ABSTRACT
In Jerome’s late fourth-century Life of Saint Paul, the First Hermit, the nonagenarian monk Anthony searches the desert for the still older hermit Paul. Anthony prays for help, God sends a centaur, and, after crossing himself, Anthony asks it for directions. The centaur, “barbarum nescio quid infrendens, et frangens potius uerba quam proloquens inter horrentia ora” [gnashing out I don’t know what foreignness, and with words broken rather than spoken through its bristly mouth],1 extends its right hand and points out the way. A bewildered Anthony next meets a “homunculum … aduncis naribus, fronte cornibus asperata, cuius extrema pars corporis in caprarum pedes desinebat”[little man with a pointed nose, a forehead bristling with horns, whose extremities terminated in goat’s feet].2 Anthony girds himself in prayer, but instead of threatening him, the creature only offers him provisions. Anthony, “quisnam esset interrogans” [asking it what it was], receives this answer:
1 Jerome, Trois vies de moines: Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, ed. Edgardo Martín Morales, trans. [into French] Pierre Leclerc (Paris: Cerf, 2007), p. 158. Throughout, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. For a recent discussion of the range of meanings of “barbarus” in the ancient world-including among its connotations “subhuman,” “bestial,” “crude,” and “irrational,” and, in Roman rhetorical training, “solecistic”— see Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 25-43. I thank Alan Stewart for supplying this reference.
