Arator

Arator was born in Liguria in northern Italy around 490 and orphaned young. He was raised and educated under the care of Laurentius, bishop of Milan, and trained as a lawyer. He was good at it. He argued cases, made a name, and entered the service of the Ostrogothic court that then ruled Italy, holding office under Athalaric as count of the private estates.

Then the Gothic War came, Italy was ruined by two decades of fighting between Goths and the armies of Justinian, and Arator left public life. He went to Rome and was ordained a subdeacon of the Roman church under Pope Vigilius.

There he wrote the book he is remembered for: De actibus apostolorum, the Acts of the Apostles rendered into Latin hexameter verse, about twenty-three hundred lines, told in two books, the first following Peter and the second following Paul. It is not a paraphrase. Arator narrates the episode, then stops and expounds it, drawing out what he takes to be its spiritual meaning, often with numerological readings that the Middle Ages loved.

What happened next is documented in the manuscripts themselves. In the spring of 544 the poem was read aloud publicly in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Arator read it himself. The crowd would not let him stop; passages had to be repeated at their demand, and the reading was extended over four separate days between April and early May. Rome was a broken, besieged city that year, and people packed a church to hear the book of Acts turned into poetry.

The poem became a school text. For the next thousand years European boys learned Latin verse partly out of Arator, and manuscripts of him survive by the hundreds. Aldhelm in England knew him; so did the Carolingian schools; he was printed early and often once printing arrived.

He died about 550. His achievement was to take the church's own narrative, not Virgil, not Ovid, and give it the form that educated Romans regarded as the highest one available, and then to read it out loud to anyone who came.

Sources: Arator, De actibus apostolorum, with the dedicatory letters and the subscription recording the public recitation of 544; Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Arator".