Letters & Poems 2 part 13/16

and, defiled by such sacrileges rather than purified by such sacrifices, the perpetrators of this ill-omened slaughter think it a religious duty to exact from a captive's life torments rather than ransoms. For which reason I fear many things, I suspect various things: although, on the contrary, mighty considerations encourage me. First, that you accompany the standards of a victorious people; then, that against wise men, among whom you are justly reckoned, misfortunes have less power to strike by chance. Third, that for comrades joined in loyalty but sundered by place, fears frequently strike even the safe with sorrow; because dread the more readily forebodes every sinister thing about actions distant and uncertain. But you may say that perhaps such things as I dread so greatly are not so much to be cared about.

That indeed is true, but this too is not false, that for those whom we love more, we fear more. Whence nonetheless I pray you: for your sake take away as soon as possible from our senses the anguish that has arisen, by a prosperous report. For I can never be bent afresh to this — that concerning traveling friends (whom, indeed, the campaigning and military watchword wears down) I should not dread adversities until I know of prosperous things. I have sent Varro the logistorician, as you had requested, and Eusebius the chronographer; if the file of them reaches you, if you have leisure, at least by lot, amid your camp cares, being as it were in the field, you will be able, after you have wiped your arms, to remove also from your mouth the rust of speaking. Farewell. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his own Audax, greeting.

Where in the world would you have me say they now hide themselves — those who often used to flatter themselves upon the masses of amassed resources, and upon heaps of silver now growing black, already piled up? Where too is the prerogative of those who, against the natural disposition of younger men, swelled with pride merely on the occasion of their prior age? Where are those whose kinship is recognized by no greater sign than by feuding? Surely, as soon as there is a place for good deeds, and there is at last weighed on the scale of the sovereign's judgment not a pound of coins but of morals, there remained behind those who most arrogantly supposed that they were to be esteemed by their fortune alone:

who, thus brooding over their vices as over their riches, wish another's person to seem to have risen out of vanity, while they are unwilling for it to be noted that their own substance has grown out of covetousness. Yet, exercised in this palaestra of detraction, they are steeped, as though in oil, so in the poured-in venoms of their rivalries. But you, amid these things, be blessed — you who, enlarged with the titles of the prefecture, although hitherto you might have been reckoned illustrious from an illustrious lineage, have nonetheless labored no less especially, that from you your descendants might be more gloriously counted. For nothing is more noble, according to the judgment of every good man, than whoever with steadfast effort exercises the joined labor of talent, body, and wealth to this end, that he may be set before his ancestors.

As for what remains, I beseech God that your sons may attain to you, or — what it is more fitting to wish — surpass you: and whoever cannot bear to love you thus advanced, let him ever, seething inwardly, exact from his own self the penalties of his own envy; and since he will never have had against you any causes for pity, let him have those for envy. For indeed, justly under a just prince he lies low who, being in himself least and great only through his possessions, lives small in spirit and great in patrimony. Farewell. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to his own Syagrius, greeting. Say, flower of the Gallic youth, how long, busied with rural labors, will you disdain the town?

How long do the tools of Ceres claim for themselves, against right and divine law, those hands once worn by the throwing of dice? How long will your Taionnacus wear you out — a farmer of patrician stock? How long, not as a horseman but as a herdsman, will you hide the spoils of the leafy meadow in the winter fallows? How long will you lay down the weight of your blunted mattock, its prongs not even worn through? Why, rival of the Serrani and the Camilli, when you guide the plow-handle, do you dissemble your longing for the palm-embroidered robe? Only refrain from playing the rustic, to the envy of your nobility. If you cultivate a field moderately, you possess it; if too much, you are possessed by it. Give yourself back to your father, give yourself back to your country, give yourself back also to your faithful friends, who are rightly placed among your affections.

Or if the life of Cincinnatus the dictator so delights you alone, then bring forward before you an Hacilia to yoke the oxen. Nor would I say that domestic affairs are not to be cared for by a wise man, but with that moderation which considers not only what one may have, but what one ought to be. For if, all the other arts of noble studies being repudiated, only the itch for propagating your family estate goads you: though you may reverence a name derived from triumphal robes, and ivory curule chairs, and gilded litters, and fasti overlaid with purple, you will assuredly be found to be one whom, so industrious yet so obscure, the censor ought not so much to honor, as the census to burden. Farewell. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his own Lampridius, greeting.

As soon as I came to Bordeaux, your letter-carrier offered me a letter full of nectar, of flowers, of pearls: in which you fault my silence, and you demand some verses of mine in return for your verses — verses which are wont to be poured forth for you, tinkling with varied voice through the vaulted hollow of your palate, as though from a many-holed flute. But you, abusing sufficiently the munificence of the king, do this now free of care after your gifts: because perchance you do not recall that satiric line about the satirist: 'He is full,' when Horace says 'evoe.' Why say much? You rightly bid me sing out of leisure, because it now delights you to dance. Whatever it be, I obey nonetheless; and that not only not under compulsion, but even spontaneously do I do it.

Only do you somehow moderate that Catonian judgment of your supercilious brow. For you know well-nigh the gladness of poets: whose talents are so wrapped in sorrows as little fishes in nets; and if anything be harsh or sad, poetic tenderness does not at once unloose itself from the chain of the anguish it has met. For not yet have I obtained anything of my mother-in-law's inheritance, or for use of a third part at the price of a half. Meanwhile, you shall see how the theme of the demanded epigram will please you: yet my anxiety by no means allows me to have one thing now in a legal action, another in a poem. This indeed you would do beyond justice, if you should now in turn, as it were, compare my writings. I play the laborious part, you yourself play the fortunate one.

I play still the exile, you yourself play now the citizen: and on this account I sing unequal things, because I ask for like things, and do not obtain equal ones. But if by any chance you receive with more indulgent nod these trifles which I have composed amid the torments of my mind, you will persuade me that they have been like the songs of swans, whose modulation is more tuneful in their pangs; like too the strings of a lyre too violently stretched, which, the more twisted, the more musical it is. But if verses devoid of leisure or of cheerfulness cannot be approved, you too, in the page which I have woven below, will find nothing that pleases. To these add further, that a subject which has fallen not to a hearer but rather to a reader is helped nothing by the recitation of the absent author.

For after a work has been sent forth, there remains nothing that a poet, however vocal, may do — one whom the distance of place does not even permit to do what choruses of pantomimes are wont to do, who by good singing commend what is ill written. Why do you now try to stir up to songs either Cyrrha, or the Hyantian Camenae, or the learned waters of the Heliconian maids, sculpted by the stroke of the tinkling chisel — you, O Lampridius, glory of our Thalia? And thus you compel me time and again to write, as though I had brought Delphic instruments to your Delian one: and, a new Apollo, that I should ply the cauldron-tripod, the lyre, the quivers, the bows, the griffins, and shake now from this side the berries, now from that the clusters of the twofold foliage.

You now, O Tityrus, after your fields have been recovered, wandering through the myrtles and the plane-grove, strike the barbiton, and mouth and plectrum echo back to you the harmonizing measures; astounding psalter-player in string, in voice, in meter. Us, placed here and seen but once, already twice does the monthly moon behold: nor has the lord himself much leisure, while the subdued world seeks his responses. Here we see the sea-blue Saxon, accustomed before to the brine, fearing dry land alone: whose scalp the edge of the razor crops to the utmost — not content to hold its own bites, it raises the margin of the hair; and thus, with the locks cut back to the skin, the head shrinks, and the face is enlarged.

Here, with shorn back of the head, the aged Sicamber, after you have been conquered, draws back to his old neck new hair. Here the Herulus, with sea-green cheeks, wanders — inhabiting the lowest recesses of the Ocean, nearly of one color with the weedy deep. Here the seven-foot Burgundian frequently, with bent knee, entreats peace. Here the Ostrogoth flourishes with his patrons, and, pressing hard upon the neighboring Huns from time to time, is proud toward these from that by which he is himself subject to the other. From here, O Roman, you seek your salvation: and against the throngs of the Scythian region, if the Bear brings any Parthian tumults, O heroic Euric, your hands are entreated, that mighty through your resident force you may defend the slender Tiber by the Garonne.

For because he perceives that arms rise up hence with great preparation for the Bosphoran side, the Parthian Arsaces himself now beseeches here, that he may be able to hold the summit of the Susian court under a stipendiary treaty: he thinks sorrowful Persia, now roused to the din of war, scarcely to be defended by the bank of the Euphrates. Who, though feigning stars akin to himself, and swelling with his kinship to Phoebus, nevertheless here fills the part of a mortal by his supplicating. Amid these things, we waste vain delays. But do you, O Tityrus, forbear to provoke. For I do not envy, and I rather marvel — I who, though I deserve nothing, and spend my prayers in vain, have begun to be a Meliboeus. Behold the song which, reviewing it at your leisure, and gazing on our sweat and dust, you, like a charioteer already crowned, from the platform...

For the rest, there is no reason for you to suspect that I will seek again an equal kind of service, even if you should be delighted with the present one, unless I myself first cease to prophesy losses rather than songs. Farewell. LETTER X. Sidonius to his own Ruricius, greeting. I greatly rejoice that letters are alike of use and dear to you. I would more freely assert how great a flame of sentiments or wave of eloquence accompanies your style, were it not that, while you strive not a little to praise me, you would forbid yourself to be praised much. And although in your letter charity keeps its sweetness, nature its fluency, skill its discipline; yet in the choice of subject-matter alone you have erred: although that very thing can be extolled in your intention, wherein you seem to have gone astray in judgment.

You apply the huge titles of your eulogies to my character. But if you had somehow taken account of my modesty, it would have been fitting for you to ponder that saying of Symmachus: 'As true praise adorns, so false praise chastises.' In which place, however, if I measure your mind aright, above the affection which you show to be greatest, you have done this also with art. For it is the custom of eloquent men to prove the resources of their talents by the difficulties of their business, and there to fix their skilled style, as a kind of plowshare of a fertile breast, where a barren subject-matter, like a dry clod of a meager sod, goes hungry for argument. The world teems with like examples: the physician is known in a desperate case, the pilot in a tempest; the preceding perils exalt the fame of all these:

which fame assuredly lies hidden, unless it finds where it may be proved. Thus also a great orator, if he undertakes a narrow case, then more applaudably displays an ample talent. Marcus Tullius in his other pleadings surpassed others; in the defense of Aulus Cluentius he surpassed himself. Marcus Fronto, while he stood out above his other orations, preferred himself to himself in the Pelops. Gaius Plinius, on behalf of Attia Viriola, brought home from the centumviral bench more glory than when he delivered a panegyric comparable to Marcus Ulpius, an incomparable prince. Thus you too have done, who, while you wish to exercise your knowledge, have not feared that even my own conscience should be a hindrance to you. Nay rather, by your supplicating, heal my languors:

and do not, through the snare of an ill-flattering eloquence, oppress with the weight of false glory the frailty of a soul still sick. Truly, since your life is fairer than your fair speech, you indulge me more, if for my sake you would rather pray than plead. Farewell. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his own Lupus, greeting. What do the Nitiobroges do, what your Vesunnici, among whom, over claiming you for themselves on either side, there is ever born a holy contention? One people holds you by patrimony, the other even by marriage; and while this one holds you by birth, that one by wedlock — better still is that both hold you by their judgment. You, however, by the gift of God, are happy amid these things; concerning whom, in occupying and possessing you longer, it is worth the pains that the votive zeal of the peoples should contend.

But you indeed, in due arrangement and by turns dividing your presence to each, now restore to those people their Drepanius, now to these their Anthedius: and if rhetorical instruction be demanded of you, these do not require their Paulinus, nor those their Alcimus. Whence I marvel the more at you — you whom the daily ventilated abundance of your manifold library wearies — that you demand of me some of my old ditties. I obey indeed, although the recollection of jests may seem untimely in a time of grief. The orator Lampridius is now recognized by me as but lately slain; whose death would consume my love with the utmost anguishes, even if a violent blow had not snatched him from human affairs. This man once (as jests among friends) used to call me Phoebus, having himself received from us the name of the Odrysian bard.

It is fitting that this be told beforehand, lest figurative expressions obscure the poem set below. Once, while visiting Bordeaux, I sent this sheet of billeting-verse ahead, as it were, with the Muse going before me. I think it is offered to you more freely than if, composing some mournful piece upon the death of one departing, I who failed to please by eloquence should also displease by my subject-matter. To Thalia, too much beloved and his own peculiar, Phoebus gives this admonition: Laying aside your plectrum a little while, Muse, bind up your loosened hair with a green fillet, and let the more nimble ivy-tendrils gird up the wrinkles of your trailing robe. Beware of bearing perfumed oils, as the goddess was wont; let the foot pace high in the loose buskin. But think that you should tie such things as Harpalyce bound, or as she who cut down her vanquished suitors with the sword.

Thus will you go better with flying leap, if the traces of your bare foot guide their steps along the very tip of the toe with swift, firm advances, and if, as the little loops of your bindings meet, the chain, bent back, rises up along your leg across the arch. Remember in a countryman's garb to visit my Orpheus, who day by day, tuneful with sweetly-speaking art, softens rocks and oaks and hearts of horn. Him at one moment the man of Arpinum enriches with thundering tongue, at another the pen of Maro, or that by which you, Horace, gladden Latium, a lyre-player mightier than Alcaeus himself. And now he swells the epic of tragedies, now he tempers merry comedy, now satires blaze, and the declamation of tyrannical controversies. Say, Phoebus comes, and after the post-horses beats the sail-winged Garonne with oars.

He bids you meet him, but with lodging first prepared, and with Leontius, whom the descendant of Livius Piscus gives from the senate. Say, now he will be here: mark one right witty, and rustic in name alone. But if the houses refuse you, as being occupied, go at once to the doors of the bishops; and having kissed the hand of holy Gallicinus, ask the loan of a small shelter, lest, if I am left with a home denied, I should go mourning to the dripping taverns, and, closing my two nostrils again and again, groan on account of the smoke-filled kitchens. There, where the ruddy little inn reeks with wild-thyme-bearing chains around its twin bays, from the pots the clouds smoke with joined vapour together with the crackling pans. Here, when the festal day begins to break forth its hoarse songs, and to rattle the wanton complaint of the buffoons:

Then, then would I, a barbarian, whisper songs more worthy of you, roused by the Muse of a wine-loving host, more than those men can sing. O the abject necessity of being born, the wretchedness of living, the harshness of dying! Behold whither the wheel of human mutability, so called, is said to turn. I loved the man, I confess, well enough, though he was entangled in certain pardonable faults, and mingled lesser things with his virtues. For often he was stirred by trivial causes, but stirred only lightly; nevertheless I strove to persuade the others that this was rather his nature than a vice, and I would build up the better view, so that the wrath materially reigning in the man's breast, being infected with the blemish of cruelty, might at least be cleansed under the pretext of severity.

Moreover, though frail in counsel, he was most steadfast in faith; most incautious, because credulous; most secure, because he did no harm. No one was so much his enemy that he could wring a curse from him; yet no one so much his friend that he could escape a jibe. Hard to approach, yet easy to look upon; a burden indeed to bear, yet bearable. For the rest, if you measure his orations: keen, well-rounded, well-composed, polished; if his poems: tender, of many metres, subtle. He was a craftsman. For he made verses altogether finished, with a wondrous variety both of feet and of figures: hendecasyllables smooth and free of knots;

hexameters resounding and buskined; elegiacs now echoing, now recurring, now linked at end and beginning by anadiplosis. When he had recommended a work as one to be undertaken, he would vary the ethical diction according to the quality of person, time, and place; and that not with any sort of words, but with grand, beautiful, painstakingly wrought ones. In controversial subject-matter strong and sinewy; in satire anxious and biting; in tragedy fierce and tearful. In comedy urbane and manifold; in Fescennine verse fresh in words, seething with desires; in bucolic watchful, sparing, given to song; in georgic so much the countryman that he was in no way rustic. Moreover, as regards epigrams, pleasing not by abundance but by sharpness;

which were bounded by nothing shorter than a distich, nor longer than a tetrastich: and while you might behold in them not a few peppered, many honeyed, yet you perceived all of them salted. In lyric poetry, following Flaccus, he was now borne along swift in the iambic, now grave in the choriambic, now flowing in the alcaic, now inflated in the sapphic. What more? Subtle, apt, well-equipped; and wherever his mind carried his pen, altogether most eloquent, so that you might justly reckon that, after the Horatian and Pindaric swans, he would fly away on the wings of glory. To dice and ball he was not equally devoted. For while at the dice-board he was engaged as at a labour, at ball only as at a pleasure; he tired others gladly, and, what is sweeter, was more gladly tired himself.

He wrote assiduously, though he had the itch to write still more frequently. He also read authors incessantly, the ancients with reverence, the moderns without envy. And, what is most difficult among men, he yielded to no one the praise of genius grudgingly. This one thing indeed was not only blameworthy in the man, but fatal: that he once consulted astrologers about the end of his life, citizens of African cities; among whom, as is the region, so the spirit is more ardent. Having examined the constellation of the inquirer, they alike named the year, month, and day which (to use a term of the mathematical art) he would find climacteric; inasmuch as, when his horoscope was cast, the scheme of a bloody nativity had, as it were, lain open:

namely because, in the year of the nourishing friend, whatever wandering orb of the planetary stars a prosperous rising had raised up in the tract of the Zodiac, this—reddening at its setting with bloody fires—had been exasperated either by Mercury disjoined across the diameter, or by Saturn retrograde across the quartile, or by Mars returning across the centre. But concerning such matters, however they may stand—although they are utterly false, and therefore deceiving—if anything coheres more fully and more plainly, though you yourself also study arithmetic, and though, with your accustomed diligence, you anxiously unroll Vertacus, Thrasybulus, Saturninus, as one who ever meditates nothing but what is secret and lofty. Meanwhile, at present nothing was managed by conjecture, nothing by ambiguities:

since indeed this rash inquirer of ours into things to come, long shifting to and fro in vain, was bound fast by the time and manner of the foretold death. For, oppressed and strangled at home by the hands of his servants, his breath stopped, his throat throttled—not to say by the death of Lentulus, of Jugurtha, or of Sejanus—certainly he perished by the death of Scipio the Numantine. These things were the less grievous in this slaughter, because the very crime, together with the author of the parricidal deed, was discovered at daybreak. For who is so far removed from human sense, who so blinded in both eyes, that, upon inspecting the corpse of the slain man, he would not at once gather the signs of a life wrenched away?

For at once the livid skin, the bulging eyes, and, in the overspread countenance, the traces of anger no less than of pain, gave proof. The ground indeed was found soaked with fallen drops, because after the crime the robbers themselves had turned the dead man's face down toward the pavement, as though an over-boiling flux of blood had drained him. But at once the man who had been the kindler, instigator, and standard-bearer of that very faction was seized, and the rest of the accomplices being overpowered and examined apart, the terror of the tortures drew the truth of the crime out of unwilling breasts. And would that he had not deserved to meet this end, while his empty faith rashly took counsel.

For whoever shall presume to pry into things forbidden, secret, and prohibited, I fear that such a one will stray from the rules of the catholic faith, and be made worthy to be answered with adversities in a condition, while he seeks out unlawful things. Vengeance indeed followed upon the dead man: but such things profit rather the living. For as often as a murderer is punished, to be avenged is not a remedy, but a consolation. Love has impelled me to proceed rather far, whose anguish I could not breathe out in silence. Do you meanwhile, if there is anything there worth knowing, quickly report it: at least writing on this account, that reading may lighten my mind, heavy with sadness. For to my confused breast there was grief, and indeed rightly much, when I committed these things to the page alone.

For it pleases me to do nothing else at this time with hand, speech, or counsel—to write, to speak, to turn over in mind. Farewell. LETTER XII. Sidonius to his friend Trigetius, greeting. Does the city of Bazas so hold you—set not upon turf but upon dust? Does the Syrtic field, the wandering soil, and the sands flitting with the wrangling winds so possess you, that you, sought with great entreaties, separated by small distances, awaited for many days, can be drawn to Bordeaux neither by powers, nor by friendships, nor by oysters fattened in fish-ponds? Or in the winter season do the uncertainties of the roads hold you in suspense? and because the Bigerric whirlwind is wont to confound the marks of the moving embankments, do you fear on the earthly journey a certain pedestrian shipwreck?

Where, we ask, has Calpe, but lately subdued beneath your steps, so quickly departed from your mind? Where are the tents fixed in the western borders of the Gaditanians? Where is that limit of wandering which once was to my Trigetius the same as to Hercules? Do you so differ from your very self, that you have yielded wholly to the rights of sloth—you by whose traversing of the secret places of fabulous regions the exertion of labour failed before the intent of weariness? And after this do you so sluggishly tread the harbour of Alingo, as if you now had to set out to the Danubian frontier against the raiding Massagetae; or as if now too your ships were crossing the pools of the Nile's water through crocodiles dreaded by the natives.

And since you are not so delayed by the obstacle of twelve miles, what do we suppose you would have done with the army of Marcus Cato in the Leptitanian Syrtis? But however much you may tremble at the mere names of the wintry months, so mild is the face of the sky, so warm, so clear, and it has breezes rather than winds in such measure, that the season cannot more earnestly hold you back than the mildness invites you. But if you scorn a summoning letter, I believe you will not resist even verses, with their coaxing promptings and, as I suspect, the strenuous executors of my desire; whose camps will be moved against you after two days.

Behold, now my Leontius, easily first of the Aquitanians, behold, now Paulinus, little inferior to his sire, at the place I mentioned above, along the ebbing and flowing streams of the Garonne, will meet you not only with a fleet but even with the river itself. Here will your praises, in modulated boat-song, be sung by the rowers among the thwarts and by the steersmen among the sterns. Here awaits you a couch built up with cushions, here a board laid out with two-coloured pieces, here the die frequent, to rebound upon the ivoried steps of the towers: here, lest the rolling bilge-water wet your dangling foot, the curving bellies of the keels will be planked over with a fabric of fir-wood beams: here, under the arched hurdle of the awnings, you will avoid the treachery of the wintry weather even when clear.

What more could be lavished upon your delicate indolence, than that you should find yourself arrived when you scarcely feel yourself coming? Why do you mutter? Why do you delay? We ourselves seem likely to outstrip your arrival, like creeping snails with their native homes. Besides, you have a most abundant larder, splendidly heaped and stuffed with dainties, provided only there be a spirit equal to the outlay in winnowing them. In brief: come, either to be fed or to feed—nay, what is more pleasing, to do both. Come with a Mediterranean supply to war down and subjugate those gluttons of Médoc provender. Here let the Adour fish insult the Garonne mullets: here, before the abundance of Bayonne lobsters, let the crowd of cheap crabs give way.

You, although in this kind of warfare you will be about to fight against the rest, if by my judgment you think anything ought to be conceded (for it is not unjust to believe one who has experience), you will make our senator, my guest, exempt from this contest; if you enter his banquet and his roof, you would deem the feasts Cleopatran and the lodgings sumptuous. For although both he himself and his native land contend over this pursuit, long since has the sentence been passed that he surpasses the rest of the citizens, as also that land surpasses the rest of the cities. Farewell. LETTER XIII. Sidonius to the lord bishop Nunechius, greeting. We rejoice that many kinds of virtues have been heaped upon you by heavenly gift, most blessed bishop.