Logographer

I’ve been working on my thesis for far too long, and now I feel more compelled than ever to finish it. Yes, I see the irony of saying this while posting something to my seldom-read blog, but there you go.

I’ve been reading the Chronicon of Hydatius, a fifth century bishop at what is now Chaves in Galicia, north-western Spain. It was fun to run this under the year 451:

A comet began to appear from 18 June; by the 29th it was visible at dawn in the eastern sky and was soon perceived after sunset in the western sky. By (16 July – 1 August) it appeared (only) in the west.

This was more than likely Halley’s comet, easily checked by remembering the 76-year cycle for the phenomenon and calculating backward from, say, 1910, when the comet made a big impression on our more recent ancestors.

These kinds of things make reading Hydatius interesting and exciting. His Chronicle comes alive, even though it lacks the rich narrative of Gregory of Tours. Hydatius may have lived nearly 1500 years ago, but only 20 visits of Halley’s separate us.

The year 451 was full of portents, as Hydatius called them. He saw a lunar eclipse on September 26. His colleague Eufronius wrote to him about other celestial events seen in Gaul around Easter. On April 4th, Hydatius himself saw the Aurora Borealis “from nightfall until almost the third hour of the night.” I thought it was remarkable that he could see the Aurora as far south as Spain, but it’s not unheard of. An astronomer on the Mediev-L mailing list pointed out this photo of the Aurora over Texas taken a few years ago.

What did these things portend for Hydatius? Well, 451 was the year in which a Roman dux named Aëtius and the Visigothic king Theoderic pushed the Huns out of Gaul at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, recorded more memorably by Jordanes. (Theoderic lost his life in the fight.) Hydatius thought he was watching, and recording, the end of the world, an event to occur “450 years from Christ’s Ascension, i.e., on 27 May 482″ (to quote R. W. Burgess from his critical edition of the Chronicon).

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