Heiric of Auxerre Reads Suetonius with Lupus of Ferrières: Carolingian Monks and the Classics

Abstract

This essay examines a ninth-century collection of excerpts from Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars compiled by Heiric of Auxerre (841–c.880), a monk, when he was a student of Abbot Lupus of Ferrières (c.805–c.862). Heiric later in his life presented the notes to Bishop Hildebold of Soissons (871–884). After reviewing the relationship between Christian learning and the pagan classics, the essay analyzes the Suetonian excerpts to determine why they were important to their monastic compilers and readers.

1. Introduction

Medieval monks receive high marks when it comes to assessing the reception and transmission of ancient texts. After all, it is well known that the modern world owes the existence of many Roman texts, today considered “classics”, to the diligence of medieval monastic scribes. To take one example: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve vividly retold the tale of Poggio Bracciolini’s (1380–1459) rediscovery of Lucretius’s (c.99 BCE-55 BCE) De rerum natura and the effect that that ancient work had on modern thinking (Greenblatt 2011). Greenblatt’s subtitle, How the World Became Modern, strongly suggests that Poggio’s discovery in 1417 made us who we are. But, before Poggio there were medieval monks. The manuscript Poggio rediscovered and all surviving Lucretius manuscripts date from the Carolingian age, that period from the eighth to tenth centuries when a dynasty of warlords ruled fitfully over most of western Europe. Medieval monks so cultivated classical Roman texts that one modern author baptized the period as the aetas Vergiliana (Traube 1911, p. 113).

But it was not always so (See Contreni 2014; 2020a). Christian Late Antiquity had an ambiguous relationship to classical learning. Jerome’s famous dream in which he imagined himself turned away from the gates of Heaven because he was a Ciceronian and not a Christian was repeated often. Monastic legislators worried that the fictions and sexual excesses embedded in the works of the poets posed dangers to their flocks, and especially, to their monks. There was another temptation as well. Educated Church leaders in the post-Roman world were brought up in the classical tradition and could not help but speak in a sophisticated register to their flocks for whom classical education meant less and less. In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great famously warned Bishop Desiderius of Vienne that his duty was to save souls, not to teach classical literature from his pulpit.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Bible began to compete with classical literature as a source of wisdom, albeit of a different kind. But in the minds of some, there was no rivalry. For Cassiodorus (c.485–c.585), Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), and Bede (672/3–735), all literature and literary devices were already present in the Bible, which enjoyed priority over secular literature. Although Isidore of Seville in his Rule for young monks advised that “The monk should refrain from reading the books of pagans or heretics. It would be better, in fact, to ignore their pernicious teachings than to fall, from knowing them, into error,” Isidore embraced classical learning and in his extraordinarily influential Etymologies compiled for Christians what they needed to know of it (See Isidore of Seville 1844, viii, 3, col. 877; Isidore of Seville 1911). From Bede’s perspective, the Bible was the source not only of spiritual guidance, but of all wisdom, including secular learning, a dichotomy Bede would not admit. Bede the Latin grammarian was not a different teacher than Bede the exegete. The schemes and tropes of human language occur first in the Bible, the words of God. In fact, Bede’s work on schemes and tropes illustrated classical grammatical figures with biblical examples (See Bede 1975). It was in Bede’s corner of the early medieval world, the western fringes of Christendom, that a new, utilitarian perspective on the classics developed.

In Anglo-Saxon and Celtic speaking lands, it was essential to study classical Latin grammar and authors in order to enter into the Latin language culture of Christendom. And with no viable remnant of pagan culture extant in those lands, the substance of classical literature was remote, objective, and not spiritually relevant to Anglo-Saxon and Irish learners of Latin. As non-participants in Roman culture and the evolving romance languages, insular scholars approached classical literature with less hesitation than their continental brethren.

By the time of the Carolingian age, classical culture comfortably fit in with Christian wisdom. Alcuin, the Anglo-Saxon teacher who spent his last years in the kingdom of the Franks as abbot of the important monastery of Saint Martin in Tours, employed a powerful image to get this point across. In his book on grammar, he proposed that the temple of Christian Wisdom was supported by seven columns. The columns represent the seven liberal arts. One cannot enter into the temple except by passing through the pillars which support the temple (Contreni 2020b, p. 44). With Alcuin, the Christianization of the liberal arts was completed. It was acceptable to be a Ciceronian, if it helped one to better understand the mysteries of Christian Wisdom.

Later in the ninth century, John Scottus, an Irish master who worked at the court of Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, wrote that “no one enters into heaven, except through philosophy,” by which he meant the wisdom of the ancients. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius, John called “the seven disciplines which the philosophers call liberal, the sacred disciplines.” According to John, just as the waters from various sources come together to flow in the bed of one stream, so too are the arts united in the contemplation of Christ, who is “the highest source of wisdom” (Contreni 2020b).

Earlier Christians had co-opted Jewish scriptures to make them presentiments of the New Testament; now, Carolingian masters integrated classical learning into their concept of Christian wisdom. But not all was seamless. Some worried that the pursuit of the imperial title, revived by Charlemagne and held by his son, Louis the Pious, and grandson, Charles the Bald, might lead to the revival of Roman values of pride and arrogance. The monk Ebrardus worried that the pursuit of linguistic virtuosity would lead some to neglect the pursuit of ultimate truth. Lupus of Ferrières, Heiric’s teacher and a formidable scholar, counseled Ebrardus to pursue a well-ordered life that melded “polished discourse” with an “upright character.” He urged Ebrardus to believe that all Christians are united in a kind of “discordant concord,” that will lead the “indivisibly divided” from various routes to the temple of Mother Church.1 From seven solid pillars supporting the temple of wisdom, to the courses of many bodies of water uniting in one river, to an image of roads from all different directions leading to Mother Church, Carolingian intellectuals found words and images to express their new culture, a culture where finally the classics and Christian wisdom could co-exist fruitfully. This is the story of a cultural transformation that took place between the second century when Tertullian famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” and the ninth century when Carolingians did not blush to call Aachen the “second Athens” (See Tertullian 1956, p. 36; Alberi 1989).

Paganism and Christianity, polytheism and monotheism, the triune God and multiple gods and goddesses, basically theology, seem not to have erected the ethical, moral, or intellectual barriers we assume existed between the minds of medieval monks and Roman scholars. It was in this environment that Lupus of Ferrières and Heiric of Auxerre read Suetonius.

2. Lupus of Ferrières and Heiric of Auxerre

Lupus (c. 805-d. after 862) has always been one of the luminaries of the Carolingian intellectual and cultural revival.2 He came from a well-connected aristocratic family and was raised as a monk at Ferrières-en-Gâtinais in the diocese of Orléans in the modern French département of Loiret by disciples of Alcuin of York (c. 765–804). Lupus’s tutelage included a stage at Fulda some 725 km (450 miles) away in modern Germany where he studied with Abbot Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780–856). Lupus’s reputation rests largely on his renown as a scholar of the Roman classics, a humanist before humanism, thanks to his hand copying of Cicero’s De oratore and the frequent mentions in his letters of his efforts to locate and copy classical texts that were unavailable to him (See Beeson 1930). But Lupus was a hagiographer and also a theologian of some consequence during the Carolingian age’s predestination controversy (Lupus of Ferrières 2019). His letters reveal how fraught the life of an abbot could be, punctuated as it was with political tensions, including imprisonment after Charles the Bald’s (840–877) unsuccessful military campaign in Aquitaine, and the need always to be at the beck and call of his king. Lupus was also a teacher. A marginal note in in a ninth-century manuscript of Augustine of Hippo’s sermons describes him as an “abbot and teacher.”3 Ferrières students also cropped up in his letters. He sent three of them to Abbot Marcward (r. 829–853) of Prüm in the diocese of Trier to learn German and checked in on them often whenever he wrote to Marcward.4 He expressed his wish to King Charles that he be allowed to get back to studying the liberal arts and teaching them to others.5 In another letter, Lupus lamented the death of several young Ferrières monks who were already well advanced in their studies and set about to recruit at least one replacement from the monastery of Saint Germanus in Auxerre and promised to bring him up along with his other students.6

Lupus’s ties with the Auxerre monastery, which was only some 82 km (51 miles) from Ferrières, were strong. His uncle and two of his brothers served as bishops there. In an especially heartfelt letter to the community, he lamented that when he stayed with them his royal duties prevented him from enjoying their companionship and even prevented him from thanking his monastic brethren for their hospitality when the king decided to decamp Auxerre in haste. To reinforce his lament he sent his relative, Remigius, along with his pupil Fredilo, probably the young Auxerre monk that came to Ferrières for tutelage, to deliver his personal regrets.7

Heiric of Auxerre (841–c.880) is not mentioned in the letters nor in any of Lupus’s other works, but there is no doubt that Heiric studied with Lupus since he explicitly credited Lupus with his training in secular letters in the collection of Heiric’s notes known today as his Collectanea.8 Heiric annotated and perhaps curated the collection of Lupus’s correspondence compiled shortly after the abbot’s death sometime after 862. He also preserved and personally copied a collection of Lupus’s poems (See Allen 2014). Much of what we know today of Lupus is owed to Heiric. The young monk also became an author, most notably of a metrical life of his monastery’s patron, St. Germanus of Auxerre (c.378–c. 442–448), which he dedicated to King Charles the Bald (823–877). He also compiled an account from monastic archives of the ninth-century miracles attributed to Germanus and composed sermons and biblical commentaries. With many intellectuals of the Carolingian age, Heiric was also well-versed in the numeric arts, especially computus, the medieval term that embraced time-reckoning and the art of calculation. His annotated copy of MS Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, 412 (370 G 32), a compendium of Bede’s scientific works and miscellaneous computistical texts, including entries documenting rare biographical details, still exists.9 Heiric also had the great good fortune to study with another luminary of the Carolingian revival of intellectual life, Haimo of Auxerre. Haimo is also memorialized in Heiric’s Collectanea. He was a formidable biblical scholar who used his exegesis to make pointed critiques of the Carolingian church (See Shimahara 2013; Contreni forthcoming; also Noble 1998; Contreni 2002, pp. 50–53).

As with Lupus before him, Heiric travelled, but the precise chronology of his itinerary is still unsettled. If his serial homage to his two mentors in the preface to the Collectanea, “His Lupo, his Haimo ludebant,” suggests chronological stages of study, he first went from Auxerre to read with Lupus and then back to Auxerre to read with Haimo of Auxerre. He also traveled to Soissons where he recorded his personal involvement in miracles that took place there.10 His stage at Soissons was significant, although poorly documented. One thing is certain: he struck up an especially close relationship to the town’s bishop, as his dedicatory poem to Bishop Hildebold in Michael I. Allen’s translation movingly tells.11

	Hildebold, refreshment and glory of your a church,
	great by your see’s honour, greater by your love of God,
	Receive graciously what lo modestly
	Heiric presents, full of love for your--wits!
5	Presenting small things commands modesty, since you deserve very big ones;
	yet expending b the big things of those very small is still decent.
	And he who gives this modicum is proved already to have bestowed more,
	because he indeed gave you who he is and what he can do.
	Here, you have the lovely playthings of the two teachers
10	under whom as guides I cultivated my intellect.
	With the ones Lupus, with the others Haimo, used to do school-play in the agreeable order,
	when calendar and day-hour granted that some school-play c should happen.
	The one was expert in the humanities, the other in things divine:
	each excelled famously in his own subjects.
15	These things I used to summarize with fingers flight by skill’s favour,
	since instructed then at tracing stealthy shorthand.
	I indeed did not bother to expand them into plain text,
	until now when they will be given to you.
	By means of them, I would say, father, remember to delight your mind,
20	when your breast splits from the burden of your cares.
	By means of them, increase the natural gleam d of your face and brow,
	as often as you wish to be glad.
	If this you dignify e and take up with calm regard,
	you soon will be avid to muse quite agreeably f.

a.

The use of tu bespeaks close familiarity.

b.

Lupus is very fond of using pendere (“to pay,” as “to weigh out”), also in his poems.

c.

I use “school-play” for “elementary education.” Ancient elementary school was headed by the magister ludi, which sets the semantic framework of the Latin here.

d.

I am drawn to think of Lupus’s poem on the Liber legum, especially its Carolingian portraits. See B.1. carmina in Librum Legum (= Carm. 1–2), in Servatus Lupus Abbas Ferrariensis Liber Epistolarum (ed. Allen).

e.

Lupus also uses the exceptional combination of dignor + Acc. in his poems.

f.

Gratius means “quite (or more) agreeably (or welcomely).” Heiric suggests all at once.

The poem is important for its recognition of Heiric’s teachers and the specific attributions he made of their tutelage in humanities and divine wisdom. His summaries of their instruction had long lain as “stealthy shorthand” (vv. 15–16), Tironian notes, in Heiric’s personal archive until he transcribed them in “plain text” (v. 17), Carolingian minuscule, for Hildebold. He regarded his collection as “lovely playthings” (v. 9), gathered during times of less serious instruction, times devoted to “school-play” (vv. 11–12). Their purpose was to amuse the careworn bishop.

3. Heiric’s Collectanea

Heiric’s gift to Hildebold consists of six uneven sections. He attributed the first two collections of excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius to Lupus.12 These are followed by scripturally based conundra that he gleaned from the teaching of Haimo of Auxerre. He called these Scolia Questionum or Notes on Questions or Investigations.13 The next sections are not attributed to any master and may well have been compiled from Heiric’s own reading. The opinions of ancient philosophers which could be inserted into modern conversations consist of 79 aphorisms drawn from Pseudo-Caecilius Balbus.14 These are followed by a similar set of 32 brief sayings of wise men who dined with Metullius.15 The collection then returns to Christian themes with excerpts from Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticum futuri saeculi.16 This is followed by a curious, but historically important interruption in the series of collected excerpts: a poem meant to be inscribed on a church bell and a second poem that ascribes the inscription to the instigation of a Bishop Dido, most likely Bishop Dido of Laon (883–893/895).17 The Collectaneum ends with selections from Solinus’s third-century Collectanea rerum memorabilium and a brief account of the seven pagan wonders of the world.18

4. Reading Suetonius

The Valerius Maximus excerpts have been studied, but only tangentially (See Schnetz 1901; Schullian 1935). The Scolia Quaestionum has been mined to verify the attribution of biblical commentaries to Haimo of Auxerre.19 And the Suetonius excerpts have been valued as important witnesses to the textual tradition of the De vita Caesarum.20 But so far, only one scholar, Matthew Innes, has asked why Carolingian scholars were so interested in Suetonius. His article on “ninth-century encounters with Suetonius” documents that Einhard, who famously patterned his depiction of Charlemagne on details inspired by Suetonius’s collected biographies, was but one member of a “political and cultural elite” who knew the De vita Caesarum (Innes 1997, p. 274). When Innes wrote that “Heiric and Lupus are interested in Roman history as a source of exempla,” he was certainly correct. He made an even more important observation when he suggested that Carolingian readers of Suetonius appreciated that the De vita Caesarum “took the omnipresent God out of the historiographical limelight and facilitated the discussion of individuals in terms of character traits and abilities rather than divine backing or approbation.” (Ibid., p. 279 for the first citation; p. 281 for the second). This judgment rings true, but on the other hand, there was much in Roman writing that appealed to Christian audiences for, after all, Romans lived in a world populated by many omnipresent gods that allowed substantial easy congruity between classical Roman culture and the Carolingians. Consider the story of a supernatural event that took place in the boyhood home of a revered figure. The house contained a small room that the locals believed was the very room in which the holy man was born.

Religious scruples forbid anyone to enter except for some necessary reason, and after purification. It had long been believed that casual visitors would be overcome by a sudden, awful terror; and recently this was proved true when, one night, a new owner of the house, either from ignorance or because he wanted to test the truth of the belief, went to sleep in the room. A few hours later he was hurled out of bed by a supernatural agency and found lying half-dead against the door, bedclothes and all.

This sounds for all the world like a slice of medieval hagiography, but it comes from Suetonius’s life of Augustus (II,6) (Suetonius 1957, p. 53). What is impressive about this passage and many others in Suetonius’s lives of the Caesars is, for want of a better word, the pervasive “medievalism” of the Roman’s sentiments, his worldview, and his outlook. Mariken Teeuwen’s appraisal of keen interest in Martianus Capella’s pagan allegory, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, strikes the same chord.

Carolingian readers were obviously fascinated by this text, by its mythological and allegorical richness, by its strange language, with undreamed-of grammatical constructions, unusual words and neologisms, Graecisms and Greek words, its variety in the use of prose and metre, and the variety of metres used. They seem to have wanted to pick Martianus’s brain on every aspect of his work: language and vocabulary, poetic techniques, myth and allegory, and the technical treatises on the seven liberal arts. But what intrigued them most is the underlying philosophy of the work concerning the nature of learning, knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment, and how all this can be reached in human existence (or how such wisdom is, in fact, beyond reach).

(Teeuwen 2011, p. 12)

She concluded that the pagan nature of the allegory never seemed to bother its readers, “the scholars who studied the text were members of the highest literary elites of the time.” (Ibid., p. 34) Lupus and Heiric certainly were Carolingian literary elites and might be said to have belonged to the same textual community as Suetonius, one that was more similar than dissimilar and one they were eager to know and exploit for their own ends.

5. Patterns

What were those ends? In his dedicatory verse to Bishop Hildebold, Heiric recalled that as a student, perhaps 20 years earlier, he wrote with quick fingers in notulas or Tironian notes, the medieval stenography, as he recorded the lessons of his masters.21 Did the notes he recorded from Lupus’s teaching represent Lupus’s choices of excerpts for his students or do they represent choices Heiric made as Lupus read through the texts? Heiric told Hildebold in his verse dedication that the notes originated as “school-play” when time was allotted for such diversions. My sense is the 70 excerpts represent selections that Lupus chose for his students, although there is no way to prove this.22 Heiric probably copied out Suetonius’s words in stenographic form on wax tablets at first before transferring them to parchment and then wrote them out in minuscule for presentation to Hildebold. The Suetonian excerpts follow the text closely, but sometimes Heiric condensed what he heard and also omitted material from his selections. He made editorial comments only sparingly and used bridging language such as Idem in the sense of “likewise” or “also” to help the flow of excerpts within each emperor’s biography. The excerpts are organized as blocks of text under each emperor’s name without indication of book or chapter.

When Matthew Innes considered Heiric’s work, he thought the excerpts offered readers exempla. But exempla of what? When Janet Martin examined John of Salisbury’s (1990, c.1120–1180) use of Heiric’s notes in his Policraticus, she thought he was attracted to their “moralizing emphasis.” (Martin 1984, p. 184) But can we say more about Heiric’s choices, the putative tastes of Bishop Hildebold, and the interests of the readers of the twelve surviving manuscripts? Or should we conclude that the selections Heiric memorialized were random and without internal coherences? The single Orosian excerpts for Jovinian and Trajan, one relating to an emperor’s freakish manner of death and the other recording a major imperial decision in the early history of Christianity, would suggest that. At the very least, a pattern does emerge in a comparative analysis of Heiric’s 70 Suetonian excerpts.23 If we leave Jovinian and Trajan aside and count the absolute number of excerpts for each emperor, Augustus at 16 excerpts is clearly the leader, followed by Caligula (13), Nero (13), and Julius Caesar (10). Looked at another way, the number of paragraphs from which Heiric lifted his excerpts against the total paragraphs for each emperor in the modern edition of De vita Caesarum, Nero at 22.8% and Caligula at 21.6% emerge as the emperors who most piqued Heiric’s interest. At 13 lines in Quadri’s edition, the account of Nero’s death at Ner. VI.49 is the longest by far among the Suetonius excerpts. Augustus, to whom Suetonius dedicated 101 paragraphs in the modern edition, sinks to fifth place despite the fact that Heiric cited his gesta more than any other. Perhaps notoriety appealed more than accomplishment.

Number of Collectanea Excerpts per Emperor	Percentage of Total Excerpts (n/70)	Excerpts as a Percentage of Total Paragraphs in Each vita
Augustus 16	Augustus 22.9%	Nero (57) 22.8%
Caligula 13	Caligula 18.6%	Caligula (60) 21.6%
Nero 13	Nero 18.6%	Titus (11) 18.2%
Julius Caesar 10	Julius Caesar 14.3%	Vespasian (25) 16%
Tiberius 7	Tiberius 10%	Augustus (101) 15.8%
Vespasian 4	Vespasian 5.7%	Domitian (23) 13%
Domitian 3	Domitian 4.3%	Julius Caesar (89) 11.2%
Vitellius 2	Vitellius 2.9%	Vitellius (18) 11.1%
Titus 2	Titus 2.9%	Tiberius (76) 9.2%

Beyond ratios, several substantive patterns emerge from scrutiny of the excerpts. There is an abiding concern for personal appearance.24 Caesar was fastidious, balding, poorly dressed; even in death he arranged his toga to cover his body (Iul. I,45, 82). Augustus was short—mentioned twice—and was self-conscious enough about it to wear elevator shoes (Aug. II,73, 79). Bald Caligula took extreme steps to prevent anyone from seeing his pate from above (Cal. IV,50). Nero’s ancestor’s beard is said to reveal personal traits (Ner. VI,2). Quirks of personality piqued Heiric’s interest as well. Caesar coveted pearls (Iul. I,47). Augustus did not easily make friends but clung to the ones he had (Aug. II,66). He disliked ostentation and preferred simplicity (Aug. II,72). He was known for his aphorisms (Aug. II,87). Tiberius was frugal (Tib. III,34). Caligula was proud of his shamelessness and enjoyed being outlandish, but was afraid of thunder (Cal. IV,29, 37, 51), as was Tiberius (Tib. III,69). Caligula also enjoyed the tactile experience of money (Cal. IV,42). Nero took pains to preserve his voice and blocked his audiences from leaving his performances (Ner. VI,20, 23, 25). He also never wore the same garment twice (Ner. VI,30). Vespasian was said to be greedy (Vesp. VIII,16). Domitian caught flies with a stylus (Dom. VIII,3).

Suggestions of sexual scandal also attracted ninth-century notice. Caesar dreamt of violating his own mother and a popular song mocked his relationship with Nicomedes (Iul. I,7–8, 49). Augustus was said to have engaged in unnatural acts with his adoptive father and his loose morals were the subject of public comment (Aug. II,68). Nero tried to make a woman out of a slave boy (Ner. VI,28). Imperial attitudes toward food characterized several excerpts. Augustus was a light eater who compared his fasts to those of Jews on the Sabbath (Aug. II,76). Tiberius economized on his banquets by serving leftovers (Tib. III,34). Caligula served golden bread and meat to his guests (Cal. IV,37). Vitellius’s meals were lavish (Vit., VII,13). Omens, especially predicting an emperor’s death, were also popular subjects to record. Heiric seems to have been particularly keen to record omens that swirled around Julius Caesar. He recorded four of them, including that Caesar did not put much stock in them (Iul. I,7–8, 59, 61, 81), but only one in the case of Augustus in which he foresaw the soldiers who would transport his body after his death (Aug. II,99). Tiberius’s birth was attended by a mathematician’s prediction that he would be king (Tib. III,14), but his death delighted Romans (Tib. III,75). Nero foresaw and even planned his own death and funeral (Ner. VI,47, 49). Vitellius may not have foreseen his death, but Heiric thought his gruesome end worth recording (Vit. VII,17), while Vespasian saw himself becoming a god (Vesp. VIII,23). Titus, on the other hand, complained about the unfairness of his death (Tit. VIII,10). A crow predicted Domitian’s death (Dom. VIII,23). The Orosian excerpt on Jovinianus recorded his bizarre accidental demise caused by noxious fumes accumulating in his new sleeping quarters (Iov. VII,31,3).

Another predominant pattern among the excerpts centers on how rulers ruled. Julius Caesar and Augustus were interested in tools of leadership, especially official documents. Caesar was the first to write on pages, rather than on rolls and used coded language (Iul. I,56). Augustus used a variety of seals on his documents, noted the exact hour of their redaction, and also wrote in code (Aug. II,50, 88). Both Caesar and Augustus wished to emulate Alexander the Great (Iul. I,7–8; Aug. II,28). Omens foretold that Caesar would rule the world; his victories were swift (Iul. I,7–8, 37). Roman rulers were also builders. Augustus found Rome brick, but left it marble, while Nero’s urban renewal scheme inspired his burning the city (Aug. II,28; Ner. VI,38). Augustus’s morning receptions were open to all and Titus prided himself on welcoming petitioners and claimed he wasted a day if he hadn’t granted favors (Aug. II,53; Tit. VIII,8). When Augustus entered Rome, all punishments for the day were cancelled (Aug. II,57). When Caligula approached a town, he ordered the way to be sprinkled with water to keep the dust down (Cal. IV,43).25Augustus lived modestly. His villas were decorated agriculturally with groves and terraces, not with statues and paintings (Aug. II,72). Tiberius urged fair treatment of provincials, while Nero warned his officials to keep him in mind. (Tib. III,32; Ner. VI,32).26 Tiberius bore rumors patiently and noted that liberty was a hallmark of a free country (Tib. III,28). Caligula valued being feared and drew up lists of those to be killed and kept a well-stocked chest of poisons (Cal. IV,30, 49). Vespasian cured the blind and lame; he also chided a military officer for his fine ways (Vesp. VIII,7–8).

6. Conclusions

What does Heiric’s potpourri of extracts suggest about his interests as a monk or about Bishop Hildebold’s interests as a bishop? It is difficult to see how the passages Heiric chose to copy and then later presented to Hildebold might have applied to either monastic or episcopal lives—unless our view of what monks and bishops found useful is too circumscribed by our own expectations of what monks and bishops might find interesting. The Roman past spoke to the Carolingian present in many different ways that we can never completely recover.

There is the possibility of one connection between Suetonius’s past and the present of Lupus, Heiric, Hildebold, and other Carolingians that might explain why Heiric so valued his schoolboy lessons. Carolingian scholars were also courtiers—they attended courts and were sustained by their rulers. Lupus was intimately tied to court life, sometimes to his chagrin (See Noble 1998; Contreni 2002, at pp. 50–53). Heiric also travelled in royal circles. Carloman (848–c. 877), son of Charles the Bald, was for a time, Heiric’s abbot at Saint-Germain in Auxerre. Heiric dedicated his Life of Saint Germanus to the king and praised his support of learning.27 We know this from literary works they dedicated to their patrons, from the military services they provided for them, and from their frequent complaints about the toll of attending to the needs of kings and other political leaders.

We need to be mindful of a world of live, frequent contact and interaction between scholar-monks and their rulers. What I want to suggest is that the Roman classics and, especially Suetonius, provided educated Carolingians with an armamentarium of interesting anecdotes to both entertain and school their rulers. First, the interesting stories they could pull from ancient sources, no doubt elaborated in the telling, cut the mighty Romans down to size—literally and figuratively—and humanized them, warts and all. Ninth-century readers could document that Suetonius’s rulers also attended to documents, emulated heroic figures of the past, won swift military victories, sometimes lived modestly, sometimes ate sparingly, sometimes modeled mercy and hospitality, and sometimes uttered wise, lapidary statements. It is striking that sections of the Collectanea explicitly suppose an oral context: memorable sayings from Valerius Maximus; the opinions of wise men for use in conversation; the table talk of wise men who dined with Metullius.28

They also were witty and joked. Heiric in his dedication to Bishop Hildebold described the notes from his teachers as ludicra pulchra, “lovely playthings”. Lupus and Haimo engaged in “school-play” (ludebant) when they offered these notes to their pupils. Heiric encouraged Hildebold to turn to them whenever “your breast splits from the burden of your cares.” If he did so, he soon would be able “to muse quite agreeably.” The intention of the Collectanea was to lighten the cares of a busy ecclesiastical administrator. The pleasurable jeux d’esprit intent of the collection is even conveyed in the theological portions where Haimo is described as a cheerful and learned man who loved puzzles (“Haimo iocundos lepidos doctus amare iocus”).29

Assessing humor in any bygone age runs the risk of anachronism.30 Even so, a final pattern among Heiric’s Suetonian notes might be that readers, including Bishop Hildebold, would mine the notes for amusing anecdotes with which they might regale other courtiers. Consoling a worried friend, one might use Augustus’s witty advice (Aug. II,51), “Don’t worry if people speak evil of you, as long as they don’t do evil to you.” One can imagine a denizen of the court modifying the bon mot attributed to Augustus, “Let’s be satisfied with the Hincmar we have” (Aug. II,87). Or, in different circumstances, one might apply what Tiberius said of an enemy, “Carnulus escaped me” (Tib. III,61), or what Caligula advised, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me” (Cal. IV,30). Vespasian’s rebuke of a dandified military officer, “I would have preferred it if you smelled of garlic” (Vesp. VIII,8) recalls Notker (c.840–912) of Saint Gall’s account of Charlemagne’s reaction to well-dressed military men in his entourage. The Carolingian ruler sent them on an expedition which ruined their fine clothes (Notker of Saint Gall 1959, pp. 25, 10–87). Vespasian’s herdsman’s comment, “The fox changes his fur, but not his behavior” (Vesp. VIII,16), would also have resonated in Carolingian court circles, but as far as is known, only John of Salisbury used this vetus proverbium in a letter to Bishop John of Poitiers.31

With all viewers of the distant past, the monks Lupus of Ferrières and Heiric of Auxerre knew the future awaiting ancient Rome and that in that future the Rome of the Romans was no longer. But just as Carolingian power could shelter and protect Christian Rome, Carolingian books and their readers could in some sense revivify Suetonius’s Rome and its leaders and make them their own. Why wouldn’t learned Carolingian monks wish their rulers to continue down these classical paths?