Moreover, that contempt for military service was thought to border rather closely upon sloth, in respect of which the spiteful boast that men of the better party are not so much unable as unwilling to rise. Therefore, as it is fitting to do in the first place, we give abundant thanks to Christ, who, as he adorned the estate of your eminence hitherto with the nobility of your ancestors, so now also crowns it with the equal splendour of your titles; and at the same time, with hopes raised in our souls, it is right henceforth to hope for better things. Certainly it is a frequent saying among the provincials that a good year is to be reckoned from great powers rather than from great harvests. Wherefore it is your part, my greater lord, to reward our expectation with fitting arrangements. For, mindful of your origin, the whole community has persuaded itself of this:
that as long as the family of the Sabini rules over us, the family of the Sabiniani need fear nothing. Farewell. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his friend Felix, greeting. You keep long aloof from letters. So each of us follows his own custom: I chatter, you keep silence. Whence also, O man distinguished in the other offices of good faith, I reckon it a kind of virtue that you cannot be wearied by so much leisure. What then? Will you never be moved by regard for our old intimacy, so that at last you may retrace your step from your fixed purpose of unbroken silence? Or do you not know that not to answer a chatterer is an insult? You may busy yourself amid libraries or amid affairs of the toga; and from me you expect the service of a poor man's discourse, whose gift for writing, if you look well, is greater in facility than in resource.
Certainly let even our fear furnish matter for your pen; and remember to burden the hands of travellers with letters, so that the anxiety of friends may be relieved; and make haste to inform us whether, with God going before, the quaestor Licinianus has opened for our mutual trepidation any door of security. For he is a person, as they report, of great expectation, greater upon his arrival, exalted by report, and yet more exalted upon inspection, and, by reason of all the gifts of fortune and nature, remarkable. His judgement is of the highest, his courtesy equal to it, and his prudence and good faith becoming both to him who is sent and to him who sends. There is nothing affected or feigned in him, and to the weight of his words belongs a true severity rather than an imitation of severity; and he is not, like the many, one of those who, when they diffidently allege what has been entrusted to them, wish to appear to have acted more cautiously.
But neither is he, as they say, of the number of those who, trafficking in the secrets of the princes who send them, seek that the envoy rather than the embassy should fare well at the hands of the barbarians. This tenor of the man's character a favourable report has brought to us. Send word swiftly, if indeed the accounts tally, so that those may breathe again for a little while from their sleepless post, whom neither a snowy day nor a moonless and stormy night persuades to sound the retreat from the ramparts' watch; for even if the barbarian withdraws into winter quarters, they rather postpone than abandon the dread once rooted in their hearts. Soothe us with prosperous tidings, since our cause is not so far from you as our native land. Farewell. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to his friend Eucherius, greeting.
I revere the ancients, yet not in such a way as to belittle the virtues or merits of my contemporaries. Nor, if the Roman commonwealth has sunk into these utmost depths of misery, so that it never rewards those devoted to it, does it therefore follow that my age does not bring forth its Bruti and Torquati. To what purpose is all this? you ask. My discourse is about you, to you, O most efficacious of men, to whom the commonwealth owes what history praises as paid to the men aforesaid. Wherefore let those ignorant of affairs suspend their rash judgements, and not persist in either too much admiring the men of the past or despising those of the present; since it easily becomes clear that the commonwealth delays its benefits, while you earn them.
Although it ought to cause no great wonder, when a nation of usurers administers the Roman power not only uncivilly but even undermines it at its very foundations, if to noble and military men, and to those warlike beyond either our hope or the enemy's expectation, rewards should have been wanting rather than deeds. Farewell. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his friend Riothamus, greeting. The custom of our correspondence is kept up; for we mingle a complaint with our greeting; not at all with the aim that our style should be dutiful in the titles but harsh in the pages; but because those things always come to pass concerning which it is agreed that a man of my station or rank is blamed if he speaks, and sins if he keeps silent.
But we too regard the burden of your modesty, whose delicacy has ever been such that you blush for the faults of others. The bearer of these letters, a humble, obscure, and even contemptible man—so far to his loss innocent in his very meekness—laments that his slaves have been carried off, being secretly enticed away by the Britons. Whether his ground of complaint be certain, I do not know; but if, between the parties set face to face, you weigh the charges with impartiality, I think this careworn man can prove what he alleges: if, that is, amid men shrewd, armed, tumultuous, defiant in courage, in numbers, and in comradeship, one man who is unarmed, downcast, rustic, a stranger, and poor can be given a fair and equitable hearing. Farewell. LETTER X. Sidonius to his friend Tetradius, greeting.
Our young men attach much praise to their own character whenever, being in doubt about the merits of their affairs, they have recourse to the counsels of the learned; as now does the most illustrious Theodorus, noble indeed at home, but more high-born by reputation for his most modest manner of life, who, by my letters, sets out for your letters—that is, for the purest fountain of knowledge—with laudable eagerness, not only to find there something himself which he may learn, but perhaps also to carry away thence something which he may teach. Yet against the powerful and the factious, even if your expertise did not abundantly assist him, the counsel of his own prudence would suffice.
Answer us, we beseech you—unless indeed the joint prayers of us both shall be reckoned by you a burden or a weariness—by your own judgement, upon my testimony; and shore up the wavering substance and cause of this suppliant by the wholesomeness of a judicious reply. Farewell. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his friend Simplicius, greeting. Although so great an unkindness of fortune attends our longing that even now you are begrudged to our very gaze, yet you are not on that account a man whose lofty and memorable qualities of character can lie hidden from us. Thus all our countrymen, and those the same being men of the highest rank, escort you with harmonious acclaim as the most excellent head of a household of the best and most exact sort.
To this opinion of good men concerning you your very choice of a son-in-law, or the daughter so brought up, gives assent: in whose union your desires have brought forth for you so happy a contest that you may be in doubt whether you have prevailed by your judgement or by your training. But nevertheless, from this above all, be secure, you two venerable parents: you surpass all others in this, that your children have outstripped you. Therefore pardon these first letters; which, as it was slothful not to send them yet, so I fear it may be talkative to have sent them. Truly our dutiful service will be free from the blemish of loquacity, if, after the example of a returning address, you absolve the impudence of the present page. Farewell. LETTER XII. Sidonius to his friend Secundus, greeting. The tomb of my grandfather, your great-grandfather—alas the grief!—yesterday
was all but profaned by a sacrilegious hand; but God was at hand, that so great a wickedness should not be perpetrated. Now the field itself, long since crammed as full of funeral ashes as of corpses, had for a long time received no fresh grave; yet the earth that is heaped over the buried had returned, spread out, to its former levelness, the mounds having subsided under the weight of snow or the long-continued flow of rains. This was the reason why the bearers of bodies dared to defile the place, as though it were vacant, with their funereal mattocks. Why say more? Already the turf was black instead of green; already fresh clods lay upon the ancient sepulchre, when, as I chanced to be journeying towards the city of Arverna, I espied from the brow of a neighbouring hill this public outrage;
and, hurling myself forward on my galloping horse over level and broken ground alike, impatient even of the slightest delay, before I arrived I checked the audacious crime by a cry sent on ahead. While they, caught in the act, were hesitating whether to slip away or to stand their ground, I came upon them. I confess my transgression: I could not defer the punishment of those taken; but over the very covering-stone of our old man I racked the robbers, so far as might suffice for the care of the survivors and the security of the dead. For the rest, that I reserved nothing to our priest; foreseeing my own case and his person, I took counsel for the common good, lest either this matter be avenged more mildly than was just, or that other should avenge it more severely than was just. Yet, when nevertheless I had sent him from the road the whole order of the affair, as if in satisfaction;
that holy man, unaccustomed to anger, gave glory to my indignation, since I was asking nothing more than pardon, pronouncing, after the manner of our forefathers, that the perpetrators of so great a rashness seemed to have been slain by right. But lest anything be permitted in future to those mischances which we ought to avoid by example, I ask that at once, even in my absence, by your care but at my expense, the scattered heap may rise again into a monument, which a polished slab may inscribe. To the venerable Gaudentius I have left the price of the stone and the wage for the work. This poem, indeed, which follows, I composed the past night, unpolished, I admit, because my mind was not a little intent upon the road: which I beg that, however slight it be, may be quickly set upon the tablet. But see to it that the stone-cutter make no fault in the marble:
lest a spiteful reader ascribe such a blunder—whether committed of set purpose or through carelessness—to me rather than to the stonemason. But I, if in pious zeal you attend to what I ask, will give thanks as though no praise or glory accrued to you as well, upon whom—that is, once I your uncle am removed—the whole solicitude of the present duty would have devolved by right of kinship. Farewell. Late, after my uncles and my father, this poem have I, a grandson not unworthy of my grandsire, dedicated: lest at some future time, O traveller, unaware of reverence due the buried, you should tread the unmounded earth. Here lies Apollinaris the prefect, after his upright governance of the Gauls, received into the bosom of his mourning fatherland.
Most sagacious and most serviceable, a cultivator of the countryside, of warfare, and of the forum, and, by an example perilous to others, free under domineering tyrants. But this is proved his greatest dignity: that, cleansing his brow with the cross and his limbs at the font, he was the first of the number of his fathers to renounce sacrilegious rites. This is his first glory, this his proud virtue: to precede in hope those whom you join in honour; and those parents who here are your equals in titles, there to surpass them in merits. I know indeed that the quality of the epitaph does not match the learning of our author; yet a soul versed in the Muses does not refuse such funeral offerings. To you too it ought not to seem tardy that we, the third and fourth heir, pay this due:
since we have learned that, after the revolution of so many years' cycle, great Alexander made offering to the shade of Achilles, and Julius Caesar paid the due rites to Hector as though to his own kinsman. Farewell. LETTER XIII. Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greeting. I singularly approve, rejoice, and marvel that out of love of chastity you flee the companionship of the unchaste; especially of those who hold nothing weighty, nothing sacred, in coveting and prating of foul things; and who, because by shameless words they defile the reverence due to public ears, think themselves grandly witty; of which vileness understand that the standard-bearer, even the very chief, in our fatherland is Gnatho. For this fellow is a very whirlpool drawn from the authors of fables, from the fabricators of crimes, from the doublers of sinister rumours;
himself talkative, yet not eloquent; laughable, yet not merry; arrogant, yet not steadfast; inquisitive, yet not sharp-sighted; and, with charm indecently affected, the more boorish for it: courting the present times, carping at the past, disdaining the future. Of a benefit, if he is about to ask one, he is importunate in the asking, a disparager of what is refused, an envier of what is granted, cunning in seeking its renewal, querulous when dunned, garrulous when it is restored; but if he is the one to be asked, a pretender of readiness, a dissembler of what is sought, a huckster of what is bestowed, a publisher of what is secret, a slanderer of one who delays, a denier of what is paid. A hater of fasts, a follower of feasts; delivering a praiseworthy verdict—not upon the man who lives well, but upon the man who feeds well.
Yet amid all this he himself is most avaricious, and one whom not so much good bread as another man's bread nourishes: this alone he eats at home, if among the buffetings of blows he has sent on ahead any morsel from what he has snatched. Nor indeed is the man's frugality altogether to be passed over in silence as though praiseworthy: he fasts whenever he is not invited; but even so, with a parasite's fickleness, if he is invited, making excuses; if he is shunned, prying; if he is shut out, reproaching; if he is admitted, exulting; if he is beaten, awaiting more. When he has reclined at table, he is straightway carried—if he eats slowly, into rapine; if he is quickly sated, into tears; if he thirsts, into complaints; if he gets drunk, into abscesses; if he wearies others, into insults; if he is wearied, into furies:
in filthiness altogether like a sewer, which the more it is stirred, the more foul it grows. Living thus, he is a pleasure to few, a love to none, a laughing-stock to all: a burster of bladders and a breaker of ferules; greedy in drinking, greedier in disparaging, breathing mire, foaming wine, and speaking venom, all with the same rabid mouth, he makes it a doubt whether he be reckoned the more shameless, the more sottish, or the more villainous. But you say, the quality of his mind colours over the disgraces of his spirit by his countenance, and the quality of his body pleads excuse for the follies of his mind. An elegant man, forsooth, and most charming, and one whose person is a spectacle worth seeing to those who behold it.
Nay rather, it is filthier and more misshapen than a corpse upon the pyre, which, half-burnt when the torches have been applied, and presently, the pile subsiding, rolled off sideways, the now fastidious layer-out of the dead shudders to restore to the flames. Besides this, he bears eyes devoid of light; which, in the manner of the Stygian marsh, roll their tears through the darkness. He bears also ears elephantine in their monstrous size, whose double-mouthed orifice an ulcerous skin surrounds, with stony knots and tufa-like warts of moisture protruding along the curved margin. He carries too a nose which, though it be ample in its nostrils and pinched at the ridge, so gapes open to the horror of it that it is straitened for smelling. He puts forth also a mouth leaden in its lips, bestial in its gape, purulent in its gums, box-yellow in its teeth;
which the mephitic odour, exhaled frequently from the hollow of his rotting molars, befouls, and which the belching of food from yesterday's banquets and the bilge-water of overflowing suppers heaps still higher. He displays too a forehead which, by a most hideous grimace, folds up the skin and stretches out the eyebrows. He nourishes also a beard which, though already growing hoary with age, yet through disease turns as black as Sulla's. His whole face, in short, is so pallid in the wretch, as though hour by hour saddened by ghostly shades. I say nothing of the rest of his bulk, bound with gout, dissolved with fat. I say nothing of his brain furrowed with many a weal; which, it is agreed, is little more covered with hairs than with scars. I say nothing that, by reason of the shortness of his neck, the edges of his shoulder-blades cling to his tilted-back occiput.
I say nothing that honour has fallen from his shoulders, grace from his arms, strength from his upper arms. I say nothing of his gout-ridden hands, wrapped in the greasy rags of poultices as though in boxing-gauntlets. I say nothing that, hemmed in as to his captive flanks by the goatish and souring caverns of his armpits, he blights with the fanned pestilence of a twofold Ampsanctus the nostrils of those seated round about. I say nothing that his breasts sag, broken by the weight of their lard, and that, whereas it were foul for them even to protrude upon a manly chest, these have drooped like a mother's paps. I say nothing of the pendulous nets of his privy parts, drawn in by an inward-curving belly, because it is more base to offer to the feeble a covering that is shameful, to the foul, with foul wrinkles. Now why should I here commemorate his back and his bosom? out of the tracks of whose joints, though the curvature of the ribs may weave the expanse of the chest as it bursts forth;
nevertheless this whole branching frame of bones lies hidden beneath one sea, as it were, of a billowing paunch. I say nothing of the corpulence of his loins and buttocks, compared with whose bulk his lean belly is reckoned slender. I say nothing of his thigh, dry and bowed, his enormous knees, his tender hams, his horny shins, his glassy ankles, his tiny toes, his huge feet. And although he bristles so with distorted lineaments, through which, bloodless and half-alive, he neither feels it when carried nor advances when supported, yet he is more execrable in his words than in his members. For, although he labours under an itch for dishonest speech, then above all is he to be guarded against as regards the secrets of patrons; of whom he is a praiser in prosperity, an informer in doubt:
but if the reckoning of the time should incite him to publish the secrets of his intimates, then through this Sparacus whatever is shut is broken open, and whatever is bolted is unbolted: so that what he cannot assail among houses with the engines of open enmity, he attacks with the tunnels of clandestine treachery. With this contrivance our Daedalus builds up the crown of friendships: who, as he is joined to his comrades like Theseus amid prosperity, so afterwards from them, like Proteus, slips away amid adversity. Therefore you will act according to my wish, if you associate not even in a first meeting with the fellowship of such men, especially of those to whose prostituted and theatrical talk shame extends no reins and sets no bars in the way.
For among those boastful men who, apart from the lustre of decency, defile us with the unbridled tongue of the dregs of chattering wantonness, the conscience too is most befouled. In short, it more easily befalls that a man speaking serious things should live obscenely, than that one can be shown who is at once base in his words and upright in his morals. Farewell. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to his friend Placidus, greeting. Although your own Gratianopolis holds you fast, yet I have learned by a faithful report of your hospitable leisure, that you deem my trifles—whether wrought in prose or made songlike in the poets' style—worthy of more than the reading of stored-up volumes. I rejoice in this very thing, that I have recognized your leisure to be occupied with our papers.
But I understand well that it is not the effect of the work, but the affection for its author, that has struck out this pleasure to suit your character. And therefore I owe the more, because the point of glory which you would deny to my composition, you grant to friendship. But concerning the other disparagers of my studies, what I should pronounce outright, I have not yet deliberated. For he who seems most learned to himself turns over sane diction and insane with almost equal appetite, coveting no more the lofty things which he may praise than the despised things at which he may laugh. And in this fashion knowledge, display, and propriety of the Latin tongue are held in the utmost contempt by the judgements of idle men; whose slovenliness, negligence being its companion, wishing only to read that which it may carp at, thus does not use letters, because it abuses them. Farewell. LETTER I.
Sidonius to his friend Probus, greeting. My sister, who is your wife—hence between us there is the highest and chief bond of kinship, and that indeed of cousinship, not of full brotherhood, which for the most part loves the other more purely, more strongly, more sincerely. For, the lawsuit over property between brothers having first been laid to rest, those who are now born of the brothers dispute nothing between themselves: and hence often affection is greater in cousins, because rivalry has ceased from the division, while the affection has not ceased from the seed. A second bond of our souls has come to us from the likeness of our studies, since we feel, blame, and praise the same things in letters, and equally to us does any composition please or displease. Although in this I arrogate too much to myself in comparing my judgement with yours.
For what young man or old does not know that you were my own private master, though we seemed to have a common one? and that whatever the epic poet composed as lofty, the comic as witty, the lyric as tuneful, the orator as mature, the historian as true, the satirist as figured, the grammarian as regular, the panegyrist as applause-worthy, the sophist as serious, the epigrammatist as wanton, the commentator as lucid, the jurisconsult as obscure, all in manifold ways—that you handed down in every kind to each single pupil, save to him whom his own genius or himself had failed? Good God! how our fathers gloried in this, when they saw that, under the help of Christ, you were able to teach and I to learn: and that you not only did what you could, but also willed what you did:
and therefore you were pronounced good no less than skilled? And truly, within the Eusebian household, a certain mint of such disciplines had received you, formed upon whose philosophic anvil, you now unfolded to us various systems of things and of words, even he who had taught you approving; now, like Plato the disciple already almost superior under Socrates, so you now, under our Eusebius, a craftsman dialectician among the Aristotelian categories, spoke pure Attic, while he was still ripening our tender little age—mobile, tender, raw—now with the severity of chastisement boiling it down, now seasoning it with the wholesomeness of precepts. And of what precepts, good God, and how precious!...
which, if anyone bent on philosophizing were to carry off, either to the marsh-dwelling Sicambri, or to the Caucasus-born Alani, or to the mare-milking Geloni, the horny hearts and icy fibres of those bestial and rigid nations would beyond doubt be softened and thawed; nor should we laugh at, despise, or dread their ferocity and stolidity, which after the manner of beasts plays the fool, grows brutish, and is inflamed. Therefore, since studies as well as kinship have joined us, I pray that, wherever you are, you may keep the laws of friendship unshaken; and that for long, even if we are absent in dwelling, we may be present in affection; whose unblemished portion, so far as it regards us, shall be made everlasting by us for ever, if there is any life remaining. Farewell. LETTER II.
Claudianus to Pope Sidonius, greeting. (This letter we have published in Patrologia, vol. LIII, col. 779, where you may see it.) LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Claudianus, greeting. (This letter also you may see in Patrologia, vol. LIII, col. 781.) LETTER IV. Sidonius to his friends Simplicius and Apollinaris, greeting. Behold at last the fulfilment of my promise, the object of your expectation, Faustinus, a paterfamilias noble at home and to be numbered among the greatest ornaments of the fatherland, now common both to me and to himself. He is my brother in the equality of birth, my friend in the likeness of souls:
often have I mingled serious matters with him, often too jests; and when in time past we were young men, in ball-play, in dice, in leaping, running, hunting, swimming, there was ever a contest between us both, holy charity abiding withal. To me indeed he was the elder in age, yet only so much that it was not so much necessary to honour him as it delighted me to imitate him; and at the same time he himself was the more won over hereby, that he understood himself to be loved rather than, as it were, courted. But with the advancement of his age, from clerical service, whereas before he was lovable, he has now begun to be venerable. Through him I say greeting, desiring, under the help of Christ, to see you as soon as possible, if the public situation should allow.
Wherefore, unless my longing should seem burdensome, when the aforesaid returns, let me become acquainted with your places and your times. My resolve stands firm: to struggle against the opposing difficulties of private occupations, and to appoint however long a service to the embracing of your hearts: if only—what even now we fear—no superior force, marshalled against us, throw all into confusion: which it is not too unfitting that you also, together with brother Faustinus, should deliberate upon by shared discussion, as the times admonish; whom, because I love him as one who loves me, I have sent. If he answers to my judgement, I give thanks. Moreover, since a good man is so reckoned by all, a man is not worse if he is not the best. Farewell. LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Felix, greeting.
The repetition of a greeting repeats the bearer. Your Gozolas (may God grant that he be ours too) is made for the second time the carrier of my letters. Therefore take away from both of us the shame that is common, if you still meditate keeping silent: all will judge both me unworthy of a greeting, and him through whom you ought to write. Of the state of the times I now consult nothing, as before, lest it be a burden to your character, if you should signify adverse things, when prosperous ones do not follow. For since it does not become you to send false tidings, and likewise things worth mentioning in prayer are lacking; I shun to learn, through the reports of good men, whatever ill it is. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greeting.
Through the bishop Faustinus—bound to me no less by the fellowship of old comradeship than by the communion of his new profession—I had by word commanded certain things to be guarded against: I rejoice that you have obeyed the word. Since it is implanted in the heart of the prudent to avoid chance mishaps: as likewise it is absurd, if the outcome opposes bold undertakings, to rise up into complaints, and to turn the blameworthy issues of ill-advised arrangements into a means of shaping the uncertainties of chance. To what end is all this? you say.
I confess that I greatly feared, lest in a time of public dread you should not be afraid, and lest the unshaken security of a solid house, secure to this point of the age, should tremble at the tempestuous inroads of enemies with an untimely devotion, and lest amid the tenderness of matronly spirits the sought-for solemnity should begin to grow cheap: although in the breasts of those same women native holiness has so measured out for itself a peculiar dwelling-place, that, if anything untoward had befallen them as they journeyed, they would have rejoiced to have endured, as it were, a kind of martyrdom in place of a martyr. But I, whom the lesser innocence makes the more diffident, gladly cling on this doubtful matter to the more cautious opinion, nor am I with difficulty brought over even to those who fear things that are safe.
Accordingly it was well done, that you profitably deferred the doubtful journey, and that the estate of so great a family was not within the throw of so great a hazard. And although the journey once begun might have prospered, yet I for my part will by no means cast a white pebble for a counsel of this sort, whose rashness cannot be absolved except by the benefit of good fortune. God will indeed grant such vows to be advanced by worthy successes: and it will be permitted hereafter to remember these terrors under the pleasantness of peace; but present things make those cautious whom future things shall see secure. Meanwhile, for the present, the bearer of my letters sighs over certain losses inflicted upon him through your Genesius. If you perceive that his complaint does not diverge from the truth, I beg that redress be granted to one who proves his case, and speed to a stranger.