Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › Epitaphium
This short epitaph in hexameters was written by Martin of Braga for his own tomb in the church of Dumium, near Braga, where he died about AD 580. In six lines he records that he was born in Pannonia, crossed wide seas, and was brought by divine will to Gallaecia, where he established worship and the rites of the church, and that he now rests in the hall dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, whose name he shared.
The epitaph is a compact piece of autobiography and one of the main sources for Martin’s origins and career. Its closing play on the shared name, ‘the same in name, not in merit’, expresses the humility appropriate to a bishop’s tomb and his devotion to his patron, and it belongs to the long tradition of Latin verse epitaphs for churchmen. Its mention of crossing the seas alludes to Martin’s journey from the East, where he had been trained as a monk before coming to Spain.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: C. W. Barlow, 1950), licensed CC BY-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.