A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

chiefly celebrated as an ecclesiastical historian,was a native of Aquitaine (Dialog. 1.20), and flourished towards the close of the fourth century under Arcadius and Honorius, being a few years younger than his friend Paulinus of Nola, to whose letters, of which fourteen are addressed to Severus, we are principally indebted for any information we possess regarding his career. Descended from a noble family he was carefully trained in all the learning of the age and country to which he belonged, distinguished himself as an orator at the bar, and married early in life a high-born and very wealthy bride. The untimely death of this lady produced so deep an impression on his mind that, while yet in the flower of his years, he resolved to abandon the pursuit of worldly pleasures and honours, and in company with a few pious friends, to seek tranquillity in seclusion and holy exercises. To this determination he steadfastly adhered notwithstanding the opposition of his father, by whom he was in consequence disinherited, a misfortune compensated, however, to a great extent by the liberality of his mother-in-law Bassula. He eventually became a presbyter of the church, and attached himself closely to St. Martin of Tours, whom he ever cultivated with peculiar reverence, imbibing from him many wild and fantastic notions respecting dreams, visions, miraculous manifestations, and the millennium, which in some measure sullied the brightness of his orthodoxy. Gennadius, in a passage, whose authenticity has been somewhat unreasonably disputed, positively asserts that Severus, towards the close of his life, was tainted with the Pelagian heresy, but that having become sensible of his error, and feeling convinced that he had been betrayed by a too great love of speaking, maintained silence ever afterwards as an appropriate atonement for his sin. The precise date of his birth and of his death are alike unknown. The former has been referred to A. D. 363, the latter variously to A. D. 410, 420, 422, 432, an argument in favour of the earliest of these epochs being derived from the fact that he is never mentioned by Paulinus subsequent to that year. His retirement from the world took place about A. D. 392. We must carefully avoid confounding this Sulpicius Severus with another ecclesiastical writer. Sulpicius Severus, surnamed Pius, who was the twenty-seventh bishop of Bourges, in the middle of the seventh century, and contemporary with Gregory of Tours, who dedicated to him his tract on the Seven Sleepers.

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