Epiphanius Scholasticus

Epiphanius was a Greek-speaking scholar who worked at Vivarium, the monastery Cassiodorus founded on his family estate in Calabria after retiring from a long career in the government of Ostrogothic Italy. Cassiodorus called him vir disertissimus, a most eloquent man, and named him in the Institutions as one of the translators he relied on. The title scholasticus marks him as a trained man of letters, probably with legal education.

His job was to break a language barrier. By the sixth century, Greek was disappearing from the Latin West. The Christian learning of the East, its histories, its commentaries, its councils, was becoming unreadable to Western monks. Cassiodorus set out to rescue what he could, and Epiphanius did the translating.

The result that mattered most is the Historia tripartita, the Tripartite History. Three Greek historians, Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen and Theodoret, had each written continuations of Eusebius covering the fourth and fifth centuries, the age of Nicaea, Constantine, Julian, Athanasius, the Arian struggle and the settlement under Theodosius. Cassiodorus selected and arranged the passages; Epiphanius translated them into Latin; and the two were woven into a single continuous narrative in twelve books.

That book became the standard church history of the Latin Middle Ages. For a thousand years, when a Western monk, bishop or schoolman wanted to know what happened at Nicaea or who Athanasius was, this is what he read. Hundreds of manuscripts survive. Everything from Bede to the medieval universities drew on it.

It has real faults. The compression flattens the three historians' differences, the arrangement is sometimes confused, and the Latin is uneven. Modern scholars go back to the Greek originals. But for the long stretch when the Greek originals were simply unavailable in the West, this translation was the memory of the church.

Epiphanius also translated other Greek theological and exegetical material for Vivarium's library, commentaries and conciliar documents, and worked alongside other translators Cassiodorus employed. Of his own life, birth, origin and death, nothing is recorded.

He is on this wall as the kind of man history usually forgets: not an author, a translator; not a bishop, a scholar in somebody else's monastery; and without him a large part of what the West knew about its own past would have gone dark.

Sources: Cassiodorus, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, I.17; Cassiodorus and Epiphanius Scholasticus, Historia ecclesiastica tripartita (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 71); Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, s.v. "Epiphanius Scholasticus".