Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was born in Duplavis, modern Valdobbiadene, near Treviso, northern Italy, sometime in the 530s CE. He received in the schools of Ravenna the literary education traditional in late antiquity. In the mid-560s CE, though, for reasons that are unclear, he moved to Merovingian Gaul, establishing himself initially at the Austrasian court of Sigibert in Metz, where he wrote an epithalamium for the king’s marriage to Brunhild (For. Carm. 6.1). All but two (Carm. 1.1 and 1.2) of his poems date fr…