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words a period characterised by the last three phases of the Gothic underdog-war
conducted by Totila against the Byzantine Empire and its epilogue in the early 550s
(Wolfram 1987, pp. 354 ff.). In view of his later career it is only fair to suspect that
from his childhood and onwards he was acquainted with Gothic ways, and the way
in which they formed a cultural background for a rather dedicated or at least cunning
resistance. (Wolfram 1987, p. 353). For that reason it may well have been easy for
him to communicate with Germans and to know how, generally speaking, he should
write to please a member of the Austrasian nobility, but when it comes to the poems
to Sigibert and Brunhild, he has obviously made use of more specific and current
information, e.g., about Brunhild’s trip from Spain. This information was supplied to
him or he may actively have sought it in order to write an appropriate poem.
Venantius lives the myths of both cultures and that is what makes him worthwhile.
The Lupus Poems (Appendix II)
Lupus, Duke of Champagne, was one of Sigibert’s most trusted men and accordingly
lost influence and power after Sigibert’s death in 575 AD (Gregory IV. 4). His
interest in uniting Latin and Germanic culture is attested by Venantius’ description in
his poems of his relation to the bilingual Lupus, and also by an account by Gregory
from which we understand that Lupus introduced the slave Andarchius at Sigibert’s
court. Andarchius’ merits, although he showed himself later to be a terrible bully, lay
in the fact that he was learned in arithmetic, in the Theodosian code, as well as in
Vergil (Gregory IV. 46).
Even the male names in Lupus’ family hint at the unification of Latin and German
inasmuch as the names of the men known to us have the German or Latin word for
wolf, i.e., ulf or lupus as a common denominator: the brothers Magnulfus
(magnus+ulf) and Lupus, and Romulf, who was Lupus’ son. This means that the
Lupus family followed the Germanic tradition of common denomination while being
open to Latin variations.
Venantius came to know Lupus at the height of the Duke’s career and the poems
follow him up to c. 576 AD, i.e., up to his most troubled years. We hear nothing in
Venantius’ later books of Lupus’ partial return to power at Brunhild’s court nor of
later events in his life.
Venantius describes his relation to Lupus in such a way that to begin with we must
label him one of Venantius’ patrons, but later Venantius gained a position of his own
under the combined patronage of Queen Radegund and Gregory of Tours while
Lupus was facing political trouble, which made the two more even.
The chronology of the four poems is relatively easy to establish when it comes to
the first and the fourth. The first (Venantius 7.7, i.e. Book VII, poem no. 7) can be
dated to 566 AD or the beginning of 567 AD when Venantius was still in Metz. The
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