The Career of Venantius Fortunatus

Abstract

There is something immediately appealing about a wandering bard such as the sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, who left his native Italy to seek the hospitality and patronage of the kings and bishops of Merovingian Gaul. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fortunatus attracted the attention of a succession of scholars such as Thierry, Caron, Dostal, Meyer, and Koebner, but it is now over fifty years since the last full-scale treatment of the poet was written: that of the Abbé Tardi in 1927. As a consequence of this, a number of rather questionable biographical details, as they are given in these standard accounts of the poet, have come to be somewhat uncritically accepted. Some re-examination of the evidence for Fortunatus' travels and career is long overdue. My aim here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the poet's career, nor indeed a full biographical sketch, but rather to discuss critically some key issues within these accounts of Fortunatus' career, in the light of the elements of autobiography found in Venantius' poems. As we shall see, an outline of the various stages of his career, both before his arrival in Gaul and during the many years of his residence in his adopted homeland, may be pieced together with the aid of the scattered evidence contained in his poems, yet this evidence is often obviously incomplete and is at times frustratingly ambiguous. Still, we can best proceed in the reconstruction of Venantius' career and travels by investigating what may be established, or brought into question, by the evidence of the poems themselves.