Fulgentius, Fabius Planciades

▪ Latin author

flourished late 5th and early 6th centuries AD

      Christian Latin writer of African origin, a mythographer and allegorical interpreter of Virgil. Though his writings are mediocre and fantastic, they exerted a great deal of influence on scholars of the Middle Ages, who followed his method of using allegory to interpret classical writers.

      Fulgentius is the author of the Mitologiarum libri iii, containing allegorical interpretations of myths supported by absurd etymologies, and of an Expositio Vergilianae continentiae secundum philosophos moralis, in which he makes Virgil himself appear in order to reveal the mystic meaning of the Aeneid. He also wrote an Expositio sermonum antiquorum, explanations of 62 rare Latin words supported by quotations, some of them from authors and works that never existed; and a Liber absque litteris de aetatibus mundi et hominis, a bizarre work in which human history is divided into 23 periods. His youthful poems and a work entitled Physiologus are lost.

      It was once thought that Fulgentius might be St. Fulgentius of Ruspe (Fulgentius of Ruspe, Saint), who composed treatises, sermons, and epistles modeled on the works of St. Augustine in defense of orthodoxy against Arianism and Pelagianism. Most scholars, however, have abandoned the idea that the two men were the same person.

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