Latin

A manuscript listing twenty-five excerpts from the De re militari selected by Sedulius Scotus, an Irish scholar who settled in Liège in the mid-ninth century, represents the first known collection of excerpts taken from Vegetius’ work to survive to this day. Two things strike the reader at once. One is the generous proportion (60 per cent) of excerpts taken from Book III, setting an early trend for the relatively high level of interest in that book, already remarked upon. The other, related to the first, is the high proportion (20 per cent in this case) of excerpts taken from Book IV, leaving the opening books I and II with only 20 per cent between them. It may also be noted that all but two of the excerpts feature regularly (and sometimes prominently) in collections made at later dates.

What encouraged Sedulius, by no stretch of the imagination a soldier, to copy excerpts from this work? Close examination reveals that by simply omitting a word (often no more than a conjunction) or by making statements of fact or opinion more concise, he was able to remove the excerpt from its context and transform it into a statement of almost proverbial character and authority which could then stand on its own. It is not surprising, then, that four excerpts should have been taken from Book III, 26, the so-called ‘Rules of war’, in which Vegetius had already set out in the language of the maxim some important principles of his thinking.