Merobaudes: Panegyricus in Prosa (Fragments)

Flavius Merobaudes, a Spanish-born general and poet of the Western Empire, served the generalissimo Aetius and was honoured with a statue in the Forum of Trajan in 435. His surviving works come almost entirely from a damaged palimpsest manuscript at St Gall. Among them are these fragments of a prose panegyric, an oration in praise of Aetius, whose broken lines celebrate his patron’s integrity, the openness of a life lived under the eyes and judgment of all, and his public achievements.

The fragments are among the last examples of the Latin prose panegyric, a form descended from Pliny’s Panegyricus and the Gallic orators of the fourth century, and they are a rare contemporary voice from the court of Valentinian III. Though lacunose and difficult, they illuminate how the power of Aetius, the dominant figure in the West in the decades before Attila’s invasions, was presented to the Roman aristocracy. The palimpsest that preserves them was discovered by Barthold Georg Niebuhr in the early nineteenth century.