Born in Berlin, Bekker completed his classical education at the University of Halle under Friedrich August Wolf, who considered him as his most promi ...

in the Bonn Corpus scriptorum hist. (1836); the ''De Christo'' in T. Birt's ''Claudian'' (1892), where the authorship of Merobaudes is upheld; most recently F. Bücheler and A. Riese, ''Anthologia latina sive poesis latinae supplementum'' (2nd ed. of vol. 1, Leipzig, 1894–1926) 1, 2: pp. 327–328, no. 878. See also A. Ebert, ''Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande'' (1889). English translation by F.M. Clover
"Flavius Merobaudes: A Translation and Historical Commentary", ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society''
New Series, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January, 1971), pp. 1–78

References

External links

in
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' {{Authority control 5th-century births 5th-century Frankish people 5th-century writers in Latin 5th-century Roman poets Late-Roman-era pagans Romans from Hispania Year of death missing