In toto orbe primus omnium sacerdotum: Pope Vigilius, Arator and the Petrine Primacy

Arator’s Historia Apostolica was a product of papal literary patronage and part of an ideological strategy aimed at different but convergent purposes. It should demonstrate that the primacy of Peter had been already sanctioned by the evangelist Luke by overstating the role of the first apostle to the detriment of Paul. Peter’s primacy applied of course also to his successors, as is clear from the very beginning of the Historia Apostolica, where pope Vigilius is called “the first of all priests in the whole world”. Then, Arator’s books should strengthen papal authority in the West and for this reason they were sent also to Northern Italy and Gaul. The poem showed also that the pope was the real heir of imperial Rome, because he (through Arator) was able to master classical poetry and to support his ambitions with intertextual relations with classical authors of the Augustan period, thereby depriving Justinian of his role of defender of Rome.