Jerome in Rome: Memory and Project

Abstract: "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." What happened to Jerome in Rome has proved harder to contain. Sixteen centuries and several decades later, gossip still circulates, helping shape the meanings we attach to the names "Rome" and "Jerome." The proceedings of a recent conference provide an opportunity for historical and critical reflection on the earliest recoverable forms of that Jerome/Rome discourse, as mediated by late fourth-century texts. One such—Letter 27 in the collection of Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae edited in 1981 in CSEL 88 by Johannes Divjak as part of the Sancti Aurelii Augustini Opera —enables us to watch Jerome, in Bethlehem in the early 390s, building his personal literary profile "in real time" as he narrates an incident supposed to have taken place in Rome in the mid-380s. Unlike the rest of the documentation we have on and from this author down to the time of its writing, Ep . 27* inter Augustinianas can be securely dated in the form in which it is extant—a point of difference made more salient now by one of the essays in the new proceedings. Pursuing a line of argument re-opened by that essay, and drawing resources from other essays in the same conference volume, this article invites students of Jerome to begin to consider how much of the standard chronology of his life and works—dependent as it is in large part on the terminal notice of his catalogue, De viris illustribus —may be an artefact of his purposive, post-Roman projection of a Vegas-style, Jerome-themed Rome of collective memory.