Flavius Merobaudes was a 5th-century Latin rhetorician and poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

, probably a native of Baetica in Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

.

He was the official laureate of Valentinian III

Valentinian III

-Family:Valentinian was born in the western capital of Ravenna, the only son of Galla Placidia and Flavius Constantius. The former was the younger half-sister of the western emperor Honorius, and the latter was at the time Patrician and the power behind the throne....

 and Aetius

Flavius Aëtius

Flavius Aëtius , dux et patricius, was a Roman general of the closing period of the Western Roman Empire. He was an able military commander and the most influential man in the Western Roman Empire for two decades . He managed policy in regard to the attacks of barbarian peoples pressing on the Empire...

. Till the beginning of the 19th century he was known only from the notice of him in the Chronicle (year 443) of his contemporary Hydatius

Hydatius

Hydatius or Idacius , bishop of Aquae Flaviae in the Roman province of Gallaecia was the author of a chronicle of his own times that provides us with our best evidence for the history of the Iberian Peninsula in the 5th century.-Life:Hydatius was born around the year 400 in the...

, where he is praised as a poet and orator, and mention is made of statues set up in his honour.

In 1813 the base of a statue was discovered at Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, with a long inscription belonging to the year 435 (CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions. It forms an authoritative source for documenting the surviving epigraphy of classical antiquity. Public and personal inscriptions throw light on all aspects of Roman life and history...

 vi. 1724) upon Flavius Merobaudes, celebrating his merits as warrior and poet. Ten years later, B. G. Niebuhr

Barthold Georg Niebuhr

Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish-German statesman and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. Classical Rome caught the admiration of German thinkers...

 discovered some Latin verses on a palimpsest

Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος originally compounded from πάλιν and ψάω literally meaning “scraped...

 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

Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Greek mythology, hexameter...

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

Claudian

Claudian was a Roman poet, who worked for Emperor Honorius and the latter's general Stilicho.A Greek-speaking citizen of Alexandria and probably not a Christian convert, Claudian arrived in Rome before 395. He made his mark with a eulogy of his two young patrons, Probinus and Olybrius, thereby...

 by another; but Ebert

Friedrich Adolf Ebert

Friedrich Adolf Ebert was a German bibliographer and librarian.-Biography:Ebert was born at Taucha, near Leipzig, the son of a Lutheran pastor....

 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 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. Biicheler 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

External links

Merobaudus Flavius: Carminum Panegirique Relequiae in Documenta Catholica Omnia