SEDULIUS:
Under the Emperor Lothair 840–855 there was at Liège a colony of Irish teachers and writers of whom the best known is Sedulius, sometimes called Sedulius the Younger to distinguish him from the author of the Carmen Paschale. We have already referred to the fact that he was a distinguished poet[509] and a learned grammarian.[510] He is no less famous as a scribe[511] and as a writer on other subjects.
He wrote an important treatise on the theory of government entitled De Rectoribus Christianis.[512] This work was written at Liège probably about the year 855 A.D. It is in reality the first systematic contribution of the Middle Ages to the theory of political government and should rank in importance with St. Thomas’s De Regimine Principis, with Colonna’s De Regimine Principum and with Dante’s De Monarchia.[513] As its latest editor Dr. Hellman has remarked, if this work is not drawn from exclusively Irish sources, it is drawn at least from sources which were held in high esteem by Irish writers of the Carolingian Age. This Celtic conception of the duties of a Christian ruler is of very special interest to the student of mediæval political theories. Its sources are Christian and classical, its immediate object was the direction of a Frankish ruler (probably Lothair II.), the mind that conceived it was Celtic and here we have at the beginning of mediæval speculation a combination of forces and interests which went to make up the mediæval policy.[514]
Sedulius also wrote a commentary of Porphry’s Isagoge (or Introduction to the Logic of Aristotle) for which the basis may have been the Greek text though the work was known to other Christian logicians only in the Latin translation.[515]