Elafius

The Vita Germani is not a historical source that we can necessarily trust in every detail. Nora K. Chadwick [5] quoted Constantius himself : “So many years have passed it is difficult to recover the facts from the silence in which they are buried”. Edward Arthur Thompson [6] emphasised how poorly informed Constantius seems to have been about Germanus’s British visit compared to his activities in Gaul and Italy. Meanwhile, Professor Ian S. Wood [7] has interpreted Constantius' account of Germanus's two British expeditions as in large part 'allegorical' rather than factual. This applies especially to the story told about Elafius where the curing of his son symbolises the spiritual cure that Germanus is bringing to Britain by cleansing it of the Pelagian heresy. It actually forms a direct parallel with the curing of the blind girl, described as having taken place on Germanus's first visit.

Even more pertinently Germanus's second visit to Britain, as described by Constantius, has been suspected as representing merely a ‘doublet’, of the first: a version that was so badly remembered that it appeared to Constantius or his source as representing an entirely different, 'second', visit. As Norah Chadwick [8] noted, in both visits the object is the same, Germanus is accompanied by another bishop and the incident of the cured boy of the second visit is matched by an incident in which Germanus cures a blind girl in the first. Then there is the fact that on both visits, as Germanus sets out, there are ‘demons’, active against him (in the first they provoke bad weather: in the second we are told they are unable to do this, but instead spread news of his approach). Professor Ian Wood [9] argued for the authenticity of the second visit: he quoted the Vita Genovefa (Life of St Genevieve) but this (perhaps 6th c. work) is one of many sources written after Constantius's Vita Germani which are likely to have been influenced by it. The allocation to Germanus of a different, named, companion - Severus instead of Lupus - remains hard to explain but it might be that it was details like this (originating perhaps with the oral transmission of one version of the tale) that persuaded Constantius that Germanus must actually have made two separate visits.

A recent study by Professor Anthony Barrett [10] has concluded that the complex problems surrounding the dating of the life of Saint Germanus can be most credibly solved on the basis that he made only one visit. Particularly important to his argument are the near-contemporary mentions made by Prosper of Aquitaine. He mentions Germanus's first visit (under the year 429) but not any second one (in later versions of his chronicle up to 455). In another work (his In Collatorem[11]) he describes the exile of the Pelagians which Constantius attributes to the second visit. In fact Ian Wood [12] noted that the harsher treatment of the Pelagians on the second visit as something that differentiated it from the first but it could be that it represents, in fact, a desire to corroborate the success of the first visit while allowing a valid purpose for the second. In any case the point is that Prosper's mention in his In Collatorem was almost certainly written before any second visit could take place.[13] He refers to a lapse of over 20 years since the start of the Pelagian controversy dated to 413 in his chronicle - which would date his In Collatorem to circa 433. Even more decisively he involves Pope Celestine I in this event and since Pope Celestine died in 432 it must have occurred before that time – which Professor Barrett argues would not allow time for a second visit.[14] - especially since, according to Constantius, that second visit happened after Germanus's visit to Arles to secure tax relief, something that probably occurred in the mid-430s.

If the second visit of Germanus to Britain is, indeed, a 'doublet' of the first it would cast something of a shadow over the reliability of, at least the British episodes of Constantius's Vita – and certainly everything that occurs in the second visit. This would have to represent a version of the story of Germanus's visit that had changed so much in the telling that it had become unrecognisable as the same as a better recorded version and consequently was assumed by Constantius or his source, to represent another, 'second', visit. It would particularly throw into doubt the figure of Elafius, who is something of a mysterious anomaly, in any case, given that he represents the one and only named Briton in the whole of Germanus's account (besides the martyr-saint Alban). Conceivably he might then represent, like the expulsion of the Pelagians, a detail originally connected with the (first and only) visit of 429. On the other hand, he may represent some outcome of the process of distortion that produced a second 'unrecognisable' version of the story of the first and only visit. As noted above he is connected with an episode (the curing of his son by Germanus) that looks more like allegory than historical fact and which duplicates a similarly allegorical episode (the curing of the blind girl by Germanus) in the "first" visit.

Philip Thornhill [15] suggested that the name actually represents a mis-heard version of a Celtic name Albios or Latin Albius (spoken in a Celtic-influenced dialect of vulgar Latin) that was an alternative name for the cult figure otherwise referred to as Albanus (Saint Alban). He argues that in the pronunciation of the time the names (Elafius and Albios/us) would have sounded very similar. Elafius would then represent a distorted duplicate of the one recorded personal name from Britain that we have in Constantius's account of the first visit: but from leading cult-figure of the region he had become “one of the leading men in the country” (“quidam regionis illius primus”). This might fit the allegorical context since the martyr Alban seemed in some way to represent the whole of Christian Britain so in healing Elafius = Albius = Alban – or at least his 'son' – Germanus was healing (spiritually) the whole of Britain. Thornhill argues further that such a name Abios/us could also have been the basis of the Irish cult of the allegedly “Pre-Patrican” Saint Ailbe of Emly, said to have been baptised by Palladius, who Prosper of Aquitaine tells us was sent to Ireland in 431, shortly after Germanus's visit to Britain. The name Ailbhe, according to Thornhill, would accurately represent a British-Celtic Albios (or Latin Albius, spoken in a Celtic-influenced way) as it would have been borrowed into Irish at the time.

• Passages from Constantius including mention of Elafius
• Bede's text on Elafius, derived from Constantius