St. Gregory, Rome's prefect, gives his fortune away and becomes a monk

ROME, 574 AD — The house on the Clivus Scauri, on the slope of the Caelian hill, is a spacious one, and there is a fountain of elaborate design in its atrium. Until this year it belonged to the family of the senator Gordianus, who owned it along with large estates in Sicily. It is a monastery now, dedicated to St. Andrew, and Saint Gregory the Great, who inherited it from his father, is living in it as an ordinary monk.

St. Gregory is thirty-four. The Emperor Justin II appointed him Prefect of the City at an unusually early age, certainly before 573 AD, when he was little more than thirty. The office is the top of what is left of Rome’s civil administration. Inside the walls the running of the city rests in the prefect’s hands, and his authority over the citizens is almost unimpaired. He is the city’s great authority in money matters, and he buys and distributes the grain together with the pope. He works with the general commanding the troops on the defence of the city. The rank also makes him chief judge of Rome, and his processions differ little from a consul’s. It obliges him to wear the trabea (a rich robe of silk), embroidered and sparkling with precious stones. Only consuls and praetors may wear it. His father’s death had put the Caelian palace and the bulk of the family money into his hands and made him one of the richest men in the city. He has given all of it away and laid down every civil office he held.

Gordianus had the rank of senator and a large fortune. After his son was born he gave up the world, and he died holding the title of Regionarius, an office whose duties are not clear. He had three sisters, Saint Tarsilla, Saint Aemiliana and Gordiana. All three took up the monastic life at the same time and kept it together in a house of their own, until Gordiana gave it up and married the steward of her estates. St. Gregory began his public education in the city at fourteen, in 554 AD.

The city he then administered had been emptied around him. The Lombards marched into Italy in the spring of 568 AD, and Alboin entered Milan on September 3 of the following year. Behind the Roman lines they founded the great duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. Plague had gone through the country ahead of them and left whole villages standing empty, and a famine followed in 570 and 571 AD. Few men of good family were left in Rome, and most of the citizens were living on charity doles. While St. Gregory held the prefecture the Lombards were all round the city and communications with Constantinople were cut off.

Then Gordianus died. His widow, Saint Silvia, did not stay in the house: she went into seclusion at a place called Cella Nova, close by the great door of the Basilica of St. Paul. Everything else came to her son.

He put the greater part of it into founding and endowing seven monasteries. Six were built out of the estates in Sicily. The seventh was the house on the Clivus Scauri, close to the church of St. John and St. Paul, and it was dedicated to St. Andrew. On each of the seven he settled revenue enough to keep the monks living in it, so that they would not have to work for their food. What was left over after that he handed out to the poor.

He kept nothing, and he did not leave. He gave up every mark of his rank: the silk robes and glittering jewels had caught every eye when he drove through the city in procession. He put on the coarse dress of a monk and began as a simple brother in the house he had just given away. He wears a tunic and a long black cuculla (the monk’s hooded cloak). His days go to studying Scripture in his cell, to the services in the oratory, and to the slow work of copying out the Fathers. The rule of the house is strict about property: no monk may possess anything of his own. Hilarion is its first abbot. St. Gregory’s fasts are already hard enough to be doing him damage. His food comes across the city from his mother — raw vegetables and fruit, sent from Cella Nova on a silver dish.

Near the fountain in the atrium he has had his parents painted. In the first picture St. Peter sits with his right hand clasping the hand of Gordianus. Gordianus stands beside him in a chestnut-coloured chasuble over a dalmatic: a tall man, long face, light eyes, short beard, bushy hair, a grave look to him. In the second St. Silvia is seated and robed in white, a woman of full height with a round fair face wrinkled with age, large blue eyes and a cheerful expression. Two fingers of her right hand are making the sign of the cross, and her left holds a Psalter, open at the verse “Let my soul live, and it shall praise Thee; and let Thy judgments help me.”