Romanus of Subiaco

Romanus of Subiaco was a monk of central Italy in the early sixth century, known almost exclusively from the account given by Pope Gregory the Great in the second book of the Dialogues, written in the 590s as a life of Saint Benedict of Nursia. According to Gregory, when the young Benedict left his studies in Rome and withdrew into solitude, he settled in a remote cave in the rocky Anio valley at Subiaco. A monk named Romanus, who lived in a monastery not far from that cave under the authority of an abbot named Deodatus, perceived Benedict’s intention, kept it secret, clothed him in the monastic habit, and undertook to support him in the eremitical life.

For about three years Romanus supplied Benedict with bread, lowering it from the heights above the cave by a long rope. A small bell attached to the rope served to alert the hermit that food had arrived. Gregory records that the devil, envious of this charity, once cast a stone and broke the bell. The cave later known as the Sacro Speco became a major place of Benedictine pilgrimage and monastic life. Gregory’s narrative presents Romanus as the person through whom Benedict received both the habit and the material means to persevere as a hermit during those first years in the Simbruini mountains east of Rome.

Beyond this episode, contemporary evidence for Romanus is lacking. Gregory does not record his birth, death, or later career, and does not describe him as an abbot. Later liturgical tradition came to commemorate him as an abbot and to associate his memory with Subiaco. He is entered in the Roman Martyrology on 22 May. Some medieval legends, which are not found in Gregory, claim that Romanus afterwards travelled to Gaul and founded a monastery there; such stories are uncertain and may arise from confusion with other saints of the same name, such as Romanus of Auxerre. No reliable source preserves a precise year of birth or of death.

Romanus’s historical importance lies in his role in the earliest phase of Benedict’s monastic vocation, at a time when Italian monasticism was still diverse and the Rule of Saint Benedict had not yet been written. He belonged to an existing community in the Subiaco region rather than to the later Benedictine order that grew from Benedict’s foundations at Subiaco and Monte Cassino. His cult is of the ancient, pre-congregation type, resting on local veneration and martyrological listing rather than on a formal papal canonization of the later medieval kind. He is venerated in the Roman Catholic Church and is also honored in the Eastern Orthodox tradition in connection with the saints around Benedict.

The landscape of Subiaco, with the cave and the later monasteries of Santa Scholastica and the Sacro Speco, remains the principal place associated with his memory. Little else can be said with confidence: his family, place of birth, and the circumstances of his death are unknown, and later embellishments should be treated with caution.