The Church Fathers · c. 501–513
The Life of Epiphanius and the Letters
Ennodius of Pavia · c. 474 – 521
What it is
A bishop of Pavia writing in prose so ornamented that readers have complained about it for fifteen hundred years. The life of his predecessor shows a bishop ransoming captives from Burgundians and Goths and negotiating with kings, because there was nobody else left to do it.
Why it lasted
The clearest record of the bishop becoming the civil authority in post-imperial Italy, and of what an educated Roman still thought prose should sound like as the schools that taught it were closing.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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