Flavius Merobaudes

The fragmentary Latin works, transmitted without author’s name and titles in a palimpsest preserved in the Stiftsbibliothek of St. Gall (Sangallensis, 908), were assigned by the editor, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1823, 1824²), to Flavius Merobaudes, a Spanish writer of the fifth century AD. The works are as follows: four short occasional poems; a panegyric in prose, almost certainly a gratiarum actio to Aetius; a panegyric in hexameters on Aetius’ third consulship in 446 AD (CPL 1433, 1434). In 1905 these works were edited by Friedrich Vollmer in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores antiquissimi, vol. XIV. Since then no other edition was printed.
The so-called Carmen de Christo (CPL 1435), a short poem collected by Vollmer in the works of Merobaudes, belongs to a different manuscript tradition. The poem was published for the first time in 1510 by Johannes Camers, who assigned it to Claudian with the title Laus Christi. In 1564 Georg Fabricius printed the poem with the title De Christo, regarding it as the work of a «Merobaudes Hispanus Scholasticus». On the question of the attribution of the poem to Claudian or Merobaudes various points of view have been put forward by the scholars over the centuries, without reaching a satisfactory solution.