medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
According to the _Liber Pontificalis_, Hilarus (also Hilarius) was a Sard. As deacon at Rome he was one of pope St. Leo I's legates to the second council of Ephesus (the-called Robber Council) in 449. After the latter's condemnation and deposition of the papally supported bishop of Constantinople, the recently celebrated (17. February) St. Flavian, Hilarus had difficulty in safely getting out of Ephesus. By 455/56 Leo had elevated him to archdeacon. In that year and the next Hilarus, assisted by Victorius of Limoges, worked at papal command on a new method of computing the date of Easter, producing a paschal cycle that was accepted only in Italy and in Gaul.
Hilarus succeeded Leo as bishop of Rome in 461. During his papacy he opposed the spread of Arianism in Italy, dealt with overreaching bishops in Gaul, and worked on restoring ecclesiastical properties in the Eternal City, then still recovering from the Vandal sack of Rome (455). He died on 29. February 468.
Hilarus' chief monuments are the chapels of St. John the Evangelist and St. John the Baptist added during his reconstruction of the Lateran Baptistery, the former fulfilling of a vow he had made at the Evangelist's great church at Ephesus when he was attempting to leave that city unharmed in 449. One of the images on this page (the one just above the Barberini bee) is a view of Hilarus' name inscribed on his bronze door to the chapel of St. John the Baptist:
http://tinyurl.com/2jdknm
Gillian Mackie's _Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function and Patronage_ (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2003), discusses these chapels on pp. 195-211.
Hilarus as depicted (right margin at bottom) in a hand-colored woodcut in the Beloit College copy of Hartmann Schedel's late fifteenth-century _Weltchronik_ (_Nuremberg Chronicle_; 1493) at fol. CXXXVIv:
https://www.beloit.edu/nuremberg/book/6th_age/left_page/40%20%28Folio%20CXXXVIv%29.pdf
Best,
John Dillon
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