SOURCE: "Satire in St. Jerome," The Classical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 6, March, 1941, pp. 322-36.

[In the following essay, Pence explores Jerome's satirical style, focusing primarily on his letters.]

I.

Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus Sanctus was born between A.D. 340 and 350 into a world of bloodshed and destruction—the last age of the old Graeco-Roman civilization. In the span of his life came the final destruction of paganism and the crumbling of Rome under not only the attacks of barbarians from without, but also the lowered standards of morality within her boundaries. The date of his birth¹ fell in the troubled times after the death of Constantine in 337, but before Constantius, by shedding the blood of nine of his near relatives, made himself sole emperor in 353. He saw the long succession of emperors and puppet emperors, a few of them able and patriotic, but on the whole weak men, whose reigns were marked by murder and intrigue.

The opening of the fifth century was accompanied by the ravaging of the whole of the Roman world by barbarians. In 401 and again in 403 Alaric invaded Italy with his Visigoths. In 405 a great host of Ostrogoths, Vandals, Suevi, and Burgundians under the leadership of Radagaisus swarmed through Italy, plundering as they went, until finally their leader was caught near Florence and put to death. In 409 Alaric entered Italy for the third time, and in August of the year 410 his army besieged Rome and sacked it. The destruction and suffering in the city were horrible. Jerome, from his retreat in Bethlehem, uttered a cry of anguish at the fate of his beloved Rome. To his friend Principia he wrote:²

A terrible rumour has come from the West that Rome has been besieged and that the safety of the citizens' lives had to be bought by gold, and that then they were besieged again, so that after having lost their property they also lost their lives. My voice sticks in my throat, and sobs choke my words as I dictate. The city has been taken, which once took captive the whole world.

One by one Roman provinces passed into the hands of the barbarians. In 419 and 420, at the time of Jerome's death, the Empire was practically wholly overwhelmed, although sixty years more of havoc and destruction were to pass before its final collapse.

The fall of Rome was imminent, however, long before Alaric and Radagaisus invaded the Italian peninsula. Grave economic wrongs, a lack of feeling of duty and citizenship among true Romans everywhere, low moral standards among nobles and clergy alike, had for a long time been breaking down the Empire from within. St. Jerome, for one, was fearless in denouncing the moral evils which existed in the world of his day and in his Letters, especially, he appears as another Juvenal.

The saint cannot be called a satirist in the formal sense of the word, perhaps, for he did not write in verse, but except for that one detail he has all the earmarks of one. Even in his own day his critic Onasus called him a "writer of satires in prose."³ J. Wight Duff, in his book on Roman satire, says:⁴ "What gives satire its vital importance in Latin literature is not poetic charm, for, though in verse, it is not poetry of the highest order; it is rather its faithful representation of contemporary life and its comments thereupon." By this criterion Jerome is a satirist of the first rank. With scathing sarcasm, as well as with some exaggeration, he rails against all classes of society—patricians, plebeians, and even slaves. He denounces the chattering through of slaves who surround noble ladies and decries the influence for evil which they exercise.⁵ "Slaves," he says, "are always complaining, and whatever you give them, it is never enough. For they do not consider how much you have, but how much you give, and they console their vexations as only they can—by finding fault."

Again and again he pointed a finger of shame at the woman of the world who painted her face and showed off in a robe of shining silk.⁶ "Nowadays," he writes his pupil Eustochium, "you see many women filling their closets with fine clothes, changing their dresses every day, and so they never can get rid of the moths."

He has much to say about widows. In a letter to Principia he describes pagan widows thus:⁷

Such women always paint their faces with rouge and powder, they strut about in silk dresses, actually glitter with jewels, wear gold necklaces galore, and hang from their pierced ears the most expensive pearls from the Persian Gulf, to say nothing of reeking with perfume. They rejoice that at last they have escaped from a husband's supremacy, and look about for another, not intending to obey him, according to the law of God, but rather to command him. With this in mind they even choose poor men, so that they will have husbands in name only, who will have to endure rivals patiently, or, if they grumble, will be cast out then and there.

This smacks of the sixth satire of Juvenal! In that famous poem the first-century satirist also describes the woman who is a busybody, running about town like Fama herself, gleaning every scandal to be learned, and passing on her tales to each man and woman she meets. Now hear Jerome.⁸

Rumors and lies reach the ears of matrons and, fanned by their racing tongues, reach into all the provinces. You can see many of these women who, with painted face and frenzied tongue, their eyes like those of snakes and their teeth polished with pumice-stone, foam at the mouth when they carp at Christians. One of them [and here he quotes directly from the first satire of Persius; as Rand says, "Jerome often smears his barbs with a little of the ancient virus."⁹]—One of them, with a purple mantle about her shoulders, talking through her nose, shouts out some ridiculous nonsense and minces her words on her dainty palate."¹⁰ Then the whole chorus of gossiping women joins in and every one of them begins to snarl.

Jerome's barbs, however, were especially aimed at those who called themselves Christians and yet lived wicked lives. He bitterly attacked the … s, "dearly-beloved sisters," who, under guise of seeking spiritual consolation, lived in the same house with their male friends:

Why, even noble ladies of the best families, [laments Jerome] desert their husbands to live in sin, and in the name of religion. Many a Helen follows her Paris about, and has not the slightest fear of Menelaus.

Oh for shame, for shame, the world is hastening to destruction, but our sins flourish and increase. The glorious city, heart of the Roman Empire, is consumed by one great fire. There is no region in the world which does not harbor her exiles. Churches once sacred have now fallen into heaps of dust and ashes, but we still strive for money and for power. We live as if we were going to die tomorrow, and yet we build as if we were to live forever in this world. Gold gleams in our walls, our ceilings, the capitals of our pillars, and yet when we allow our poor to die, Christ too dies, naked and hungry, before our doors.¹¹

We are reminded here again of Juvenal. In his second satire he attacks the false philosophers who, while in public, show the stern looks and righteous manners of the Stoics, but in private practice the worst vices.

Jerome found many a hypocrite to ridicule. In a letter to Eustochium he tells about one very noble lady whom he has seen on her way to church.¹²

Recently I saw a very noble Roman lady—I'll not mention any names lest you think this a satire—in the basilica of St. Peter's. She was preceded by her own band of eunuch couriers, and she was actually giving out money to the beggars—a penny apiece—to make people consider her extremely pious. Then, as usually happens in such a case, one old woman, weighed down with years and rags, ran up to her again to get another penny, but when her turn came, she got a blow instead of a coin, and the poor culprit paid with her blood for such a crime. Verily, avarice is the root of all evils.… Peter the Apostle said: "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, give I thee." … But nowadays many say, in deed if not in word, "faith and pity have I none, but such as I have, silver and gold, that I do not give to you either."

And in the same letter he describes holy women who practice piety merely in order to attract attention to themselves."¹³

Some women [he writes] even disfigure their faces so that men will be sure to know they have been fasting. As soon as they spy anyone, they begin to groan, to lower their eyes and cover up their faces—that is, except for one eye, which they leave uncovered to see if their actions are being observed. They wear a black dress and a girdle of sackcloth, their hands and feet are always dirty; only their stomachs, because they can't be seen, are seething with food. Others dress in goats' hair, and returning to their infancy, make themselves babies' hoods, and look just like owls.

The church of Jerome's day was far removed from the early years of Christianity when simple men lived according to the spirit of the Gospels. By the end of the fourth century the Bishop of Rome was a great potentate surrounded by wealth and luxury and worldly pomp. There was also much corruption among all classes of the clergy. Jerome had a great deal to say about these ecclesiastics. For example, he describes those who, when they ought to have been going about their duties, spent their time visiting the merry widows of Rome:¹⁴

They kiss the heads of their patrons [writes the saint] and then hold out their hands—to say a benediction over them, you would think, if you did not already know that they were receiving a reward for that blessing.

There are other men, [he continues]¹⁵ and I speak of members of my own order, who seek to become presbyters and deacons only to be able to visit women more freely. The only thought of such men is their clothes—do they have a pleasant odor, do their shoes fit smoothly? Their hair is crimped up by a curling-iron, you can tell, their fingers shine with rings, and if the path they walk on is even a little damp, they walk on tiptoe so as not to spot their shoes: When you see such as these, consider them men betrothed rather than men ordained. Some, indeed, spend all their zeal and their whole lifetime in learning the names and households and characters of married ladies.

I will describe briefly to you one who is the master of this art in order that you may more easily recognize the pupils when you know their teacher. He gets up in haste—with the sun. The order of his morning calls is fixed. He thinks he must take short cuts, and the importunate old man almost walks into the very bedrooms of ladies still asleep. If he sees a little pillow, or an elegant table-cloth, or any little bit of household furniture, he praises it, he admires it, he fingers it, and complaining that he needs just such a thing as this, does not beg it so much as he extorts it, because all the women are afraid of offending the town gossip. Chastity, yes, and fasting are not for him. What he approves of is a savory dinner, with a big fat bird, for instance. He has a cruel and impudent tongue, ever ready for insult. Wherever you go, he is the first one you see. Whatever news is whispered about, he either started the tale, or exaggerated it. His horses are changed hourly, and are so sleek and spirited that you might think he was the brother of the king of Thrace himself. [A reference to Diomede, another barb taken from the Classics!]

The Letters of Jerome abound in such flagellations of his fellow-churchmen.

But to turn from clergymen to a more general field, Jerome also holds forth brilliantly against the way everyone tries to expound the Scriptures:¹⁶

Everyone, nowadays, [he writes] thinks he can interpret the Bible! But you can't possibly make any progress without a guide to point out the way. Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, … yes, musicians, astronomers, and astrologers have to learn from qualified teachers. Why, even farmers, and masons, and carpenters cannot be what they want to be without training. As Horace says:¹⁷

               Quod medicorum est
promittunt medici; tractant fabrilia fabri.

The art of interpreting Scripture is the only one which everyone everywhere thinks he can do best.

And again Jerome emphasizes his point by quoting Horace:¹⁸

Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim.

The gossipy old woman, the old man in his dotage, the long-winded sophist all consider themselves masters of the art; they tear the Scriptures to pieces, and then teach them before they themselves have learned them. Some, with knit brows and big words, philosophize about Sacred Letters to groups of women. Others—oh, the shame of it!—learn from women what they teach to men. And, as if this were not enough, with a certain glibness of tongue they boldly declaim to others what they themselves do not understand. I say nothing about those who, like myself, came to a knowledge of the Scriptures after the study of secular literature. Such men, when they charm popular audiences by the polish of their style, think that whatever they say is the word of God. They do not deign to find out what the prophets, the apostles, have meant, but fit incongruous passages to suit their own meaning, as if it were a splendid method of teaching, and not the worst, to corrupt the real meaning and to make the Holy Scriptures do their own bidding. As if I had never read centos from Homer and Vergil! and yet I know that it is impossible to call Vergil, who did not know Christ, a Christian simply because he wrote:¹⁹

And now the Virgin returns, now the kingdom
  of Saturn returns;
Now a new race descends from heaven on
  high.

Here Jerome shows himself a scholar as well as a satirist. He realized, although many learned men of his day did not, that neither Vergil, nor the Sibyl in the fourth eclogue, was foretelling the coming of Christ.

But all this, [continues Jerome] is childish and like a mountebank's trick. It is bad enough to teach what you do not know, but much worse not even to know that you know nothing.

Apparently Jerome had no fear of arousing long-lasting hatred against himself. In fact, he expected it, for he wrote thus to Furia in 394:²⁰

I am putting my hand into the fire knowingly and with my eyes wide open. Eyebrows will be raised, fists shaken at me, and [he concluded, quoting from the Ars Poetica of Horace] "With a booming voice will angry Chremes rage."

Angry Chremes did rage, and on all sides. Rufinus, for one, said:²¹

Jerome wrote a certain treatise while he was in Rome which all pagans and enemies of God, all apostates and persecutors, and indeed all who hated the name of Christians, vied with each other in copying down; for in that work he defamed with the most foul reproaches every rank and class of Christians, every group of the clergy, and indeed the Universal Church. And that man further said that the crimes laid to us by the pagans were true, and even that much worse things were done by our people than those ascribed to them.

Such charges, however, did not baffle Jerome. He answered them with scathing irony and became more and more the champion of Christian sanctity, against the luxury and vice of the day.

II.

Jerome resembles the Republican satirist Lucilius, however, rather than Juvenal, when he rails against his enemies. Juvenal, as a rule, attacks men only if already dead, and his satire is aimed at actions rather than individual men. Often the individuals whom he does single out for abuse are fictitious, representing a type. Not so Jerome! In vigor of expression and bitterness of tongue against his contemporaries he is a true descendant of Lucilius.

In an early letter he speaks thus of Lupicinus, a priest of his native Stridon:²²

In my own country the household god is the stomach and men live for the day alone. The richer a man is, the holier he is considered. Well, according to the old proverb, the cover is worthy of the dish, since the priest there is Lupicinus. He proves that the popular adage is true which Lucilius said made Crassus laugh the only time in his life: Similem habent labra lactucam asino cardus comedente. In other words, at Stridon a crippled pilot steers a leaking boat, a blind man leads the blind into a deep pit, and, as the ruler is, so are the ruled.

But those who suffered most from the pen of Jerome were the ones who had dared to criticize him—the poor monk, for instance, who opposed his stand against the heretic Jovinian, and in public. Vividly he pictures for his friend Domnio the poor churchman who spent his time loitering about the streets, at the crossroads, and in all the public places. He was a gossip, an ignoramus, why, he didn't even know Aristotle or Cicero!

It is a good thing [remarks Jerome] that he decided to become a monk instead of a lawyer, for no one could be proved innocent if he did not so please. No wonder that such a master of the Latin tongue and of eloquence should overcome me, far away, and out of practice in speaking Latin, when he could vanquish even Jovinian in person. Jesu bone, Jovinian, qualem et quantum virum, whose writings no one can understand and who sings for himself alone, and for the Muses!²³

To Riparius, a presbyter, he attacks Vigilantius, who was preaching in southern Gaul against the worship of relics.²⁴ He begins by remarking that the heretic was inappropriately named. He should be called not Vigilantius but Dormitantius. The rest of the paragraph is just as well left untranslated. But he goes on to say:²⁵

His tongue ought to be cut out by doctors, or better still, his head should be treated—for insanity. And as he does not know how to speak, may he learn some day to keep quiet. I myself saw the monster once, and I wanted to bind the madman with Scripture texts, like the chains of Hippocrates, but he had gone, departed, escaped, flown—sed abiit, excessit, evasit, eripuit.

Here Jerome uses Cicero's invective against Catiline, and with great effect.²⁶ "But whatever the fool says," concludes our satirist, "it should be considered just so much talk and noise."

And Onasus, the priest, poor Onasus! Our ecclesiastic pokes fun at his disfigured nose, his manner of speech, his name. Onasus, apparently, did not hold with Swift, who writes in The Battle of the Books: "Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."²⁷ On the contrary, he had the unfortunate idea that all Jerome's satires were directed against him, and furthermore, he aired his grievances round about. But he learned, and a bitter lesson it was, what it meant to cast aspersions on the pitiless censor. In the fortieth epistle to Marcella, Jerome plays on the word O-Nasus to ridicule the priest's homely nose, and he adds:²⁸

What, is Onasus of Segesta the only one who puffs out his cheeks like bladders and balances hollow words on his tongue? It pleases me to make fun of ghosts, of owls, of monsters of the Nile. But whatever I say you take it as meant for you. At whatever vice the point of my pen is turned, you cry out that it's aimed at you alone!

And he continues in still another vein:

And so you think that you are handsome simply because you are called by a lucky name (Onasus is a form of Onesimus, and means "lucky" or "profitable").²⁹ Not at all! A thicket is called a lucus because it gets no light, and the Fates Parcae because they never spare, and even the Furies go by the name Eumendies.… But if you always become angry when your faults are mentioned, I'll make you feel handsome again by singing to you the poem of Persius.³⁰ "The king and queen want you for their son-in-law; the girls run after you; and whatever you tread upon becomes a rose."

Persius is here deriding the foolish prayers of old women who make such wishes for new-born children.

However [Jerome continues],³¹" I shall give you some advice, on what you should hide to appear more handsome. Don't show your nose on your face, don't say a word, and then you can be both handsome and eloquent.

As we have already seen in Jerome's satirical pictures of the times and in his raillery against his enemies, the saint often made reference to the ancient classics, especially in his later works. There was a time in his youth when his burning enthusiasm for the monastic movement and biblical study made him feel that all secular literature must be rejected. "What similarity is there between light and darkness?" he had demanded, in a letter to Eustochium.³² "What agreement between Christ and Belial? What has Horace to do with the Psalter? Vergil with the Gospels? Cicero with the apostles? … We ought not to drink from the chalice of Christ and of devils at the same time." He even had a dream in which he was severely rebuked by Heaven for reading too much Cicero, and he vowed that never again would he read a pagan book.³³ But he loved the classics. He had studied them eagerly in his schooldays at Rome under the guidance of Marius Victorinus and Aelius Donatus, both great classical scholars. Even the rigorous discipline of his life as an ascetic in the Chalcidian desert could not make him forget his early training in Vergil and Horace and the satirists. And as time went on, the memory of the dream faded ever more into the past and quotations from the classics occurred more and more frequently, even in works where we should expect them least of all.³⁴ For example, in the very letter in which he rebukes himself for the flowery eloquence of his youth and emphasizes the superiority of the Christian simplicity of language over pagan rhetoric, he refers to Vergil six times, citing the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, to Petronius once, and to Cicero six times, including a long passage from an oration which has been lost.³⁵

III.

Most of the classical references in the Letters of Jerome are to Vergil, but it is interesting for us to note that our ecclesiastic, a writer of satire himself, quotes the earlier Roman satirists in one out of every five citations. Lucilius, Horace, Persius, Juvenal are quoted many times, and also Petronius and Martial. A few examples will show how Jerome continually introduces words from pagan classical satire into his own writings.

He especially loves to identify himself with Horace. In 394 he complains to his friend Domnio of the invidious gossip directed against him by some obscure enemy; he declares that he could retaliate in kind if he so wished—that his opponents could be warned of him just as men once were of Horace:³⁶

Faenum habet in comu, longe fuge.

Jerome indicates in several passages, moreover, that he feels a similarity of injustice between the charges brought against him for a leaning toward the heretic Origen and the accusations made against Horace for unfavorable criticism of Lucilius.³⁷

Letter L is a bitter attack against an ignorant monk who had criticized his book Against Jovinian. It contains five quotations from the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Jerome contemptuously describes his opponent as an emptyheaded, overeloquent public speaker, whose sayings were held up as models of rhetoric to curly-headed schoolboys. He echoes here the first satire of Persius, which, directed against the corruption of literature of the day, describes with scorn the man who says:³⁸" "Ah, it's a grand thing to have people point you out and say, 'that's the man.' Who wouldn't like to have his poems assigned to a hundred curly-headed schoolboys?"

In this letter Jerome also identifies himself with Juvenal. He states that he, too, could give an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. His ability to retaliate is as great as that of his enemy; he, too, has been to school and has written themes. With the first century satirist and in similar application he exclaims:³⁹

Et nos saepe manum ferulae subtraximus.

In a later epistle this line from Juvenal is used caustically against an opponent who has criticized his method of translation from Greek into Latin:⁴⁰ "What do you say, 0 pillar of learning, the Aristarchus of our times? You who come to an opinion after perusing all the writers! I guess I have studied all this time in vain, and in vain saepe manum ferulae sub-duximus.

To Rusticus Jerome describes the wrong kind of monk thus:⁴¹

Some monks shrug their shoulders to the sky and croaking I don't know what nonsense to themselves, with their glaring eyes fastened on the ground, they balance swelling words on their tongues, so that if you add a herald, you would think that His Honor the Mayor was coming.

Both the spirit and the expression of Persius are reflected here, although the poet is not directly quoted. Persius writes nescio quid … cornicaris⁴² and Jerome, nescio quid cornicantes; the poet, trutinantur verba,⁴³ and the saint echoes, verba trutinantur.

In the same letter⁴⁴ Jerome advises the young monk to beware of flatterers,

who will fawn upon you with loud praises and in some way or other make powerless your judgment. But if you suddenly look behind you, you will find that they are mocking you with their gestures, either curving their necks at you like storks, or wiggling their hands at their ears like donkeys' ears, or sticking out at you the thirsty tongue of a dog.

This is an imitation of Persius, who, with similar advice for the writers of his day, exclaims:⁴⁵

O lucky Janus, no human stork can peck at you behind your back; no hand, mimicking white donkeys' ears, will make fun of you. No, nor can any tongue stick out at you as far as a thirsty Apulian dog's!

Jerome also quotes from the satirists to express his own feelings, often in an application which is not at all satiric. For example, in one letter he apologizes to a friend because he has not written much sooner—but his present wordiness will make up for past sins. For, as Horace says in his satire:⁴⁶ "This fault all singers have; if asked to sing among their friends they never will, but if not asked, they never stop."

In a letter to Rufinus, dated 398, Jerome excuses its poor style by explaining that illness had compelled him to dictate the epistle. He says:⁴⁷ "I cannot dictate with the same charm with which I write because when I write I often turn my stylus over to erase, for anything worth reading must be written again and again" These are almost exactly the words of the poet Horace, who warns in his Satires that what is worth writing must have cost much effort.⁴⁸ These passages are further evidence that Jerome liked to compare himself to Horace and to the other Roman satirists.

Quotations from Roman satire are also made as important authority for the support of Jerome's own opinions. In regard to original sin he cites Paul and Vergil to the effect that passions are innate in human lives, and he continues:⁴⁹Quam ob rem et gravissimus poeta Flaccus scribit in satira:

Nam vitiis nemo sine nascitur; optimus ille est
   qui minimis urgetur.

Again in Letter LXXIX these words are quoted to emphasize to Salvina the fact of the essential sinfulness of man.⁵⁰ Horace is also produced along with Cicero as a model for the right method of translating. After quoting from the De Optimo Genere Oratorum the indignant monk continues thus⁵¹ "And Horace, too, a man both intelligent and learned (acutus et doctus), in his Ars Poetica teaches the same thing I do concerning the right way to translate:

Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus
   interpres.

But it is the ethical precepts of the earlier satirists that Jerome especially loves to quote. As Duff aptly points out, satirists are always preachers, and Jerome no less than Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. By depicting the vice and corruption in an evil world they think they can show men the better way. Horace, through his verses, gives his philosophy of life. Persius was ever ardent in preaching the ideals of Stoicism. Juvenal was more bitter than the others, but he too had a doctrine—to trust the gods and do the right.⁵² It is easy to see why these poets appealed to Saint Jerome! The monk advises Eustochium in Letter XXII not to be too pious, nor yet too humble, lest she seek glory in avoiding it. "Desire for praise," he writes,⁵³ "is a fault which only a few avoid, and that man is best whose character, like a beautiful body, is disfigured by the fewest blemishes." The words he uses are Horatian: qui quasi in corpora rara naevorum sorde respergitur. The well-known passage in the sixth satire of Book I reads:⁵⁴

                velut si
egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos.

This passage of Horace is often quoted by Jerome.

Paulinus of Nola is advised in the year 395 to persevere in his study of the Scriptures.

         Nil sine magno
vita labore dedit mortalibus,

warns Jerome, quoting the maxim of "the Bore" from Horace's famous ninth satire.⁵⁵

The ethical precepts of Persius are also given a Christian application. For instance, in a letter to St. Augustine, Jerome tells his friend that a difference of opinion between them should not lead to injured feelings.⁵⁶ But that is a just reproof for friends, "if," as Persius says, "we think so much about another man's wallet that we cannot see our own." So, too, in a letter to Principia, he praises the virtues of their mutual friend Marcella, who lived ever mindful of death, extolling the disertissimique praeceptum satirici:⁵⁷

Vive memor leti, fugit hora, hoc, quod loquor, inde
   est.

Therefore, the satirists not only provided the monk with epigrams to hurl against his foes, but they also upheld ideals which were Christian in spirit and in application.

St. Jerome's personality was made up of opposites, and although for the most part we have looked at one side of his nature only, he combines the most excellent qualities with grave faults. He was ever sensitive and impulsive, capable of great friendships, as well as equally great enmities. His attitude toward pagans was often tolerant, and yet he fought bitterly and long against heretics; unjust and violent in his attacks, and, as we have seen, not above insulting his opponents and giving them nicknames. In his moral attitude he was rigorous to the extreme—Wright speaks of him as "the pious puritan"⁵⁸—and yet he was kindly and generous, wholly without avarice. As a scholar, his devotion to his work, his tremendous industry, his erudition call for our deep admiration. In his own day he was loved as well as hated. Countless numbers of men and women, laymen and monks, traveled to Bethlehem from all parts of the world—to visit the birthplace of Christianity, it is true, but especially to see Jerome.⁵⁹ Sulpicius Severus, a contemporary of the saint, writes his impression of the great scholar. This quotation I take from E. S. Duckett's excellent book, Latin Writers of the Fifth Century.⁶⁰

The heretics hate him because he is always attacking them; the clergy hate him because he rebukes their way of life and their sins. But all good men admire and love him. He is read through all the world.

His works remain a monument of lasting value. The Church did well indeed to honor his name.

Notes

¹ Scholars are not agreed on the date of the birth of St. Jerome. It is usually placed at about 345. For a discussion of this matter cf. Ferdinand Cavallera, Saint Jerome, Sa vie et son oeuvre: Louvain (1922), II, 3f., who places the date near 347; and Georg Grützmacher, Hieronymus: Leipzig (1901-1908), I, 41-43. Cf. also Classical Journal XXXIII (1937-1938), 4.

²Epist. CXXVII, 12. The edition of the Epistulae referred to throughout is by Isidorus Hilberg, "Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum" Vols. LIV-LVI: Vienna (1910-1918).

³Epist. XL, 2.

⁴ J. Wight Duff, Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life: Berkeley, University of California Press (1936), 6.

⁵ CXVII, 8.

⁶ XXII, 32.

⁷ CXXVII, 3.

⁸ LIV, 5.

⁹ Edward Kennard Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages: Cambridge, Harvard University Press (1928), 113.

¹⁰Persius I, 32 f., 35.

¹¹ CXXVIII, 4 f.; cf. XXII, 14.

¹² XXII, 32.

¹³Ibid., 27.

¹⁴ XXII, 16.

¹⁵Ibid., 28.

¹⁶ LIII, 6 f.

¹⁷ Horace, Epist. II, 1, 115 f.

¹⁸Ibid., 117.

¹⁹ Vergil, Ecl. IV, 6 f.

²⁰ LIV, 2; Horace, A.P. 94.

²¹Apologia in S. Hieronymum II, 5 (Migne, P. L. XXI, 357).

²² VII, 5; cf. Cicero, De Fin. V, 92; Tusc. III, 31.

²³ L, 1-2.

²⁴ CIX, 1.

²⁵Ibid., 2.

²⁶ Cicero, Orat. in Catil. II, 1.

²⁷ Swift, Preface to The Battle of the Books, ed. Temple Scott: London (1919), I, 160.

²⁸ XL, 2.

²⁹ Cf. W. H. Fremantle, trans., Principal Works of Saint Jerome, "Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers": New York (1893), VI, p. 55, n. 1.

³⁰ Persius, Sat. II, 37 f.

³¹ XL, 3.

³² XXII, 29.

³³ For Jerome's account of the dream, cf. Epist. XXII, 30.

³⁴ Cf. Arthur Stanley Pease, The Attitude of Jerome towards Pagan Literature, T.A.P.A., L (1919), 150-167.

³⁵Epist. LII.

³⁶ L, 5; Horace, Sat. I, 4, 34. In this satire Horace speaks thus of the fear men have of his barbs.

³⁷ Cf. Epp. LXXXIV, 2; CXVII, 1.

³⁸ Persius, Sat. I, 28 f.

³⁹ Juvenal, Sat. I, 15. Juvenal's verse is, Et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus.

⁴⁰ LVII, 12.

⁴¹ CXXV, 16.

⁴² Persius, Sat. V, 12.

⁴³Ibid., III, 82.

⁴⁴ CXXV, 18.

⁴⁵ Persius, Sat. I, 58-60.

⁴⁶ VI, 2; Horace, Sat. I, 3, 1-3.

⁴⁷ LXXIV, 6.

⁴⁸ Horace, Sat. I, 10, 72 f.

⁴⁹ CXXXIII, 1; Horace, Sat. I, 3, 68 f.

⁵⁰ LXXIX, 9.

⁵¹ LVII, 5; Horace, A.P., 133 f.

⁵² Duff, op. cit., 8 f.

⁵³ XXII, 27.

⁵⁴ Horace, Sat. I, 6, 66 f.

⁵⁵ LVIII, I1; Horace, op. cit., I, 9, 59 f.

⁵⁶ CII, 2; Persius, Sat. IV, 24.

⁵⁷ CXXVII, 6; Persius, Sat. V, 153.

⁵⁸ Wright, F. A. and Sinclair, T. A., A History of Later Latin Literature: London (1931), 49.

⁵⁹ Cf. Epist. LVIII, 4 for Jerome's account of the large numbers who crowded to the little monastery in Bethlehem: De toto huc orbe concurritur; plena est civitas universi generis hominibus et tanta utriusque sexus constipatio, ut, quod alibi ex parte fugiebas, hic totum sustinere cogaris. Cf. also Epist. LXVI, 14, in which he complains that he can get no work done because of his many visitors.

⁶⁰ Duckett, Eleanor Shipley, Latin Writers of the Fifth Century: New York (1930), 124 f.