Zachary Yuzwa - To Live by the Example of Angels: Dialogue, Imitation and Identity in Sulpicius Severus' Gallus

In the Gallus, known also as the Dialogues, Sulpicius Severus undertakes an ostensibly historical project, a project of remembering, in which he fashions by his rhetoric a recent ascetic past (even an ongoing present) and thereby imagines a tradition with which – and against which – to identify himself, his subjects, his audience. The literary act of remembering and representing the monastic deserts of the east is for the author one means of constructing for pro-Martinian ascetics in Gaul a coherent pre-history which gives form to a collective present; it is one means of expressing models for ascetic practice which will serve as a locus of identification and differentiation. Sulpicius engages in the textual process of forging group identity, a process which has at its core an impulse to exemplary imitation.

In my paper, I will demonstrate how the dialogue form – by no means a self-evident choice of genre in this ostensibly hagiographical context – is particularly suitable for just such a project. The Latin tradition of dialogue writing is one in which authors – Cicero, most notably – adopt and adapt diverse cultural and intellectual models as a means of articulating identity and difference. I suggest that a similar impulse motivates Sulpicius' Gallus and  argue the point with particular reference to those sections of the text which Jacques Fontaine has labelled the intermèdes gaulois, the very passages, that is, where the dialogue is at its most dialogic and likewise where the text grapples most directly with the relationship between eastern models and local Gallic practices. By focusing on one such 'interruption' in particular, we will see that these intermèdes gaulois function in some way as a locus of exchange, a point at which the exempla in the text are brought to bear on the situation of the interlocutors.