About the author:
Maria R. Nenarokova, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, 1) A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; 2) Lomonosov Moscow State University, Lomonosovsky prospekt 27-4, 119991 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5798-9468
E-mail:
Abstract:
St.Jerome’s treatise “On the Famous Men” is the first history of Christian literature. It consists of the biographies of ecclesiastical writers. Jerome modeled his book on the treatises of the corresponding genre by Suetonius and Cicero. Jerome’s treatise covers the first three centuries of development of the Christian literature. Each of the treatise’s 135 chapters is dedicated to an individual writer. The amount of the chapters is variable. The biographies of the writers are created in accordance with the rules of the classical rhetoric. The most important elements of the biography are the name of the writer, the time when he lived and worked, and his work, that is, books, written by him. To achieve credibility and accuracy, necessary in a historical narrative, Jerome mentions time, facts, known to everybody, the accounts of eyewitness. Jerome himself acts as a a witness expressing his opinion about people, and about the books. The lives of ecclesiastical writers are described against the background of the events of the contemporary life. The reader learns about the persecution of Christians, their polemics with the Gentiles, the school of late antiquity, the library of Caesarea Maritima.