St Caesarius (470–542; bishop of Arles, 502) was graced with a biography valuable historically and interesting to read in various ways and at different levels. Its authors (bishops Cyprian, Firmin and Vincent, the priest Messian and the deacon Stephen) leave the impression of having composed it with genuine affection and gratitude if obviously too with the unexpressed intention of staking a public claim for the permanence of his achievements: his monastery (founded with a dubious transfer of Church funds and, at the time the Life was written, under Abbess Caesaria, ‘probablement sa nièce’); his advancement of the see; his relations with civil powers; and his successful opposition to ‘semi-pelagianism’. The life story is told simply, and if uncritically, without cloying effusiveness: more like an obituary in a modern church periodical than hagiography. The obligatory ‘miracles’ are credible events which their agent himself treated matter-of -factly. Much is left out either, presumably, because it was not known or because it was thought irrelevant: family life and upbringing; explanation of why his election to office took longer than might have been expected; his later years after the Council of Orange. I do not suspect deliberate suppression of facts. Delage writes in the introduction that the bishop ‘apparait comme un solitaire’ revealing little of his feelings and without the usual intercourse with colleagues and friends though, as he says, the biographers emphasise his warm heart responsive to human needs often anecdotally. The ransoming of prisoners of war was more important to him than the preservation of Church plate and getting money for his convent than the niceties of canon law. Solitary and of independent mind indeed he was to begin with and remained: he lost his first job as cellarer of the monastery for moderating the rations in proportion to the perceived needs of the recipients and the chagrin of the disadvantaged. Bishop of a city successively under the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Franks he was a respected advocate of good causes and trusted by civil authorities in politically turbulent times. William Klingshirn's fine study, Caesarius of Arles: the making of a Christian community in late antique Gaul (1994) (rev. this Journal xlvi [1995], 545) treated of the saint and his work with more detail and in a wider scope than here but all essentials for reading and understanding this Vita are present and effectively dealt with in the introduction and notes. The Latin text is Dom Morin's, marginally improved. The reliable translation likewise modifies Klingshirn's in the Translated Texts for Historians series (1994) at a couple of points. The notes on the Latinity will interest philologists. The map of Arles, essential for the story, seems a touch more tentative than Klingshirn's. I will end by recording with satisfaction that I read this book with pleasure as well as profit: the life of a careful pastor, a reliable church leader and a devout man.