Eugippius

Eugippius was abbot of a monastery at Castellum Lucullanum, just outside Naples, in the early sixth century. The community had an unusual origin: it had been formed around the body of Severinus of Noricum, carried into Italy by refugees when Roman authority on the Danube collapsed.

Severinus had appeared in Noricum, roughly modern Austria, around 454, just after Attila's death, and spent thirty years as the effective leader of a province the empire had stopped defending. He negotiated with barbarian kings, ransomed captives, organized grain for starving towns, and told the Romans there, in the end, that they would have to leave. In 488 Odoacer ordered the evacuation, and the population withdrew into Italy taking Severinus's coffin with them.

Eugippius had known him. In 511 he wrote the Life of Saint Severinus, and it is one of the most valuable documents to survive from the end of the Roman West. It is not chiefly a miracle story. It is a close, specific account of what the collapse of a frontier province actually looked like: towns cut off one by one, garrisons unpaid and eventually massacred, tax revenue gone, raiders on the roads, and a churchman doing the work no official was left to do. Historians of the fifth century use it constantly.

Eugippius's other great work is an anthology. Augustine had written more than any Latin father before or since, and by the sixth century the sheer bulk of it was a barrier. Eugippius went through the whole corpus and compiled the Excerpts from the Works of Saint Augustine, roughly three hundred and fifty selected passages arranged so a reader could find what Augustine said on a given question without owning a library. It circulated widely, and for many medieval readers it was Augustine.

He corresponded with Fulgentius of Ruspe, the exiled African bishop, and with Dionysius Exiguus, the monk who devised the system of numbering years from the birth of Christ. Cassiodorus praised him in the Institutions as a man not deeply schooled in secular letters but thoroughly versed in the Scriptures. He also wrote a monastic rule drawn from earlier ones.

He died about 535.

Sources: Eugippius, The Life of Saint Severin, translated by Ludwig Bieler; Eugippius, Excerpta ex operibus S. Augustini (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 9); Cassiodorus, Institutiones, I.23; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Eugippius".