Fabius Planciades Fulgentius

Life

Fulgentius left almost no record of his life beyond the occasional self-reference in his writings. The Latin he used, his familiarity with Greek, and his treatment of classical authors and religious practices point to an education in North Africa. His works also include details of African culture, which further locate him there before the seventh-century Muslim invasions. He knew the Libyco-Berber language and script, and in On the Ages of the World and of Man he calls that language part of his 'own' heritage, suggesting he was ethnically African. It has long been assumed that he worked as a grammaticus or rhetor, a teacher of rhetoric, but this rests on small clues he left behind, and some scholars now question it. He may have been an amateur writer instead. In the prologue to Book 1 of the Mythologies, he mentions a wife, but this could be either a real detail or part of a fictional persona.

A long-running debate asks whether Fabius Planciades Fulgentius is the same person as Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe, a Christian bishop. Medieval scribes from the Carolingian period first made this identification. The two share some influences, such as an interest in Augustine of Hippo, which is not surprising given their time and place. But their main concerns differ sharply. The bishop’s writings focus on opposing heretical groups like the Arians, a topic Fabius Fulgentius never addresses. Even when a discussion of Arianism or free will would seem to fit the mythographer’s material, he avoids it. Linguistically, the mythographer’s distinctive style and his use of rare words and idioms do not appear in the bishop’s work, which further argues against identifying them as the same person.

Writings

The four extant works attributed to Fulgentius, listed in what is believed to be chronological order, are: Mythologiae (Mythologies), Expositio continentiae Virgilianae secundum philosophos moralis (The Exposition of the Content of Virgil According to Moral Philosophy), Expositio sermonum antiquorum (The Explanation of Obsolete Words), and De aetatibus mundi et hominis (On the Ages of the World and of Man). A fifth work, Super Thebaiden (On the Thebaid), has in the past been attributed to Fulgentius. The manuscript ascribes the work to 'S. Fulgencius Episcopus', whom Rudolf Helm, the first modern publisher of Fulgentius' work, considered to be the mythographer. This work was not included in the Carolingian manuscripts but was included in Helm's 1897 edition with strong reservations. While there is no consensus on its authenticity, strong evidence supports that it was written in the twelfth century by a writer imitating Fulgentius's allegorical style, likely mistakenly attributed due to scribal error. Fulgentius also mentions other works that have not survived, including earlier satirical poems in the first prologue to the Mythologies and a work on physiology in the Content of Virgil. Generally known as his chief work, the Mythologies is a series of legends told in three books, each introduced by its own prologue, with fifty chapters that explain classical myths using allegory. These interpretations include etymologies of names and moral conclusions. In the prologue, Fulgentius claims his purpose was to strip Greek myths of fictitious details to reveal obscure truths, and he suggests a Christian motive, though it would be inaccurate to define his works as 'Christian allegories'. The morals he extracted were fairly generic and would have been acceptable to any audience.

Historiographical contribution

Fulgentius carried forward the old Roman habit of assembling concise encyclopedic summaries, a style seen in writers like Cato the Elder and Cicero. His work also fits within Stoic and Neoplatonic traditions, which treated myths as symbols of deeper spiritual truths. His method of reading myths as allegories may have come from a lost commentary on Virgil by Aelius Donatus, and it certainly appears in the later moralizing Virgil commentaries by Servius. Fulgentius’s view of Virgil as a wise authority was likely borrowed from Macrobius, who first gave the poet that high status. However, Fulgentius’s habit of removing all the surface details from classical myths and replacing them with ethical lessons aligns more closely with Martianus Capella, a writer from the late 5th century. Capella had made the idea of life as a spiritual journey central to classical literature, and Fulgentius pushed that trend even further. The practice of using dubious etymologies to back up mythological allegories goes back to Plato, continued through Aristotle and the Stoics, and lasted into the Middle Ages. Although later critics attacked Fulgentius for this, it was a common technique in his era, used by Capella as well. Fulgentius’s myth summaries are often compared to those of Hyginus, a 2nd-century mythographer. Both cover many of the same stories, and some similarities suggest a shared source, but their aims differ sharply. Hyginus wanted to create a thorough reference work for myths, while Fulgentius focused on breaking the material down into allegorical meanings, something Hyginus rarely attempted.

Criticism

Fulgentius was widely read during the Carolingian era and beyond, but by the 19th century, his work faced sharp attacks for being factually wrong and full of dubious interpretations. Since then, scholars have mostly written him off as shallow and deceptive. Critics have long called his style pompous and silly. His Latin is dense and often garbled, making his meaning hard to grasp. He favors needlessly long, wordy sentences and references that are painfully obscure. He also makes serious historical blunders, such as mixing up Augustus and Julius Caesar in his work On the Ages of the World and of Man. Many of his supposed facts and word origins are thought to come from unreliable secondhand sources or to be outright inventions.