Primary source · Latin
Potamius of Lisbon, Tractates and Letters
Potamius of Olisipo · c. AD 350–360
What this text is
A small, strange, vivid corpus: the baroque meditations On Lazarus and On the Martyrdom of Isaiah, and the doctrinal letters of a bishop who crossed to the Arian court party at Sirmium and (the Luciferians sneered) 'sold the faith for a farm' — then wrote On the Substance back toward Nicaea. The whole file of a provincial weathervane, preserved.
Profile of Potamius of Lisbon →
Public-domain translations
Working translation (from the Latin, CCSL 69A)
[On Lazarus: the tomb opened, the knots of the grave-cloths undone, decay reversed limb by limb — Latin prose pushed to the edge of the grotesque. On Isaiah: the prophet under the wooden saw.]
Manuscript witnesses
Early medieval Latin tradition (works long shuffled among other authors)
8th–9th c. onwardThe tractates survived by travelling under sturdier names; sorting them back to Potamius is a modern act of attribution.
Conti's critical edition (CCSL 69A)
1999The gathered corpus, with the attribution dossier.
Provenance
Olisipo (Lisbon) — the first known bishop of the city, and the first Lusitanian author
Editions & scholarship
Critical editions and standard translations behind the text above.
- The Complete Works of Potamius of LisbonMarco Conti (ed. & tr.), 1998Critical text with English translation.
- Potamius de Lisbonne et la controverse arienneA. Montes Moreira, 1969The foundational study of his career and turn — confessionally Catholic, critically argued; balanced here by the hostile Luciferian testimony quoted on his profile.