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Hello and welcome to Literature and History Episode 107 venontius fortunatus this program is about the life and works of the Merovingian poet Venontius Fortunatus, who lived from the 530s CE and up until 600 or a little afterward and left behind a body of about 270 Latin poems. Venontius was born in the northeastern part of what is today Italy, and after immigrating to Gaul or modern day France in his late 20s or early 30s, the poet spent the remainder of his career in the newly minted Merovingian kingdom, making a living as a professional writer for various wealthy patrons. Ranging from just a few lines at the shortest to 400 lines at the longest, Venontius poetry is often called court poetry in that the literature that he wrote was written for specific individuals on specific occasions weddings, for instance, or holidays or openings of new churches, or often just to say hello or express gratitude for a favor or gift. Eloquent, observant, kind, and appreciative, Venontius poems demonstrate that beneath the often merciless chaos of Merovingian leadership, the Gallic aristocracy and clergy of the late 500s had warm and demonstrative friendships and still appreciated a good Latin turn of phrase, just as their Roman forebears had. Venontius is not an especially well known poetry today for several connected reasons. First, his poems are written to a wide and diverse network of acquaintances, many of them obscure nobles or churchmen living beneath Merovingian rule. Merovingian Gaul is a forebodingly complex time and place to a newcomer with four kings frequently on four thrones, geographical territories shifting brothers and uncles and nephews usurping one another and frequent wars with neighboring populations. And so trying to understand the implications of a poem that Venontius wrote to even a Merovingian king or queen takes quite a bit of background knowledge. Another reason Venontius isn't especially well known is that he generally seems to have been content writing incidental poetry. He did not, in other words, leave behind a great many poems intended as timeless meditations on humanity and nature. His poems were written for specific contexts, words of thanks to a friend or a note that he missed someone, or praises to a prospective patron seeking to tighten ties with them. Finally, Venontius was a Catholic who dabbled in theological work and hagiography. While his faith and interests are not surprising considering the time and place in which he lived, the poet's fairly predictable outlook and sentiments as a Christian don't especially set him apart from the greater Middle Ages, which were just beginning in the second half of the five hundreds during his career. Still, there are extremely compelling reasons to know about Venontius Fortunatus. As an ambitious young man who left war torn Ostrogothic Italy in the mid 6th century, Venontius saw opportunities abroad in the new barbarian kingdoms of Western Europe. Scholar Joseph Pucci writes that it was a brave new world that Venontius spied as he made a life for himself in Gaul. To one used to the old imperial conflicts roiling Italy and the Byzantine East, Gaul must have seemed the wave of a future very much being made outside the Roman mold. Venontius poems offer us a window into this brave new world, its fusions of old Gallo Roman and new Germanic culture, the indigenous aristocracy that had come into being there, the emergence of the Catholic clergy as a powerful new social class, and the ways that this class at its best offered alms to the poor and educational and career opportunities for men and women alike. We can learn about Merovingian Gaul, certainly through dynastic trees and history books, and memorize which monarch killed which other monarch and when border wars and other calamities struck the young kingdom. But Venontius gives us more depth than this a vibrant record of personal relationships and everyday interactions, quotidian travels between home and work, cold winters and abundant harvests, and moreover, the resilient and adaptive Gallic culture welling up beneath Merovingian rule. Literature, as we've seen so frequently in our show, often is history, and Venontius Hundreds of surviving poems offer us an an early look into the workaday compassion and support networks that would eventually help Europe weather the worst of the Middle Ages. Beyond merely being a purveyor of cultural information, Venontius has something else fairly unique to offer modern readers like us. Back in 2018, Science magazine published an article entitled Quote or why 536 was the worst Year to Be Alive. Drawing on the analysis of Harvard historian Michael McCormick, the article explored the many reasons that 536 CE and the decade afterward would have been absolutely awful to live through. Most obviously, this was the so called Dark Ages. After the lights had gone out, the intermittent periods of stability that Roman rule had once fostered were now a memory. Less obviously, humanity had its first run in with the bubonic plague between 541 and 549, a disease that, as we know from Gregory of Tours, continued to boil up in Gaul until the end of the 500s. But beyond the general systems Collapse of the post Roman world and the bubonic plague. Something else happened to make 536, at least according to this recent article, the very worst year to be alive. And that was a massive volcanic eruption that happened likely in Iceland. This eruption triggered an immediate volcanic winter throughout 536, together with rampant crop failures and famines for years afterward. Another volcanic eruption in either 540 or 541, the very year the bubonic plague emerged, caused more climatological upsets. And another still in 547, with the plague ravaging everywhere, did the same thing, piling freezing temperatures and starvation on top of sickness. These were the years of Venontius childhood. Again, he's thought to have been born between 530 and 540. And as if everything else weren't catastrophic enough, Venontius was born in a war zone. Italy, which had been ruled by Goths for two generations, was being attacked by the Byzantine Empire. And so in the poet's first 20 years, he would have seen all four horsemen of the apocalypse. Famine from volcanic winter, pestilence from the bubonic plague, war between Goths, Byzantines, Franks and others, and death from all of the above. And the question I want to ask before we learn anything else about this 6th century Merovingian poet is in what was an unequivocally terrible period to be alive, by some standards, the very worst of all, what good could poetry do the finely tuned Latin elegiacs that Venontius wrote? These had been born and bred during the late Roman Republic and early Empire. They were the music of classical civilization's height and the parlance of patrician flirtations and genteel repartee. What place did they have in the ice bound dark of Merovingian Gaul, beneath the boots of barbarian kings, when even goodly bishops and abbots were seeing their treasuries raided by passing armies. Wasn't poetry the anachronism of a bygone gentility? And to ask it again, very simply, after a generation of climatological and immunological catastrophe, what good could poetry really do? As we'll see in this show, I think the answer to this question is that it possibly did quite a bit of good. But in order to see how, where and why, we need to learn a bit more about our author for today, Venontius Fortunatus. He his birth, his upbringing and the fascinating and unlikely career that he eventually to understand the early years of the poet Venontius Fortunatus, it will be helpful to review what was going on in northern Italy around the time of his birth and childhood. Venontius Fortunatus was born sometime in the 530s in a town called Duplavis, today called Valdobiadini, a small community about 35 miles northeast of Venice and at the southern skirt of the Italian Alps. He was born during the twilight of what historians call Ostrogothic Italy. The Ostrogoths, following the deposition of the last Roman emperor, romulus Augustulus in 476, had ruled over the peninsula for the half century prior to Venontius birth, having an often strained relationship with their Byzantine neighbors to the east. This relationship with which had seethed and simmered, according to which Byzantine emperor held the throne, erupted decisively in the year 535 with the beginning of the Byzantine Gothic War of 535. 554. This long war had at its root the martial and expansionist spirit of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Justinian had taken Vandal Africa in less than a year between 533 and and 534. Heartened by the recovery of Rome's old breadbasket, the Byzantines looked northward with the aim of retaking the old Roman heartland. The war's first phase concluded in 540 with the Ostrogothic capital of Ravenna falling to the Byzantines. However, within a year after Ravenna's fall, the Goths rallied around a new leader and hostilities dragged on for another 12 years. By 554, the war's normal terminus point in history books, the Byzantines had eked out a victory. But by this point many of the peninsula's cities had been severely damaged and depopulated, both due to the war as well as the aforementioned outbreak of the bubonic plague. Military challenges to the Byzantine east had also persisted through the middle five hundreds. Slavs and Bulgar raiders had been coming over the Danube to raid what is now Bulgaria, and the Balkans would also see barbarian invasions over the course of the subsequent century. Byzantine Italy persisted for only three years after Justinian's death in 565. After this point, Lombard settlers with roots in northern Europe conquered most of Italy, ruling it until 774. Venontius then was born into a world of military, climatological and immunological catastrophe. And as with so many poets from antiquity, when we try to figure out how he came to survive and flourish, we only have a tiny bit of information, and it mostly comes from his poetry. First of all, we don't know much about his family. His poetry mentions a brother, a sister and some nephews. His full name, Venontius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus, suggests some possible connections to known lineages in Ostrogothic Italy, but nothing definitive. In spite of multiple military upheavals between the Byzantine invasion of 535 and the Lombard invasion of 568, between 573 and 576, it seems as though Venontius likely wealthy family was able to live sustainably in northeastern Italy. As a young man growing up in wartime Italy, Venontius had some contacts in Aquileia, but from what we can tell, his first decisive departure was to the capital of Ravenna. For the purposes of his studies, Ravenna, under Byzantine reconquest when Venontius studied there, still offered something like a traditional roman education around 560 CE. And Venontius had training in law, rhetoric, literature and composition. As historian Joseph Pucci writes, quote. Given Ravenna's prominence as both a Gothic and Byzantine capital, its location at the crossroads of east and west, and the competing Christian cultures established there, part of Fortunatus education too must have derived from the rich urban environment the city provided, unlike any other in the west in the 6th century, shaping the poet in multiple ways as he completed a training intended to secure a career in the law or government in Ravenna, then, Venontius would have acquired polish and gentility as well as a formal education, a polish and a gentility that served him well over the course of his later career. His first surviving work is a praise poem to a northern Italian bishop, and the next three commemorate churches, at least one of which was in Italy. The first proper date that we can assign to Venontius fortunatus is 566 CE. By 566 the poet was in Metz, the capital of the Austrasian region of Merovingian Gaul, and the Same Metz that's 175 miles east of Paris and 35 miles south of Luxembourg in modern day France. We have discussed Merovingian Gaul extensively in the past couple of episodes on Gregory of Tours, but for purposes of review, modern day France during the five hundreds was mostly under the control of what we call the Merovingian dynasty. This dynasty had arisen due to the military efforts of the Salian Frankish king Childeric and more famously, his son Clovis. Clovis, through military skill, outright brutality and sound leadership, brought the fragmented world of post Roman Gaul largely under a single rule. And after converting to Catholicism. He passed the kingdom onto his four sons in 511. This began a bloody Merovingian game of thrones that persisted throughout the rest of the 500s. By the time Venontius arrived in Gaul in the 560s, the Merovingian kings on the throne were Clovis grandsons. And there had been a considerable culling of his descendants through political assassinations, battlefield deaths and once in a while, natural causes. In any case, something drew Venontius to Merovingian Gaul. Perhaps the opportunities provided by a cash flush regime, perhaps the religious climate of a new Catholic kingdom, or some combination thereof. The occasion of Venontius being up in the city of Metz in the year 566 was the celebration of a famous Merovingian wedding. The wedding between King Sigibert, the sturdy and promising grandson of old King Clovis, and Sigibert's bride, Runhild, a Visigothic princess. Venontius trip was from the north of Italy to Metz would have been a long journey, undertaken just as Lombards were conquering the short lived outposts of Byzantine Italy. Venontius himself offers two accounts of the journey. The later one attests it to have been a religious pilgrimage, one which began with his being miraculously cured by St. Martin in a church in Ravenna, after which he had to go to Gaul to see St. Martin's Church for himself. That's simple enough. But Venontius first explanation of why he went to Gaul is much more colorful, offered in the preface to his first collection of poems, a preface addressed to Gregory of Tours. In this preface, written by a young Venontius, particularly plucky about his own literary importance, the poet announces himself as quote a new lyric, Orpheus, who gave voice to the forest and the forest echoed it back, styling himself as Orpheus. Then Venontius tells Gregory that he's crossed 17 named rivers in a massive counterclockwise journey out of Italy, up through the Alps and all the way through Gaul, down to the Pyrenees. And not just rivers, but also lands of unassimilated barbarian tribes and frosty mountain peaks as well. During this long journey, Venontius writes, he has written poetry in a daze, for the most part, either on horseback or half awake through the Alps, suspended on mountain passes. His only audience for his compositions were unlettered barbarians, whom he describes as those who could not discriminate between a goose's honking and a swan's singing. Barbarians who could only croak their approval at beautiful poetry and tended to do so while Inebriated Venontius main account of his journey from Ravenna to Gaul is a self aggrandizing one depicting the poet as a careworn migrant and veteran of riparian and Alpine crossings, reciting poetry among barbarian companions who could only grunt like apes in appreciation. And while this account of Venontius background likely involves more than a little fiction, when Venontius reached Merovingian Gaul he appears to have made use of some very real and legitimate networking skills. As mentioned a moment ago, Venontius went to the Merovingian court in Metz in 566 to read a celebratory wedding poem upon the marriage of Sigibert and Brunhild. However he made this happen, it was certainly a high profile debut, but Venontius didn't just market himself to the secular nobility. As scholar Brian Brennan puts Venontius was also eager to be known in episcopal circles in Gaul, and he sought episcopal patronage to this end. One of his earlier works was the Vita Martini or Life of Saint Martin, a hagiography written with a tinge of classical epic done in the early 570s. If we picture Venontius Fortunatus in Gaul in say the year 575, we can make a general and reasonable assumption about his presence there. He would have been somewhere between 35 and 45 years old. As awful as the mid 6th century in Italy was for aforementioned reasons of wars, climatological disasters and the plague, Venontius had during his younger years in Ravenna been fortunate enough to enjoy about the best education that what was left of the Western Empire could offer. Looking for opportunities abroad and learning about what was afoot abroad through the Italian clergy, Venontius must have learned about a volatile but wealthy new regime in Gaul, a regime whose grandsons had just come to power. Kingdoms like the Merovingians needed diplomatic and ecclesiastical connections but but they also sought cultural legitimacy, such as still radiated from the ancient Italian capitals of Ravenna, Milan and Rome. Venontius, as close to an authentic Roman as one could still get in the year 575, knew that he could provide cultural cachet in addition to excellent Latin poetry, poetry with roots in the ancient Mediterranean past, but also with sensitivity toward the diplomatic and ecclesiastical climate of Merovingian Gaul. He wasn't the only educated person in 6th century Gaul. Indeed, many of the recipients of his poems seem to have also been fluent in Greco Roman letters. But on the whole, both inside and outside of his poetry, Venontius seems to have possessed a verve with literature, a knack for networking and a keen ear for delicate diplomacy that opened many doors for him after he emigrated to Frankia. He seems to have made a splash with his wedding poem in 566 because subsequent pieces from his early years show him circulating among courtiers and powerful clergymen. His luck ran into a snag however in 566 and 567. He may have sought to become a court poet to King Sigibert, but never managed to do so. Next he attached himself to Sigibert's brother Charibert, but this king died in 567. Problematically, a third Merovingian king, King Chilperic, loathed these two brothers and Venontius was on record praising them both. In about 567Venontius headed down to the west central part of modern day France, making the acquaintance of some important clergymen there. Among the most formative of Venontius friendships was his friendship with a nun named Radegund, whom he likely met in 567. Radegund had been a Merovingian princess. She was of Venontius parents generation. Once married to the ruthless but successful King Chlothar, Radigund had fled, become a nun and founded what is now called the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Poitiers. Radigund emerges from the history books as almost a larger than life character. A Germanic princess whose family has been murdered who is compelled to marry the murderer and after 10 grim years abandons him not to seek revenge but to devote the rest of her life to almsgiving and religious contemplation. The abbey that she founded received its name from a relic of the true cross that Radigund herself was able to obtain through dealings with the Byzantine emperor and his wife. And Venontius wrote several poems around the occasion of Poitiers acquiring this important relic. Venancius also had occasion to deal with another Merovingian princess around the same time. He had just a couple of years earlier read an epithalamium or wedding poem upon the marriage of Sigibert and his Visigothic bride Brunhild. Brunhilde had a sister, Galswinth, who married the volatile King Chilperic. This marriage was awful and brief. Chilperic may have murdered his new bride not long after their wedding. Volatile King Chilperic and sturdy King Sigibert were already at odds with one another. But with Chilperic killing Sigibert's sister in law and poor Brunhild deprived of her sister in 569 or 570, the two grandsons of old Clovis weren't going to become friends anytime soon. Venontius wrote a consolation poem to Poor Queen Brunhilde, in which he aligned himself unambiguously with what we might call the more decent and functional branch of the Merovingian family tree. Venancius spent the early 570s after this traveling and writing for various patrons and potential patrons. At some point, probably by 576, Venontius was ordained as a priest. Whatever the circumstances or exact chronology of the ordination, by 576, Venontius was spending plenty of time in Poitiers, having written many gracious and warm poems about the Abbey of the Holy Cross. There, together with its founder Radagund and its abbess, a woman named Agnes, Venontius had a close relationship with these women and their world, and often addressed them as his mother and sister. He may have had a professional role at the Abbey of Poitiers, but we don't know for certain. The personal and professional relationship between Venontius and another of his patrons is much more extensively documented in the poetry that he left behind. This patron was Gregory of Tours, the author of the History of the Franks. We read over the past couple of episodes and pound for pound in the long run, perhaps the most most influential citizen of 6th century Gaul, aside from old King Clovis and his wife Clotilde. Gregory likely learned about Venontius initially because of Venontius epic inflected biography of St. Martin. Gregory, who never pretended to be a great Latin stylist, must have admired his near contemporary Venontius energy, background and skill in Latin poetry, and their long friendship eventually led to Gregory gifting Venontius a villa along the Vienne within Gregory's diocese. It was not a vast villa. Venontius at one point describes the harvest of my modest estate. In other words, farm work keeping him too busy to meet a prior obligation. But nonetheless, Gregory's bequest of land gave Venontius a home between Tours to the north and Poitiers to the south, where the poet could supplement his literary income with agriculture, perhaps serving as a liaison from time to time between Gregory's officials and the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Poitiers, where his spirit mother and sister lived and worked. Allied with Gregory of Tours then, Venontius and his friend weathered a dangerous political storm in the late 570s, they had both expressed support of the sturdy King Sigibert. Sigibert in 575 was murdered, likely at the behest of his brother Chilperic. And Chilperic, during the late 570s became a force of destabilization, especially around tours. In 575, Gregory offered sanctuary to some of Chilperic's foes, angering the Merovingian king. And Chilperic attacked tours in 577, the city having become a part of chilperic's territories in 579. While a bishop like Gregory could hunker down while his diocese weathered attacks and changed royal hands, in 580Gregory faced a much more personal threat. Ludist, the Count of Tours, together with Chilperic himself, fomented a conspiracy against Gregory. Venontius would have watched from the sidelines at first as Gregory was put on trial for slandering the volatile King Chilperic's wife. While Gregory had many tools to defend himself with, not the least of which was the fact that he was actually innocent and was a fundamentally decent person, Gregory also made use of Venontius. Venontius, in about 580, was deployed to write an effusive praise poem for the raging King Chilperic. We'll look at it later, but the poem was likely intended to diffuse the situation and also more subtly to emphasize certain virtues that King Chilperic was not exhibiting. However exactly it happened, and Venontius poem must have certainly helped, the conspiracy against Gregory faltered. After the storm cloud of the trial passed, Venontius wrote more poems to King Chilperic and his wife, Gregory probably sending him along to do so for the purposes of maintaining positive relations with the Merovingian king. A regime change took place in the merovingian world. In 584, the volatile King Chilperic was assassinated, leaving only one remaining grandson of old Clovis alive. This grandson was King Guntram. Having no heirs himself, he graciously decided he would pass power down onto his two nephews, one the son of his dead brother Sigibert, and the other the son of his dead brother Chilperic. As power shifted in Francia, Gregory of Tours sped off on a diplomatic mission to the north, possibly accompanied by his useful compatriot Venontius. Venontius, with power having shifted, wrote gracious and diplomatic verse to celebrate this new era of Merovingian leadership, deploying poems to Queen Brunhild and her son, the teenage king Childebert ii. As he grew older, Venontius continued to serve as Gregory's poetic right hand man. He tried to help the bishop minimize a new tax levy on the city of Tours in 589, Venontius sought Gregory's intervention in a scandal that broke out at the Holy Cross Abbey in poitiers. Also in 589, Venontius celebrated the elevation of one of Gregory's colleagues to the position of bishop in Poitiers, and when that bishop died, Venontius himself, the wanderer who had penned poetry while shivering in the saddle as barbarians belched nearby, was himself elevated to the position of bishop in Poitiers, perhaps with the help of his friend and patron Gregory, around 593, or 594. Venontius connected everywhere in the Merovingian world by that point, also had a substantial interest in theology, as is evident from the opening poem in book 10 of his collection, a long theological explication of the Lord's Prayer, and the opening of book 11, a similarly lengthy line by line explication of the Nicene Creed. Venontius outlived Gregory by at least six years, but of Venontius own time as a bishop, we know nothing. So that's an overview of Venontius life and times. What I'd like to do now, naturally, is to jump into his poetry. Venancius surviving 270 poems are almost always divided up into 11 books, because this is how they've been preserved since late antiquity. The first seven of these books were likely compiled and arranged by the Author himself in 576 at the request of Gregory of Tours. Not long after books 8 and 9 were added and books 10 and 11 were likely collected for circulation after Venontius death. The 11 books of Venontius poetry, then, are in loose chronological order, beginning with a few he wrote before leaving Italy and afterward following the path that he took while living in Gaul, the journeys he made, and the friendships and patronages he sought out and formed. Venontius poetic Corpus is sizable, 400 pages in a recent modern Harvard University Press edition. We could proceed through it in chronological order, but I think in doing so we'd find ourselves changing topics every page or so. Thus, as we've done with other corpuses of poetry, I think the best way for us to explore Venontius will be to do so by topic. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes from Venontius poetry in this episode will come from the Michael Roberts translation published by Harvard University Press in 2017. There is a vocabulary word we will need to learn for the remainder of today's episode. You may already know it, but that word is panegyric. A panegyric is a text or speech intended to praise someone or something our poet for today. Venontius wrote hundreds of panegyrics, poems written to praise priests, deacons, bishops, kings, queens, and other generally high ranking members of Merovingian society. Venontius did not invent panegyrics. Panegyrics, as Venontius well knew, were part of an ancient literary tradition that stretched at least all the way back to the Greek poet Pindar, back during the 460s and 450s BCE who wrote Victory odes for winners of athletic games. For a thousand years before Venontius. Then, poets were writing celebratory verses about influential or powerful people. Sometimes panegyrics were written for public recitation at special occasions. Other times they were sent to recipients out of the blue. They were most often poems written to wealthy addressees for the purposes of earning patronage and job security. But sometimes panegyrics were also remarks of genuine appreciation to friends. Venontius wrote panegyrics on both ends of this spectrum, disingenuous praise poems offered for political or economic gain on one side, and sincere tributes to friends on the other. Venontius wrote a fairly wide range of poetry. It included epitaphs, consolations, religious hymns and hagiographies, as well as panegyrics. If there is a unifying characteristic to what he left behind, it is perhaps reverential appreciation. Appreciation of people, places, occasions, and as a Catholic, of course, appreciation for the bounty of God and the health of the Church. Never one to spare words, Venantius doled out compliments and acknowledgments readily to friends and acquaintances. And his generous and effusive poems, though often rather over the top with their compliments, seem to have made him far more friends than enemies. Part of his poetic personality is his self effacing modesty. Frequently Venontius describes himself as unequal to the task of offering proper praises to this or that addressee. He describes his work as trivial, rough and lacking in intelligence, or rusty and unpolished, and shies away from accepting compliments. While these are standard postures for a Latin lyric poet to take, often Venontius self effacement is quite specific and funny. He tells his dear friends Radigund and Agnes about eating way too much fruit and about eating so much at a meal they made for him that he ended up nodding off while still chewing his longest piece of self abnegation. Similarly is also a poem describing a great feast after eating far too much rich food, he tells his addressee. His belly swelled to the size of a pregnant woman's and he was filled with the wind storms of the God Aeolus, his gut and digestive tract becoming the site of an epic battle and producing immense belches. It's one thing to adopt a humble demeanor in a poem to a high ranking superior, but in Venontius various self deprecating poems we often meet a living, eating, breathing human who sometimes overindulges, sometimes gets into petty tiffs with peers, complains about being chilly during winter travel, and seems to have been inordinately fond of fruit. As humbly as Venontius presents himself as a poet, his Latin is rich, musical and shows an abundant knowledge of Greco Roman literary history. Structurally, most of Venontius poems are in elegiac couplets, something that we've discussed a lot in our podcast. Elegiacs, which Ovid called club footed, have a long line followed by a shorter line. This lopsided meter, by the time Venontius inherited it, had long been used for lighter lyric poetry rather than Latin epics, with the initial line of each couplet setting metrical expectations and then the second shorter one defying expectations, often in an ironic, humorous or flirtatious manner. While elegiacs are most famously associated with the Augustan Age love poetry of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid 500 years later, Venontius made use of elegiac couplets a bit differently. Venontius, unlike his Roman predecessors, knew that his audiences might not have a very strong comprehension of Latin or its more subtle rhythms. Thus, as scholar Michael Roberts in the vast majority of cases, each line of Venontius poems is an independent syntactical unit with oral cues to the structure of the verse to make it perceptible as poetry for an audience that was no longer sensitive to differences of metrical quantity. In other words, short stuff is easy to understand. Alliteration makes marvelous music for men who might miss meter. Venontius wrote self contained rich lines with auditory devices like alliteration that don't require any specialized background to understand. So that should be enough background on Venontius to get us started. What I want to do now is to begin looking at Venontius poems to Merovingian kings and queens. We've just been through two programs on Gregory of Tours, whose book gives us most of what we know about these kings and queens. So let's start by taking a look at Venontius important wedding poem to King Sigibert, son of Clothar, son of Clovis and his imported Visigothic bride, Queen Brunhild. Venontius Fortunatus in the year 566 wrote a wedding poem celebrating a prominent Merovingian marriage. The groom was Sigibert, grandson of Clovis and and from what little information we have, one of the more level headed Merovingian kings of the 500s. The bride was Brunhild, a Visigothic princess Sigibert sought out because he wanted a marriage that had aristocratic parody and diplomatic utility as well. And the poem about them takes a form called the Epithalamium. It's a fantastic poem, the first poem in Venontius sixth book of collected works, if you want to read it for yourself. Venontius knew that it needed to be an excellent poem because the epithalamium of 566 for Sigibert and Brunhilde marked Venontius entrance into the Frankish court. The poem begins with words about the beauties of spring and how springtime brings birds out of comparative dormancy to reproduce with one another. Venontius writes that King Sigibert ruled over many different people, but he did so with mildness and self control. Cupid, however, came to King Sigibert and inscribed on his mind a face. And Sigibert was filled with ardor for a woman he'd never met. Having accomplished his mission, the God of love went and bragged to his mother Venus, who brought Brunhild to meet him. Brunhild is described in laudatory terms as a beautiful and upright woman. The union of the two, Venontius writes, was truly extraordinary. A fitting marriage between equals of two two flourishing nations and a marriage that could have only had divine roots, roots as we notice as modern readers, that came from Greek polytheism rather than Christianity. The poem must have been a very calculated effort on Venontius part. It is, like so much of Venontius work, an adroit piece of flattery extolling the groom and bride alike. It offered the Merovingian court a savory helping of Greco Roman mythology from one trained on the subject in the old captivate capital of Ravenna. It complemented both the Frankish and Visigothic nations and cited the union as a judicious marriage undertaken by a far sighted couple. Whether the royal bride and groom found it interesting or memorable is debatable. Venontius never managed to find a royal patron for any duration, though he certainly tried. But as an Epithalamium written for a very specific occasion, it seems that at the very least, Venontius read the room well in 566 and recorded a very important performance on his resume. Later in his career, Venontius continued his praise poems to Sigibert and Brunhild as well, although he changed his tactics. Earlier I mentioned how Sigibert's more unscrupulous brother Chilperic had also, following his brother, married a Visigothic princess. This was Brunhild's sister Galswinth. Chilperic, however, seems to have murdered this new bride, and so around the time of her death, the poet Venontius composed an elegy to the poor woman, likely sending it along to King Sigibert and Queen Brunhild. This elegy, interestingly, is not a set of general consolatory remarks. Instead, it's a narrative that attempts to reconstruct poor Galswinth's experience in leaving Visigothic Spain. Here's the narrative in Venontius elegy. Poor Galswinth never wanted to come to Frankia in the first place. Happy as she was in Visigothic Spain, she was so reluctant to part from her mother in Venontius story at least, that plentiful tears flowed between the two of them. Venontius writes a very long sequence in which the mother and daughter can't bear to part. Eventually the ill fated Galswinth departed from the gates of Toledo and her mother accompanied her part of the way. When they finally split up as Venontius, the mother was more caught up in her sad thoughts than her daughter on the carriage, one trembling in prayer, the other with the motion of the wheels. Venontius describes Galswinth's long journey across Francia and the Visigothic princess ill fated arrival at Paris to be married with the volatile King Chilperic. The poem upon Galswinth's marriage never mentions Chilperic himself at all. We learn that Galswinth was married, that she bore her husband a son and converted to Catholicism, and then that she died. A brief deathbed scene follows with a nursemaid lamenting that she'd promised Galswinth's mother that she'd keep the princess safe and still failed. Galswinth was given funeral services and word of her death went out to her sister Brunhild. News was also carried to Galswinth's stricken mother over in Visigothic Spain, and the Visigothic queen bemoaned the fact that she had attended neither her daughter's wedding nor funeral. The consolation to the whole tragedy, Venontius tells us, is that Galswinth departed far too early from a promising life, at least went to heaven. The Story of Galswinth is one of the longest poems in Venontius collection, a mini epic of 370 lines, complete with exposition, imaginatively reconstructed dialogue, tearful goodbyes, a terrible crisis, a period of mourning, and then editorial consolation. As a poetic effort, it's an interesting piece to study. First. If Venontius wrote it with Gauswinth's sister Brunhild as an intended reader, and it's reasonable to assume that he did, then Venontius must have felt comfortable essentially writing consolatory fiction to a bereaved sister. If you or I lost a family member, it would be very odd to receive a flowery poem or short story in which a poet made up a bunch of details about our familial past. Perhaps less strangely, in this mini epic, Venontius does not mention King Chilperic at all, and nor does he linger on the nature of the murder. This was likely a prudent omission taken to safeguard him from charges of libel against a powerful and dangerous king. But the effect on the poem is that it creates a strangely anticlimactic ending in which a very promising young person tearily leaves her home to marry an unnamed groom and then, for unexplained reasons, dies in her bed. So those two poems, the Epithalamium or wedding poem, and then the consolation poem, were both aimed at King Sigibert and his wife Brunhild. They are two of the longer and more ambitious poems in Venontius collection and are directed toward what we can think of as one wing of the Merovingian royal dynasty. Venontius also directed poems to the other wing of the Merovingian dynasty. This was King Chilperic, the guy who had killed his wife Galswinth, and Chilperic's wife Fritigund, who had probably been involved in the killing. In about 580, Venontius wrote some poems to this couple, who have generally gone down in recorded history as more villainous than any other Merovingian rulers. The context of these poems is important. These weren't just normal, friendly panegyrics seeking patronage. Chilperic was one of the grandsons of Clovis and of his four regal brothers. Even beyond killing his wife Galswinth, Chilperic appears to have been unusually volatile and inclined to backstab Gregory of Tours, whose histories we read in the past two shows called Chilperic the Nero and Herod of our time. Chilperic had attacked the area around tours in 577 and annexed it for himself in about 579, in the process showing little regard for the churches of Gregory's diocese. He evidently had a bone to pick with the bishop Gregory, because Gregory ended up being dragged into a defamation trial in 580 under accusations that Gregory had slandered Chilperic's wife Fridegand. Now, all the history we have on this event is one sided. It comes from Gregory and to a lesser extent, Venontius, and so it's likely that we're missing some information. That said, it has most often been assumed that Gregory was being falsely accused of slander by an especially pernicious and power mongering Merovingian king and that king's murderous wife, and thus that his eventual acquittal was good news for Tours and Frankia, in which the bishop Gregory generally played a beneficent role. Venontius poems to Chilperic and his wife, as I mentioned earlier in this show, are ostensibly praise poems. Let's take a quick look at them. They take up about 300 lines in total. Venontius calls Chilperic sublime and tells the black sheep that Chilperic has brought grandeur to his family. And it isn't long before Venontius is laying it on very, very thick. He writes that Chilperic's birth was like a second sun rising over the world, that Chilperic is everywhere known on earth, from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and that Chilperic is renowned for his goodness. It wasn't Chilperic, Venontius writes, but instead fate itself that threw a discord between Chilperic and his brothers. And in spite of Chilperic's life being in danger, Chilperic stayed steady, being like an unbreakable tower for his country, sound always in his judgment. Beyond these regal qualities too, Chilperic was, at least in Venontius praise poem, quite impressive. Chilperic was a skilled polyglot. In addition to being a capable warrior, Chilperic was also a talented poet whose various qualities were hard to even imagine. Altogether at once the poet Venontius, in his strategically deployed praises to Chilperic, not only applauds the king himself, he also applauds Chilperic's wife Friedegande. Friedegand, in the work of Gregory of Tours, is a villain. She is scheming, murderous, jealous and altogether malevolent. Venontius, though in his praise Poem calls prudent in council, resourceful, cautious, powerful of intellect, winning favor by her generosity with gifts. King Chilperic and Queen Fridiger, then, although they come across as scoundrels in Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks are given a standing ovation by Venontius Fortunatus. Venontius also wrote a consolation to Chilperic at the loss of at least one of his children. It's an interesting piece because according to Gregory of Tours, Chilperic himself had his own son Merovech killed, and later Fritigund had Chilperic's son Clovis killed as well. The consolation poem begins with a long account of the inevitability of death, tracing it from the days of Adam all the way through various biblical patriarchs making very general statements about death, bringing low the proud and exalted, and tells Chilperic to hope for a new crop of male heirs with Fritigand. A separate consolation poem to Chilperic and Fritigern tells the pair that though rough winters glaze the landscape with ice, spring always comes, just like Easter, and better times are ahead of them and their reigns. The small set of poems that Venontius wrote to Chilperic and Fritigund are a fascinating testament to what we might call literary diplomacy during the Merovingian period. They are complementary across the board, declaring a pair elsewhere depicted as evil and choleric, as being quite the opposite mild, far sighted, fair minded and generous. On the simplest level, then, Venontius was saying nice things about the couple to win their favor and lower the general temperature around the time of Gregory's trial. But the poems to Chilperic and Fritigand might also be interpreted as calling attention to the very qualities that the pair steadiness, security, public approval that other Merovingian couples before them had enjoyed. While Venontius then may criticize Chilperic and his wife by complimenting them, he also does something else in the poems that he wrote for the pair. The subject of death comes up a lot in his poems to Chilperic, the ubiquity of it, the inevitability of it, and the way that it equalizes everybody. The pair seems to have lost some children in addition to their murders of Chilperic's grown kids from a previous marriage. In his many words about death, then, to this dangerous power couple, Venontius gently reminds them of the unalterable nature of certain actions taken in haste. Spring indeed brought fresh grass to April meadows, but humanity once gone, was gone, and so perhaps the pair ought to stop choosing extreme and permanent solutions to what might be temporary and otherwise solvable problems. Venontius never actually says this, I should add, but in his many somber remarks about death to the royal pair, maybe he was trying to draw attention to some of the severer actions they'd taken, both individually and as a couple. Having covered Venontius major poems to Sigibert and Brunhild and Chilperic and Fredegund, we've been through some of the more complex panegyrics that he wrote to Merovingian kings and queens. Not all of Venontius writings to Merovingian monarchs had such tricky agendas behind them. After Sigibert died, his son Childebert succeeded him, though Childebert was only a little boy. The poet Venontius, knowing that Sigibert and Brunhild's side of the Merovingian house were generally less malevolent than Chilperic's, left behind a long poem to young King Childebert and his mother Brunhild on the occasion of St. Martin's feast day and tours. St. Martin, the most famous of all Gaul's Catholics at that point, was universally loved, and Childebert and Brunhild seem to have enjoyed far more positive reputations than Chilperic and Friedegand. Thus Venontius poem to Childeric and Brunhild praises St. Martin and hopes that the great saint's life is an exemplar to them as rulers. A different poem to Childebert and his mother Brunhild is a benediction that they are prosperous and live long lives, and that their people do the same. Some praise poems, it seems, were easier to write than others in the modeled world of Merovingian monarchs. Another, more straightforward praise piece that Venontius wrote to a Merovingian king is his panegyric to King Charibert, the oldest of the four grandsons of Clovis. In 566 or 567. Venontius wrote that King Charibert was loved by barbarians and Romans alike, and that he was a family man who had taken in his nieces after their father had passed away. While Charibert's ancestors were great, Venontius writes, Charibert ruled peaceably over happier and more tranquil times, and was loved precisely because he wasn't a warmonger. Moreover, King Charibert was steady and had great clarity of judgment. Venontius writes that Charibert was marvelously articulate in Frankish, and adds that Charibert's Latin was excellent as well, though it wasn't the king's native language. And just as Venontius paid poetic compliments to King Charibert, he did the same to Charibert's wife, Theudechild, calling her intelligent, tactful and generous. So far in this episode, we've discussed a pretty small sheaf of Venontius poems, specifically the ones that he wrote for Merovingian kings and queens for the sake of securing patronage and in Chilperic's case, maybe easing diplomatic tensions and helping his friend Gregory escape conviction in a slander trial. When Venontius initially came to Gaul, looking to make a living there, the Merovingian kings and queens were his first obvious source of income. They were a new, wealthy, powerful Catholic regime, healthy new trees that had sprung up after the old Roman forest had fallen down. As promising as they looked as patrons, though, it seems that Gregory was never able to seal the deal with any one of them. King Charibert died in the year 567, very soon after Venontius arrival. King Sigibert was assassinated in 575. King Chilperic and his wife were dangerous and unstable after 575. That left Sigibert's son, Childebert, and his mother Brunhild, and the fourth grandson of Clovis, King Guntram. But these Merovingian leftovers, as much as they come across pretty positively in Gregory of Tours history of the Franks, were evidently too busy tending to their business as leaders to bankroll a court poetry. Thus, unable to find royal patronage, Venontius went to the next logical place, the aristocracy and the clergy. When we read works of Merovingian history, if we come to it from the classical period, one of the most arresting things that we notice is that by 500, Gaul had developed its own homegrown aristocracy with a wide array of counts and dukes. These counts and dukes had once been military leaders with imperially appointed positions, military leaders with both Roman and barbarian backgrounds and every combination thereof. But as Rome fell to pieces across Western Europe in the 400s, its former generals often survived by becoming warlords and then coalitions of warlords. There was no Western capital left to appoint anyone to office, any. And so the positions of count and duke became congenital and hereditary. When the Visigothic, Ostrogothic and Merovingian kingdoms coalesced during the late 400s and early 500s, their monarchs found something valuable in counts and dukes. Prefabricated power blocks that could be dealt with as units on the chessboard of post Roman Europe. These wealthy aristocrats, then, although their positions were novel, were some of Venontius best candidates for patrons. The other candidates were high ranking clergymen. At first glance, this sounds a bit odd. Today, when we think of priests and bishops, we don't really imagine people driving sports cars and wearing gold and diamonds in Gaul. However, in the 6th century, bishops were often likely to come from high ranking aristocratic families, old Roman senatorial families, or newer dynasties of counts and dukes, or both. Venontius friend Gregory of Tours came from an old senatorial family that by the mid-500s had already seated several prominent bishops. And as bishops, Gregory and his contemporaries oversaw what we can think of as miniature city states, channeling the flow of tithes into various charity outreaches and public works projects that benefited their dioceses and sometimes misappropriating funds for personal gain. Thus, when Venontius came to Gaul in 566, the top rung of the social ladder were the Merovingian kings and queens. Any of them could have funded the presence of a polite and a deferential Latin poet like Venontius at their court. The next rung of the social ladder down from kings and queens, though, was the more heterogeneous world of counts, dukes and bishops. Venontius wrote dozens and dozens of panegyrics to men and women of these social groups. Often, we can assume, to get a leg up in the world, and just as often to be nice and everything in between. So now that we've been through Venontius royal panegyrics, let's dive into his more general panegyrics, the complementary poetry that he wrote to a wide array of nobles and churchmen over the three decades or so between 566 and 596. We'll begin by dipping into the many kindly poems Financius wrote to and about bishops, deacons and priests during these three decades. If we read Venontius 270 or so surviving poems from beginning to end, it is during book one that we start to get a sense of how the poet operated. The first book of Venontius poems contains a representative little set of poems addressed to a prominent bishop down in Bordeaux, a man named Leontius. Venontius begins his lengthiest praise poem to Leontius by calling Bishop Leontius of Bordeaux the foremost citizen of Gaul, writing that even when Leontius was a child, he was already a man in maturity and dignity. As a young man, Venontius writes, Leontius already came from A distinguished stock, and his military services had already made him exceedingly noble. But then, upon becoming a bishop, Leontius acquired an entirely new nobility. Though numbered the 13th Bishop of Bordeaux, Venontius writes, Leontius will always be counted as the first. And just as Bordeaux stands tall among all other Gallic cities, Leontius rises above all other bishops. Just as the Garonne is superior to all other rivers, Leontius eminence is second to none. Praises to Leontius alone for Venontius are not enough. In this poem, Leontius joined the clergy as a married man, and in doing so he took a vow of celibacy with his wife Placadina. And so Venontius turns his praises on this woman as well. Venontius imagines Placadina as an ideal Roman woman. She is beloved and calm, comely clever, pious, gentle and generous. From her speech the sweetness of honey flows. And in addition to Leontius wife, Venontius offers generous words on Leontius villa writing. There is a spot where even in the boiling heat of summer the land is always green, made fresh with flowers. The fields are scented, spangled with saffron coloring. The turf breathes odors and entices with its scented grasses. Here its loving owner has built a charming residence where a well proportioned portico advances on three sides. This isn't the only villa of the Bishop Leontius that Venontius lavishes attention on either. The poet also praises Leontius other estates compounds in the country which sound like old Roman plantation houses and which the rich bishop evidently had been fixing up and refurbishing. And that's a summary of Venontius Four poems to Leontius of Bordeaux, a set of poems that praise the bishop. Bishop's past, present and future stop just a little short of calling the bishop entirely peerless. Compliment the bishop's wife and then compliment the bishop's fine estates. Another high ranking bishop received similar acclaim from Venontius in a set of poems in book three of the collection. This was Felix of Nantes. Felix as a middle aged man had joined the clergy, renounced sexual relations with his wife who became a nun, and dedicated his fortune and his energy to projects that benefited his diocese. This diocese was on the border with the sovereign kingdom of Brittany and so during his career Felix was sometimes needed to quell flare ups between the Bretons and Merovingian kings. Venontius, if his poetry is any indication, thought quite highly of Felix, writing that the bishop's eloquence had the plenitude of the waves of the sea and that it was so Masterful that it seemed to almost make the sun rise in the west, as though Felix himself were illuminating the Atlantic's surface at sunset. Felix's eloquence was not merely ornamental. It also kept relations with the Bretons stable. As Venontius writes, watchful in your care you banish the assaults of the Bretons. No one can match in arms all that your tongue can do. Venontius was quite aware of the healthy power that diplomatic speech could have over a society. Venontius describes a different churchman in an epitaph as having peacemaking language, which was itself a healing to return to Felix, the famous bishop of Nantes. The city of Nantes, as Venantius writes, might be in the furthest corner of the world, but Felix gives the city its own centrality, not in the least because Felix helped commission and build the cathedral there. Venontius writes that the dedication of this cathedral had all the sanctity of the dedication of Solomon's Temple, and he describes the new cathedral in detail, comparing its arches to mountain peaks in the stars. In a gorgeous Easter poem that celebrates the earth and waterways breathing in the spring warmth, Venontius emphasizes that Felix has brought pagan idolaters around to Christianity, just like the seasons coaxing blossoms out of the hard winter earth. Of all the clergymen who received lines of admiration from Venontius Fortunatus, more than Bishop Leontius of Bordeaux and more than Felix of Nantes, Bishop Gregory of Tours most often found complimentary poetry from the writer in his mailbox. Gregory was eventually Venontius main patron and benefactor. Gregory was also Venontius close friend and as you can imagine, Venontius, who was ready to write complimentary poetry to anyone who even held a door open for him, pulls out all the stops in his generous words to Gregory. We first learn in the collection that Gregory was elected Bishop of Tours. The year was 573, by the way, to universal acclaim, including the acclaim of the benign king Sigibert and his wife Brunhild, and that Gregory of Tours had all the virtues of the great Saint Martin of Tours. The range of poetry and correspondence that we have addressed to Gregory from Venontius is expansive. Venontius is predictably effusive with compliments, opening a letter with honored eminence, saintly glory, source of abundant light, shepherd of the apostolic sea, winning affection with love, always to be held in my embrace, sacred in status. And all of this before even getting to Gregory's name. Sometimes Venontius writings to Gregory are incidental, as when he writes to confirm that he's arrived to his destination in spite of cold winter weather, or to say thanks for a book that Gregory has sent him, or some tasty apples, or some hides, or to offer Gregory some verses in Sapphic meter about which Gregory was evidently curious. More emphatic words of thanks come in a short sequence of poems written to thank Gregory for giving Venontius a villa. Occasionally Venontius reaches out just to say hello and acknowledge receipt of one of Gregory's letters. And Venontius is so grateful to every aspect of Gregory's patronage and general self conduct that Venontius even left behind a poem praising Gregory's mother. Naturally, the building efforts of Gregory of Tours also receive special praises in Venontius surviving poems. Gregory had rebuilt a cathedral in Tours, a cathedral with special esteem as it was associated with St. Martin. The building in question had evidently seen a substantial refurbishing project, and its restoration was good for Tours, good for Gregory, and good for the storied legacy of St. Martin. The praise poem Venontius wrote on the cathedral retells many of the St. Martin miracle stories, and to a lesser extent it extols Gregory of Tours as when Venontius writes, by virtue of your power, God grant him a high place in heaven, who gave you this building on earth? The erection of new church buildings in Merovingian Gaul was something that Venontius wrote about, often celebrating refurbishment projects and new buildings altogether. Cathedrals, abbeys, small parish churches, and so on. These were, in the 570s and 580s when Venontius wrote about them, emblems of Gaul's spiritual growth. But they were also symbols of the communities that they represented, tangible evidence that Gaul's corroded old Roman civitades had evolved into healthy dioceses and that these dioceses could organize and direct public funds into construction projects. The pre Romanesque ruins of Europe today seem to us almost the unimaginably ancient remnants of a dark age gone by. But in the late 500s, new churches, abbeys and cathedrals were the equivalent of freshly built skyscrapers, edifices that glorified their builders, those who funded them, and the communities that they were constructed to serve the panegyrics. Venontius wrote about new ecclesiastical constructions, thus applaud both the buildings and the building in specific ways. Some of them were likely read at what we might call ribbon cutting ceremonies, and others displayed inside the buildings themselves. Long after foundation festivities were held on a church recently built in Bordeaux. Venontius this building was the work of a man of talent and skill. The site itself adds to its appeal as high over the fields it stands out on the lofty slopes of a swelling hill, on a high extended range it overlooks all below, and everywhere it looks the prospect is delightful. The weary traveler finds energy in the inviting sight. Though his feet grow tired, he advances drawn on by his eyes. Close Quote Venontius often wrote about the unique architecture of new churches or the topography surrounding new churches, as in these lines that he set down to celebrate a recent riverside A holy church of God stands fixed and firm in a river for a splendid basilica to rise up in a narrow defile, though a mountain forbade it, a river provided the space for the wandering wave to pay a service to the heavenly abode. A new art constrained in their course the waters of or the poem not only praises the building of the new church but also the unique circumstances of its construction. While Venontius doled out panegyrics to brand new churches, he also praised various expansion and remodeling projects taking place throughout the Frankish state. He lavished compliments to a new baptistery added to a church up in Mainz that had gone up under the supervision of a Merovingian princess. Another building had seen some fine gilding work done and a new ceiling put in, and Venontius recorded lines of appreciation for silver coating covers the sacred tomb laid upon it. The sheen of gold intermingles its glimmer, and the unalloyed metal spreads widely its rays. A paneled ceiling of novel and ingenious construction lends luster. You'd think here the artist had brought wild animals to life. Another church still had seen a substantial expansion under funding by a nobleman, and Gregory celebrated in a different poem the fact that this church could now house its congregation, which had grown too large for the old building. There are elements of church buildings that Venontius frequently draws attention to. He repeatedly commands the way that church windows let in light from outside, sometimes so much that their interiors still seem to contain an afterglow long past the sunset. As he says in the case with a new cathedral in Paris, Venontius makes occasional comparisons to biblical constructions, saying that this or that novel Merovingian church building is equal to the size of Solomon's temple or the holiness of the tabernacle. None of these these praise poems to churches are particularly long. The dozens of them that Venontius wrote are generously specific in their attention to the details of this or that ecclesiastical edifice or refurbishing project. But they also occasionally contain recycled motifs. And while short panegyrics to long toppled Churches in this back corner of European history are probably never going to join the poems of Shakespeare or Pushkin in notoriety. Venontius poems about church construction projects are still lovely to read. They demonstrate that the poet cared deeply about fresh church constructions and how they impacted their communities. He knew that the bishops, dukes and counts who funded them were proud of their efforts and that the laity who worshipped in them were glad to see a tangible reward for their time. Venontius generation, who had come of age during the volcanic winters, the awful pestilence and frequent warfare of the 530s, 540s and 550s, saw in these new buildings and expansions emblems of hope. And in his praise, poems of the abbeys and cathedrals slowly polka dotting their way across modern day France and Belgium, we see a poet celebrating new causes for optimism. Now, at this point, we've already heard Venontius praising kings, queens, bishops and buildings. You have a sense by now, I imagine, that Venontius was a poet who knew how to compliment and flatter. But to give you a fuller impression of just how many panegyrics this author set down, I still want to walk you through some more of them. More poems to bishops, poems to members of the lower clergy, and poems to noblemen. I think if we spend just a few additional minutes with this category of Venontius poetry, absolutely the majority of poems that he left behind, you'll be able to walk away with a better feel of what it's actually like to read all of his work from COVID to cover. Venontius wrote generous epitaphs for the departed as well as panegyrics for the living. On the passing of a prominent bishop in Northwestern Gaul, Venontius summarized that he calmed others emotions with his patience of spirit. With dignity, he bore all that vanity inflicted if a stranger traveled from distant parts, immediately with the bishop, he felt he'd found home. He had smiles for the joyful and showed his regard for the sorrowing. The tears of another he quickly claims as his own. Sharing the lot of the hungry at the prompting of charity. When exposed to grief, he quickly gave what was wanted rich to the poor. He dispersed his wealth to the needy. A good man, he bestowed his bounty before being asked. Epitaphs like this one often prompt Venontius to the heights of his considerable eloquence. And there are certain qualities of the departed that he is most liable to praise. One of these is mildness. Venontius extols departed bishops who have been patient and forgiving during their tenures at the pulpit and ones who have answered insults and hostility with forbearance. Often, too, Venontius praises the aristocratic lineage of certain bishops who have come from old senatorial families. But he's quick to indicate that this genetic heritage is not nearly as noble as personal achievements or deeds on behalf of the Church. A very common formula for praising blue blooded churchmen is exemplified by Venontius description of a bishop as noble in the antiquity of your descent from your forefathers, but still more noble by your merit in Christ. Elsewhere, Venontius describes a priest as noble but empowered by his still more ennobling virtue. Humbleness and meekness are certainly virtues praised in the New Testament and recipients of Venontius epigrams. Even important bishops are acclaimed for their modesty, as when Venontius describes how a bishop, by a new kind of piety, wished to be lower than all. Venontius then often calls bishops doubly noble for piling ecclesiastical distinctions atop their already aristocratic backgrounds. To some extent, these were stock compliments that churchmen had been shelling out to patrician Christian patrons for a long time. Exactly two centuries before Venantius applauded blue blooded bishops for being doubly glorious both in heritage and piety. St. Jerome had been telling his Christian patrons in Rome the same thing Jerome told his main patron that she was noble in family and nobler still in holiness. Such remarks had been around for centuries then, but nonetheless they might well have been written with complete sincerity. After all, the scions of moneyed families could very well have lived in comfort on the earnings of their estates and rested on their laurels. Instead, the patrician bishops we meet in Venontius poems had taken a different path, opting for lives of work, civic engagement and community leading. And thus Venontius esteem for them in many cases may have been quite genuine. While Venontius commended various bishops for being humble, generous, friendly and industrious, another quality he was inclined to cheer was eloquence. Needless to say, eloquence was and is a useful capacity for any cleric to have. But Venontius seems to single out specific churchmen and other acquaintances who had a literary bent, trying to make them feel appreciated. As a fellow writer. He assures a literarily minded bishop that indeed he recognized this bishop's literary verve in that the bishop brought classical allusions and expressions forth in his writing. Commonly comparing the eloquence of others to water in ocean waves, or from a spring, or from rain, or comparing it to honey or nectar. Venontius writes sometimes formulaic compliments to tell others how articulate they are. One representative tribute tells an acquaintance that with your words you build honeycombs, providing a new kind of honey, and with the nectar of your sweet eloquence you surpass the bees. The powerful charm of your lips issues from an abundant spring, and from its hidden source a voice fit to banquet on flows. It's quite a nice compliment, but dozens of similar ones pervade Venontius panegyrics, such that one walks away from reading Venontius corpus of poems with the sense that 6th century Gaul was filled to the brim with astonishingly eloquent individuals. Elsewhere, Venontius tells another bishop that he has happily received this bishop's letter. Using a rather overdone metaphor of rain and a parched desert, Venontius writes with eyes upraised and hands held out afire with eagerness rather than parched. I awaited the great tidings of your letter to see if I in my thirst would be moistened, though even by a small cloudlet, and my fleece become damp, fully aware of my longing, my wishes outstripping what I wished for, in the hope that a letter traveling secure even over the shifting waves would bring me the surest news of you, so that the rain shower of your speech would assuage my dryness and water me without erasing your writing. Then I received your letter full of holy affection, which, as you have the skill, is artistically constructed and as I experienced, is composed with flowers of language. The hyperbole here is extravagant, but we can guess that it was well intended and well received. The recipient of this letter, Martin of Galatia, by the way, is told that the multitude of the arts have met in you as if in their common lodging place. And while Venontius praises for the bishop are fulsome, the letter's copious references to classical authors demonstrate that the two had genuine shared intellectual interests that enriched their acquaintanceship. Still, some mercantilism inspires Venontius written compliments from time to to time. He reasons to Bishop Martin of Galatia that it is logically consistent that the hope of patronage should come to us from where you are, through you. Having made his case that he adores the bishop's epistolary talents and shares common interests with him as a student of philosophical history. As an artist seeking stable patronage, Venontius reached out to various different tiers of the nobility in search of economic support as well as the clergy. The sorts of compliments that he offered to the nobility were not too surprisingly similar to the ones he doled out to clergymen. In book seven of his eleven books of poems, Venontius left behind a sequence of praise poems addressed to a duke named Lupus. In these poems, Venontius compares Lupus virtue to those of prominent men of classical antiquity. Lupus fine qualities, like those of so many recipients of Venontius poetry, are likened to fresh water during a drought, and Duke Lupus also receives the following string of hyperbolic golden spirit transcends the riches the world has to offer, and mimics the beauty of jewels in your glittering breast. Your fragrant feelings spread abroad, sweet perfumes endowing your soul with the fine properties of incense. Words flavored with honey flood from your heart, and you give voice to an eloquence seasoned with salt. As after the darkness of night, suppressing the light of the stars, the morning star shines with its beams, so do you with your soul upon me. As the light comes from the rising sun to restore the world, so your words bring illumination to my spirit too. Close quote now, when you read a collection largely made up of the same poet's panegyrics as we are in this program, you naturally notice a lot of recycled material, while nothing is properly copied and pasted. Venontius had certain ready to hand metaphors that he deployed, in which unsubtle figurative language assures almost every recipient that they are, bar none, the most extraordinary person in Frankia. We can wince at the formulaic nature of such praises, but it's also important to remember context. For one, Venontius in many cases would have been writing to addressees for whom Latin was largely unfamiliar, and so sticking with simple, piercing metaphors involving sweet honey, rain in a dry wilderness, the Beauty of Dawn, etc. Etc. Etc. Were more surefire ways to ingratiate readers than the wry, sophisticated, and understated elegiacs of someone like Propertius or early Ovid. So, to cap off our long look into Venontius panegyrics, and I hope to have a quick laugh, I want to read you what are, in my opinion, his most effusive lines. At some point, perhaps in the 570s or 580s, he wrote to a governor of Provence named Jovinius. The letter begins by lamenting that Venontius has received no correspondence from the governor Jovinius. But in spite of Jovinius silence, Venontius, quoting some lovely lines from the Book of Ruth, tells where I walk, you walk where I go, you go, lover. And as if in sweet talk I take kisses from your lips I have you in my gaze, but your dear image is slipping away. I have it now, but I can't hold it for long. These are affectionate words of friendship, even in the context of Latin letters between friends. And they show, if nothing else, that in the sometimes ruthless world of Merovingian Gaul, men of letters could write quite tenderly to one another. A moment later, Venontius begs, write when you have the free time. Drive, I pray, through my chest the plough of your words, so that my field of grain is the furrow of your tongue, so that the harvest of my heart springs to life with swelling ears. Here Venontius moves from warm and amicable to just plain plow my chest with your words, so that the corn of our mutual affection sprouts forth from my sternum and nipples. Some metaphors are better than others. That's probably enough panegyrics for one podcast episode. I've left one general quadrant of Venontius's poetry for last, though, and this is, loosely speaking, the poems that he wrote that are related to the town of Poitiers, the abbey there, and the friends that he had there. The most important of these friends was Lady Radigand, whom I mentioned earlier in this program. Venontius by the 570s and 580s had begun to think of Radigund as a sort of adopted mother, and from what we know about her, she seems to have been quite an exceptional person. Much of what we know about her comes from Venontius himself. So let's jump into what we can think of as Venontius Poitier poems. By first meeting Radigand toward the very end of the standard Harvard University Press edition of Venontius poems that we've been using today, we find a long poem that Venontius left behind about Radagund. Radagund was not a Frank she was a Thuringian and had been the princess of the independent kingdom of Thuringia before it was defeated and annexed by the first generation of Merovingians back in 531. Radagund had been just 11 at the time, and between 531 and 540, she had stayed in a compound of the earlier Merovingian king Chlothar, until she turned 20, at which point she became one of Chlothar's wives. The marriage, if it can be called that, had been miserable. It produced no heirs, and it ended in 550 when Radagund fled to seek the protection of the Church. The event that pushed her over the edge, it seems, was her husband's murder of her brother, the last potential heir of Thuringia. By 560, Radigund had founded the Abbey of Poitiers. Venontius would have met her there in about 567, when she was in her 40s and he a decade or so younger. Radigund's position there was an exceptional one in many ways, and Venontius knew it. Merovingian kings generally had no trouble murdering insubordinate spouses, but Radigand, perhaps due to her willingness to act so consistently on behalf of public charity, managed to live out the rest of her natural life caring for the needy, having left her regal husband and the grim events of her childhood behind. It is precisely these grim events that Venontius recollects in the final book of his poetry, the Violent Sack of Thuringia and the Abduction of Radagund as a child. The poem Venontius wrote on the subject, again a longer one, describes the final days of Thuringia as horrifying ones. Physical destruction accompanied the loss of life, and innocent palace servants numbered among the casualties. Marriages were torn apart as women were kidnapped, and to some extent the Thuringians killed were the lucky ones. The poem is written from the perspective of Radigund and addressed to her cousin, and in it the speaker recollects happier days and describes how desperately she awaited any word from him after the attack. Even the Radigund Invenanches poem laments the murder of her brother did not cause her missing cousin to seek her out, and a letter covered with his dear handwriting was all that she wanted. This late piece in Venontius collection is always folded into an appendix, an appendix that only survived in one manuscript. Some readers have assumed that it actually is a letter that Radigund wrote lamenting her missing Thuringian cousin. Others, noting that the poem is in Venontius trademark elegiac couplets and that it's closely modeled on Ovid's Heroides, assume that the poet himself wrote it in an exercise of sympathy for his friend. Ovid wrote, often from the perspective of bereaved women, in this famous earlier book. Both arguments seem plausible to me, and both can ultimately lead us to similar observations. The Merovingian state under which Venontius and Radigand both lived in the 560s and 570s was a place with gutters full of bad blood from recent conquests, armies gone awry, and political murder. It was not Gaul for one and one for Gaul, so to speak, but instead a checkerboard of territories held together by brutality and more positively, the charity of Catholic institutions. Radigan's poem about Thuringia's fall, whoever actually wrote it, demonstrates that beneath the paste and clapboard of the new Merovingian state there still seethed tragic memories of conquered people, people for whom even the promises of the Church could not assuage the hardships and humiliations of the past. Venoncius wrote all sorts of poems to Radigund and the actual abbess of Poitiers, Agnes, who had been a part of the queen's court and had fled to Poitiers when Radegand did. His praises of the chaste founder and abbess of the abbey of Poitiers reveal a long and very amiable relationship with the pair. He seems to have been close with Radigand. He records having sent her a bouquet of violets, chestnuts, wild plums, and in another poem he bewails her absence at a time when she's gone into ascetic isolation. Late in the collection, perhaps concerned with Radigan's strong inclinations toward asceticism, he encourages the older nun to drink some soothing wine for you are over weary, take some wine, for such a draught brings succor to the weary flesh. While he describes himself as quote yours in love to Radigund and similarly to the abbess Agnes, the affection is obviously familial rather than romantic. Again, he thinks of Radagund as the spiritual mother of both himself and the abbess Agnes, his spiritual sister. Their mutual friendship is extremely warm and filled at times with light humor. Venontius left behind a thank you poem to the abbess Agnes for some sort of feast she sent his way, but he notes that he ate far too much, and a similar meal from both Radigund and Agnes elicited a similar poem of gratitude elsewhere. He thanks them multiple times for gifts of milk and eggs. The many poems Venontius wrote to his friends Radigund and Agnes are generally not seminal works of literature. They capture the ephemera of a small circle of friends, the small acts of generosity, the melancholy partings and long absences, and the otherwise quotidian flow of days into weeks and months. At the same time, there is something touchingly earnest about them. In his poems to Radegan and Agnes, Venontius keeps his usual inclination toward hyperbole in check, and he simply chronicles the joys of a long friendship, offering thanks for gifts, given words of longing during extended separation and other odds and ends that demonstrate that his friends missed him when he was away and out traveling in the sometimes dangerous roads and waterways of the Merovingian world. The small estate that Gregory of Tours gave to Venontius was likely somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, giving him a dwelling close to his adopted mother and sister to the south and his adopted brother, colleague and patron to the north. While, as we have seen, he sometimes backed Gregory at important political junctures in the bishop's career, Venontius may have also had professional obligations toward Radagund and Agnes, perhaps serving the abbey and appendant nunnery's logistical or material needs in some way. While Radigund was not the full fledged Merovingian monarch that Venontius had perhaps initially hoped for as a patron, when he immigrated to Gaul, she was still a quondam queen, and it's utterly clear from the work that he wrote that he loved her and he respected her, and moreover that she was the dearest of the many friends the poet made in the communities of Poitiers and Tours. In addition to the lovely personal poems that Venontius wrote to Radegund and Agnes, he also wrote a different composition for the two women. This was a panegyric on the subject of virginity. A praise poem to celibacy was certainly a nice thing to offer to two holy women who had renounced sexual relationships. But Venontius Hymn to Virginity, though likely intended with kindness, is nonetheless a bit weird. At 400 lines, it is the longest poem in Venontius entire collection. It is addressed to Agnes, the abbess of Poitiers. The poem begins as a revelation in which Venontius describes the architecture of heaven and all the people there. In Venontius vision, heaven is a musical place filled with singing and the chants of Old Testament prophets. In its center is the Virgin Mary surrounded by other famous virgins. One of these is Radegand. Venontius writes that Radigund learned much about Christianity from a famous Gallic bishop named Caesarius. The bishop Caesarius of Arles, had pushed Radegund and her spiritual sisters in Poitiers toward a more ascetic path, himself being the author of what's called the Regula Virginum, or Rule for Virginia, a monastic code of conduct directed at nuns. Venontius, using what I assume is unintentionally sensual imagery, writes that Radigund laps up whatever the rule of Caesarius contains. She collects the honey that flows from the breast of that bishop and drinks the stream of his eloquence without being filled. The more she draws from that spring, the more her thirst intensifies and grows, and she becomes more ardent as she is moistened by God's dew. The message is, of course, that Radigund appreciates the bishop's distinctive piety, although the image of a nun suckling honeyed words from a man's chest is one of the stranger ones in Venontius poetry. Venontius Hymn to Virginity has stranger sections than this. Though a quarter of the way through the poem, Venontius tells us that Christ prefers virgins above all others. Jesus loves in the body of his bride what previously in his holiness he chose to honor in his mother. He gladly enters where no man has been before. He soothes and caresses, adores, honors and shelters you and places your chaste body in his own bridal chamber. Whether intended or not, these are pretty steamy lines about Christ and virgins. Virgins to Venontius as to his predecessors, Augustine and Jerome were better than other Christians and received greater posthumous esteem. The poet envisions a celestial aristocracy all standing around a wedding in heaven. The wedding is between Christ and an unspecified virgin. Christ, speaking to the assembly at this imaginary wedding, praises the fact that the virgin he is going to marry was never pricked by brambles, pierced by arrows, or bitten by snakes, that she had a miserable life, crying so much that her eyes were drained of tears. But Jesus says, at this imaginary wedding in heaven, the virgin will now enjoy his kisses and marriage with him. Then, as this celestial wedding vision proceeds, the bride gets a jeweled crown, a circlet, a necklace, bracelets, gold threaded robes, and a bejeweled girdle, all of it sparkling with rare gemstones. Switching from his hypothetical portrayal of a virgin marrying Christian, Venontius writes more general praises of virginity. Virgins, he tells us, are unstained. They also do not have to bear the pangs of pregnancy and giving birth, which he describes as dreadful and exhausting. Venontius writes that when a woman is pregnant, the skin is so extremely distended beyond the human frame that the mother is ashamed of what she bears. When the frame releases the hidden load it carried succumbing to childbirth, the gate of the body lies open. The mother sadly turns her weary eyes to the child. Often, Venontius tells his reader, miscarriage is an outcome, leaving women neither virgins nor mothers. Losing a child, either in childbirth or later, is to Venontius cataclysmically devastating. But even worse is losing a husband, an event that leaves women weeping on graves Often the pith of Venontius poem on virginity comes in a single line near the who can recount the evils that come to an ordinary woman? The long panegyric to virginity that Venontius left behind is an awkward text. Venontius uses it to flatter and perhaps even to titillate the Abbess Agnes with visions of an unspecified virgin's pending wedding to Jesus, in which the virgin is kissed, caressed, and bedazzled with finery as recompense for her self denial on earth. Praising the superiority of virgins in the afterlife isn't enough, though, because the poem also denigrates women who are married and become mothers, depicting them as physically ravaged and far more vulnerable to loss. In contrast, tacitly the abbess Agnes and those like her are impregnable to familial misfortunes and will get loving and even steamy unions with Christ when they die. It was evidently a pleasing poem for the abbess to receive, but by modern standards its campy eroticism and open disdain toward mothers wives make for a pretty graceless poem. In a subsequent poem in book 8, Venontius is added again, noting that virgins are better than regular Christians and receive upgraded posthumous esteem and pleasure, being decked out with the finest glitter and jewelry in the afterlife. The virginity poem is quite an odd note on which to end our summary of Venontius works. So before we close the Michael Roberts edition of Venontius Works works, let's turn to two poems in the collection that are actually vastly more famous than anything else therein. These also have to do with Poitiers and the Abbey of the Holy Cross located there. The abbey, as I mentioned before, was named after a relic alleged to be from the True Cross on which Jesus was actually crucified. Radegund had obtained this relic from the Byzantine Emperor Justin ii, and needless to say, the abbey's acquisition of this relic proved both deeply sacred to those who believed in its legitimacy, as well as excellent press for the abbey itself and Poitiers more generally on the subject of this sacred relic. Venontius wrote a number of poems, and two of them are part of Catholic liturgy today. The less famous one is called Pange Lingua gloriosi proelium CER Tamin, or Sing My Tongue of the Battle in the Famous Contest. This poem is sung on Good Friday and at other annual occasions in Catholic congregations, and it inspired a more famous hymn by Thomas Aquinas with a similar first line. Most famous of all is a poem called Vexilla Regis Prodeiunt, whose title has often been translated as the Royal Banner Forward goes. This too is part of Catholic liturgy today, being sung in evening services the fifth Sunday of Lent to the day before Good Friday, or, put more plainly, through most of March and April. Both of these famous poems use a metaphor of the cross as a tree that bore Jesus as the fruit of salvation. While both of these famous hymns essentially just recapitulate gospel stories with an emphasis on the cross itself, I still think it's worth hearing one of them in its entirety, the Vexilla Regis Proteiunt. What I'm going to do is to play a Gregorian chant version of this poem in Latin, performed by Amadeus Santiago Munoz of the website Verbum Gloriae in the oldest plain song melody version that survives today. And then, as he sings, I'm going to read an old iambic tetrameter translation in rhymed couplets done by J.M. neill around 1875. Let me note that this hymn has evolved over the centuries, and the version you're about to hear has had some later stanzas added to it. This poem was first performed, by the way, in the autumn of 569 CE, while a procession carried the famous relic of the True Cross into Radigan's Abbey in Poitiers. The royal banners forward go the cross shows forth redemption's flow where he by whom our flesh was made, our ransom in his flesh has paid, where deep for us the spear was dyed, Life's torrent rushing from his side to wash us in the precious flood where flowed the water and the blood fulfilled is all that David told in sure prophetic song of old, that God the nation's King should be and reign in triumph from the tree therefore to thee eternal three in one let homage meet by all be done as by the cross thou dost restore, so guide and keep us evermore. That again was Amadeus Santiago Munoz of the website Verbum Glorii, singing some of the original Latin that Venontius wrote and an older translation by John Neal. So now that we've had a reasonably thorough tour of Theontius Fortunatus world and his works, let's take a few minutes here at the close of the show, consider what we've learned and draw some conclusions. At the beginning of this episode we learned about the volcanic winters of 536 CE, and afterward we learned about the bubonic plague that struck Europe between 541 and 549 and lingered for decades, and moreover, about the wars that laid waste to the Italian peninsula over the middle of the sixth century. And I asked a pointed question in the midst of so much doom and gloom, what good could a court poet do? Was a traditional Roman education by the 560s and afterward an anachronism in the barbarian kingdoms of the European interior? There's a number of ways that Venontius can help us answer these questions. One of them is that when we peer into the anecdotal evidence of a single poet's collected body of works, we see a rather different 6th century Gaul than we might expect if we just considered the high level catastrophes of the 500s. Or read Gregory of Tours. Venontius poems, looked at altogether open up the daily life of Merovingian Gaul a bit more vibrantly than the historical writings of Gregory of Tours. In Gregory's Historia Francorum we read a bloody saga of kings, queens and wars, interspersed with dozens and dozens of miracle stories. Gregory's 600 page history is sopping with information. Showdowns between monarchs and nobles, sudden border wars that flare up almost annually along the Rhine or Pyrenees or Brittany or the Italian Alps, and a liberal helping of miracle healings and exorcisms to adsmart filler. It's a dense and invaluable book, but also frequently an impersonal one. Choppy prose, as we discussed last time, estranges Gregory's reader from a clear sense of cause and effect. Motivations often go unquestioned or unconsidered, and the text often feels like a chilly marionette show, with not a single character very vividly drawn. None of this is surprising, of course. Gregory's Latin was not of the caliber of Enantius's, and as historiographical models, Gregory had the biblical deuteronomist Eusebius and a small stack of pagan Roman historians. Gregory's History of the Franks, then, often lacks nuance, giving us very little sense of daily life, even over the course of its 600 page breadth. It is a discursive, uneven book, and we finish reading it with the general sense that Merovingian Gaul was quite an unpleasant place and time to live. Ventius shows us something else. While his 11 books of poetry don't lead us to believe that Merovingian Gaul was some sort of utopia, he draws attention to some of its bright spots, its friendships, its networks, and its piecemeal economic growth and civic projects. With Rome gone, Gaul was in the hands of various consortiums. The clergy, the aristocracy and diverse energetic laypeople helped mitigate the damages caused by feuding Frankish kings. Beneath the hard parapets of Merovingian leadership, a more flexible world of municipal and ecclesiastical collectives had come into being, collectives emblematized by the new cathedrals and abbeys going up all over the place. Thus, when we ask what good poetry can do in the midst of such catastrophes as the 6th century faced, one answer is that in the form of kindly correspondences, diplomatic overtures, eloquent dedication ceremonies, energetic new liturgy and Christian folktales, poetry was already part of the good that was being done there when Venontius arrived. A better question to ask about Venontius then, might how did court poetry affect the changing social order of Merovingian Gaul? And I think that's a question we can answer fairly well. On one hand, Venontius was a professional flatterer. His poems tell recipients that they are akin to the rising of a second sun, that their eloquence is like honey, that he misses them like the desert misses rain, and on and on. And occasionally he does feel smarmy and disingenuous. If we value straightforward speech and plain spoken honesty, then Venontius poems contain too much icing and too little cake. At the same time, though, there is what feels like a genuine and unaffected warmth in Venontius panegyrics. We open his long collection to yet another praise poem to yet another bishop, but the details of each still feel largely fresh and heartfelt. In some cases, such as a letter of appreciation to a majordomo or palace steward, Venancius can't have had very much to gain from offering kind words. Venontius tells a majordomo who's been employed by two different Merovingian kings, that this palace steward has risen up the ranks due to his hard work, work and personal merit that the man showed consistent professionalism regardless of who employed him, that he cared deftly for an important royal heir, and that Venontius appreciates all of it. While it's quite easy to accuse Venancius of being saccharine and uncandid, there were far more sinister things afoot in Gaul in the last decades of the 500s than a court poet giving people nice compliments at a very simple level, then, Venontius made himself a valuable part of Merovingian society by recognizing the merits of others and celebrating local events and personalities in fine Latin verses. As he knew ages before, Pindar had done something similar, and closer to Venontius own time, his Latin predecessors, Ausonius and Statius, had written commemorative poetry for friends and acquaintances. Their Poems, precious snapshots of people and occasions otherwise lost to history. Thus Venontius, to put it quite plainly, may have served quite a valuable role in merely being generous and appreciative. In his words, to others, Merovingian society was a new construct and a chimera made of different parts. And its cohesiveness, like the cohesiveness of other complex societies, was due in no small part to considerate overtures and perceptive diplomacy such as Venontius was so skilled at formulating. The poet knew well enough that King Sigibert in the 560s had no real ties to Roman emperors. But in telling the Kingston and in a public setting, Venontius still played a role in stabilizing the tenure of a decent king in a time and place where decent kings were in very short supply. As important as any of this, though, is that Venontius was able to leave behind poetry that still survives today. As he wrote in the very first paragraph of his first edition of his collective works, greedy death has no power to abolish with the grave the sight of the dead still circulating on the tongues of the living. In poetry, if not in person, it's a statement that's as corny as it is profound. Merovingian Gaul is long gone. Even its soundest buildings are mossy rubble and debris beneath less ancient foundations. In Venontius poems, though, we see it alive again. Gregory of Tours wrote a history of carnage and miracles, biblical in its horrors and revelations. Venontius, though, left behind thousands and thousands of lines about life, love and friendship in the new Frankish state. In his poems, spring comes once again, rising out of grim winters to offer hope to church and state alike. Healthy new Christian buildings emerge as community achievements in decades of international turmoil. Dearth, pestilence and unrest are mitigated through the contributions of dozens of extraordinary people, each of them given their gracious due. Sometimes they are famous people and their accomplishments manifold. At other times, they make briefer appearances, receiving an epitaph for a life well lived or a remark of gratitude for refurbishing a baptistery or expanding a church. Individually, Venontius poems are brief, stylized performances designed to commend and ingratiate. Collectively, though, they show medieval flowers springing up through the stonework of defunct Roman institutions and a social order that could be humane and graceful even in the very worst of times. Venontius Fortunatus, like so many authors we've covered in our show, knew that poetry left behind a documentary record of people, places and events that could otherwise be dust in the wind. And as we come to the close of our long season on late antiquity on this general subject, we will place some special emphasis on the curation and preservation of classical learning. Venontius, as we learned in this show, was a unique figure in Frankia throughout his career, partly because of his unusual education. Midway through the long Byzantine Gothic War of 535 to 554 Byzantines took charge of Ravenna in 540 to those who voyaged there afterward to serve in educational and governmental posts, a reborn Roman Mediterranean appeared to be in reach. The scions of old Roman families who had lived in Ostrogothic Italy for almost three generations welcomed their distant Byzantine cousins. And Venontius generation, educated in Ravenna like he was, would have come of age in this peculiar atmosphere before Justinian's expansionist dreams ultimately proved unfeasible. The child of volcanic winters, a catastrophic plague and a civilizational false dawn, then Venontius watched an empire nearly grab ahold of the old Roman territory once more, only to find, due to population migrations, pandemics and a changing social order, that it was not to be. As much as Venontius generation faced strife, though like any generation, they were also able to prepare for the future. As the 500s led to the 600s in Ostrogothic Italy, in Merovingian Gaul, and in Visigothic Spain, several figures from late antiquity emerged as bridges between the classical past and the medieval future. One of these was Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy and other works made some of the ideas of pagan antiquity available during later centuries in Christian institutions of learning. Venantius, though not a curator of philosophical ideas like Boethius, helped bring the finer qualities of classical Latin verse forward into Catholic Francia. And the subject of our next show, Isidore of Seville, sought to make his works into an emporium of classical wisdom for all posterity. Isidore's most famous book is his Etymologies, an encyclopedia organized into 20 books covering different categories that contained hundreds of synopses of earlier works. The power of the Etymologies as a text came not from its originality, but but from the ambition of its scope and the breadth of Isidore's learning. It was, in short, an inexhaustibly useful book, and generations of medieval readers learned about classical antiquity not from reading classical texts like Isidore did, but instead from reading Isidore himself. In these closing episodes of our season on Late Antiquity programs, on Boethius, Gregory of Tours, Venontius, Fortunatus, and next time Isidore of Seville we have moved our focus northward and westward from the central Mediterranean, and we've come to understand how classical learning was preserved and transmuted in the century between 520 and 620. Isidore of Seville's considerable output, which included a universal history and a volume on astronomy and biology in addition to many others, prompted the French historian Charles Forbes, the Comte de Montalembert, to call Isidore the last philosopher of the ancient world. A fitting end to our programs on late antiquity. Then Isidore will teach us not only about how classical learning was transmitted to the medieval period in the Latin west, but also how what constituted classical learning by the year 600 was already a reduced and rarefied canon of largely Latin works. I have a short announcement. All content creators like myself have been forced by Apple and Patreon to change the way that our Patreon subscriptions work. The Literature and History Patreon page used to be based on a per episode pledge, but I have been forced to move to a per month pledge. I've already mentioned this on Patreon and there are more details available there for this show's supporters. The long and short of it is that the Literature and History podcast is now on a monthly subscription model and I will plan, as I have since November of last year, to Release at least one episode on the 15th of every month. If I need to release more than one episode in a month, as I plan to next summer with multi episode sequences on Muhammad and the Quran, I'll just take one for the team and release some shows for free. If for some reason I have to take a break from the show, as I did at several points over the past couple years, due to family concerns, I'll just suspend the show's Patreon account so that no one is paying me for sitting around. That's the announcement. And again, as I mentioned on Patreon a while ago, existing supporters don't have to do anything. Your per episode pledge has already been converted to a per month pledge, and other than definitely seeing a new episode on the 15th of every month, henceforth it'll be business as usual. There's a quiz on this program in the notes of your podcast app if you want to review what you've learned in this program for you Patreon supporters. I've recorded another short story from 19th century France, this time from the novel, novelist and short story writer Alphonse Daudet, a wonderful little story from 1866 called the man with the golden brain that made me think about Venontius Fortunatus when I reread it the other day for everybody. There's a song coming up. Stay on if you want to hear it, and if not, I'll see you soon. Still listening, I got to thinking about panegyrics. I have read a lot of the and really, as I said in this episode, I think there are far worse things in the world than complimenting people and making them feel appreciated. Nonetheless, to put myself in Venontius shoes, if I had to lavish praises on someone like Chilperic or someone like Fritigand, someone who was plotting against my friends and was more generally a bad person, I'd find that hard to do. I got to thinking about a strategy for praising scumbags, and I think the best way to do it would be to just quickly slip in some barbs here and there that would be too sophisticated for the recipient to understand. That was how I came up with the idea for the song. You're about to hear a tune called you are the Best, which is what Venontius Fortunatus would sound like if he had lived in about 1987. I hope you like it and Isidore of Seville and I will see you next. You are, you are, you are you?