ArcadiaBecomes Jerusalem:

Angelic Caverns and Shrine Conversion

at Monte Gargano
By John Charles Arnold

The cyberpilgrim may tour the Shrine of St. Michael on Monte Gargano at http://
www.gargano.it/sanmichele/. A few clicks of the mouse bring into view the thir-
teenth-century octagonal bell tower with its mullioned windows set within Gothic
arches. The nave, contemporary with the tower, appears with its portico of 1395
and its famous epigraph: "Impressive is this place. Here is the house of God and
the gate of heaven (terribilis est locus; iste hic domus dei est et porta coeli)." The
terracotta roof tiles of the surrounding town of Monte Sant'Angelo crowd about
the base of this "Gate of Heaven" found in Apulia. Among the untold numbers
of visitors to the mountain Pope John Paul II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, and
St. Francis of Assisi have traversed the area on the Garganic promontory in south-
eastern Italy so as to marvel at a numinous grotto encased within the sacred
architecture. According to tradition, around 500 C.E. the "blessed archangel Mi-
chael who always stands in view of the Lord" visited the cavern just north of the
port town of Sipontum, today Manfredonia. The king of Naples and Sicily,
Charles I of Anjou (1266-85), honored Michael with the nave and bell tower
found there today. Lombard kings in Pavia and dukes in Benevento had sponsored
earlier building projects in the seventh century, throwing up a monumental col-
onnaded ingress and portal for the throngs of pilgrims who climbed the moun-
taintop. The Lombard architects in turn had enhanced an existing sixth-century
church, the construction of which apparently the imperial court in Constantinople
had subsidized. This architectural palimpsest adorned a hole in the earth from
which a fiery gust of wind had revealed Michael's presence. From the sixth century
onward, religious travelers journeyed to Apulia from Rome to revere the victor
over Satan (Rev. 12.7), then departed Sipontum to continue on to Palestine.1Such

I thank the anonymous readers of Speculum for their useful and helpful suggestions and comments.
I also wish to thank Professor Lynda Coon of the University of Arkansas for her friendship, unflagging
support, and tireless editing, all of which made this article possible.
1 Francois Avril and Jean-Rene Gaborit, "L'ItinerariumBernardi monacbi et les pelerinages d'Italie
du Sud pendant le haut moyen-age," Melanges d'arcbhologie et d'bistoire 79 (1967), 269-98, details
the development of the site as a stage in the journey to the Holy Land. The appellation "sanctus
Domini archangelus" occurs in the Liber de apparitione Sancti Micbaelis in Monte Gargano 2: see
Acta sanctorum (henceforth cited as AASS), Sept. 8:61-62, or MGH SSrerLangob pp. 540-43. The
latter edition is cited here, abbreviated as Liber. Michael's self-designation, "qui in conspectu Domini
semper adsisto," paraphrases Tob. 12.15, where the angel Raphael reveals himself as "ego enim sum
Rafahel angelus unus ex septem qui adstamus ante Dominum." Michael's conquest of Satan is re-
counted in verses 7-9 of Rev. 12: "et factum est proelium in caelo. Michahel et angeli eius proelia-
bantur cum dracone et draco pugnabat et angeli eius. et non valuerunt neque locus inventus est eorum
amplius in caelo. et proiectus est draco ille magnus serpens antiquus qui vocatur Diabolus et Satanas

Speculum75 (2000) 567

568 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
an aura accrued to the cavern that not only did Anglo-Saxons travel to south-
eastern Italy and carve their names on the walls in runes, but even fourteenth-
century Icelanders could describe the grotto with some accuracy.2The Garganic
cavern owed its widespread fame to a hagiographical treatment of Michael's vis-
itation, the Liberde apparitioneSanctiMichaelisin Monte Gargano.3
An analysis of that text reveals the hagiographer's concern with a "rhetoric of
landscape." The archangel, in fact, consecrated as fitting for Christian pilgrimage
a particular site. The angelic fire illuminated a mountain deemed sacred by the
local inhabitants since the Bronze Age.4 This discursive treatment of topography
provides important evidence for one specific shrine conversion in late antiquity.
The Liber de apparitione presents Christian motives for pilgrimage to the site by
manipulation of traditional descriptions of sacred landscape drawn from Vergil's
Aeneid; it also incorporates such mythic patterns as miraculous animal healing
and cattle theft as instantiated in epic and pastoral poetry. A comparison of the
meaning of cattle rustling and landscape features within their pre-Christian and
Christian contexts reveals the process by which one ancient sanctuary responded
to "Christianization."

THE LIBER DE APPARITIONE

The earliest witnesses to the received text of the Liber appear in two ninth-
century manuscripts from St. Gall (MSS 558 and 550) and a contemporary hom-
iliary of Ottobeuren, most likely copied in the region of Benevento.s Rabanus

qui seducituniversumorbem.proiectusest in terramet angelieiuscum illo missisunt."The datingof

the apparitionto the 490s restsupon an insertionin Beneventanscriptwithinthe biographyof Pope
GelasiusI (492-96) foundin a tenth/eleventh-century minusculecopy of the Liberpontificalis,Vatican
City,BibliotecaApostolicaVaticana,Vat. lat. 3764, fol. 4r-v; the text is entitledVitaesummorum
pontificum.LouisDuchesnecalledattentionto the insertion,Liberpontificalis53 (Paris,1886), as did
EliasA. Lowe, The BeneventanScript,2, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1980), p. 148. The gloss reflectsa tenth-
centuryattemptto link the angelicappearanceto the episcopacyof Lawrence,patronsaintof Sipon-
tum, reputedlyappointedby the emperorZeno (474-75, 476-91). The bishop'sVitamaiorascribes
his ordinationto Gelasius,thus linkingboth Sipontumand the Garganicshrineto the Romanepis-
copate.The two vitae of Lawrenceappearin AASSFeb. 2:57-62. Ada Campionediscussesthe dates
and aims of the texts in "Storiae santita nelle due Vitaedi Lorenzovescovo di Siponto,"Vetera
Christianorum 29 (1992), 169-213.
2 Carlo Alberto Mastrelli, "Le iscrizioni runiche," in II Santuario di S. Michele sul Gargano dal VI

al IX secolo, ed. CarloCarlettiand GiorgioOtranto(Bari,1980), pp. 319-36; and Ole Widding,"St.

Micheleat Garganoas SeenfromIceland,"AnalectaRomanaInstitutiDanici 13 (1984), 79.
3 See n. 1 above.

4 Elise
Baumgarteldescribedburialassemblages(includingbronzeweaponsand ceramicdrinking
cups)contemporary with signsof BronzeAgehabitationof a cavernon the northernshoreof Gargano:
The Cave of Manaccora, Monte Gargano, Papers of the British School at Rome 19 and 21, n.s. 6/2
and 8/1 (New York,1951), pp. 24-38.
s Vito Sivo, "Ricerchesulla tradizionemanoscrittae sul testo dell'Apparitiolatina,"in Culto e
insediamenti micaelici nell'Italia meridionale fra tarda antichita e medioevo: Atti del Convegno inter-
nazionale, Monte Sant'Angelo, 18-21 novembre 1992, ed. Carlo Carletti and Giorgio Otranto (Bari,
1994), pp. 95-106, reviewsthe manuscripttraditionof the Liber.ReginaldGregoirediscussesthe
homiliary: Les homeliaires du moyen age: Inventaire et analyse des manuscrits, Rerum Ecclesiastica-
rumDocumenta,seriesmaior,Fontes6 (Rome,1966), p. 142, text of the Apparitioon p. 156. On the
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 569
Maurus included the Liber among the volume of homilies he compiled at Fulda
c. 816 and dedicated to Haistulf, archbishop of Cologne.6 Scholars, however, long
have recognized the composite nature of this account of Michael's deeds. Its de-
scription of the sanctuary as composed of two caverns with the main entrance
through the more northerly of the pair harks back to a time prior to the seventh-
century renovations sponsored by the Lombard courts at Pavia and Benevento.7
The use of many varieties of clausulae in combination with ictus points not only
to a period of composition when the full range of "Asiatic" metrical rhythms were
used with accentuation but also to one before their standardization into the four
clausal formulae of the medieval cursus.8
The sentences, for example, of the second section of the text, that which details
Michael's fiery apparition, end with various patterns, in particular that of creticus
+ trochaeus (long-short-long-long-short).9 A variety of clausulae terminate the
descriptions of the grotto and its environs, which occur in the fifth section. The
molossus, with its "long-long-long" pattern on the final participle erectis, added
emphasis and weightiness to the concept of the angelic sanctuary "with walls not
built in the manner of human workmanship (non in morem operis humani pari-
etibus erectis)."10The dicoreus prevented any suggestions of levity caused by final
short quantities. The doubled "long-short" pattern on the single word angulosa,
for example, imparted an impression of strength in regard to the "craggy house,"
that place of refuge where God and the angels might "love purity (diligere puri-
tatem)."11
If the extant Liber represents cumulative redactions of a work shaped and am-
plified over several centuries, only achieving its final form c. 800, the internal

date referas well to SirAlfredChesterBeatty,The Libraryof A. ChesterBeatty:A DescriptiveCat-

alogueof the WesternManuscriptsby GeorgeMillar,1 (Oxford,1927), pp. 2-18, who opts for the
late eighthcentury.BernhardBischoffchooses the early ninth:Die siidostdeutschenSchreibschulen
und Bibliothekenin der Karolingerzeit (Leipzig,1940-80), pp. 52-53.
6 De
festispraecipuisitem de virtutibus,Homily32, PL 110:60-63.
7 AntonioQuacquarelli, "Gliapocrifineiriflessidi un graffitodel Calvarioe il 'Liberde apparitione,'"
in IISantuariodi S. Michele(henceforthcitedas Quacquarelli), pp. 207-54, at p. 237. MarcoTrotta,"I
luoghidel 'Liberde apparitione,'" in Cultoe insediamenti, pp. 126-49, correlatesarchitectural descrip-
tionsin the text with constructionat the site undertakenduringthe sixth andseventhcenturies.
8
Quacquarelli,pp. 232-37. HeinrichLausbergsummarizesclausaltheoryand practicein Hand-
book of LiteraryRhetoric(henceforthcitedas Lausberg),trans.MatthewBliss,AnnemiekJansen,and
David Orton(Leiden,1998), pp. 434-58. Seealso MathieuNicolau, Lorigine "cursus"rythmiqueet
les debutsde l'accentd'intensiteen latin (Paris,1930), or GudrunLindholm,Studienzum mittella-
teinischenProsarhythmus (Stockholm,1963).
9 Quacquarelliprovidesa clausal analysisof the Liber;see p. 235 for the analysisof section 2.
Lausbergdetails the creticus-trochaeus pattern,pp. 443-48, one favoredby Quintilian,Institutio
oratoria9.4.97, ed. andtrans.H. E. Butler,LoebClassicalLibrary(hereafterdesignatedLCL;London,
1922): "Spondeusquoque,quo plurimumest Demosthenesusus, non eodemmodo semperse habet.
Optimepraecedeteum creticus."
10Quacquarelli,p. 230; Lausberg,p. 443; Quintilian9.4.83: "Horumpedumnullusnon in orati-
onemvenit,sed quo quiquesunttemporibusplenioreslongisquesyllabismagisstabiles,hoc graviorem
faciuntorationem,brevesceleremac mobilem."
pp. 230-31; Lausberg,p. 443; Quintilian9.4.97: "Non nihil est, quod supradixi
1 Quacquarelli,
multumreferre,unoneverbosint duo pedescomprehensian uterqueliber.Sic enimfit forte Criminis
causa;molleArchipiratae,mollius,si tribrachyspraecedat,facilitates,temeritates."
570 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
evidence of the clausulae suggests the mid-sixth century as a date for the original
composition of the second and fifth sections, if not the entire text.12This accords
with the period during which the imperial court in Constantinople sponsored
building projects at the sanctuary in the wake of the Gothic War.13Perhaps a
resonance of those tumultuous events of the early sixth century appears in the
third section of the Liber, where Michael displays the military qualities associated
with his Greek title of archistrategos.14The conqueror of Satan led his "Chosen
People" of Sipontum to victory on the battlefield. The victory, however, is against
neither Goths nor imperial forces. Instead, Michael's heavenly arrows vanquished
"pagans" from Naples, a designation rendered more enigmatic by the seemingly
deliberately ahistorical nature of the account.15 The lack of dates or verifiable
personages within the narrative militates against Giorgio Otranto's persuasive sug-
gestion that Michael's victory on the battlefield concurred with a defeat of Byzan-
tine troops by a combined Sipontan-Beneventan army led by Duke Grimoald I of
Benevento (647-71).16 Despite assertions by medieval authors to the contrary, the
anonymous bishop to whom Michael revealed himself in dreams as inspector and
custos of the mountain cannot be firmly identified as Lawrence of Sipontum.17
The one character aside from Michael who is named in the text, the dominus
Garganus, cannot be established as Elvius Emmanuelis (d. 528), an actual magister
militum who lived in Sipontum in 506. The epigraphs cannot be found that would
support this attempt to construe Garganus as an eponymous hero.18
If these literal and historicist readings have revealed no specific year in regard

12
Quacquarelli, p. 237. Giorgio Otranto, "II 'Liber de apparitione,' il santuario di san Michele sul
Gargano e i Longobardi del Ducato di Benevento," in Santuari e politica nel mondo antico, ed. Marta
Sordi (Milan, 1983), pp. 210-45, investigates the evolution of the text.
13 Quacquarelli; Trotta, "I luoghi."
14 The title archistrategos, which denotes the angel who appeared to Joshua prior to the Battle of

Jericho (Josh. 5.14), is conferred upon Michael in "The Miracles of St. Michael the Archangel at
Chonae," Bibliotheca hagiographica Gracea (henceforth cited as BHG), 3rd ed., ed. Francois Halkin
(Brussels, 1957), no. 1282 (or "AtiryiiqxoT ay&itou ApXtnnou Kai1tpoculavdptou"),ed. FranqoisNau,
"Analyse des manuscrits grecs palimpsestes Paris, suppl. 480 et Chartres, 1753, 1754," in Patrologia
Orientalis 4/5:231-78. The earliest known redaction of this text is preserved as the underwriting in
eighth-century uncials found on fols. 14, 11, 24, 27, 5, 4, and 3 of Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de
France, suppl. gr. 480. Nau also provides the eleventh-century Latin translation undertaken at Mount
Athos by Leo, monk of Amalfi, found in BnF lat. 11753, fols. 221v-226v (Bibliotheca hagiographica
Latina [Brussels,1898-19011, no. 5946), MiraculumSanctiMichaelisArchangeliin Conas. Max
Bonnet published an edition of the same redaction with the Latin translation, "Narratio de miraculo
a Michaele Archangele Chonis patrato," Analecta Bollandiana 8 (1889), 289-307. In the same article
he offered a recension attributed to Simeon Metaphrastes (BHG 1284), pp. 308-16. The version
ascribed to Sisinius (BHG 1283) appears in AASS Sept. 8:14-47.
15 Liber 3: "Haec inter et
Neapolitae, paganis adhuc ritibus oberrantes, Sepontinos et Beneventanos,
qui 250 milibus a Seponto distant, bello lacessere temptant."
16 Jean Stilting, in the eighteenth century, was the first to link the hagiographical battle with the

attacks upon Gothic Italy that the imperial court orchestrated between 490 and 530: AASS Sept. 8:57-
58. Otranto presents a historiographical overview as he offers the Lombard context involving Gri-
moald I: "II 'Liber de apparitione,' " pp. 223-36.
17 Cf. n. 1 above. Liber 2: "sanctus Domini
archangelus episcopum per visionem alloquitur, dicens:
... Locumque hunc in terra incolasque servare instituens, hoc volui probare inditio omnium quae ibi
geruntur ipsiusque loci esse inspectorem atque custodem."
18 "
Otranto, "II 'Liber de apparitione,' pp. 215 and 216.
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 571
to the foundation of a Christian sanctuary on the mountain, mythic analyses have
fared little better. The second section of the Liber relates the story of the lord
Garganus and his wayward bull. The owner, angered that his taurus had wandered
away from the herd and not returned home, tracked the beast to a "spelunca at
the top of the mountain," where he seized his bow and let fly a poisoned arrow
at the errant bovine. Disguised as a fiery gust of wind, Michael turned the weapon
back upon "the one who had loosed it." The locals, stupefied by this prodigy,
alerted an unnamed bishop to whom Michael later appeared in a dream.
French and Italian scholars have treated this account as a naive or folkloric
kernel that transmits the historical event of the conversion of the site. Such a
reading becomes speculation given the absence of pre-Christian artifacts from the
cavern.19Michel Rouche would locate there a Mithraeum: Michael's salvific acts
averted the central ritual of the Taurobolium.20Rouche further argued that Chris-
tianization caused an abandonment of local, chthonic deities for the new "solar"
monotheistic God and his angelic helper. The glowing, heavenly messenger took
under his tutelage the wandering bull, symbolic of fertility rites long celebrated at
the mountain.21Italian scholars generally concur with this assessment, maintaining
that local reverence for Michael the Archangel supplanted, or, better, substituted
for, preexisting ancient cults.22To indicate such a process, the eminent Lombardist
Gian Piero Bognetti coined the term esaugurazione: local veneration for the arch-
angel "grew out" of preexisting religious practices.23
To be sure, the bodiless Michael claimed as his own an exalted landscape long
associated with heroic corporeal remains. As early as the third century B.C.E.,the
Alexandrian tragedian Lycophron had spoken of oneiric tombs at the mountain.
A "false" tomb of Calchas (the seer who revealed to the Homeric heroes the reason
for the pestilential attack of Apollo's arrows in Iliad 1.79-118) lay near the grave
of a son of Asclepius. This child of the healing god Asclepius, Podaleirius (present
at Troy but unnamed by Lycophron), spoke through dreams to all who slept on
his tomb wrapped in the hides of sheep. The local inhabitants invoked this spirit
when they "washed the sick with the waters of Althaenus," a stream flowing near
the site.24 Strabo, the geographer of the first century C.E., spoke of incubation

19Preclassical
pottery fragments and carbon, however, were discovered within the grotto in 1929:
Cosimo D'Angela, "Gli scavi nel santuario," in II Santuario di S. Michele, p. 376. The entire article
recounts the discoveries of the amateur excavations, which began in 1949 and continued into the
1960s (pp. 355-78). See also Matteo Sansone, "Panorama archeologico del Gargano," Studi di storia
pugliese in onore di Giuseppe Chiarelli, 1, ed. Michele Paone (Galatina, 1972), pp. 121-96.
20 Michel Rouche, "Le combat des saints
anges et des demons: La victoire de Saint Michel," in Santi
e demoni nell'alto medioevo occidentale, 1, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto
Medioevo 36 (Spoleto, 1989), pp. 533-71.
21 Ibid. The concept derives from Georges Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion (Chicago, 1970), and

is summarized by Covington Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology, rev. ed. (Berkeley,
Calif., 1973), pp. 1-19.
22
See Otranto's summary in Italia meridionale e Puglia paleocristiane (Bari, 1991), pp. 190-97.
23 Gian Piero
Bognetti, "I 'loci sanctorum' e la storia della chiesa nel regno dei Longobardi," in L'eta
longobarda, 3 (Milan, 1937), p. 310.
24
Lycophron, Akhgav§pa 1047-55, in Callimachus, Lycophron and Aratus, ed. and trans. Alex-
ander W. Mair, LCL (Cambridge, Mass., 1969): "'O A'Aib0voviv KayKiKa&X%avtros r&cov, / uotiv
a6Xq0p6v artpoq, vo68§pi0ov/ g:v£v 67i' 6atc1OtaOt6y'raeCt K6vtV. / 8opa(q 6§6 ilRkXv c6tp3ov
572 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
practices at the tomb of Calchas found on the "crest" (ko6po;)named "Driun."
He placed at the base of the mountain the tomb of Podaleirius; from that heroic
grave, he wrote, flowed a stream that served as a "universal remedy for the diseases
of animals."25
These ancient authors, however, make no mention of a cavern. Italian scholars
assume that the Michaeline cult must have grown out of existing faith practices,
and since the angel located his sanctuary in the grotto, there must have been a
Roman temple there.26Lycophron, however, specifically refers to a zrapoS(grave)
and Strabo to 'pcpa (tombs of heroes), surely round domed structures located
within a distinct space (a Oo6ko within a z:Egtvos). Even though specific flpcpa
have not been discovered on Monte Gargano, it is conceivable that they stood in
some proximity to the cave. Christians may have occupied an unused or aban-
doned grotto so as to insinuate themselves into existing sacred space.27Synoecism
certainly acted as an important tool of Christianization in Asia Minor as well as
in Athens.28In that ancient Greek city Christians did not reconsecrate the temple
of Asclepius, for instance, but located a church within the temenos. The two spir-
itual centers coexisted until the last quarter of the fifth century.29
None of this means that cultic activity could not have occurred at the grotto,
just that the wording of the sources speaks against the performance of heroic
sacrifices and incubation at that place. Caverns certainly attracted worshipers and
most particularly in rural areas. Excavations of two important Attic caverns, the
"Vari Cave" on Mount Hymettus dedicated to Pan, the nymphs, and Apollo and
the other Cave of Pan on Mount Parnes, suggest a paradigm distinct from the

/yKotgIo)C;vo1t / %pf76iYt KaO' icvov c&at vTIhPcpTr9p&6tv,/ v6CTov 68'diKc6Tlq Aauviotq Krck0nlcyTat,
'AkOaivou poai( / pc/yo6vai6§ilc7xnv 'HCniouy6vov / caxoiotcKal7i toluvatct
/ 6rav KalcKuccaivovT6cq
nIpeu6evtn 0oX£ev."
25
Strabo, rFoypacpiK6, C 284 = 6.3.9, ed. and trans. Horace Leonard Jones and John Robert
Sitlington Sterrett, LCL (London, 1917-49): "6eiKvvrat 6 TrfqAauviaq cepi X6'pov,0( ovoga Aplov,
ipCpa Tob,UvK6kXavToq £n' lKpqtfi Kcopucpfi- vayifout 68'aclcp ,c kava Kptbv oi CuavTeu6ieuvot,
cyKcoIt6eievoIt v T'p 86pgaT TO§6 no6a etpiou OU K&Twcpbo, T!piOni, 861tov T OUa aX6Trl;qO6ov
oTa60iouVS 6KaTL6Opl 8' 6t acrTo ioTdjLtov76cvaKceq npbqr TCq6vOpeji6dcov v6oovq."
26 Particularly Francesco Fischetti, Mercurio, Mithra, Michael (Monte Sant'Angelo, 1973), pp. 15-
19: "che di basilica si continua a parlare ora, a Monte Sant'Angelo, e di basilica si e parlato, nel solo
senso possibile per gli antichi tempi: grande edificio composto essenzialmente di una sola navata, a
volte preceduta da porticus, che serviva ai Romani come luogo di riunione. Non pub essere semplice
coincidenza che l'antico manoscritto dell'Apparitio parli di una basilica grandis, preceduta da una
longa porticus ... in realta basilica abbandonata o ancora frequentata per culti misterici."
27Jean-Michel Spieser highlights the dwindling attention paid to traditional cult sites in late-antique
Greece ("La Christianisation des sanctuaires paiens en Grece," in Neue Forschungen in griechischen
Heiligtiimern, ed. Ulf Jantzen [Tiibingen, 1974], pp. 309-20), a phenomenon that mirrors that found
in fourth-century Gaul; see Aline Rouselle, Croire et guerir: La foi en Gaule dans l'antiquite tardive
(Paris, 1990).
28 Frank
Trombley points to the coexistence of the cults of Sarpedonius and St. Thecla in Seleucia,
and similar possibilities at Phrygian Combusta and the spring dedicated to Michael found at Chaire-
topa, near Colossae: Hellenic Religion and Christianization, 1 (Leiden, 1993), pp. 152-55.
29 Arja Karivieri, "The Christianization of an Ancient Pilgrimage Site: A Case Study of the Athenian

Asklepieion," in Akten des XII. internationalen Kongresses fur christliche Archdologie, 2, Jahrbuch
fur Antike und Christentum 20/2 and Studi di Antichita Cristiana 52 (Miinster and Vatican City, 1995),
pp. 898-905.
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 573
synoecism discerned at the Athenian Asclepeion. Visits to the Vari Cave ceased
during the second century B.C.E., to resume only during the period of Christiani-
zation. Coins indicate renewed activity from the reign of Constantine through that
of Arcadius. The inscriptions of late Roman names and relief carvings found at
the grotto on Mount Parnes demonstrate non-Christian worship there well into
the fifth century. The presence of Christian markings on numerous votive lamps
excavated at both sites evidences little more than that non-Christians often used
Christian lamps.30In Attica, at least, pagans seemed to pay increased attention to
rural caverns as places of worship as Christians took control of urban sanctuar-
ies.31
These differing scenarios of shrine usage do not support the concept of esau-
gurazione so much as they make clear the options that must be considered when
analyzing the uses of sacred space in a multireligious society, where varieties of
faith practice often overlapped in particulars as well as generalities. Only archae-
ological evidence could truly ascertain when or whether the cavern on Monte
Gargano witnessed non-Christian rituals. Michael's salvation of the wandering
taurus reveals such details neither explicitly nor implicitly. An intertextual and
discursive analysis establishes a more useful understanding of the bull story and
the hagiographer's intent when he included it. The author's sources and reasons
for their deployment emerge when unpacking the thematic strands of this section
and tracing the origins of textual citations. A comparison of the hagiographer's
pre-Christian and Christian sources reveals a naive bit of folklore as a sophisti-
cated blending of Christian exegetics with mythic and thematic strands drawn
from the classical pastoral genre. This discourse refashions pastoral themes into
a foundation legend, then advertises this Christian pilgrimage attraction. It also
makes use of ascetic advice to instruct Christians as to the need for traveling there.

VERGILREFASHIONED

The argument that Christian writers of the fifth/sixth centuries constructed de-
votional and didactic texts through a transformation of generic structures, plots,
themes, and characters excerpted from pre-Christian, or "classical," writings is
hardly an unexplored topic. When Hippolyte Delehaye discussed in 1905 the in-
clusion within hagiographical texts of "pagan survivals and reminiscences," that
scholar of hagiography justified their study as a solution of the question whether
an "expression of ancient cultus [survived] under a Christian form."32If the oddly
ahistorical style of the Liber has compelled Rouche, Otranto, and others to spec-

30
Garth Fowden, "City and Mountain in Late Roman Attica," Journal of Hellenic Studies 108
(1988), 56-57; and Richard Rothaus, "Christianization and De-paganization: The Late Antique Crea-
tion of a Conceptual Frontier," in Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. Ralph W. Mathisen and
Hagith S. Sivan (Brookfield, Vt., 1996), pp. 299-305.
31 Fowden, "City and Mountain." The notion of a dynamic sacred landscape in late antiquity accords

well with Susan Alcock's contentions in regard to that of second-century Greece: Graecia Capta: The
Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge, Eng., 1993).
32
Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Virginia M. Crawford (Notre Dame, Ind.,
1961), p. 187.
574 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
ulate about the cavern's pre-Christian use, the stylistic problem also provides a
qualified affirmation if analyzed from a literary standpoint. Delehaye did recognize
the discursive qualities of the hagiographical genre, noting that classical material
found its way into Christian texts as the "stream of literary activity [carried]along
with it the debris of earlier ages."33More recent work has pointed out that this
classical "debris" plays an important structural role in late-antique texts. The
apocryphal Acts of the Apostle Andrew, for example, emerged from plot lines,
characters, and even textual citations drawn from the Odyssey and various Pla-
tonic dialogues.34 The fourth-century poet Prudentius made use of similar tech-
niques to construct accounts of Christian saints, "[imposing] patterns from myth
and legend onto the lives of his martyrs."35As Martha Malamud has stressed in
her work on Prudentius, the paucity of information on the "poetic goals and
techniques, critical assumptions, and methods" that informed late-antique litera-
ture obscures the fact that its authors worked within "a highly developed and
articulated literary tradition," one so well understood by its audience that subtle
manipulations of language created a "commonly-agreed shorthand with which to
sum up and render manageable strictly contemporary situations."36
The Garganic hagiographer had in mind such a "shorthand" when he re-imaged
his cavern through the repackaging of pastoral discourse. In doing so, he merely
conformed to a literary trend essayed by such fourth-century Christian authors as
Ambrose of Milan and Paulinus of Nola. As bishop of Milan, Ambrose provided
an exegesis of the Creation story in Genesis through a corpus of preached sermons.
A reworked version published as Hexameron incorporated copious citations and
allusions not only to Vergil's Aeneid but also the Eclogues and, more particularly,
the Georgics. When discoursing on, for example, God's creation of winged crea-
tures during the fifth day, Ambrose provided a prose paraphrase of Georgic 4,
discerning in Vergil's treatment of apian society an allegory of the Christian
heaven. As a symbol of God, the bee king owed his position neither to lot nor to
election but instead to the "huge size and appearance of his body" and his "gen-
erosity of character."37Christ likewise ousted Apollo and the Muses as objects of

33 Ibid.
34 Dennis Ronald MacDonald, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew
(Oxford,1994).
35 Martha Malamud, A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1989), p. 6.
36
Malamud, p. 4, quoting Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Calif.,
1982), p. 92.
37 Exameron
5.21.68, CorpusScriptorumEcclesiasticorumLatinorum(henceforthcited as CSEL)
32/1, ed. KarlSchenkl(Vienna,1897), p. 190: "apibusautemrex naturaeclarisformaturinsignibus,
ut magnitudine corporis praestet et specie, tum quod in rege praecipuum est, morum mansuetudine."
For details of composition and publication, see the introduction of John Savage to his English trans-
lation, Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, Fathers of the Church 42 (New
York, 1961), pp. v-ix; and Steven Oberhelman, Rhetoric and Homiletics in Fourth-Century Christian
Literature (Atlanta, Ga., 1991), pp. 21-62. Michael Roberts discusses paraphrase technique in Biblical
Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 1985). Vergil suggested physical beauty
and military prowess as a basis for kingship: "Verum ubi ductores acie revocaveris ambo, / deterior
qui visus, eum, ne prodigus obsit, / dede neci; melior vacua sine regnet in aula. / alter erit maculis auro
squalentibus ardens; / nam duo sunt genera: hic melior insignis et ore / et rutilis clarus squamis; ille
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 575
invocation in various proemia of the poems written by Paulinus to commemorate
the festival of St. Felix at Nola.38 The performative aspect of the natalicia perhaps
contributed to the epic approach to their subject, not only in terms of length, but
also in the use of hexameters and Vergilian citations.39 While the poet of the
Georgics may have created an unconscious element of irony when he applied epic
hexameters to the mundane business of farming, Paulinus unabashedly used the
same technique to treat the banal theme of cattle theft and the intercession of Felix
for the return of the oxen. The intentional humor caused by the juxtaposition of
lowly subject matter and compositional techniques appropriate to aristocratic
tastes doubtless appealed to a rustic audience who had gathered to honor a patron
who cured their cattle of diseases as often as he did their children.40Paulinus's
assertion that in recounting the plight of the poor farmer and the return of his
stolen boves he merely referred to one astonishing miracle out of many must have
rung true with those who so often led home those once-ill beasts made "frisky"
by Felix.41The poet's allusion to a dossier of miracle stories grounded his account
in a preexisting truth, much as an anonymous panegyrist based his claims to the
divinity of the emperor Maximian on his kinship with the Pinarian gens and its
association with Hercules. The orator derived his information about the family
that performed the rites of Hercules at the Ara Maxima in Rome from the com-
mentary tradition on book 8 of the Aeneid.42

horridus alter / desidia latamque trahens inglorius alvum" (Georgic 4.88-94, ed. R. A. B. Mynors
[Oxford, 1969], with all further citations from that text). On the reception of Vergil among the church
fathers, particularly Augustine, refer to Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the
Mind of Augustine (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
38 Charles Witke, Numen litterarum: The Old and the New in Latin Poetry from Constantine to

Gregory the Great, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 5 (Leiden, 1971), pp. 75-80.
39
Ibid.; Reinhart Herzog, "Probleme der heidnisch-christlichen Gattungskontinuitat am Beispiel des
Paulinus von Nola," in Christianisme et formes litteraires de l'antiquite tardive en occident, Fondation
Hardt pour l'Etude de l'Antiquite Classique 23 (Geneva, 1977), pp. 373-412; Patrick G. Walsh, The
Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, Ancient Christian Writers 40 (New York, 1975), pp. 1-30, and "Pau-
linus of Nola and Virgil," Studia patristica 15 (1984), 117-21; and Gerald Malsbary, "Vergilian
Elements of Christian Poetic Language," in Eulogia: Melanges offerts a Antoon A. R. Bastiaensen a
l'occasion de son soixante-cinquieme anniversaire, Instrumenta Patristica 24 (The Hague, 1991), pp.
175-82.
40 All translations are from
Walsh, Poems. Paulinus, Carmina 18.198-201, CSEL 30, ed. Wilhelm
Hartel (Vienna, 1894): "uideas etiam de rure colonos / non solum gremio sua pignora ferre paterno,
/ sed pecora aegra manu saepe introducere secum / et sancto quasi conspicuo mandare licenter." On
the humorous aspects of the poem see W. Evenepoel, "Saint Paulin de Nole, Carm. 18,211-468:
Hagiographie et humour," in La narrativa cristiana antica, Studia Ephemeridis "Augustinianum" 50
(Rome, 1995), pp. 507-20. Dennis Trout speaks to the pastoral aims of the nataliciae in "Town,
Countryside and Christianization at Paulinus' Nola," in Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, pp. 175-
86.
41 Carmina 18.204-10: "et uere
plerumque breui sanata sub ipso / limine laeta suis iumenta reducere
tectis. / sed quia prolixum et uacuum percurrere cuncta, / quanta gerit Felix miracula numine Christi,
/ unum de multis opus admirabile promam / innumeris paribus, sed ab uno pende relicta, / quae uirtus
eadem gessit distantia causis."
42 Witke, Numen litterarum, p. 77. An anonymous panegyrist alluded to the myth of Cacus and
Hercules that established the Ara Maxima: "Mamertini (?) panegyricus Maximiano Augusto dictus,"
in In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, trans. C. E. V.
Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 10.1, pp. 53-54 and 523.
576 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
This appeal to tales, Scripture, or even exegetical tradition as received versions
of historical events gave rise to a Christian topos of a "preexisting book" that
lent authority to the account in question.43 Such a libellus reputedly found in the
Garganic sanctuary had "made known to mortals" the ancient events conveyed
by the hagiographer. The reference to the "little book" does not disprove, however,
some preexisting source for the narrated event. A close reading of the story of
Michael and the bull exposes connections with the ancient myth of Hercules and
Cacus, the cattle thief recounted by King Evander in Aeneid 8.184-305, the story
that burnished the fama of the emperor Maximian. Vergil had presented an elab-
orate treatment of a Greek myth adopted early on by Romans to explain the
foundation of the Ara Maxima dedicated to Hercules on the Palatine Hill.44
The Garganic author knew his Vergil, for a tag from Aeneid 3.22-25 appears
in section 5 of the Liber. As did the imperial panegyrist, the hagiographer could
have known the Cacus myth through the late-antique Vergilian commentaries of
which remain those compiled by Servius and Tiberius Claudius Donatus.4s
Whether or not Paulinus of Nola knew the commentary tradition on Aeneid 8,
he quoted from the epic, as did other late-antique Christian authors such as Je-
rome, Ausonius, Arnobius, and Sidonius.46The fact that tags from book 8 even
appeared in epitaphs heightens the possibility that Christianized prose paraphrases
of the myth, similar to Ambrose's adaptation of the Georgics, informed the hagi-
ographer.47Students learned composition by paraphrasing Vergil. Christians cer-
tainly applied the technique to their own scriptures, as attest the late-antique bib-
lical verse epics of Iuvencus, or those of Sedulius, also treated in prose as well.48
Such an approach would have wrung the ideological content from the Vergilian
text, leaving only the bare form of the plot on which to drape Christian charac-
ters.49Such a fabrication could have existed as a short poem, or even epigram,
which reworked portions of the great text. Papyri provide various examples, as
does the Anthologia Latina. That collection includes a funeral oration for Hercules
(in epic verse), replete with summaries of the twelve labors.50Contents of this sort
provided grist for the efforts of students and litterati alike. The Ludes Herculis,
however, breaks off when speaking of the Cretan bull and lacks the passage dealing
with the cattle of Geryon. According to the Aeneid, after Hercules had driven
those cattle from Spain up as far as the Tiber, the monstrous half-man Cacus stole

43
Witke, Numen litterarum, p. 77.
44 As did Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.6-7. Also refer to Jocelyn Penny Small, Cacus and Marsyas in
Etrusco-RomanLegend(Princeton,N.J., 1982), particularlypp. 3-36.
45
Servius,In Vergilii carmina commentarii, ed. GeorgThilo and Hermann Hagen,3 vols. (Leipzig,
1884); and TiberiusClaudiusDonatus, InterpretationesVergilianae,ed. HeinrichGeorges,2 vols.
(Leipzig,1905-6; repr.Stuttgart,1969).
46 PierreCourcelle
presentsa comprehensiveoverviewof citationsfrombook 8 of the Aeneid:Lec-
teurs paiens et lecteurs chretiens de I'Eneide, 1 (Paris, 1984), pp. 567-612.
47
Ibid., p. 567, citing ErnstDiehl, InscriptionesLatinaeChristianaeveteres149.2, 1:39. The tag
"soporaltushabebat"from8.26 ("nox eratet terrasanimaliafessaperomnis/ alituumpecudumque
genussopor altushabebat")appearsin the epitaph"innodiumleti hic sopor altushabet."
48 Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase, pp. 61ff.
49 Walsh,"Paulinusof Nola andVirgil."
50
AnthologiaLatina881, ed. AlexanderRiese (Leipzig,1869), pp. 303-8. Robertsprovidespap-
yrological examples: Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase, pp. 52-53.
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 577
some of them, dragging them to his Aventine grotto by the tail so that their foot-
prints would point outward and fool the owner who tracked them. Hercules,
however, heard the cattle lowing within the cavern and, warding off the fiery
breath of Cacus, struck the cave dweller dead with his fabled club. He then rescued
the herd and continued driving it on toward Greece.
In both Aeneid 8 and the Liber a bull is tracked to a cave on a mountain out
of which blast supernatural fire and wind. Cacus is the son of Vulcan, who, like
Michael, saved animals by means of a blazing intervention. Vulcan the Heavenly
Blacksmith shot out of the broken rock of a volcanic grotto in Sicily to save the
lives of dogs. In the guise of a "full flood of fire," Vulcan would consume the
incense offered by pure-hearted dog owners, thus allowing them to wash their
beasts in a pool of hot pitch found within the cleft.51The pitch cured a disease
called robor, characterized by a spreading paralysis and discharge from the eyes.52
As did his father Vulcan at the canine healing center in Sicily, Cacus "vomited
forth great fire from his mouth,"53for "the conflagration in the breast of his father
Vulcan traveled to that of his son, smoke and flames were coming forth from his
jaws ... and he was burning whatever he touched with his breath."54
Monte Gargano, long recognized as a site of animal healing, did not attract the
fiery Michael because the angel pushed Vulcan or his son Cacus from a cult site
within the grotto. Rather, the cavern itself allowed the convergence in the hagi-
ography of analogous discourses appropriate to the discussion of Michael, Vulcan,
and Cacus.55Christians associated angelic divinity with fire. The liturgy proper to
the archangel's Garganic festival employed an alleluia from the text of Ps. 104.4
(NRSV): "You make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers."56
The men who appeared at the tomb of Christ in the Gospel of Luke were desig-
nated as angels because of their fiery appearance. They were "dressed as if in
lightning" (Luke 24.4; "/Ev x0iQ't aoTpaotolTon").

51 Grattius, Cynegeticon 430-66, in Minor Latin Poets, trans. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff,
LCL(Cambridge,Mass., 1978): "adversisspecibusruptoquee pectoremontis/ venitovansAustriset
multoflumineflammae/ emicatipse ... quaeroborepestis/ acrioraut leto propiorvia?"
52
Pelagonius, Ars veterinaria 294, ed. Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Leipzig, 1980), p. 51: "robur si in
posteriore parte erit, signa haec erunt: crura inter se complicabit, erunt umeri et cervix usque caput
rigida, erunt oculi lacrimantes, sed et caudam rigidam habebit."
53 Aeneid 8.198-99.

54 Donatus
8.195, 2:144. "Vulcani incendia in pectus fili migraverant, exiebant de eius faucibus
fumus et flammae et ... ardebat tamen quod flatibus attigisset."
55 The cavern functions as a
"chronotope," Mikhail Bakhtin's adaptation of Einstein's theory of
relativity, which conceptualizes "the assimilation of real historical time and space in literature": The
Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981), pp. 84-258.
Bakhtin envisioned the chronotope as "the primary means for materializing time in space." "From a
narrative and compositional point of view, this is the place where encounters occur [.. . where] the
webs of intrigue are spun ... where dialogues happen": quoted by Janice Best in "The Chronotope
and the Generation of Meaning in Novels and Paintings," Criticism 36 (1994), 291-92. For the
application of the concept to historical sites and texts, see Richard Flores, "Memory-Place, Meaning,
and the Alamo," American Literary History 10 (1998), 428-43; and Ute Margarete Saine, "Narrative
Description in Marco Polo's 'Travels': A Nonfictional Application of Bakhtin's Chronotope," Journal
of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 11 (1990), 1-17.
56
Sieghild Miiller-Rehle, Missale Beneventanum von Canosa, no. 666 (Regensburg, 1972), p. 149:
"qui facit angelos suos spiritus et ministros suos flammam ignis."
578 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem

Independent evidence suggests that the Cacus legend and its learned exegeses
gave rise to other stories about Michaeline caverns. One such site was found at
Monte Tancia near the monastery of Farfa. According to chronicles and charters
Michael had graced the grotto prior to 774. A local liturgical reading for the
angel's festival at Farfa stated that the entrance to the cavern "lies (pendet) a bit
below the middle of the mountain, and the top of the entrance juts out to an
extended point, the lower part equally so, though liable to break and fall into the
depths below."57 According to Vergil, the lair of Cacus was "hidden on a wild
height," reached by a "cliff which hung from the rock" (8.190: "iam primum
saxis suspensam hanc aspice rupem"). The comments of the Vergilian exegete
Donatus on this passage link the Aeneid with the Farfan lectio: "See the cliff which
nature made hanging (pendentem) from the rock."58 Michael's grotto at Tancia
"hangs" (pendere) on a splintering cliff, as did that of Cacus, a cliff that the Servian
commentator believed could "fall at any moment."59
The textual account of the Tancian tradition further bears the imprint of Ver-
gilian commentary. "A pestiferous serpent held the cavern," as the lectio has it,
and "it was slaying the surrounding Sabine farmers (colonos Sabinensium vicinos)
with its death-bearing breath."60 Servius explained that Cacus "is said to vomit
fire, because he was laying waste to the fields with fire.... He was laying waste
to everything surrounding (vicina omnia populabatur)." The similarities in to-
pographical details are suggestive, but the appearance of the same words within
similar contexts, describing essentially the same set of concepts, is surely not a
coincidence. Some version of the Vergilian text and its classical exegeses either
informed the Christian refashioning of the Cacus legend or passed into the oral
tradition, giving rise to a written account of Michael's appearance at Monte Tan-
cia.
When manipulating these sources, the Garganic hagiographer also incorporated
unmistakable allusions to Christian ascetic writings. The single bull provides an
important clue to the writer's intentions. Vergil specified that Cacus had dragged
away bulls, tauri, and it is a taurus that wandered away alone to Michael's spe-
lunca. The use of taurus is a telling word in Christian discourse, for it is a rare
scriptural word. It occurs most often in the Old Testament, and always in reference
to animal sacrifice.61In addition to these associations with non-Christian rituals,
Vergil used the bull to symbolize untamed male lust. When commenting upon
Georgic 3, Servius said, "In every case there is only one love, it is the same; and
believe that there is one love common to the wolf that is the same as that common
to the horse."62Or in this case, what is common to the bull is common to mankind.

57 Alberto
Poncelet,"SanMicheleal Monte Tancia,"Archiviodella R. SocietaRomanadi Storia
Patria29 (1906), 541-48, at p. 545.
58
Donatus8.190, p. 143: "rupemhancaspicequamsaxis fecit naturapendentem."
59 Servius8.190, p. 227: "SUSPENSAM RUPEMquasiiam iamquelapsuram."
60 "Nam
supramemoratamcriptamserpenspestiferpropternimiamsolitudinempossidebat....
colonos Sabinensiumvicinosmortiferoflatuinterimebat,"ed. Poncelet,"SanMichele,"p. 545.
61Judg.6.25-28, 1 Chron.29.21, 2 Chron.29.21-32, Heb. 9.13.
62
Servius,on Georgic3.244, In VergiliiBucolicaet Georgicacommentarii,ed. GeorgThilo(Leipzig,
1897), p. 295: "AMOROMNIBUSIDEMin unoquoquegenereunusest amor,id est similis:ut puta
in lupisunus amorest, id est similis,item in equis."
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 579

Vergil warned farmers either to close off bulls or to pasture them on distant
mountains, for "the female, being looked upon, gradually seizes his male power
and burns him up" (3.215-16, "carpit enim viris paulatim uritque videndo femi-
na"). Inflamed desire led the bulls to fight and wound one another with their
horns. The winners grew proud; the losers wandered off alone into the mountains,
sleeping upon hard rocks and eating poor fodder (3.230-31). The taurus who
ambled off to Michael did not behave in an unexpected manner. It was not
dragged, however, to the cavern unwillingly, as happened at the hands of Cacus,
nor did it flee there to recover from the wounds of love. This bull "disdained an
association with the gathered herd and wandered away alone."63 "Association"
translates consortia, which often in later Latin conveys the sense of family or
community.64The bull voluntarily left behind the network of familial and com-
munal ties within which he had found meaning and a sense of identity. The met-
onymic signification of taurus has slipped between non-Christian and Christian
usage. The victim of amor, a wounded gladiator who retreats to recover from the
ravages of libido, instead becomes a Christian ascetic who seeks salvation through
the act of anachoresis. The failure to satisfy lust drove the Vergilian bull to hard
rocks and thistles; the Christian taurus found salvation among the same as he
abandoned his desires and subjected himself to the will of God.
Such animal behavior allegorized the relationship between God and the angelic
powers, a relationship made explicit in the commentary tradition on Ps. 8.8-9:
"You have put all things under their feet [the feet of humanity], all sheep and
oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas" (8.6-8, NRSV). "With the heavenly
Virtues and Powers and whole host of Angels bequeathed to [God], with mankind
himself so bequeathed," Augustine of Hippo likewise construed "the flocks sub-
mitted to him." The spirit joined to Christ not only mankind and all of the angels
but also sheep and oxen (boves), which exemplified "holy minds" (animas sanc-
tas). In furthering the metaphor, Augustine called those men boves who "imitate
the angels by evangelizing the word of God." In such a way they behaved as did
the apostles.6 The conceit of the angelic bull certainly enjoyed a circulation in
southern Italy. Augustine's exegesis was known there, as a late-seventh/early-

63
Liber 2: "contigit, taurum, armenti congregis consortia spernentem, singularem incedere solitum
et extremum."
64
Souter, A Glossary of Later Latin, suggests "partaker" or "sharer";Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis
lexicon minus, establishes the communal association.
Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum 8.8-9, PL 36:114-15: "Videtur enim relictis coelestibus Vir-
65

tutibus et Potestatibus et omnibus exercitibus Angelorum, relictis etiam ipsis hominibus, tantum ei
pecora subjecisse; nisi oves et boves intelligamus animas sanctas, vel innocentiae fructum dantes, vel
etiam operantes ut terra fructificet, id est, ut terreni homines ad spiritualem ubertatem regenerentur.
Has ergo animas sanctas, non hominum tantum, sed etiam omnium Angelorum oportet accipere, si
volumus hinc intelligere omnia esse subjecta Domino nostro Jesu Christo; nulla enim creatura subjecta
non erit, cui primates, ut ita dicam, spiritus subjiciuntur.... quoniam ipsi homines non ob aliud boves
dicti sunt, nisi quod evangelizando verbum Dei Angelos imitantur, ubi dictum est: 'Bovi trituranti os
non infrenabis' (Deut. 25.4). Quanto igitur facilius ipsos Angelos nuntios veritatis, boves accipimus.
. . . 'Subjecisti' ergo, inquit, 'oves et boves universas,' id est, omnem sanctam spiritualem creaturam:
in qua etiam sanctorum hominum accipimus qui sunt in Ecclesia."
580 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
eighth-century manuscript of Enarrationes in Psalmum was copied in the region.66
Cassiodorus made use of the text of the African bishop when composing his own
Expositio Psalmorum during the 540s.67When commenting upon the passage, the
Italian exegete did not specifically characterize cattle as either angels or apostles,
although "not only the holy ones are subjected [to God], but flocks as well." While
Cassiodorus here used no direct citations from Augustine, he nevertheless para-
phrased the African's exegeses. Cassiodorus understood boves to "denote preach-
ers who plow[ed] the human breast with heavenly commands." They "made the
harvest of virtue to sprout" much as Augustine's bovine missionaries worked "so
that the earth might bring forth fruit."68
As a co-worker of the angels and an aspiring ascetic, the wayward bull merited
Michael's protection. For that reason "scarcely had the arrow" of Garganus left
the bow than the fiery wind "turned [it] around" and "struck the one who loosed
it."69The hagiographer here personified a section from St. Jerome's Epistle 125,
addressed to the monk Rusticus, which advised him on the proper life of virtue.
As usual, Jerome wrote at length about the monastic virtue of celibacy. He even
suggested that those who could not control their passions be followed unknow-
ingly by another brother who would shout accusations and humiliate them with
insults.70Such a cure, however, should never be undertaken out of malice. When
handled unwisely, evil words created strife within the community and always re-
bounded upon their speaker: "for just as an arrow (sagitta) is sent against hard
matter, it returns not a little upon the sender and wounds the wounder; thus is
fulfilled: 'They have attacked me with a false bow (Ps. 77.57).' "71
The phrase sagitta toxicata further qualifies the character of the wounded archer
Garganus, for it is not merely an ascetic admonition of Jerome that stalks the
Vergilian bull. Sagitta toxicata has no usage in classical Latin literature and is
found but rarely in later texts. The Salic Law levied monetary fines against anyone

66
Lowe saw as a single redaction three partial manuscripts of the Enarrationes: Rome, Biblioteca
Vallicelliana, B. 3811; Vatican City, Ottob. lat. 319; and Monte Cassino CCLXXI (348): "A List of
the Oldest Extant Manuscripts of Saint Augustine," in Miscellanea Agostiniana: Testi e studi pubblicati
a cura dell'Ordine eremitano di S. Agostino, Studi Agostiniani 2 (Rome, 1931), p. 237. See, in the
same volume, Andre Wilmart, "La tradition des grands ouvrages de Saint Augustin," pp. 257-325;
the section on the Enarrationes begins on p. 295.
67 See Patrick Walsh's introduction to his translation of the Expositio Psalmorum: Cassiodorus:

Explanation of the Psalms, 1, Ancient Christian Writers 51 (New York, 1990), p. 7.

68 Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum 8.8, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 97

(Turnhout, 1958), p. 94: " 'Boves' autem praedicatores designant, qui humana pectora mandatis cae-
lestibus exarantes, uirtutum messem germinare fecerunt. Nec vacat quod dicit: 'insuper,' quia non
solum illi sancti subiecti sunt, sed etiam peccatores."
69 Liber 2: "invenit tandem in vertice montis foribus cuiusdam adsistere
speluncae, iraque permotus,
cur solivagus incederet, arrepto arcu appetit illum sagitta toxicata. Quae velud venti flamine retorta,
eum a quo iecta est mox reversa percussit."
70 Jerome, Epistle 125.13, PL 22:1079: "Graecus adolescens erat in coenobio, qui nulla abstinentia,

nulla operis magnitudine flammam poterat carnis extinguere. Hunc periclitantem Pater monasterii hac
arte servavit: imperavit cuidam viro gravi, ut jurgiis atque conviciis insectaretur hominem."
71 Ibid., col. 1083: "Sicut enim
sagitta si mittatur contra duram materiam, nonnunquam in mittentem
revertitur,et vulnerat vulnerantem; illudque completur: 'Facti sunt mihi in arcum pravum.' "
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 581
who "would wish to wound another with a poisoned arrow."72Unless we accept
the intriguing possibility that the Garganic hagiographer was Frankish (or ac-
quainted with Salic law), he would have related toxicatus and cognate forms to
such devilish attributes as heresy or the passions of anger and jealousy.73Perhaps
he recalled the use of this odd tag by Ambrose to describe the effect of the loan
shark upon those who owed him money. The loan shark or usurer (faenerator)
"is like a hunter who has surrounded a wild beast, sure of his prey. You kiss his
head, you embrace his knees and like a deer struck by the poison of an arrow
(sagittae toxico), going forward but a bit, you fall to the ground overcome by the
venom."74The dreaded faenerator, "who pretends to be saddened by your funeral,
but who gladly takes part," stalks the bull and finds his arrow blown back upon
him by the angelic fire. Michael's actions at Monte Gargano replicated his apoc-
alyptic victory over Satan as described in Rev. 12.7. Satan the faenerator found
that his loans of heresy, anger, and jealousy produced no interest. The great arch-
angel circumscribed the sacred mountain and exorcised evil from within that holy
precinct. Much as Hercules had acted as a civilizing force by clubbing to death
the troglodytic Cacus, Michael rendered the site fit for Christian pilgrimage.75The
figure of the archangel took up the clavis of Hercules in the guise of the salvific
fire associated with Cacus and Vulcan. In so doing Michael destroyed Satan the
evil faenerator, as Hercules had the semihomo Cacus. The sanctus archangelus
permitted the followers of Christ to find spiritual healing where local farmers once
had dipped their sick cattle.

THE RHETORICOF LANDSCAPE

Scholars have long maintained that an important aspect of Christianization lay

in the reconfiguration of the landscape. If conversion resulted in any other great
change in the Mediterranean world, it certainly caused a recharting of the sacred
map. The long-haunted groves, springs, and marble temples of antiquity gave way
to churches, monasteries, and pilgrimage sites like Monte Gargano. The loci of
devotional travel, however, developed around the body parts of saints or at least
objects that the holy had touched or worn.76As early as the second century, Chris-
tian faithful had visited the tomb of the martyred Polycarp, praying in the presence

72 Pactus
legisSalicae17.2, MGH LL4/1:76: "si quis alterumde sagittatoxicatapercuterevoluerit
et ei fueritadprobatum,'mallobergoseolandovefasunt,MMD denarios
'et colpuspraetersclupaverit
qui faciuntsolidosLXIIsemisculpabilisiudicetur."
73Apponius,In Canticumcanticorumexpositio 12.80, 106, ed. B. de Vregilleand L. Neyrand,
CorpusChristianorum, SeriesLatina,19 (Turnhout,1986); FulgentiusMythographus,De aetatibus
mundiet hominis5 (Leipzig,1898).
74Ambrose, De Tobia 7.26, CSEL 32/2, ed. Karl Schenkl (Vienna, 1897), p. 532: "quasi uenator,
qui feramcinxerit,securusest praedae.tu osculariscaput,amplecterisgenuaet quasiceruussagittae
toxico ictuspaululumprocedenstandemuictusuenenoprocumbis."
75 BruceHeiden,"LaudesHerculeae: SuppressedSavageryin the Hymnto Hercules,Verg.A. 8.285-
305," American Journal of Philology 108 (1987), 665; and Howard Jacobson, "Cacus and the Cy-
clops," Mnemosyne 42, ser. 4 (1989), 101-2.
76 The classicaccountremainsPeterBrown'sCult
of the Saints:Its Rise and Functionin Late An-
tiquity(Chicago,1981).
582 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
of his remains and begging his patronage before God.77By the sixth century those
traveling near the city of Tours in Gaul found useful as medicine bark scraped
from a tree that once had lain across the road. It had become a contact relic after
the great St. Martin had set it upright.78Angels, however, possessed no bodies. As
such they theoretically left behind no relics. These purely spiritual intelligences
appeared to the intellect as a bodily form so as to reveal messages and carry out
assigned deeds.79Vergil's bull wandered to an isolated cavern not because angelic
body parts could be found there. By its emptiness the grotto proclaimed the truth
of the Resurrection. The angelic grotto would reify textual descriptions of the
rocky cavern in which tradition maintained that Jesus had been buried. Michael
would manifest these allusions when he impressed his ethereal footprints (poste-
rula pusilla) on the wall of rock. The angelic apparition replicated on Monte
Gargano the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.80
This rhetorical manipulation of landscape provides important clues as to how
Christians reconceived the ancient map of sacred space. Christians approached
numinous topography with quite a different attitude from that of their polytheistic
ancestors. The hagiographer demonstrated his interest as he offered a lengthy
description of the mountaintop as well as the spelunca and its interior. This an-
gulosa house, which "seemed to hold five hundred persons," had a "ceiling of
different heights, here touched by an upright person, but in other places hardly
reached by the hand." Behind the altar, a glass vessel suspended by a silver chain
gathered cool, sweet-tasting heavenly water, which fell from the cavern ceiling.
Locals called it "the drip" (stilla). They used the liquid to extinguish the "flames
of fever." A colonnaded passageway took the curious into a smaller cavern further
east of the nave: the Apodonia. As the faithful gazed upon the crest of stone that
swelled from the back wall, they interpreted a pair of hollows as the footprints of
Michael, left there as a pignus of the ministerium that he extended toward hu-
manity.81The cavern's importance as a point of local pilgrimage encouraged the
seventh-century Lombard dukes of Benevento to incorporate the Apodonia as a
chapel of the nave.82The high percentage of Lombard names inscribed on the cave

77
Map6uptov TOD aytou HYokuKap7o 18.3, in The Apostolic Fathers, 2, ed. and trans. Kirsopp
Lake, LCL (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
78
Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors 7, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool, 1988).
79 Pseudo-Dionysius, La hierarchie cdleste 2, ed. and trans. Rene Roques, Giinter Heil, and Maurice
de Gandillac, Sources Chretiennes 58 (Paris, 1958).
80 Susan Rabe explores this phenomenon in relation to the Carolingian monastery of Saint-Riquier,

in Faith, Art, and Politics at Saint-Riquier (Philadelphia, 1995), while Carol Heitz does so more gen-
erally, in L'architecturereligieuse carolingienne: Les formes et leurs fonctions (Paris, 1980).
81
Apparitio in Monte Tumbae 8, AASS Sept. 8:76-79, at pp. 77-78, characterizes Michael's inter-
action with humanity as a ministerium.
82 Trotta, "I luoghi"; also Antonio Renzulli, "La costruzione dell'ingresso monumentale longobardo
e la modificazione dei luoghi dell' 'Apparitio,' " in Culto e insediamenti, pp. 167-72. Liber 6: "Ex
ipso autem saxo, quo sacra contegitur aedis, ad aquilonem altaris dulcis et nimium lucida guttatim
aqua delabitur, quam incolae stillam vocant. Ob hoc et vitreum vas eiusdem receptui preparatum
argentea pendit catena suspensum, morisque est populo communicato singulos ad hoc vasculum as-
cendere per gradus donumque caelestis degustare liquoris. Nam et gustu suavis est et tactu salubris.
Denique nonnulli post longas foebrium flammas hac austa stilla celeri confestim refrigerio potiuntur
salutis."
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 583
walls testifies that these visitors ascended the neighborhood crest "covered by a
cornel forest" so as to commune with heaven by wandering across angelic
heights.83The grotto with its "walls built not by means of human workmanship,"
the rocks, the healing waters, and the forest invited and welcomed those worship-
ers who sought Michael's intercession through appeal to geological features.
Michael's votary here modeled his account after the genre of the pilgrim text.
The Liber's details of the "the craggy house .. . in the manner of a rugged cavern
made rough by outpointing rocks" recalls the vivid descriptions of Christian Je-
rusalem recorded by Pseudo-Antoninus, the Pilgrim of Piacenza.84That late-sixth-
century traveler had marveled at important features found in the Holy Land.
Foremost was the focal point of all Christian pilgrimage, the monumentum "cut
from the natural rock" in which the body of the Lord had been laid. To one side
of the doorway stood the boulder taken from Golgotha that had covered the
tomb's entrance: an angel had rolled it away to reveal the chamber that proclaimed
the Resurrection by its emptiness.
Such observations fulfilled the expectations of the pilgrim'saudience, expectations
developed by generic conventions. By the time that Pseudo-Antoninus trekked
through the Sinai to describe the appearance of the burning bush from Exodus, he
worked within a genre already two centuries old. The re-created biblical sites and
objects encountered on the pilgrim trail informed a textual reality that in turn in-
spired the audience's perceptions of the Holy Land. The itinera of the early-fifth-
century nun Egeria, for example, also had testified for the sisters of her house not
only as to the appearance of the burning bush but also the huts wherein Israel had
dwelt while fashioning the golden calf. Egeria also had spoken at length of the
religious services that she had attended at the holy spelunca, the burial grotto of
the Lord. In fact, Egeria's audience formed their view of Jerusalem by means of a
recital of liturgical movements and actions around and within Bethlehem, the
Mount of Olives, and Golgotha, the exalted landscape of the Gospels.
This need to convey impressions of geographical features by means of scriptural
allusions permeates the early-medieval pilgrim genre and is not limited to depic-
tions of the Holy Land. The monk Bernardus, for instance, who visited Monte
Gargano en route to Jerusalem c. 850, ended his arduous pilgrimage at Mont
Saint-Michel, the Norman sanctuary dedicated to the archangel Michael. Bernar-
dus resorted to imagery drawn from Exodus to describe the angelic island where
he completed his journey from far-distant Palestine. The monk likened the land
bridge that appeared between Mont Saint-Michel and the coast at low tide to the
passageway through the Red Sea created by the outstretched rod of Moses. Ber-
nardus equated Michael's rocky island with the eschatological Jerusalem. The
pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land, a metaphorical movement through the liminal
area between heaven and earth, ended in the figurative "bosom of Abraham."85

83
Carletti, "Iscrizioni murali," in II Santuario di S. Michele.
84 Antonini Placentini Itinerarium, ed. P. Geyer, in Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 175 (Turn-
hout, 1965), pp. 129-53.
85 Bernardus monachus francus, Itinerarium 18, PL 121:574: "In festivitate autem sancti Michaelis
non conjungitur mare in redundando in circuitu illius montis, sed stat instar murorum a dextris et a
sinistris. Et in ipsa die solemni possunt omnes, quicunque ad orationem venerint, omnibus horis adire
montem: quod tamen aliis diebus non possunt."
584 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
When the Garganic hagiographer spoke of rocks, caves, dripping water, moun-
tains, and trees, however, he immediately evoked those qualities of landscape that
had so concerned the second-century Greek traveler Pausanias. The "sketchbook"
or Il8ptuyrlyj of Pausanias affectionately catalogued those provincial monu-
ments of spiritual significance to his own culture and land. His trek of fifteen
years, during which he discarded his youthful religious skepticism, has been char-
acterized as a search for a personal and Greek identity amid the sacred landscape
of Roman Greece and Asia Minor.86
Pausanias sought a spiritual sense of ethnicity within a variety of numinous
locales. He acclaimed, for instance, among the attributes of other caverns, those
of the CotnkaIov at Themision, thirty stadia from Phrygian Laodicea. If the visitor
could find the hidden entrance, he could hardly discern through the dim light the
water that dripped from the low rocky ceiling to create tracks in the floor.87This
sense of sacred awe extended to the stands of trees that Pausanias encountered at
cult sites honoring both gods and heroes. A grove, partly domestic and partly
wild, that covered the Arcadian burial mound of Kallisto brought to mind oral
instructions of his teacher Pamphos: "the Arcadians once had known Artemis by
the name of Kallisto."88The pilgrim recognized the mnemonic purposes of sacred
landscape. The d,uoga of Kallisto encoded the "history, legends and ideology" of
the Hellenic religious world.89
This mosaic of rocks, caves, waters, and groves induced Pausanias to contem-
plate the spiritual dimension of his relationship to his physical surroundings. He
grasped a sense of personal wholeness through participation in a landscape made
familiar to him through acculturation, replication of sites, and available textual
descriptions.90Those who worshiped in them, however, often perceived them as
"foreign." The shrines often stood on the boundaries of y%(opatmarking the out-
skirts of city-states. Such sanctuaries also delimited sacred spaces, which were
regarded as segregated, set apart and foreign in a metaphorical sense.
In this manner the physical shrine of the classical world resembled the literary
amoenus that figured so prominently in the pastoral tradition and its adaptations
by Ovid and Vergil. Ovidian criticism has pointed to that poet's evocation of the
secretive and mysterious "beautiful place." In the Metamorphoses, for instance,
the cavern, spring, grove, and rocks combine to create not only a scene of lush
sensuality but also one fraught with wildness and danger.91While Pausanias found
spiritual solace among such landscape features, Ovid manipulated them to mask
locales fit for sexual ambush or magical performance or murder. The Garganic

86 John Elsner, "Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World," Past and Present 135 (1992), 3-
29.
87
Pausanias, Pausaniae Graeciae descriptio 10.32.4-7, ed. Maria Helena Rocha-Pereira, 3 vols.
(Leipzig, 1989-90), 3:166-68.
88 Pausanias 8.35.8, 2:296: "-OKcIV 6§8
goi K(aXII
Hgpcog gaOcv TItnapa ApKa6OSvtnpCoog Aprcgtv
£v Toi; TISCTV hv6otac KaXict'riv."
89DariceBirge,"Treesin the Landscapeof Pausanias'Periegesis,"in Placingthe Gods:Sanctuaries
and SacredSpacein AncientGreece,ed. SusanAlcockand RobinOsborne(Oxford,1996), pp. 231-
46.
90Elsner, "Pausanias."
91 C. P. Segal, "Landscape in Ovid's Metamorphoses," Hermes 23
(1969), 17-19.
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 585
hagiographer inverted this fatal site by elucidating the topography as a symbol of
heaven. The pilgrim who walked among the angelic rocks, caverns, and cornel
trees returned to the spiritual Jerusalem from which he had been separated by the
Fall of Adam. Pre-Christian pilgrims who had come to the mountain had crossed
into a sacred space whose elements revealed the mythological reasons for the
numinous qualities of the place. For Christians, these same elements acted as met-
aphors for Holy Land sites visited by Egeria and the Pilgrim of Piacenza. The
secreted, sacred space of the amoenus became a replica of the Holy Sepulchre.
Michael's hagiographer effected this transformation by reference not only to pil-
grim writings but also to the Aeneid.
Phrases such as "vertice montis excelsi posita, de corpore eiusdem saxi spelun-
cae instar precavata" and "instar speluncae preruptis et sepius eminentibus as-
perata scopulis" intimate the author's acquaintance with Vergilian Latin. These
clauses, scattered throughout the body of the Liber, parallel numerous passages
in the Aeneid. In book 1.159-69, for instance, Vergil created the image of a pas-
toral amoenus by reference to the spiritual landscape of Pausanias. In the poem
the Trojans sailed into a "long recess" on the Libyan coast, which seemed to offer
a resting place for the refugees. Vergil described with curiously menacing language
the shady cavern, sweet spring, cool rocks, and pleasant grove that normally ap-
peared within the context of a cultivated and civilized countryside. "Vast cliffs
and twin peaks [which] rise threateningly against the sky" dwarf the smooth,
inviting bay ("hinc atque hinc vastae rupes geminique minantur / in caelum sco-
puli"). A nemus, with its connotations of a woodland pasture, "flash[es] gleams
of light" and "loom[s] with bristling shadow" above the grotto, introducing a
frightening tension with this bucolic sweetness ("tum silvis scaena coruscis / de-
super, horrentique atrum nemus imminet ... scopulis pendentibus antrum; / intus
aquae dulces vivoque sedilia saxo").92
This juxtaposition of fertile earth and bare rock, shady grove and chilling
shadow, and sacred cavern and untilled wilderness delineated a countryside at
once inviting and frightening.93While the bucolic Vergilian amoenus supplied ev-
erything necessary for the refreshment of the fleeing Trojans,94it also disguised a
countryside that was unmapped, untilled, and therefore uncivilized.95Vergil char-
acterized this site with language that conveyed the fear and awe reserved for ter-
ritory seen to be not only sacred but also beyond the bounds of husbandry.96He

92Eleanor Leach provides the concept and discusses it as well: The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and
Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp.
30-35.
93 Ibid.
94
Donatus 1.170, p. 39: "propter ardores autem solis necessaria fuerant quae praeberent hominibus
defensionem, ministrabant istam naturale antrum et opacitas nemorum."
95Mary Beagon, "Nature and Views of Her Landscapes in Pliny the Elder," in Human Landscapes
in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, ed. Graham Shipley and John Salmon (London,
1996), pp. 284-309.
96 Wendell
Clausen, Virgil's Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1987),
pp. 61-82. Clausen points out the brutal and harsh version of Italian Arcadia actually found in the
Aeneid in contrast to the pastoral landscapes of the earlier Eclogues and Georgics. Leach discerns even
in those bucolic works elements of angst and disorder projected through the imagery of the landscape:
Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).
586 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
placed the familiar field with its hallowed boundary shrines within the dangerous
and foreign wilderness. The Vergilian locale beckoned precisely because it offered
protection from unexpected danger. The hagiographer maintained this tension
between the sacred and the profane. His Christian amoenus did not mask a dan-
gerous place but instead offered redemption from the surrounding world. Vergil-
ian tags transformed a pleasant spot in the wilderness into an abode of the arch-
angel Michael, a place fit for Christian pilgrimage because it lay beyond all
mundane boundaries.
The clause "vertex vero montis extrinsecus partim cornea silva tegitur" in the
Liber alludes to Aeneid 3.22-25. The words "cornea . .. silvam ... tegerem"
occur in close proximity in that Vergilian passage wherein Aeneas, after landing
in Thrace, attempted to offer sacrifice to the Bona Dea. Aeneas found a thicket of
cornel wood covering a tumulus, or grave mound, at the site of the ritual. When
he attempted to break off branches so that he might cover the altar, the bushes
bled and he heard from within the mound the voice of Polydorus, King Priam's
murdered son dispatched to Thrace for safekeeping. The mound covered his
corpse pierced by spears, the protruding shafts of which had sprouted foliage.
The Garganic cornel thicket covered its own tumulus, the empty spelunca sealed
with those most curious of relics, the footprints of Michael. While later Michaeline
hagiography speaks of such marks, the Liber first mentions these unique traces of
the archangel.97No scriptural or hagiographical passage connected with Michael
would have suggested such an interpretation of physical phenomena. The vestigia
marmori inpressa do allude, however, to both contact relics reputedly left by the
Lord during the Passion and descriptions of them written by pilgrims. Pseudo-
Antoninus, for instance, spoke of the column at which Christ was whipped: "His
chest had imprinted itself into the marble (pectus eius inhaesit in ipsa marmore)."
The vestigia of Christ's foot, "beautiful and fine," remained in the stone where he
had stood while questioned by Pilate.98Similar miraculous impressions also had
appeared in Italy, for instance, in the Basilica of St. Euphemia at Ravenna. When
St. Apollinaris, the disciple of Peter and founder of the city's church, had stood in
that space, "the stone had liquified and vestigia inpressa sunt."99By these foot-
prints the first bishop of Ravenna re-presented the power of Christ and left true
marks in which his successors would walk. The posterula pusilla of the archangel
positioned his votaries within the flow of salvation history. Michael's vestigia
marked his sanctuary, as had those of such ancient deities as Isis and Serapis, but

97Angelic footprints in rock are described in an unpublished hagiographical text found in Paris,
Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 2873A, fols. 109v-110r, second half of the tenth century,
parchment, 200 x 160 mm., 17 lines. The manuscript contains a collection of hagiographical and
homiletical works written in three or four hands. One scribe compiled three Michaeline texts on fols.
106v-114r. The Liber de apparitione (fols. 106v-108r) is followed by a second text with the incipit
"in illas regiones venit dracho." Following a struggle with a dragon, Michael (who first appeared as
a bird) left his footprints in rock: "signa aut ungularum eius in petra sicut in cera mollissima expressa
habent usque hodie." The bottom third of the folio is torn away. The text of the Apparitio in Monte
Tumbae (Mont Saint-Michel) follows. See the description in the Catalogue generale des manuscrits
latins de Bibliotheque nationale, 3 (Paris, 1952), pp. 185-86.
98 Itinerarium 22-23, ed. Geyer, pp. 140-41.
99
Agnellus, Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis 1, MGH SSrerLangobp. 280.
 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem 587
then carried the path forward to the gates of the Jerusalem to come.100Angelic
footprints led the minds of the earthly flocks to revere that Great Shepherd into
whose final care Michael would lead them.
The pilgrim Ludenus left behind an indication that he understood that the cave
in Apulia reproduced the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem. Ludenus cut his
name into the left wall of the ancient Lombard entrance gallery along with the
depiction of a cross with a square incised beneath the right arm. A line, which
retains traces of red paint, drops from the middle of the cross arm down across
the square. The entire figure surmounts a twisting column, the Temple of Solo-
mon.101The blood of the cross saved the progeny of Adam, whose tomb the incised
square represented. The hart incised in profile beneath the column symbolized the
pilgrim.102The "soul" of the visitor to the cave sought "God" just as the "deer
longed for flowing streams (Ps. 42.1)." Deer, agile mountain creatures, were be-
lieved to devour serpents. The "fire" of the ingested venom impelled them to seek
out purifying waters.103By analogy, the sinning pilgrim found relief in the cave on
the mountain. Ludenus understood that at this holy grave, his "fellow servant"
Michael revealed the truthful "testimony" of the life to come.104

When the Garganic hagiographer coupled these references to Jerusalem with his
allusions to Vergil, his text effected a transformation of this mountaintop. The
Liber de apparitione thus reflects a psychological reality, which motivated at least
one shrine conversion in late antiquity. A place that for many centuries had formed
a locus of local non-Christian pilgrimage now would exist as an eschatological
Jerusalem guarded by Michael, the psychopomp of Christian souls. Pre-Christian
pilgrims brought to Monte Gargano bulls disordered by passions, scorched by the
flames of lust, hopeful that healing waters would restore to them a sense of har-
mony. Pausanias experienced something of the sort when he at last came home to
Greek Arcadia. By the time he arrived there he had begun to believe in the ancient
mythology encoded in the world through which he trod. As a young man he had
heard those "riddles" (aivtfipata) of the ancients connected with shrines, groves,
and springs and believed them "foolish" (£r9i0ta). In the physical Arcadia he heard
the divine wisdom (ao(pia) within the ancient myths.105To those who would listen,
the antique legends conveyed a sense of personal identity and spiritual balance
attained through an interaction with a memorialized landscape, a topography that
centered the individual within a historical, familial, and religious context.
Michael's hagiography reveals a very different experience for the Christian pil-

100Katherine Dunbabin "Ipsa deae vestigia ... Footprints Divine and Human on Graeco-Roman
Monuments," Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990), 55-109.
101Carletti, "Iscrizioni murali," inscription 128, p. 125.
102
Quacquarelli, pp. 213-22.
103Cassiodorus, Expositio in Psalterium 41.2 and 103.18, PL 70:301: "animam suam dicit con-
spectum Domini sitienter appetere: quo ambitu imbecillis maxime inflammatur humanitas"; and 735:
"Cervus est (ut diximus) venenosorum serpentium vorax, spinosa transcendens, et summa agilitate
praeditus, habitare diligit in montibus altissimis. Huic merito comparantur fideles."
104Rev. 19.10 (NRSV): "Then I fell down at his feet [an interpreting angel] to worship him, but he
said to me, 'You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades who hold the
testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.'"
105Pausanias 8.8.3; Elsner, "Pausanias," p. 21.
588 Arcadia Becomes Jerusalem
grims who climbed to the top of Monte Gargano. They forsook the aid and com-
fort once found there by their ancestors. The heroic myths of the past no longer
spoke to them through the cavern, spring, and cornel grove. Instead the language
of the epic and the pastoral voiced the evangelical promise of eternal life in the
Heavenly City. When the great archangel turned aside Satan's poisoned arrow, he
in fact reversed the state of man's condition. Vergil had composed a compelling
and frightening vision of this fate in the conclusion of his third Georgic. Couched
in the scientific language of Epicurus, his verses characterized man's subjugation
to universal laws of destruction and renewal.106An imbalance of nature's elements
triggered a plague that ravaged the herds and reduced mankind to an animalistic
state. The boils and cankers of this disease, which in fact paralleled and mirrored
the earlier battles of the amorous bulls, endangered any human who touched the
skins of the dead beasts. While the fourth Georgic introduced an idealized king-
dom of the bees that arose from the rotted carcasses of dead bulls, that, too, would
pass away in its turn. The random coagulation of elements and atoms gave rise
to material form, which dissipated by necessity.107
By wrenching man's fate from those eternal cycles of destruction, Michael and
the other heroes of Christian pastoral lifted humanity onto an altogether different
and unchanging plane of existence. Christianized versions of the pastoral genre
incorporated characters from ancient Greek and Latin poetry who relied upon
their faith to prevent the death of their herds. In a late-fourth-century pastoral
poem De mortibus bovum, the shepherds Aegon, Bucolus, and Tityrus did not
"repel death with slaughter," nor did they resort in vain to "altars wettened with
blood." Instead they made the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those bulls
that exhibited symptoms of paralysis and eye inflammation remarkably similar to
that canine disease of robor cured by Vulcan.108Just as these spiritual shepherds
roamed the hilltops with their own pecora, the archangel Michael blessed those
pilgrims who left the cavern, rocks, and groves of Monte Gargano certain that
the messenger had healed them and readied their souls for the Heavenly City. As
Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, had pointed out, the voices of the
angels "resounded among the glades (nemores) and mountains." The Psalm tunes
that swirled among the "jagged outcroppings and rocks" not only "softened sav-
age beasts" but also the "sweet-singing birds of the loci amoeni."109As the angels
hymned the heavenly Emperor, ancient Arcadia became the New Jerusalem.

106 MonicaR.
Gale,"ManandBeastin Lucretiusandthe Georgics,"ClassicalQuarterly41 (1991),
414-26.
107 Ibid.
108Severus/Endelechius,
De mortibusbovum,in AnthologiaLatina,no. 893, pp. 314-18. For the
dating,see DietmarKorzeniewski,Hirtengedichteaus spitr6mischerund karolingischerZeit, Texte
zur Forschurng26 (Darmstadt,1976), pp. 4-6.
109Ambroseof Milan,Enarrationesin XII PsalmosDavidicos:In Psalmumprimumenarratio2, PL
14:965:"LaudantangeliDominum.... vox missagratioreplausue nemoribusresultet,autmontibus,
et suavioresono reddantquod acceperint.In scopulisquoqueipsis et lapidibusreperitnaturaquod
delectaret.... Feraeipsae, atque aves loci amoeniorisaut modulatiorisvocis delectationemulcen-
tur.... Naturalisigiturdelectatioest."

John Charles Arnold is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at

William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ 07470.