Magnus Felix Ennodius

Magnus Felix Ennodius was born in 473 or 474, probably at Arles in southern Gaul, into a Roman family of rank that had lost most of its money. Orphaned young, he was raised in northern Italy by relatives. He was engaged to a wealthy girl; the marriage did not happen, and instead, after what he describes as a serious illness and a vow, he entered the church, most likely at Pavia, and was ordained deacon at Milan under Bishop Epiphanius.

He served the church of Milan for about twenty years, then became bishop of Ticinum, the city now called Pavia, around 513 or 514. He died on 17 July 521.

He lived in the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a kingdom ruled by an Arian Goth who kept the Roman administration running, employed Roman senators, and left the Catholic church largely alone. Ennodius wrote a formal panegyric in Theodoric's honor, and it is one of the main sources historians use for the king's early campaigns.

He was also caught in a bitter church quarrel. From 498 to 506 Rome had two rival popes, Symmachus and Laurentius, and the dispute reached the point of street fighting. A synod at Rome cleared Symmachus, and the losing side objected that no synod had authority to judge a pope at all. Ennodius wrote the defense of that synod, the Libellus pro synodo, arguing that the bishop of Rome is reserved to the judgment of God, a text that canon lawyers quoted for the next thousand years. Later, as bishop, he was twice sent to Constantinople as a papal envoy trying to end the Acacian schism between East and West. Both missions failed.

His writing is enormous in bulk and uneven in quality: nearly three hundred letters, poems both sacred and secular, model speeches and school exercises, epitaphs, hymns, a panegyric, and an autobiographical piece he called Eucharisticum de vita sua, a thanksgiving for his own life, written in imitation of Augustine's Confessions. His Latin is deliberately ornate, so packed with allusion that even sympathetic readers find him hard going.

The piece that has lasted is the plainest. His Life of Saint Epiphanius tells the story of his old bishop at Pavia, who three times went out from a wrecked city to negotiate with barbarian kings and imperial generals, ransoming captives, buying off armies, once travelling into Burgundy to bring back thousands of prisoners. It is a first-hand portrait of what a bishop actually did while the Western empire came apart, and historians rely on it.

Sources: Ennodius, Opera (ed. Vogel, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 7); Ennodius, Vita Epiphani and Libellus pro synodo; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia; the Liber Pontificalis (for the Laurentian schism).