Letters & Poems 2

BOOK ONE. N.B. In the Sirmondian edition the notes were published separately after the text. We, consulting the reader's convenience, have restored them to the text. But their pagination, as it stands in Sirmond, we have expressed in bolder type, so that the analytical index may afterwards be reprinted into the notes not without profit. THE EDITOR. LETTER ONE. Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greeting. For a long time now, my honoured lord, you have been urging me with the highest authority of persuasion—as you are, in matters to be deliberated, most full of counsel—that if any somewhat more polished letters have flowed forth on various occasions, as cause, person, and time drew them out, I should, after the copies had been reviewed and refined, enclose them all in one volume, meaning to follow the roundedness of Q. Symmachus,

and to follow, with presumptuous steps, the discipline and maturity of Pliny. For as to Marcus Tullius, I think it better to keep silent in the epistolary style—him whom not even Julius Titianus, under the names of illustrious women, expressed in full with fitting resemblance. On which account all the others of the Frontonian school, emulating him as a fellow-follower, since he imitated the antique manner of speaking, called him 'the ape of the orators.' To all of whom I—monstrous to say—how much I have always yielded in my own judgment, and how much I have proclaimed that each man's prerogative of his own times and merits should be preserved.

But of course I have obeyed you, and have entrusted these to your examination—not to be reviewed (for that is too little), but, as they say, to be purged of dregs and filed down, knowing that you are an immoderate patron not only of studies but also of the studious. Wherefore you now drive me, exceedingly hesitant, into this sea of fame henceforth. Moreover, concerning a little work of this kind, we had more safely kept silent, content with the opinion of verses published more happily than skilfully—about which, for me, long since in the harbour of public judgment, after the Scyllas of envious barkings had been sailed past, the anchor of sufficient glory rests firm.

But if envy shall not have fixed its back tooth in these ravings too, straightway more numerous volumes, teeming with most copious discourses, will be multiplied for you by us. Farewell. LETTER II. Sidonius to his friend Agricola, greeting. You have often demanded that, because the fame of Theodoric, king of the Goths, commends his civility to the peoples, the size of his figure and the quality of his life should be signified to you in a letter. I obey gladly, so far as the epistolary page allows, praising in you the frankness of so delicate a solicitude. He is a man worthy to be known even by those who behold him less familiarly: so has God the arbiter, and reason, heaped up his person with the dowry of a nature's consummated felicity, joined together.

His character, moreover, is of such a kind that not even the envy of his very kingship detracts anything from its praises. If his figure be sought: his body is well-finished; shorter than the very tallest, taller and more eminent than the middling. The crown of his head is round, on which the hair, receding a little from the flatness of the forehead toward the crown, curls. His neck does not sit slack upon the sinews. A bristling arch of eyebrows crowns the twin orbs. But if the eyelashes be bent down, the margin of the lids nearly reaches to the middle of the cheeks. The tips of the ears, as is the custom of his people, are covered by the tresses of overlying hair. The nose is most gracefully curved. The lips are thin, nor widened by the corners of the mouth being dilated. If by chance a row of teeth should stand forth, straightway it presents a snowy colour.

There is a daily cutting of the hairs sprouting beneath the caverns of the nostrils. The beard is shaggy in the hollow temples, which, rising from the roots on the lower part of the face, the assiduous barber plucks out with tweezers, right up to the cheeks. The skin of the chin, throat, and neck—not fat, but full of juice—is milk-white, which, more closely inspected, is suffused with a youthful ruddiness. For this colour is often produced in him not by anger, but by modesty. The shoulders are rounded, the upper arms strong, the forearms hard, the hands broad; the chest advancing while the belly recedes. A lower spine divides the plain of the back amid the excrescences of the ribs. Each flank is knotty with prominent muscles. Vigour reigns in the well-girt loins. The thigh is horn-hard, the joints of the knees quite manly.

The greatest grace is in the scarcely wrinkled knees. His shanks are propped on swelling calves, and the foot that supports his great limbs is of modest size. If you inquire into his daily routine, which is publicly exposed to view: before dawn he seeks the assemblies of his priests with the smallest retinue, and venerates them with great earnestness—though, if the talk be private, you might observe that he keeps up that reverence rather from custom than from principle. The remaining morning he assigns to himself the care of administering the kingdom. His armour-bearer stands about his throne as companion; the throng of fur-clad guards is admitted, that they may be at hand, and shut out lest they make a din: and so before the doors they murmur, excluded by the curtains, enclosed by the lattices.

Meanwhile, the embassies of the nations being admitted, he hears much, answers little. If anything is to be dealt with, he defers it; if anything is to be dispatched, he hastens it. Is it the second hour? He rises from his throne, either to inspect his treasures, or to visit the stables. If the hunt is announced, he sets forth, judging it beneath his royal dignity to fasten the bow to his side: yet if, at close quarters, either you should point out a bird or a beast to him as he hunts, or chance should offer one to him as he travels, a boy inserts it into his hand reached back behind him, the string or thong hanging loose: for as he reckons it a boyish thing to carry it in a case, so a womanish thing to receive it already strung.

So, taking up the bow just now handed to him, he draws it, its ends bent toward him from opposite sides; now, with the knot's part turned toward his dangling ankle, he follows with a roving finger gliding over it the slack loop of the wavering string: and then straightway he takes the arrows, fits them, lets them fly; he warns you beforehand what you wish to have struck; you choose what he shall do, and what you have chosen he strikes: and if either must go astray, the aim of him who fixes the shot errs more rarely than the gaze of him who marks it out. If it comes to a banquet—which indeed on ordinary days is like a private one—there no wheezing servant sets down upon the yielding tables an unpolished heap of livid silver. The greatest weight then is in the words: for there either nothing is narrated, or serious things.

The furnishings are brought out now in embossed and tapestried fashion, dyed with purple, now of fine linen. The dishes please by art, not by price: the courses by their brightness, not their weight. The rare offerings of cups and bowls are such that thirst might more easily accuse them than drunkenness refuse them. Why say more? You would see there Greek elegance, Gallican abundance, Italian swiftness; public pomp, private diligence, royal discipline. But of that Sabbatarian luxury my narration must forbear, which cannot hide even from persons hidden. Let us return to what we began. When the feast is finished, the midday sleep is often none, always slight.

At those hours when the gaming-board is dear to the man's heart, he gathers the dice swiftly, inspects them carefully, rolls them shrewdly, throws them urgently, addresses them jestingly, awaits them patiently. At good throws he is silent, at bad ones he laughs, at neither is he angry, at both he plays the philosopher. He scorns to file down or to make second chances: the opportunities of these, offered, he spurns; opposed, he passes them by. He gets clear without commotion, gets out without collusion. You would think that even at the counters he handles arms. His only care is to win. When it is time to play, he sets aside his royal severity for a while, exhorts to play, to freedom, to fellowship. I will say what I feel: he fears to be feared. In short, he is delighted by the agitation of the man he has beaten:

and then at last he believes his opponent has not yielded to him, when the victory has made trust in another man's vexation. And, what you might wonder at, often that gladness, coming from the smallest occasions, brings good fortune to the deserts of huge affairs. Then petitions long before tossed about through the shipwrecks of patronage—of a sudden absolution a passage is opened. Then even I, about to entreat something, am happily conquered, when the board asks this of me, that a cause may be saved. About the ninth hour that mass of ruling grows raw again. Back come the knockers, back come the removers; everywhere the litigious ambition roars: which, drawn out into evening, grows scanty as the royal supper interrupts it, and thereafter is dispersed through the courtiers according to the variety of the patrons, to keep watch until the time of the dead of night.

To be sure, mimic pleasantries are admitted, though rarely, during the dining, in such a way that no guest is struck by the gall of a biting tongue. Yet so, that there neither do water-organs sound, nor does a chorus of singers, under a choir-master, strike up together a studied entertainment. No lyre-player, flute-accompanist, precentor, timbrel-girl, or harp-girl sings there: the king being soothed by those strings alone, by which he no less charms his mind with virtue than song charms the hearing. When he has risen, the treasure-guard begins the nightly watches; armed men stand at the entrances of the royal house, by whom the hours of the first slumber will be watched over. But now what is this to my part, who promised to disclose to you not much about the kingdom, but a little about the king? At the same time, it is fitting that an end be made to the pen:

because you too wished to become acquainted with no more than the man's pursuits and person, and I took care to make not a history, but a letter. Farewell. LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Philimatius, greeting. Go now, and by the laws of canvassing have me summoned before the senate and set moving, to ask why with sleepless cares I press on to attain hereditary dignity: I, whose father, father-in-law, grandfather, and great-grandfather shone in urban and praetorian prefectures, in palatine and military mastership. And behold, my Gaudentius, hitherto only of tribune's rank, has transcended the yawning idleness of our citizens by the vicarian summit. The trampled nobility of our young men indeed murmurs: but he who passes his detractors is moved in this alone, that he may rejoice.

Therefore they now venerate the man hitherto despised, and, stunned at the gifts of sudden fortune, look up on his seat at one whom they used to look down on in the assembly. He, on account of the barking of thrice-snoring men, lashes the ears with the voice of a hoarse crier: they who, though they be stirred against him by hostile goads, are nevertheless assigned to the friendly benches. Hence it would be fitting that you too, by the privilege of the prefecture, from which you are demanded to share—suffer swiftly the loss of an antiquated honour deferred: lest, if you should come into the council beyond the prerogative of a councillor, you might seem to have discharged only the offices of the vicars. Farewell. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his friend Gaudentius, greeting. Be glorified, most excellent man, in the fasces won by the dowry of your merits:

that you might possess their titles and summits, you counted out no maternal revenues, no ancestral largesses, no wifely gems, no paternal moneys: because for you, on the contrary, at the prince's house, your sincerity inspected, your diligence observed, your fellowship admitted, were to your praise. O thrice and four times blessed you, from whose eminence is given to friends gladness, to the envious punishment, to posterity glory; and moreover, to the vigorous and alert an example, to the sluggish and lazy an incitement; and yet if there are any who will hereafter emulate you with whatever spirit, they may perhaps owe it to themselves, if they should overtake you; to you they will beyond doubt owe this, that they follow.

I seem to myself to behold—with the good men's leave first bespoken—that pride of sloth swelling in the envious, and that fastidiousness of military service familiar to the idle, when, from despair of advancing, philosophizing amid their drinking, they praise the holidays of the unhonoured, from the vice of sloth, not from zeal for perfection. The appetite for which, lest it be of use even to boys, was rejected by the judgment of our elders; so, comparing the little declamations of youths to woven rags, they understood that the eloquence of young men is more laboriously drawn out when brief than cut short when extended. But since these things are enough on this head, I beg you to remember what underlies it: that I wish to repay you the interchange of this pursuit, provided that God, granting favour to my just actions, keeps me both safe and returning. Farewell.

LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Herenius, greeting. I received your letter while stationed at Rome, in which, anxious, you inquire whether the undertakings of my pilgrimage advance according to our common plan. What road I have travelled and how; which rivers I have seen, made illustrious by the songs of poets, or cities famed for the situation of their walls, or mountains renowned in the opinion of their names, or fields notable by the recounting of battles: because you reckon it delightful to have learned by the faithful report of those who inspected them what you have found by reading. Wherefore I rejoice that you desire to know what I am doing; for zeal of this kind proceeds from an inward affection. Well then—and if anything be otherwise, yet under God's help I will begin from favourable things;

with which beginnings even our ancestors were wont to inaugurate the unrolling of the accounts of their own mishaps. When I had gone out from the walls of our own Rhodanusia, the public post was of use to me, inasmuch as I had been summoned by the sacred rescripts, and indeed through the dwellings of my comrades and kinsmen: where indeed no scarcity of post-horses, but a multitude of friends, caused delay to the traveller: who, entwined about me in a close embrace, prayed with contending vows for a happy going and return. So the ridges of the Alps were approached: whose ascent for me was swift and easy, and, between the flanks of the precipice that terrifies on either side, the paths were softened, cut into a track through the snows.

Of the rivers too, any that were not navigable had convenient fords, or at least passable bridges, which antiquity arched with hidden vaults from the foundations up to the embankment, crusted over with a walkable flint. I boarded the courier-boat of the Ticinus (such is the name for the vessel): borne shortly by it into the Eridanus, I both laughed at the Phaethontiades so often sung by us over our cups, and at the fabricated tears of the tree's metal. Ulvous Lambrus, cerulean Addua, swift Athesis, sluggish Mincius—which rose from the Ligurian and Euganean mountains—being carried up a little through their opposing mouths, I inspected even in their own eddies: whose banks and shores were everywhere clothed with oak and maple groves.

Here was a sweet, contented, resounding chorus of birds, whose nest-structure, set now in hollow reeds, now in pricking rushes, now in knotless bulrushes, swayed: all which shrubs, tumultuously along the river-margins, had sprouted, fostered by the sap of the absorbent soil. And presently, being carried onward, I came to Cremona, whose nearness was once sighed for by Mantuan Tityrus. Then at the town of Brixillum, while the Venetian rower gives way to a boatman coming from Aemilia, we entered only to go out, coming a little after to Ravenna by a course more to the right: where you might doubt whether the mid-highway connects or separates the old city and the new harbour. Moreover, a double town: one certain part of the Po flows between it, another washes it:

which, torn asunder from its principal channel by the interposition of public embankments, and drained through the same derived channels, so divides the flowing waters that, encompassing, they afford defence to the walls, and, flowing in, commerce. Hither everything most opportune for trade, and especially what was fit for eating, was conveyed: except that, since here the salt sea dashed against the gates, and there a ditch fanned by the running of skiffs through a sewer-like broth, and the languid gliding of the very stagnant moisture, fouled by the nautical poles, was made turbid with a plugging slime—in the midst of the waters we were thirsty: because nowhere was there either the pure liquor of aqueducts, or a cistern that could be cleared of dregs, or a flowing spring, or an unmuddied well.

Whence, having advanced, we came to the Rubicon, which borrows the origin of its name from the reddish colour of its gravels: and which of old was the boundary to the Cisalpine Gauls and the ancient Italians, when the towns of the peoples of either Adriatic sea were assigned for division. Hence I came to Ariminum and Fanum—the former memorable for Julius's rebellion, the latter stained with Hasdrubal's death. Since there is the Metaurus, whose felicity, won in a single day, is thus prolonged into length, as if even now it were bringing down blood-stained corpses into the Dalmatian sea with its discolouring eddies. Hence the remaining towns of the Flaminian Way—as soon as I entered them, I went out—leaving the Picentes on the left, the Umbri on the right.

Where either the Calabrian Atabulus, or the pestilent region of the Tuscans, with the air's spirit drunk with venomous blasts, and now alternating heats, now colds, infected my steaming body. Meanwhile fever and thirst laid waste the innermost secret of my heart and marrow. To whose greediness we promised—fear beguiling desire—not only the pleasant places of springs, or the hidden depths of wells (though these too), but all those waters, whether neighbouring or in our path, that is: the glassy Fucinus, the icy Clitumnus, the cerulean Anio, the sulphurous Nar, the pure Farfar, the turbid Tiber. Amid these Rome too lay open to view: whose not only shapes, but even naval-battle basins, I seemed about to drink up.

Where, before I even touched the pomerium, having cast myself down at the triumphal thresholds of the apostles, I straightway felt every languor driven out from my ill-strong limbs. After these proofs of heavenly patronage, received in a part of the hired lodging, and even now, while lying down, scribbling these very things, I devote a little effort to rest. Nor do I yet present myself at the tumultuous doors of the prince and his courtiers. For I have arrived amid the nuptials of the patrician Ricimer, to whom the daughter of the perennial Augustus was being joined in hope of public security. Therefore now, amid this gladness not only of persons but even of orders and parties, it has seemed more advantageous to lie low on your Transalpine side:

since at this very time in which these things were being written by me, scarcely through all the theatres, market-halls, praetoria, forums, temples, and gymnasia was the Fescennine wedding-song of the talassio unfolded. And even now, on the contrary, let studies grow silent, business rest, courts hush, embassies be deferred, canvassing be idle, and amid the buffooneries of the players let the whole state of serious transactions go into exile. Now indeed the maiden has been handed over; now the bridegroom is crowned; now the palm-robed consul, now the bridesmaid in her matron's mantle, now the senator is honoured in his toga; now the inglorious man lays aside his cloak: and yet all the pomp of the bridal-chambers has not yet roared itself out, because the new bride has not yet migrated to her husband's house.

When this festival is over, the remaining struggles of my labours shall be disclosed to you—provided that the completed solemnity has at last brought an end to that most engrossing holiday of the whole city. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Eutropius, greeting. I have long desired to write to you, but now I am impelled to do so most of all, that is, now that, with Christ showing favour, my road takes me toward the City. My reason for writing—the sole, or at least the chief—is this: that I may summon you, drawn out from the depths of domestic quiet, to take up the duties of the palatine service. To this is added that, by the gift of God, there belong to you the qualities that befit such an office: an unimpaired vigour of body and of mind;

then, that though equipped with horses, arms, apparel, means, and a household of servants, you—unless I am mistaken—dread only to make the beginning; and though you are brisk at home, when it comes to undertaking a journey a sluggish despair makes you timid. Yet a man of senatorial stock, who is daily thrust among the trabeated images of his forefathers, can rightly say that he has travelled abroad only if once even in his youth he has beheld the dwelling-place of the laws, the school of letters, the senate-house of dignities, the summit of the world, the fatherland of liberty—in which, the one city of the whole world, only barbarians and slaves are foreigners. And now (O the shame of it!) are you to be left behind among rustics who follow the oxen, and swineherds who snore at their hogs?

For if you cleave open the field with the trembling coulter, or, bending low, spread out with the hoe the flowering riches of the meadow, or, a stooping ditcher, turn up the vine heavy with its shoot—then this is for you the highest bliss of your desires. Rather rouse yourself; your spirit, grown flabby from fat leisure and unnerved, will incline to greater things. It is no less proper to a man of your birth to polish his own person than to polish his farm. In fine, what you call the exercise of youth is really the idleness of veterans, in whose worn-out hands rusty swords are too late exchanged for the mattock.

Granted, the new wine will foam for you from your multiplied vineyards; the granaries too, bursting with the heaped harvest, will yield you countless mounds; your fat herdsman will pen up for you the close-packed flock with its swollen udders to fill the milk-pail, amid the reeking caves of the sheepfolds. To what end is it to have enlarged one's patrimony by so filthy a profit—and not merely to have lain hidden amid such things, but, what is baser, to have lain hidden for the sake of such things? Will it not sharply gall you when, at the time of the council, behind the young men who sit and vote, a glorious rustic, an old man standing, a nobleman skulking, you are pressed down by the vote of some poor man who has held honours—when you grieve to have seen precede you those whom it would be shameful to have follow in our footsteps? But why say more? If you allow me to encourage you, I will be the comrade, helper, guide, and partner of your endeavours.

But if, entangled in the alluring nets of pleasures, you prefer, as they say, to attach yourself to the doctrines of Epicurus, who, casting virtue away, fixes the highest good in bodily pleasure alone—then behold, I call our forefathers to witness, I call our posterity to witness, that I am no accomplice in this offence. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his friend Vincentius, greeting. The fate of Arvandus grieves me, and I do not pretend that it does not. For this addition too accrues to the praises of the emperor, that even the condemned may be openly loved. I was the man's friend beyond what the pliancy and inconstancy of his character deserved. This is proved by the ill-will lately kindled against me on his account, whose flame scorched me for being a little too incautious. But that I stood firm in friendship, I owe to myself.

Moreover, he by nature had no diligence in perseverance. I complain freely, not insultingly: for despising the counsels of faithful men, he was in all things the plaything of fortune. In short, I marvel not that he fell at last, but that he stood so long. O how often he himself would boast that he had endured adversity!—while yet, out of a deeper affection, we pitied the rashness that would one day bring him to ruin, judging that man not happy who is more often, rather than always, so judged. But you ask for the order of his administration. Saving faith and the reverence owed even to a friend in affliction, I will set the matter forth briefly. His first prefecture he administered with great popularity, and the one that followed with the greatest depopulation.

Likewise, weighed down by the burden of debt, and in dread of his creditors, he was jealous of the nobles who were to succeed him. He mocked at all men's conversations, pried into their counsels, despised their attentions, and endured suspicion because of the rareness of those who came to him, and disgust because of his own importunity—until, hemmed in by the mass of public hatred, and girt about with a guard before he was ungirt of his office, he was seized, and, marked for judgment, arrived at Rome. There at once he swelled with pride, because he had sailed with a prosperous course past the stormy coast of Tuscany, as though the very elements in some fashion served him, well aware of his own deserts. On the Capitol he was kept under guard by his host Flavius Asellus, count of the sacred largesses, who still reverenced in him the half-smouldering dignity of the prefecture so lately wrested from him.

Meanwhile the envoys of the province of Gaul—Tonantius Ferreolus of prefectorial rank, grandson through the daughter of the consul Afranius Syagrius, and also Thaumastus and Petronius, men endowed with the greatest skill in affairs and in speech, and to be reckoned among the chief ornaments of our fatherland—pursued Arvandus, who had gone before, in order to accuse him in the public name, together with the decrees that had been drawn up. Among the other matters which the provincials had commissioned them to transact, they brought forward intercepted letters, which Arvandus's secretary, when arrested, confessed that his master had dictated. This document appeared to be sent to the king of the Goths, dissuading peace with the Greek emperor, and declaring that the Britons settled beyond the Loire

ought to be attacked; affirming too that the Gauls should be divided with the Burgundians according to the law of nations; and much other mad matter after this fashion, calculated to stir wrath in a fierce king and shame in a gentle one. This letter the jurists were hotly interpreting as a crime of high treason. This affair did not escape me and Auxanius, that most excellent man, who reckoned it to be treacherous, barbarous, and cowardly, to shun Arvandus's friendship, into which we had been drawn in one way or another, now that his fortunes were adverse. We therefore disclose the whole plot to him, who feared no such thing—the plot which those keen and fiery men were with the utmost cunning contriving to conceal until the time of the trial;

namely, that they might entangle their adversary, off his guard and rashly trusting himself alone after rejecting the counsels of his comrades, in a profession of some headlong reply. We therefore told him what we thought safe for ourselves and for our more intimate friends. We advised him to confess nothing as though trivial, if anything, even as most trifling, were demanded of him by his enemies: that very dissimulation would prove most thorny, whereby they might the more easily bring on him a false security of persuasion. On learning this, he flings himself away, and bursting out into sudden abuse: 'Begone, degenerates,' said he, 'unworthy of your prefectorial fathers, with this superfluous trepidation of yours: to me, since you understand nothing, leave this part of the business to be managed. His own conscience suffices Arvandus well enough:

I shall scarcely deign to allow advocates to plead for me in suits of extortion.' We depart sorrowful, confounded no less by grief than by the affront: for who of physicians would rightly be moved, whenever frenzy seizes one given up for lost? Amid all this our defendant paraded across the Capitoline square dressed in white: now feeding on fawning salutations, now gladly hearing the popping bubbles of flatteries as though he took stock of them, now examining silks and gems and all the precious wrappings of the money-changers, and inspecting them as though about to buy, handling them, cheapening them, unrolling them; and, in the midst of his doings, complaining much about the laws, about the times, about the senate, about the prince—because they did not avenge him before they had examined him. A few intervening days;

a full senate goes into the council-chamber; so I learned afterwards, for in the meantime I had departed. Our man proceeds to the senate-house, a little before newly shorn and pumiced, while the accusers, half-mourning and unkempt, awaited the summons from the decemviri, and by deliberate squalor had snatched from the defendant the pity due to him, casting it under the odium reserved for the mourning-clad. Being called, they are led in; they take their stand, as is the custom, on opposite sides. To the men of prefectorial rank, before the opening of the case, the right of sitting is offered. Arvandus, even then with unhappy shamelessness, thrusts himself with hurried step almost into the very midst of the judges' laps.

Ferreolus, with his colleagues standing about at his sides, modestly and gently sat down at the lowest end of the benches, so that he might remember himself to be no less an envoy than a senator: for which reason he was afterwards the more praised and honoured. While these things were passing, and those of the nobles who had been absent came in, the parties rise and the envoys state their case. The letter, after the provincial mandate mentioned above, is produced; and as it was slowly read out, Arvandus, before he was even questioned, cries aloud that he had dictated it. The envoys replied that, although it stood most wickedly established that he had himself dictated it,

But when that raving man, unaware how far he was falling, ran himself through with a confession twice and thrice repeated, it was acclaimed by the accusers and cried out by the judges that a defendant confessing to high treason was convicted. Besides this, he was cut to pieces by thousands of legal formulas that sanctioned it. Then at last, laborious with a tardy repentance, he is said to have grown pale at his own loquacity, learning too late that even one who had not aspired to the garb of the purple-clad could be pronounced guilty of treason. Immediately, stripped of the privileges of the double prefecture which he had ruled for five years with repeated fasces, and cast back into a plebeian family—not so much added to it as restored—he was adjudged to the public prison.

This indeed was most pitiable, as those who saw it related: that because he had entered adorned and polished among his black-clad accusers, before the judges, a little later, when he was led away as a condemned man, he was wretched, yet not to be pitied. For who would be too greatly moved over his state, seeing him carefully groomed and anointed, borne off to the stone-quarries or the workhouse? But when the judgment had been adjourned scarcely twice over a week, being condemned to death, he was flung into the pit of the Epidaurian serpent;

where, disfigured even to the grief of his enemies, and spat out from human affairs as it were by the vomit of a nauseated fortune, he now, by the old Tiberian decree of the senate, drags out a life of thirty days after the sentence, shuddering hour by hour at the hook, the Gemonian steps, and the noose of the turbulent executioner. We indeed, so far as we are able, both absent and present, make our vows, and redouble our prayers and supplications, that, the blow of the already drawn sword being suspended, the imperial clemency may bestow on the half-dead man, though his goods be confiscated, at least the gift of exile. Yet in his case, whether he awaits every extremity or endures it, nothing is more unhappy, if, after so many brands seared upon him and so many insults, he now fears anything more than merely to go on living. Farewell. LETTER VIII.

Sidonius to his friend Candidianus, greeting. You congratulate me on tarrying at Rome; yet you do so as if in jest, with sallies of raillery mixed in. For you say you rejoice that at last your friend may see the sun, whom, as a rare drinker of the Allia, I have seldom looked upon. For you reproach me with the fogs of my Lugdunum, and complain that our day, obstructed by the morning haze, is scarcely opened up by the noonday heat. And do you prattle these things at me, you a home-born slave of Caesena—that oven rather than town? Concerning the pleasantness or convenience of your native place to you alone, you yourself showed what you felt, when you migrated: yet in such a way that, while you play the more happily at exile in Ravenna, your ears bored through by the Po's gnats, a chattering throng of municipal frogs leaps about you.

In which marsh, by the law of all things perpetually reversed, walls fall, waters stand still, towers float, ships settle, the sick walk about, the physicians lie in bed, the baths are cold, the dwellings blaze, the living thirst, the buried swim, thieves keep watch, the magistrates sleep, the clergy lend at interest, the Syrians chant psalms, the merchants soldier, the soldiers trade, old men study ball-games, young men play at dice, eunuchs at arms, and the federate barbarians at letters. Look you what manner of city it is, where your household hearth is set—a city that could more easily have a territory than solid ground. Wherefore remember that the harmless dwellers beyond the Alps must be spared, who, content with the endowment of their own sky, are given no great glory if they shine bright only by comparison with worse. Farewell.

LETTER IX. Sidonius to his friend Heronius, greeting. After the nuptials of the patrician Ricimer—that is, after the wealth of both empires had been squandered—there was at last a return to public seriousness, which threw open the door and the field for transacting affairs. Meanwhile we, received into the household of Paulus, of prefectorial rank and venerable no less for learning than for sanctity, were courteously entertained with the offices of gracious hospitality. Indeed no man is more excellent than he in every kind of accomplishment. Good God, what riddles he frames in his propositions, what figures in his sentences, what neat phrases in his verses, what devices with his fingers! Yet in this he surpasses even the summit of all studies, that he possesses, above this eminent knowledge, a conscience still higher.

Therefore through him first of all I explore whether there is any access whatever to the court of favour: with him I confer as to which of the nobles could best avail to aid our hopes. Nor indeed was there much hesitation, since few were those about whose choice as patron one might be in doubt. There were indeed in the senate very many polished with wealth, exalted in birth, weighty in age, useful in counsel, elevated in dignity, affable in condescension: but, saving the honour of the rest, two most eminent men of consular rank, Gennadius Avienus and Caecina Basilius, were conspicuous above the others. These, in that most august order, the prerogative of the military party set aside, were easily, after the purple-clad prince, the chief men.

But even between these, though both were to be marvelled at, their characters were nevertheless diverse, and there was a likeness rather of temper than of talent. For I will say a few things somewhat more concisely about them. Avienus had come to the consulship by good fortune, Basilius by virtue. And so in Avienus a pleasant swiftness of dignities was extolled, in Basilius a slow abundance of them. Each indeed, if by chance they went forth from their homes, was hemmed in by a crowd of clients going before, following after, and thronging round: but far different, in men so alike, were the hopes and spirits of their retainers. Avienus, if he had any power, exerted himself in advancing his sons, sons-in-law, and brothers; and since he was always distracted by domestic candidates, he was less effectively efficacious in dispatching the needs of outside petitioners:

and in this the Decian house was preferred to the family of the Corvini, that such things as Avienus, while girt with office, obtained for his own kin, Basilius, ungirt of office, conferred on strangers. Avienus's mind opened itself to all, and quickly, but rather unfruitfully; Basilius's to few, and late, but more advantageously. Neither was of difficult access, neither of costly; but if you cultivated both, you would more easily obtain familiarity from Avienus, and a benefit from Basilius. Having long weighed these considerations on both sides, a mutual conference so tempered the matter that, the reverence due to the elder consular being reserved—into whose house we ventured not too rarely—we should rather attach ourselves to the throng of Basilius's frequenters.

And here, while through this most eminent man we were working out something concerning the petitions of the Arvernian embassy, lo, the Kalends of January arrived, which awaited the name of the consul Augustus, soon to be entered again upon the fasti. Then my patron said: 'Come now, my dear Sollius, although you are burdened with the weight of the office you have undertaken, I wish that in homage to the new consul you should bring forth your old Muse, singing something votive even with hasty strings. I will furnish the applicant with access, the reciter with encouragement, the one reciting with support. If you trust one who has tried, many serious advantages will be advanced for you by this sport.' I therefore obeyed his instructions: he did not withdraw his favour from what he had enjoined:

and as an unconquered supporter of the devotion imposed upon me, he prevailed with my consul to make me prefect of his senate. But you, unless I am mistaken, weary of the letter's prolixity, will now, I know, dwell more pleasurably on re-reading the verses of the little work itself; and on this account the loquacious paper carries in what follows the poem itself, which may in the meantime, for the few days until I come, converse with you on my behalf. And if the points of your judgment too be granted to it, it will be as gratifying to me as if, while I harangued in the comitium or among the rostra, at my 'bravo!' not only the applause of the broad stripe but also the din of the common folk were roused. Yet I advise, and forewarn, that you by no means equate the very sweepings of your Clio with my hexameters.

For deservedly, when set beside yours, my songs will be compared not with the trappings of heroic verse, but with the dirges of epitaph-writers. Yet nevertheless rejoice, that this very panegyric received, if not the judgment, at least the outcome of a good work. Wherefore, if forbidding things must be sweetened with jesting, I wish to conclude the page with a glorious, that is, a Thrasonian ending, in imitation of the Plautine Pyrgopolynices. Therefore, since by the aid of Christ I have arrived at the prefecture by occasion of my pen, do you at once command—by the authority of the belted man, all the acclamations of every praise being heaped up on every side—that my eloquence be borne to the stars if I please, or my good fortune if I displease. I seem to see you laugh, because you perceive our boastfulness rivalling that most ferocious soldier of Comedy.

Farewell. LETTER X. Sidonius to his friend Campanianus, greeting. I received your letter through the prefect of the annona, in which you commend to me, as to a new judge, your old comrade. I give him great thanks, and you the greatest, that you have both resolved concerning my friendship either to presume upon it as safe, or to trust it as inviolate. But I embrace the acquaintance and friendship of the man not only willingly, but eagerly, since I know that our favour too will be the more closely bound by this compliance of mine. But do you also commend to his vigilance the state and cause of my good name—that is, of my repute. I fear, moreover, lest the din of the theatrical benches should resound the hunger of the Roman people, and by my misfortune the public famine be laid to my charge.

Truly I am at once preparing to send this same man forthwith to the harbour, because I have learned that five ships setting out from Brundisium with cargoes of wheat and honey have touched the mouths of the Tiber. If he does anything with energy, he will hastily cause their cargoes to be offered to the expectation of the people, thereby commending himself to me, me to the people, and both of us to you. Farewell. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his friend Montius, greeting. You ask, most eloquent of men—as you are about to set out for your Sequani—that some satire or other, if it has been written out by me, be sent to you: which for my part I marvel that you should have requested. For it is not right that you should quickly think ill and amiss of a friend's character.

I was indeed about to brood over this theme, being now at that leisure, and having that time of life, when to have dictated it as a young man and one on military service would have been presumptuous, but to have published it would have been dangerous. For to what grammarian, even when he was but greeting him, did that Calabrian not say: 'If any man has composed evil verses against another, there is a right and a judgment against him'? But lest you should believe anything further of the like against your comrade, what that thing was which the rumour and smoke of a sinister opinion breathed upon me, I will set forth from its origin, a little more at length. In the times of the emperor Majorian, there came into common circulation a paper about the court, but lacking any indication of authorship, full of biting satiric verses: which indeed, having abused the nakedness of names in a truly invective manner, carped much at vices, more at men.

Amid all this the people of Arles—where the matter was being handled—murmured, and sought which of the poets the weight of the public frenzy might deservedly press upon, chiefly at the instigation of those authors whom an uncertain author had exasperated by certain marks. It happened by chance that Catullinus, then an illustrious man, came thither from the Arverni, being a friend both to me always and especially by reason of our recent fellowship in service. For often travel abroad makes citizens more friendly. Therefore both Paconius and Bigerus laid these snares for one who suspected nothing: that in the presence of very many they might inquire of him, as of an unwary man, whether he recognized this new poem. And he said: 'If you have named it, I will tell you.'

And when in vain they poured out various things, as though in jest, Catullinus dissolved into laughter, and with untimely approval began to cry out that it was a poem worthy to be received, to be perpetuated in gilded letters, upon the beaked or even the Capitoline tablet. Paconius flared up, upon whom that satirist had all the more eagerly pressed the bite of a fiery tooth; and to the bystanding gossip-mongers he said: 'Of the common injury I have now found the guilty party. Do you see how Catullinus is dying with laughter? It is plain that a familiar note is being recalled to him. For what cause compelled him to precipitate a hasty verdict, unless that he already holds the whole who judges thus of a part? And so Sidonius is now among the Arverni: whence it is gathered that, with him as author and this man as hearer, the thing was woven.'

They rush into fury, and into abuse of a conscience absent, unknowing, and innocent; nothing is reserved for the examination of the truth. Thus the man of the people, by his popular character, drew together the pliability of a fickle mob whithersoever he willed. For Paconius himself was wholly of the populace, one who with tribunician blasts would often drive the sea of seditions. Yet if you had inquired of his race and his home, he was born no more eminently than as a municipal; and whom, at the outset, the renown of his stepfather rather than of his father had caused to be known. Again and again, however, aspiring to grow through fair means and foul, and being sparing of money through avarice, prodigal of it through ambition,

For, in order that he might at least be joined by his daughter—however most honourable she was—to a family above his own, contrary to the strictness of civic custom our Chremes, as they say, had promised his Pamphilus a splendid dowry. And when the Marcellian conspiracy for seizing the diadem was being brewed, he had shown himself a standard-bearer among the youth of the nobility in the faction: a man still new in his old age, until at length, on account of his experiences of successful audacity, he gave to the obscurity of his birth the gleam of a gaping interregnum. For when the court was vacant and the commonwealth thrown into confusion, he alone was found who, daring to gird himself for the administration of the Gauls with the fasces before the codicils, ascended for many months as illustrious prefect the tribunal of the illustrious powers:

the year being completed, scarcely honoured about the very end of the final term of his service, after the manner of the accountants, or rather of the advocates, whose dignities begin only when their pleadings are finished. Therefore this man—a prefectorius so, a senator so (for that I do not fully pay the fitting praises of his character, I owe to the character of his kindred)—stirred up the hatreds of more than the good against me, while I was still ignorant, still a friend, as though I alone in my age had the power to sing in verse. I come to Arles, suspecting nothing as yet—for whence should I?—although I was thought by my enemies not likely to appear; and having seen the prince the day after, I go down into the forum as usual; which when it was seen, straightway the sedition, as he says, having dared nothing bravely, took fright.

Some, however, grovelled at my knees more than was seemly; others, lest they should salute me, fled behind the statues and hid behind the columns; others, sad and sullen, walked at my very side with their flanks joined to mine. Here I marvelled what this meant in these men—a form of excessive pride, in those, of humility—yet did not of my own accord inquire the causes, when one of the crowd of factious men, being suborned, presented himself to be saluted by me. Then, as the conversation proceeded, 'Do you observe this?' said he. And I: 'I see it,' said I, 'and I do indeed marvel at their behaviour, yet do not wonder at it.' To this our interpreter: 'They either execrate you as a satirist,' said he, 'or dread you.' 'Whence? When?' I replied; 'who has acknowledged the crime? Who has laid the charge? Who has proved it?'

And soon, smiling, 'Go on, friend,' said I, 'if it is not troublesome, and deign to consult in my name those who are swelling with rage, whether that informer or accuser who has fabricated that I wrote a satire will also fabricate that I published it: whence perchance it may be safer if they retract, that they may cease to be haughty.' And when the messenger reported this, straightway all of them, not modestly nor singly, but hastily and in a throng, gave me kisses and their right hands. Only my Curio, having inveighed against the perfidy of the deserters, when evening drew on, was carried off and brought home by his chair-bearing slaves, more grim than corpse-carriers. On the morrow Augustus commanded that we should be present at his banquet during the games of the circus.

First on the left horn reclined the consul ordinarius Severinus, a man ever equable in favour amid the vast upheavals of princes and the unequal state of the commonwealth. Next to him was Magnus, once ex-prefect, lately ex-consul, a personage doubled in his honours: behind him reclined Camillus, his brother's son, who, having himself also run through two dignities, had equally adorned his father's proconsulate and his uncle's consulate. On this side, close by, was Paeonius, and on that side Athenius, a man practised in the variety of lawsuits and of times. Him there followed Gratianensis, a man to be set apart from all infamy, who followed Severinus in honour just as he had preceded him in favour. Last of all I reclined, where the purple-clad prince's left side was extended along the right margin.

When a great part of the feasting was over, Caesar directed his speech to the consul, and that briefly; thence it rolled on to the ex-consul, with whom, being often repeated because it turned on letters, it was, as occasion offered, transferred to the illustrious Camillus, so far that the prince said: 'You truly have an uncle, brother Camillus, on whose account I congratulate myself on having conferred one consulate upon your family.' Then he, who was wishing for something similar, having found the moment, said: 'Not one, Lord Augustus, but a first.' With the loudest uproar—so that not even reverence for Augustus could withstand it—the saying was received. Thence, questioning Athenius about something or other, the imperial address passed over Paeonius who was interjected—whether by chance or by design, I know not.

When Paeonius had taken this ill, disgracefully, and—what was more disgraceful—answered though not addressed, Augustus smiled, as, with his authority preserved, he had given himself over to sociability, full of jest: through which laughter no less vengeance fell to Athenius than affront had befallen him. So that most wily old man collects himself, and, as he was ever inwardly consumed by the heat of shame that Paeonius should be preferred to him, said: 'I do not wonder, Augustus, if he tries to snatch from me the place of standing, who does not blush to invade yours of speaking.' And the illustrious Gratianensis said: 'Much scope is opened for satirists by this quarrel.' Here the emperor, turning his neck toward me, said: 'I hear, Count Sidonius, that you write satire.'

And I said, 'This I hear too, my Lord Prince.' Then he, but laughing, said, 'Spare us at least.' But I said, 'In that I refrain from what is unlawful, I spare myself.' After which he said, 'And what shall we do with those who provoke you?' And I: 'Whoever he is, my Lord Emperor, let him accuse me publicly. If we are refuted, let us pay the deserved penalties of the reproach: but if we have not implausibly disposed of the charges laid, I pray that, by the indulgence of your clemency, besides the wrong done to the law, I may write against my accuser what I will.' At this he himself, having caught sight of Paeonius, began by a nod to consult the man who was wavering, whether the condition pleased him. But when he, confounded, kept silent, and the prince consulted him as he blushed, he said: 'I grant your requests, if you seek this very thing forthwith in verse.'

'Be it so,' said I; and turning about, as though I were asking water for my hands, and delaying only so long as the swift attendants run round the circle of the couch, I gave back my elbow to the cushion. And the emperor: 'You had pledged that you would request in impromptu verses the licence of writing a satire.' And I: 'Whoso blames me for writing satire, most mighty prince, this I ask you to decree—let him either approve it or fear it.' There followed an uproar—except that to say so is boastfulness—equal to the Camillan one; which indeed not so much the dignity of the poem as the brevity of the time deserved. And the prince: 'I call God and the public state to witness that I will henceforth never forbid you to write whatever you wish, seeing that the charge fastened upon you can in no way be proved;'

At the same time it is a grave injustice that the sentence of one clad in the purple should be surrendered to these private feuds, so that an innocent and untroubled nobility should be imperiled by an uncertain charge on account of certain hatreds. When I myself, modestly and with bowed head, was rendering thanks for this verdict, the face of my accuser began to grow pale — a face upon which, a little before, sadness had succeeded to anger; and little was wanting but that they froze, as though bidden to offer their necks to the drawn blade. Scarcely after this, and a few other words, we rose. We had gone forward a little from the emperor's sight, and were still being wrapped in our cloaks, when the consul fell upon my breast, the men of prefectorian rank upon my hands, and that very friend of mine, while all pitied him again and again and abjectly, humbled himself:

so that I feared he might, by his supplication, stir up against me the odium which he had not roused by his accusation. At length, pressed by the entreaty of the assembled nobles, I said that he should know that nothing would be requited to his efforts in verse — that I would refrain from disparaging his conduct, if only he for his part would spare mine in future; for it ought to suffice that the charge of satire had won me fame and him infamy. In sum, my honored lord, I bore with him as one who was not so much a maintainer of calumny as a mutterer of it. But since satisfaction was made to me such that, for his guilt, so many summits and rights of powers and dignities were bowed before my breast, I confess that the beginning of such an affront was worth so much, whose end was glory. Farewell. LETTER ONE. Sidonius to his friend Ecdicius, greeting.

Your people of Auvergne now endure two evils at once. 'Which?' you ask: the presence of Seronatus, and your absence. Of Seronatus — of whose very name let me speak first — it seems to me that Fortune, as if foreknowing the future, made sport, just as, on the contrary, our forefathers called those battles than which nothing is fouler 'wars' (bella, as though 'fair'), and with like contrariety named those Fates that spared nothing the 'Sparers' (Parcae). The very Catiline of our age has returned, lately from Aturres, so that the blood and fortunes of the wretched, which the former had there in part poured out as a toast, this one might mix down to the last drop. Know that in him the spirit of a long-dissembled madness is being laid open day by day: openly he envies, abjectly he feigns, slavishly he plays the proud:

He imposes as a master, exacts as a tyrant, condemns as a judge, slanders as a barbarian; all day long he is armed by fear, fasting from avarice, terrible from greed, cruel from vanity; he ceases not both to punish thefts and to commit them at once; openly, with laughing cronies summoned, he belches out among citizens the talk of battles, among barbarians the talk of letters — letters which, not even sufficiently initiated in his first alphabet, he publicly dictates out of boastfulness and corrects out of shamelessness; everything he covets he 'acquires' as it were, neither paying the price (for he scorns it), nor accepting the deeds of purchase (for he despairs of them); in counsel he is silent, in the council he commands, in church he jokes, at the banquet he preaches, in the bedchamber he condemns, at the inquiry he dozes;

daily he fills the woods with fugitives, the villas with billeted 'guests', the altars with the accused, the prisons with clerics; exulting over the Goths, insulting the Romans, mocking the prefects, colluding with the accountants; trampling the Theodosian laws and putting forward the Theodorician, he hunts out old faults and new tributes. Therefore quickly unwind your delays, and whatever it is that holds you back, cut it off. The last liberty of your quivering citizens awaits you. Whatever is to be hoped, whatever to be despaired of, it is resolved that it be done with you in the midst, with you presiding. If there be no forces from the state, no garrisons, if there be — as rumor holds — none of the resources of the emperor Anthemius: the nobility has determined, on your counsel, either to give up their homeland or their hair. LETTER II.

Sidonius to his friend Domitius, greeting. You reproach me for being in the country, when I have rather ground to complain that you are now kept in the city. Already spring gives way to summer, and the sun, drawn toward its furthest lines, is stretched with wandering ray toward the Scythian pole. What here shall I say of the climate of our region? whose expanses the divine workmanship has so stretched out that we are the more subjected to the vapors of the western world. Why say more? The world has grown white-hot, the Alpine ice is dissolved, and the earth is inscribed with the gaping windings of parched fissures; the gravel lies squalid in the shallows, mud on the banks, dust on the fields, and the very water, wherever it flows unceasingly, grows faint with lingering course. Now the wave is not only warm, but is cooked;

and now, while one man sweats in linen, another in silk, you — muffled in a thick cloak without, swathed in bandages within, and moreover cramped in the hollow seat of the town of Camerinum, with your pupils pale not less from the heat than from fear — yawning, begin to expound, 'A Samian woman was my mother.' Why not rather, if anything wholesome is dear to your heart, swiftly withdraw from the panting straits of the city, and, eagerly joined to our company, cheat the dog-star's harshness in this most delightful retreat? If it please you, then, learn what is the situation of the estate to which you are called. We are at Avitacum; this is the name of the property, which, because it is my wife's, is sweeter to me than my father's. Here, God presiding, unless you fear some evil eye, I have concord with my household.

A mountain on the west, earthen though it be, yet steep, pours forth below itself lower hills as from a twin source, drawn off about four acres in breadth. But until the level ground fitting for the house opens as a forecourt, the sides of the slopes accompany the middle valley in straight tracts, right to the edge of the villa, which is extended with its fronts turned to the North and the South. The bath clings on the southwest to the roots of a wooded crag; and if the coppice-wood on the ridge be felled, it is thrust, by an almost spontaneous fall, in falling heaps into the mouth of the furnace. Hence rises the chamber of the hot water, which squares off with a corresponding equality of space to the adjoining anointing-room, save for the semicircle of the capacious basin:

where too the force of the boiling water, threaded through a pierced wall by the channels of pliant lead, gurgles forth. Within the heated chamber there is solid daylight, and such an abundance of enclosed light that it compels every modest person to think himself something more than naked. Hence the cold room extends, which might not immodestly rival pools built by public works. First, the peak of the roof is brought to a cone, while from the corners the ridges of the crests, meeting four ways, are tiled with tiles laid between; but the room itself is squared with fitting measures in most exact spaciousness, so that, the service of the attendants not hindering one another, it can receive as many chairs as the curved couch has persons.

The builder set two windows facing one another at the edge of the hanging vault, so as to open to the gaze of those looking up the finely-wrought coffered ceiling. The inner face of the walls is content with the mere whiteness of smoothed plaster. Here no shameful story stands displayed through the naked beauty of wrestlers' bodies — a story which, as it adorns the art, so disgraces the artist. Absent are actors ridiculous in dress and countenance, counterfeiting with many-colored pigments the stock furnishings of Philistio. Absent are the slippery and writhing athletes of the boxing-ring and its holds, whose grapplings — even of living men — if they be entwined too obscenely, the chaste rod of the gymnasiarchs at once breaks apart. Why say more? Nothing will be found impressed on those panels which it would not be holier not to have seen.

Yet a few little verses will detain the newly-arrived reader, in a by no means displeasing measure; for one neither longs to read them again, nor loathes to read them through. Now if you ask after marbles — there indeed Paros, Carystos, Proconnesos, the Phrygians, the Numidians, the Spartans have laid no crusts of veined rock; nor do the stones counterfeit for me a scattered bran-like speckling through Ethiopian crags and purple ledges dyed with native murex. But although we are enriched with no hardness of foreign rocks, yet our huts or cabins have a native coolness. Nay rather, listen to what we have than to what we have not.

To this hall an adjoining pool is attached on the outside — or, if you prefer to grecize, a baptistery — on the east side, which holds about twenty thousand modii. Hither, for those coming washed by the heat, a triple entrance in the middle wall is opened through arched intervals; nor are the middle supports piers, but columns, which the more skilled architects have named the 'purples' of buildings. Into this pool, then, six pipes projecting with the mock heads of lions pour out a stream drawn from the brow of the mountain and bent through channels carried round the outer sides of the swimming-place; and to those who enter heedlessly they will present the very grating of teeth, the sheer fury of eyes, the very manes of necks.

Here, if either a household or a guest crowd surrounds the master, because through the din of the falling stream the mutual exchanges of voices are less understood, the company converse into one another's ear; so, oppressed by the alien noise, public speech affects a ridiculous secrecy. Going out from here, the front of the ladies' dining-room presents itself; to which is joined, with a weaving-room next door, a store-chamber, separated only by a barrack-partition. On the east a portico looks out upon the lake, propped rather by rounded little pillars than made invidious by marble columns. On the side of the vestibule the length lies open, roofed within, uninterrupted by middle walls:

which, because it itself looks out upon nothing, and if not a hippodrome, shall at least by my own right be called a covered gallery of mine. Yet this, defrauding something of its own space at the outermost head of the walk, makes a well-cooled room, where, a public couch being set out, the most talkative choir of clients or nurses sounds the retreat, when I and mine have sought the sleeping-chamber. From the covered gallery one comes into the winter dining-room, which the fire, often quickened in an arched hearth, has often stained with dark soot. But why these things to you, whom I now by no means invite to the fireside? Rather let me speak of things pertaining to you and to the season. From this dining-room there is a passage into a suite or little supper-room, to which almost the whole lake, and which wholly, lies open to the lake.

In it a semicircular couch, and a gleaming sideboard; to whose floor, or platform, one ascends gradually from the portico below by steps neither shortened nor narrowed. Reclining in that place, if you have any leisure while eating, you will be occupied with the pleasures of the view. Now if there be brought to you a chilled draught from that most celebrated of springs, you will see in the cups suddenly poured out the flecks of snow and fragments of mist; and that slippery gleam of the goblets, blunted as it were by a certain fatness of the sudden cold. Then draughts answering to the cups, whose freezing measures would be feared by any thirsty man — not to say by you, so greatly abstemious. Hence now you will watch how the fisherman thrusts his alder-boat out into the deep;

how he spreads the fixed nets with corks, or, with markers set at fixed intervals, how the pulls of the hooked lines are balanced; namely, that in nightly excursions over the lake the most rapacious trout may be driven into snares against their own kin. For what could I here say more fitting, when a fish is deceived by a fish? When the eatables are ended, a lodging will receive you which, because least sultry, is most suited to summer. For in this, that it opens only toward the north, it has daylight but has not sun, with a very narrow ante-chamber set between, where for the drowsy chamber-servants there is a place rather for dozing than for sleeping.

Here now how pleasant it is to have the ears fill with the cicadas chirping at midday, the frogs croaking as twilight comes on, the swans and geese clanging in the first sleep of night, the barnyard cocks crowing in the dead of night, the ominous crows with thrice-repeated voice hailing the crimson torch of the rising dawn; at daybreak the nightingale warbling among the bushes, the swallow twittering among the rafters. To which concert you may add the herdsman's muse of the seven-holed pipe, which the sleepless Tityri of our mountains often ply in nightly contests of song, resounding among the bell-hung flocks through the grazed pastures; yet these varied rivalries of voices and songs, by fostering your slumber more deeply, will minister to it.

When you have gone out from the porticoes, if you seek the harbor of the shore, in a green plot, though a common one, there is not far off a grove: two huge linden-trees, with foliage intertwined but stems apart, make one shade with no single root; in whose shadow, when my Ecdicius honors me with his presence, we give ourselves to ball-play — but only so far, until the shadow of the trees, grown more contracted, is confined within the span of the branches, and there makes a gaming-place for the weary, the ball-court being used up. But since, as I have discharged to you the debt of the building, so I owe you the lake, learn what remains. The lake flows off toward the southeast, and its washing tide, surging as the winds stir it, moistens the foundations of the dwelling impressed upon its sands.

This lake indeed, around its beginnings, upon marshy soil is full of quagmires, and unapproachable to the footstep of one who would inspect it: so does the fatness of the absorbent mud coalesce, with cold springs circling round it and weedy shores. Nevertheless the moving plain of this sea is cut far and wide by roving little boats, if the breezes have subsided. If a southern squall has grown foul, it swells monstrously, so that upon the crowns of the trees that stand on its margin the crash of the flung-up spray rains down. But it itself, according to the measures they call nautical, extends to seventeen stadia. It is entered by a river which, drawn roughly against the barriers of rocks, grows white with foaming rush, and, released no long while from the sheer crags, is buried in the lake: