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:
which — whether by chance it be that it rushes in, or that it forms the lake — at any rate flows past, forced to be strained through subterranean filters, so as to be impoverished not of its waters but of its fish, which, driven back into a lazier pool, stretch out their red flesh with white bellies. Thus, since they are neither able to return nor permitted to depart, their own corpulence makes for them a kind of living and roving prison. The lake itself, where it is on the right, is indented, winding, and wooded; where on the left, open, grassy, level. The surface on the southwest is green along the shore, because, with foliage stretched out over the water, as the water floods the gravel, so the shade floods the waters. A like crown of woods continues this color on the east; along the northern side, as its nature belongs to the deep, so its appearance;
on the west a common and disorderly thicket, often bent down by the weight of the skiffs gliding over it. Around this the slippery tendrils of the rushes twine, and at the same time the fat blades of the sedges float, and the bitterness of the gray willows, ever nursed by the sweet waters. In the middle of the deep is a small island, where, above millstones naturally heaped up, a turning-post, worn by the strokes of the driven oars into the whirlings of the ships, juts out, against which the joyful shipwrecks of the players dash themselves. For it was the custom there for our elders to imitate the contest of Drepanum of Trojan legend. But now the estate itself (though this is beyond my due) is spread out in woods, painted in meadows, rich in cattle in its pastures, wealthy in its herdsmen.
But I delay no longer, lest, if the end set by my pen be too long, autumn find you still reading. Therefore grant me swiftness in coming, for the delay of returning you will yourself provide; you will thence grant pardon that this somewhat over-scrupulous letter has exceeded the brevity owed to it, while it anxiously searches out the whole layout of the countryside — which nonetheless, in its zeal to ward off tedium, has not touched on everything. Wherefore a good judge and a skilled reader will pronounce grand not the page which describes the spaces, but the villa which, being spacious, is described. Farewell. LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Felix, greeting. I rejoice, my honored lord, that you have attained the fillets of the most ample dignity. But I rejoice no less that this was announced to me by a courier dispatched for this sole purpose.
For although at present you are the most powerful magistrate, and the patrician summit has, after so many ages, returned to the household of the Philagrii by your good fortune alone, yet you find, O man most faithful in friendships, how the pinnacle of your honors grows by being shared, and by a rare kind of example you exalt your own height by humility. So once did public favor prefer Quintus Fabius, master of the horse, to the dictatorial sternness and the Papirian arrogance. So too did his never-scorned popularity raise Gnaeus Pompey above his rivals. So did Germanicus, by the love of all, crush the envy of Tiberius. Wherefore I would not have the imperial favors flatter themselves too much concerning your successes;
for they could confer nothing more upon you than that, had we been unwilling of it, we should pass by against our will. That is your own peculiar gift, that of a singular grace: that you have none who would rival you, just as you find none who could follow you. Farewell. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his friend Syagrius, greeting. The most illustrious Projectus, noble at home, distinguished by a father and an uncle of senatorial rank, conspicuous too through a most excellent grandfather who was a bishop, betakes himself most eagerly, unless you spurn him, into the bosom of your friendship; and since the splendor of his family, the uprightness of his character, the substance of his patrimony, the vigor of his youth all square with equal balance toward every honor,
then at last he will nevertheless think himself borne up to the citadel of the most exalted happiness, if he may but gain the fellowship of your favor. Since he has sought in marriage the daughter of the most illustrious Optantius, lately deceased (may it, with God's prospering, turn out well), and has obtained her from the mother of the orphaned girl, yet he judges the accomplishment of his wishes but little advanced, unless he obtains your assent over all these matters, whether by his own diligence or by the entreaty of our intercession. For you yourself, as far as concerns the girl's upbringing, succeed to the place of her dead father in the sharing of his cares, bestowing upon the maiden a parent's affection, a patron's authority, a guardian's office. Wherefore,
since you are worthy that the ambition even of those set far off should seek out the most renowned discipline of your house, do, as befits men of the good party, honor with the kindness of your reply the modesty of a suppliant suitor; and you who, being thus sought out, ought yourself to seek out the maiden to be promised to him, securely permit her to be promised; for the reckoning of his merits has so set you over this affair, that not even to Optantius, were he yet surviving, would more be permitted over his own children. Farewell. LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Petronius, greeting. Joannes, my intimate, has fallen into an inextricable labyrinth of a manifold lawsuit, and until either your knowledge, or, if any be like yours — if indeed there be any — has examined the merits of his documents, he knows not what to reject or what to choose.
So in a certain way does the shape of this two-sided suit confound itself, that his own statement of claim does not know which order of action it is to defend, and which it is to attack. On his behalf I pour out an earnest prayer that, his little papers being examined, you may instruct him as to whatever legally befits him, showing what things and in what manner are to be alleged, what to be refuted. For we shall not fear that the course of that case, if it flow from the fount of your counsel, be thinned by any diverting of the opposing parties. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Pegasius, greeting. It is proverbially famous that delay is often the better course, as even now we have found by experience. Your friend Menstrianus, examined here over a long time, has deserved to be reckoned among the persons dear and bound to us also;
obliging, elegant, modest, sober, frugal, devout, and endowed with such gifts of character that, as often as he is admitted into the friendships of any good man, he himself gains no more of benefit than he bestows. This I have written to you not as to one ignorant of it, but that I might satisfy my own judgment. Wherefore there is a threefold cause for rejoicing: the first for you, to whom it falls thus either to form or to choose your friends; the second for the people of Auvergne, to whom I affirm that this in him has pleased which I do not doubt you have approved; the third for him, of whom all good men have judged every good thing. Farewell. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his friend Explicius, greeting.
Since your justice is rightly made venerable to the whole community through many proofs of rectitude, therefore I willingly and eagerly send into your examination each and every person who demands this very thing, longing as soon as possible that I be relieved of the burden of arbitration, and they of enmity; which will at last so follow, if you, a modest arbiter, do not wholly shut out the complaints of the parties: although this very thing — that you grudgingly grant access to yourself to the litigants — is itself a token of one who will judge well. For who would not court himself as arbiter, being about to indulge something either to a price or to favor? Therefore pardon those who hasten swiftly and headlong to the prerogative of so holy a conscience; since your sentence neither the loser, as a dullard, accuses,
nor does the victor, as a quibbler, deride; and out of regard for the truth those who are condemned pay you reverence, those set free pay you gratitude. Therefore I earnestly beseech you that, between Alethius and Paulus, you disentangle the matters which come into dispute, as soon as they have been set forth on both sides. For, unless I am mistaken, above the sentences of decemvirs and of pontiffs, only the temperance of your character, with its accustomed soundness of judgment, will heal the sickness of this well-nigh interminable quarrel. Farewell. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to his friend Desideratus, greeting. Most sorrowful, I announce these things to you. Three days ago there departed, not without a suspension of public business, the matron Filimatia — a compliant wife, a gentle mistress, a helpful mother, a devoted daughter,
to whom, at home and abroad, a person of lower rank owed obedience, one of higher rank owed dutiful service, one of equal rank owed affection. Since she had long been the only daughter of a mother already lost, she had easily, by various kinds of endearments, brought it about that her father, still young, should not through his offspring feel the want of the other sex. But now, by her sudden ending, in her prime she has, by his bereavement, pierced her father through his celibacy. To this is added that, as the parent of five children, she has by an untimely departure rendered her fruitfulness unfortunate. Which little ones, had they while their mother lived lost their long-since infirm father, would be reckoned less as orphans. Yet this woman — if any honor bestowed upon corpses is not spent in vain — no ill-omened services of undertakers and bier-bearers buried,
but while all — even strangers — wept and laid hold of the bier itself, delayed it, and kissed it, she was, received into the hands of priests and kinsmen, borne to her everlasting resting-place, more like one asleep. After which, at the entreaty of the bereaved father, I composed a funeral dirge, not in elegiacs but in hendecasyllables, to be carved on the marble, with lament well-nigh still warm. If you do not disapprove of it too much, a hireling bookseller will undertake to append it to the other volumes of my epigrams. If it be otherwise, it suffices that a stony song be contained upon the stone. For this is the epitaph: 'Snatched away by a swift and cruel end from her five children, from her father, and from her husband, the hands of her weeping homeland have laid the matron Philimatia in this tomb. O splendor of her lineage, O ornament of her husband,
prudent, chaste, seemly, grave, sweet, and to be imitated even by her elders; those things which are wont to be thought discordant, you joined together by the graciousness of your character. For the companions of your good life were a dignified freedom and a witty modesty. Hence it is that we grieve that scarcely the tenth three-year span of your life was completed, and that, in the season of vigorous age, the last rites were unjustly paid to you.' Whether the poem please you or not, do you make haste, and swiftly visit the city. For you owe the duty of consolation to the afflicted houses of two fellow-citizens. May you so discharge it, I pray God, that it never be required of you in return. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his friend Donidius, greeting. You ask why I, having long since set out for Nemausus, prolong to a late hour the fulfillment of your longing for my arrival.
I render the reasons for my rather tardy return, and I do not delay to disclose my delays, since what is sweet to me is sweet to you also. Among most delightful fields, in the company of the most gracious lords Ferreolus and Apollinaris, I have spent a most pleasurable time. Their estates have adjoining boundaries and neighboring dwellings, between which the intervening drive wearies a man on foot, yet is not enough for one on horseback. The hills higher than the houses are worked by the vine-dresser and the olive-grower. You would judge them Aracynthus and Nysa, ridges celebrated in the songs of the poets. The one house has a prospect over level and open ground, the other over the woods; yet the dissimilar situation nonetheless delights alike. But why say more now of the position of the estates, when there remains the order of their hospitality to be disclosed?
First of all, most keen-sighted scouts having been dispatched to this end, to lie in wait for the path of our return, each house beset not only the tracks of the public causeways, but also the byways tortuous with short-cuts, and the shepherds' bypaths, lest by any chance we should slip away from the ambushes of their courtesies laid out. Into which we fell, I confess, but by no means unwilling: at once compelled to give our oath that, before seven days had run out, we would meditate nothing concerning the continuation of our journey. So each morning, on the part of the two hosts, there was a first and pleasing contention over the guest, as to which kitchen should first smoke for our meals;
nor indeed could the alternation set the scale of the division evenly, although one house had with me, the other with my household, a bond of kinship: because to Ferreolus, a man of prefectorian rank, besides the tie owed to him, his age and dignity gave the prerogative of being the first to invite. Straightway we were hurried from delights into delights. Scarcely was any vestibule entered, and behold, here the pairs of contending ball-players were doubling amid the rolling gyrations of their wrestling-throws; here, amid the rivalries of the gaming voices, was heard the frequent rattle of the shaken dice-boxes and dice. Here books in abundance were ready to hand;
you would believe you saw either the grammarians' shelves, or the tiers of seats of the Athenaeum, or the piled bookcases of the booksellers. Yet in such wise that those codices which lay among the ladies' chairs bore a religious pen, while those along the benches of the fathers of families were ennobled by the buskin of Latian eloquence. Although certain volumes of certain authors preserved, amid disparate causes, an equality of expression. For men of like learning were read — here Augustine, there Varro; here Horace, there Prudentius. Among whom Adamantius Origen, translated by Turranius Rufinus, was diligently studied by readers of our faith.
And at the same time, according as diverse opinions were dear to each, they discoursed on why by certain of the chief initiates he was disapproved as a harsh and dangerous expositor — although he had been so rendered word for word and sense for sense, that neither did Apuleius so transcribe the Phaedo of Plato, nor Tully the Ctesiphon of Demosthenes, into the usage and rule of Roman speech. While each of us was occupied with these pursuits as he pleased, behold, there arrived one from the head cook, to warn that the time pressed for tending our bodies; and this messenger, keeping the increments of the hours by the intervals of the water-clock, the fifth hour, now departing, approved as having entered fittingly.
We lunched briefly, plentifully, after the senatorial manner, wherein it is ingrained and established that many dishes be served in few platters, although the banquet be varied with viands now roasted, now in broth. During the drinking there were little tales, from the knowing of which we were both cheered and instructed, since these, begun in a twofold vein, mirth and skill accompanied. Why say much? We were entertained piously, handsomely, abundantly. Then rising, if we were at Vorocingus (this is the name of the one estate), we betook our steps to our baggage and to our lodging;
if at Prusianus (so the other property was called), we cast Tonantius with his brothers — the most choice leaders among our noble contemporaries — out of their own beds, because the furnishings of our sleeping-quarters were not easily carried about so frequently. Having shaken off our noonday torpor, we rode a little while, that we might the more easily whet, for the appetite of supper, our breasts grown languid with food. Each host had baths in the building, neither in use;
But whenever the drinking company of my attendants and servants had ceased even for a little while — men over whose brains the hospitable mixing-bowls, too deeply drained, held their mastery — a trench was hastily dug near a spring or a river. Into it, as it happened, a heap of burnt stones was let down, and, with a vault woven of pliant hazel-boughs in the shape of a hemisphere, the glowing pit was covered over. Yet it was so arranged that, with Cilician cloths thrown over it, the open gaps between the twigs were darkened, the light shut out, so as to drive back the leaping vapour that is struck from the flaming flints by the sprinkling of boiling water. Here our hours were drawn out, not without witty and jesting talk.
Among these things, as we were filled with the vapour of the hissing mist and wrapped in it, a most wholesome sweat was drawn forth; and when this had been poured out as much as we pleased, we plunged into the heated waters, and, relaxed by their warmth which wiped away our surfeit, we were then braced again either by the coldness of a spring or a well, or by the abundance of the river. For the river Vuardo runs through the midst of the dwellings — save when, fed by melting snow, it grows pale, reddened over its yellow gravel-beds, yet flows clear through its channel, calm and pebbly, and none the less rich in the wild delicacies of choice fish. I would speak too of the banquets, and indeed most sumptuous ones, had not the paper set a bound to my talkativeness which modesty does not impose.
The recounting of these too would be pleasant to relate, did I not blush to soil the back of my letter with dripping reed-pens. But since I too am now under marching orders, and it pleases me straightway, by the help of Christ, to come and visit you, the banquets of friends will be more readily called to mind at my table and yours: only let the completed span of the passing week restore us as soon as may be to a longed-for hunger; for no thing better mends a stomach ruptured by gluttony than frugality. Farewell. LETTER X. Sidonius to his friend Hesperius, greeting. I love in you that you love letters, and everywhere I strive to honour with the fullest praises the nobility of so great a diligence, through which you commend to us not only your own beginnings but even our own studies.
For when we see the talents of the young growing up toward this kind of discipline — for whose sake we too have withdrawn our hand from the rod — we reap the most abundant fruit of our labour. Add this: that the multitude of the slothful has so increased that, unless a very few men vindicate the pure propriety of the Latin tongue from the rust of vulgar barbarisms, we shall soon have to bewail it as abolished and perished; thus all the purple splendours of noble speech will be discoloured through the carelessness of the crowd. But of these things elsewhere. Meanwhile, receive what you ask. You ask, moreover, that if any little verses have flowed from me since we parted from one another, I should reckon them out to you as a kind of payment for the delay.
I obey the command. For you are endowed, though young, with such maturity of mind that we desire to gratify you even though we are older by birth. A church has lately been built at Lyons, which through the zeal of Pope Patiens attained the summit of the work begun — a man holy, energetic, severe, merciful, who through his rich munificence toward the poor and toward kindness raises up heights of good conscience no less lofty. On the outermost parts of this edifice, therefore, at the request of the aforesaid bishop, I inscribed a hasty poem in triple trochees, which are still very familiar to me and now to you. For, next to the hexameters of the eminent poets Constantius and Secundinus, the sides of the basilica adjoining the altar shine bright.