Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the seventy-sixth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds The Latin West, AD 440–550, from the period about AD 440 – 551.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.

In this volume

Salvian was born about AD 400, probably near Trier, and became a priest at Marseilles, where he lived to a great age. His eight books On the Government of God, written about AD 440–450, answer those who asked how God could rule the world while the provinces of Rome were falling to the barbarians. He argues that the Romans were punished for their own vices, and that some of the barbarian peoples lived better lives than the Christians they overcame.

Sidonius was born at Lyons about AD 430 into a senatorial family and married the daughter of the emperor Avitus. He was prefect of Rome in AD 468, became bishop of Clermont about AD 470, held the city against the Visigoths, was for a time in exile, and died about AD 489. His nine books of letters, put together between AD 477 and 482, show the villas, courts, bishops and barbarian kings of Gaul in the years when Roman rule there came to an end.

Eugippius was a disciple of Severinus in Noricum, the Roman province on the upper Danube. After the saint died in AD 482 he went with the other monks to Italy and became abbot of the monastery of Castellum Lucullanum near Naples, where he died about AD 535. He wrote the Life of Severinus in AD 511 at the request of the Roman deacon Paschasius.

Dionysius was born in Scythia Minor, on the lower Danube, and came to Rome about AD 500, where he lived as a monk and worked as a translator of Greek canons and decretals into Latin. In AD 525 he drew up a table for finding the date of Easter, and in it he counted the years from the Incarnation of Christ. This is the reckoning of Anno Domini now used round the world.

Benedict was born at Nursia in central Italy about AD 480. He lived for a time as a hermit at Subiaco, and about AD 529 he founded the monastery of Monte Cassino, where he died about AD 547. His Rule, written for his monks, draws on earlier monastic writings and joins firmness with moderation. Within a few centuries it became the standard rule of the Western Church.

Jordanes was of Gothic descent and served as a secretary to a Gothic general before he took up writing at Constantinople. In AD 551 he composed the Getica, a short history of the Goths that rests on a longer lost work by the Roman statesman Cassiodorus. It is the chief surviving account of how the Gothic peoples understood their own past.

The writers in this volume lived through the end of Roman rule in the West. Salvian and Sidonius write from Gaul in the generation of the invasions, Eugippius from the Danube frontier, and Jordanes from Constantinople. Dionysius Exiguus, who gave us the counting of years from the birth of Christ, and Benedict of Nursia, whose Rule shaped Western monasticism, close the volume.

Dates and authorship

Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.