Petronius the Bishop

Petronius, bishop of Bologna in Italy, was a man of holy life, trained from his youth in the monastic disciplines. He is said to have written the Lives of the Fathers, that is, of the Egyptian monks, a work the monks accept as the mirror and pattern of their way of life. I have read a treatise that bears his name, On the Ordination of Bishops. It is full of good reasoning and remarkable for its humility, but its polished style shows that it was not his. It is perhaps, as some say, the work of his father Petronius, a man of great eloquence and learned in secular literature. I think this should be accepted, for the author of the work describes himself as a praetorian prefect. He died in the reign of Theodosius and Valentinian. [a]