The Chariot Race and the Camel

Two wonders from the Life of Hilarion have always been the most quoted — and the most revealing of its world: the Christian charioteer Italicus, whose horses Hilarion blessed against the magic spells of his pagan rival so that he won the race and converted a crowd; and the raging Bactrian camel, possessed and bound with cords, brought to the saint to be exorcised. This file reports both episodes as Jerome’s testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5), reads them against the magic and paganism of the Gaza region they confront, and shows how Jerome uses them to stage the victory of Christ over the powers of the old religion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

The Christian Charioteer

The most charming of Hilarion’s reported wonders is set at the races. Jerome tells of a Christian man of Gaza named Italicus, a town councillor, who kept horses for the circus and was matched in the games against a rival who was a worshipper of the god Marnas and who had hired a magician to lay spells on Italicus’s horses and team to make them fail. Italicus, unwilling to use magic himself but unwilling to lose to it, came to Hilarion for help. The saint, reluctant to be drawn into so worldly a matter as a chariot race, at first demurred; but, persuaded that the contest had become a public trial of Christ against the demons of the magicians, he blessed a cup of water and gave it to Italicus to sprinkle on his horses, his stable, his chariot, and the starting-gates (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the charioteer Italicus; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6).

The result, in Jerome’s telling, was decisive: Italicus’s horses flew as if winged while the rival’s seemed held back, and Italicus won so plainly that the pagan crowd itself cried out that “Marnas was conquered by Christ,” and a number were converted on the spot (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the victory of Italicus and the cry against Marnas; trans. White 1998). The wonder is, characteristically, less about the horses than about the contest behind them: it is staged by Jerome as a public duel between Christ, working through His ascetic, and the demon Marnas, working through his magician, fought out in the most public arena the city had and won before the eyes of the whole pagan populace.

Reading the Charioteer

Two things make the episode worth careful reading. First, it locates Hilarion exactly in the religious struggle of his region. Gaza was the great pagan stronghold of the Palestinian coast, its civic life centered on the temple of Marnas; the conflict of Christ and Marnas was the live conflict of the place, and would not be resolved until the Marneion’s destruction around 402 (Chitty 1966; Weingarten 2005; on the geography, see Gaza and Alexandria). The charioteer story dramatizes that conflict in miniature, and its point — that the power of the Christian ascetic openly outmatches the magic of the pagan priests — is precisely the point the historical Christianization of Gaza was working out over the same decades.

Second, Jerome himself frames the episode with a faint irony that signals his awareness of its oddity: a desert hermit asked to fix a horse race is an incongruous spectacle, and Jerome lets the saint’s reluctance show before letting him act, so that the wonder is justified only by the missionary outcome — the conversions it produced (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — Hilarion’s reluctance; Weingarten 2005). The methodology’s note applies: [Disputed: the Italicus episode is reported by Jerome alone; it is read by scholars as a hagiographic composition dramatizing the Christ-versus-Marnas struggle of the Gaza region rather than as an independently attested event, and its function — a public conversion-miracle against pagan magic — is conventional to the genre (Weingarten 2005). It is received here as the *Life*'s testimony, not as adjudicated fact.]

The Possessed Camel

If the charioteer shows Hilarion’s power over magic, the camel shows it over the demonic in its most violent form. Jerome reports that a huge Bactrian camel, possessed by a demon and gone berserk — it had already, he says, killed and injured a number of people — was brought to the saint bound with stout ropes and dragged by many men, roaring, its eyes bloodshot, foaming, its whole bulk a terror. Hilarion ordered the beast loosed; the bystanders were aghast, but the saint went up to the raging animal, addressed the demon within it, and at his command the camel collapsed to the ground, its fury gone, tamed and harmless (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the possessed Bactrian camel; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6).

Jerome draws the lesson explicitly, and it is the lesson of all the exorcisms: that the demons who can madden even a great beast tremble before the servant of Christ, and that the power which terrifies the strong is itself nothing before holiness. He has Hilarion himself voice the moral — that it is not the size of the body the demon inhabits that matters, for the same enemy that rages in a camel had assaulted Judas and rages in men, and is overcome not by force but by the name of Jesus (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the saint’s word on the demon’s power; trans. White 1998). The episode thus serves to magnify the exorcisms of men by showing the same power exercised on a creature whose strength was beyond any human resistance.

Reading the Camel

The possessed camel is one of the Life‘s most vivid scenes and one of its most clearly literary. The demoniac animal tamed by the holy man is a recognizable hagiographic figure — the saint’s authority extending even over the beasts and the demonic forces that drive them — and the detail of the Bactrian (two-humped, Central Asian) camel adds an exotic grandeur typical of Jerome’s eye for the striking image (Cox Miller 1983; Weingarten 2005). As with the charioteer, the historicity of the particular event cannot be established and is not the point: [Disputed: the camel exorcism is attested only by Jerome and is read as a hagiographic exorcism-narrative magnifying the saint's authority over the demonic; it is reported here as the *Life*'s testimony per METHODOLOGY §3.5, not as a verified occurrence]. What the scene conveys — the absolute superiority of Christ’s power, exercised through His ascetic, over the demonic in even its most furious bodily form — is the steady theology of the whole desert literature.

The Two Wonders Together

Taken together, the charioteer and the camel show the two faces of Hilarion’s reported wonderworking as Jerome conceived it. The charioteer is the public, missionary face: a wonder that converts a pagan crowd by defeating its magic on its own ground. The camel is the cosmic, exorcistic face: a wonder that displays Christ’s mastery over the demonic in nature itself. Both are set in, and aimed at, the pagan world of Gaza that Hilarion’s holiness confronted; both give the glory to Christ and keep the saint reluctant and self-effacing; and both are to be received, by the discipline of this guide, as the testimony of Jerome’s Life — read with reverence for the saint and clarity about the source (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on the source, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion).

References

Jerome. Life of Hilarion (Vita Hilarionis). Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6. 1893; and trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998. (The charioteer Italicus and the contest against the magic of the worshipper of Marnas; the crowd’s cry that Christ conquered Marnas; the possessed Bactrian camel and its taming; the saint’s word on the demon’s power.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Gaza, Marnas, and the Christianization of the coast.)
Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The Italicus and camel episodes as hagiographic compositions; the Christ-versus-Marnas framing; Jerome’s eye for the exotic image.)
Cox Miller, Patricia. Biography in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. (The taming of beasts and the conventions of the holy-man wonder.)