Flavius Merobaudes: A Translation and Historical Commentary

In his masterful commentary on the panegyrics of Sidonius Apollinaris, Andre Loyen has occasion to remark on the historical value of the fragments of Flavius Merobaudes, another late Roman panegyrist. To Loyen, Merobaudes' poetic panegyric ('Panegyric II') contains some useful historical information, but the work is "extremely difficult" to interpret. My own attempt to grapple with Merobaudes as a historical source bears out the accuracy of Loyen's statement not only for 'Panegyric II' but also for the rest of Merobaudes' secular works. Our present knowledge of the fifth century is limited, but Merobaudes compounds the difficulty of interpretation by making his remarks immediately comprehensible to only a small circle of his contemporaries. In order to elucidate the evidence he conveys as effectively as possible, I have found it both necessary and desirable to render all of his surviving works into English. To my knowledge I present the first complete translation of Merobaudes' fragments into English, and the second into a modern language.