Library › Latin: Biography › Vita Sancti Hilarionis
Jerome (c. 347–420) wrote this life of Hilarion, a monk from Thabatha near Gaza in Palestine and a disciple of Antony the Great, at Bethlehem around 390. An editor’s summary at the beginning describes it as a portrait of the perfect monk. In his prologue Jerome calls on the Holy Spirit who dwelt in Hilarion, and recalls Alexander the Great at the tomb of Achilles, envying him his herald Homer. The life follows Hilarion from his studies at Alexandria and his visit to Antony, through decades of ascetic life and miracles in the desert near Gaza, to his journeys in old age to Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia and Cyprus, where he died.
With the lives of Paul the First Hermit and of Malchus, the Life of Hilarion is one of Jerome’s three monastic biographies, and the longest. It established Hilarion as the founder of monasticism in Palestine and joined the conventions of classical biography to the wonder-tales of the desert. The sample’s account of his visit to Elusa during a festival of Venus, worshipped there by the Saracens for the morning star, is a notable witness to pagan cult in the region. The work was widely read in the Middle Ages and influenced later saints’ lives.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 23, Parisiis 1845), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.