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The saint as envoy: bishops’ Lives

had been respectfully greeted by the imperial court and particularly by the
augusta Galla Placidia; when he later fell fatally ill, in the passage immedi-
ately following the cessation of his intercession, there was a pious contest
between members of the imperial family and court and the Ravennan
church to pay homage to his memory. 79 The failure of Germanus’ mis-
sion caused no breach between the Gallic bishop and the imperial court,
nor did Constantius modify his positive portrait of the court (the contrast
with Martin, leaving the court of Magnus Maximus with grief and sighs,
80
is sharp ). It is difficult to construe a message pertinent to times of crisis
from this harmonious tone. The imperial court is pious, merciful, and
just; the Alans are no more and no less than standard literary barbarians,
of a group which was to play no very significant part in the affairs of
late fifth-century Gaul; the Armorican provincials, though ‘flighty and
undisciplined’, were delivered from the ‘treachery’ of Tibatto by the wise
‘circumspection’ of the imperial court; even Tibatto is only a device in-
troduced to deflect both the blame and the punishment of the rebellion.
Crisis is far from the literary world of Constantius. The author’s portrait
of the times is more positive. There is no compelling reason to believe
that Constantius’ heroic portrait of Germanus was intended as a model
for contemporary bishops, any more than the bishop’s more fantastic as-
pect as a thaumaturge was seriously meant for imitation (indeed, it is
noteworthy that Constantius’ representation of Germanus’ ascesis, one
aspect which could serve as a practical model for contemporary bish-
ops, is both brief and mild, and largely restricted to his hospitality). 81
The heroic image of Germanus was surely intended to complement, not
to challange, his role as a miracle-worker; journeys may determine the
structure and the climax of the work, but comfortably familiar miracles
fill more pages. 82 Accounts of miracles served an important role in the
cult of saints, to be sure, but at a literary level they also served as a form
83
of entertainment, with strong ties to the genre of romance. The heroic
aspectof Vita Germani may be best construed as a complement to the ro-
mance elementof hagiographic miracles. Epic imagery was popular with
the Gallic literate elite of the late fifth century, as Sidonius’ panegyrics

79 80
Constantius, Vita Germani, 42–4. Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi iii, 13.
81
Cf. Geary, Living with the Dead, 22.
82
The assessmentof Chadwick, Poetry and Letters, 265–6, 273, too brusquely dismisses the im-
portance of miracles in Vita Germani. Christensen, ‘Germanus and Fifth-Century History’,
227–8.
83
H. Delehaye, Legends of the Saints, trans. V. M. Crawford (1907; repr. Norwood, PA, 1974), 3–4;
Borius, Introduction to Vie de Germain, 32; Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading
the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover and London, 1987); van Uytfanghe, ‘Heiligenverehrung ii’,
168–72.
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