LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Syagrius, greeting. Since you are the great-grandson of a consul, and that through the male line (although this pertains little to the subject I am about to broach); since therefore you are of the seed of a poet, to whom without doubt letters would have granted statues, had the consular robes not granted them—which even now the words of the author, polished in verses, attest, and from whom the studies of his descendants have not degenerated even in the least, in this respect at least—it is monstrous to relate how greatly I am astonished that you have seized the knowledge of the Germanic tongue with such great facility. And yet I remember that your boyhood was fittingly steeped in the liberal schools, and I have it sufficiently ascertained that you often declaimed keenly and eloquently before the orator.
And though this is so, I would have you tell whence your breast has suddenly drawn in the euphony of an alien race; so that now, after the ferules of Maronian reading, and after the toilsome, varicose Arpinate's copiousness and volubility that you have sweated over, you burst forth as it were a new falcon out of old Hilary. It cannot at all be estimated how great a laughter it is to me and to the rest, whenever I hear that in your presence the barbarian fears to commit a barbarism in his own tongue. The bent old age of the Germans is astounded at you interpreting their letters, and takes you as arbiter and umpire in their mutual affairs. You are a new Solon of the Burgundians in expounding laws;
a new Amphion in the harps—but three-stringed ones—of which you are entrusted with the tuning; you are beloved, frequented, sought after; you delight, you are chosen, you are consulted, you are heeded. And although they are stiff and untractable alike in body and in sense, they embrace in you, and learn together, their ancestral speech, yet a Latin heart. This one thing remains, most accomplished man, that no less diligently, even when you have leisure, you devote something to the reading of the work, and preserve, elegant as you are, this measure: that this tongue be kept by you, lest you be laughed at; that the other be exercised, that you may laugh. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greeting. As soon as summer gave way to autumn, and the Arvernians' fear could be tempered somewhat by reason of the season, I came to Vienne:
where I found your brother Thaumastus—whom by the right both of blood and of age I embrace with reverend familiarity—most sorrowful. Who, although he was greatly affected by his recent widowhood, was nonetheless little less anxious on your behalf. For he feared and dreaded lest the barbaric whirlwind, or the soldiery's wickedness, should contrive some calumny against you. For he affirms that it was secretly whispered to Chilperic, master of the soldiers, a most victorious man, by the venomous report of certain villains, that—chiefly by your machination—the town of Vaison was being attached to the party of the new prince. If any suspicion is thereby stirred up against you and yours, teach me swiftly by the return of familiar pages;
lest the opportunity of my solicitude or presence be lost to you. It will be my particular care, if however you shall think anything must be guarded against, so to make you either secure by favor obtained, or more cautious by wrath explored. Farewell. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his friend Thaumastus, greeting. We have at last tracked down who it is that, before our tetrarch, were slandering your brother's friendships, and, on the opposite side, those of the new prince's party—if however the clandestine tracks of the informers did not elude the faithful sagacity of our comrades. These, doubtless, are they, as you heard when present yourself, whom Gaul groans to have long endured among the more clement barbarians. These are they whom even those who are feared, fear.
These are they whom this province in particular awaits, to bring in false accusations, to inform against persons, to bring on threats, to carry off substances. These are they whose occupations you hear praised in leisure, their plunderings in peace, their flights amid arms, their victories amid wine. These are they who, when called in, delay causes; when passed over, hinder them; when admonished, grow disdainful; when enriched, forget. These are they who buy lawsuits, sell interventions, appoint arbiters, dictate what is to be judged, tear up what is dictated, drag in those about to litigate, protract those to be heard, haul off those adjudged, drag back those making a settlement. These are they whom, if you ask a benefit even with none opposing, it irks to promise, shames to refuse, repents to have granted.
These are the men to whom, by comparison, a Narcissus, an Asiaticus, a Massa, a Marcellus, a Carus, a Parthenius, a Licinus, and a Pallas would raise a finger in surrender. These are they who begrudge the tunic-clad their leisure, the war-cloaked their pay, the couriers their travel-money, the merchants their market-days, the envoys their little gifts, the informers their customs-dues, the provincials their estates, the townsmen their crown-tax, the treasury-clerks their weights, the assessors their measures, the registrars their salaries, the accountants their allotments, the praetorians their gratuities, the cities their truces, the tax-farmers their revenues, the clergy their reverence, the nobles their pedigree, their betters the place of honour, their equals fair meeting, the girded their rights, the ungirded their privileges, the schools their pupils, the teachers their fees, and the trained their letters.
These are they who, drunk with new-gotten wealth, so betray—that you may know even the least of it—by their intemperance in enjoyment their ignorance in possessing. For they gladly go armed to banquets, in white to funerals, in furs to church, in mourning to weddings, in beaver-skins to the litanies. No kind of men, no rank, no season is dear to their heart. In the forum they are Scythians, in the bedchamber vipers, at the feast buffoons, in exactions harpies, in conversations statues, in lawsuits wild beasts, in negotiations snails, in contracts money-changers;
in understanding stone, in judging wood, in taking offence flame, in forgiving iron; for friendship leopards, for pleasantries bears, for deceit foxes, for arrogance bulls, for devouring minotaurs. Their firmest hopes they set in the upheavals of things; they love uncertain times the more surely, and, trembling alike from cowardice and from a guilty conscience—though they be lions in the praetorium, they are hares at the harrow—they fear treaties, lest these be broken; wars, lest they must fight. And if anywhere the whiff of a rust-crusted money-bag has breathed upon their nostrils, straightway you will see there brought to bear the eyes of Argus and the hands of Briareus, the claws of Sphinxes, the perjuries of Laomedon, the wiles of Ulysses, the falsehoods of Sinon, the good faith of Polymnestor, and the piety of Pygmalion.
With such ways they overwhelm a man who excels no less in goodness than in power. But what can one man do, hemmed in on every side by a venomous go-between? What, I say, can he do, whose nature is one with the good, but whose lot is cast among the wicked? By whose counsels there would be rendered a Phalaris more bloodthirsty, a Midas more greedy, an Ancus more boastful, a Tarquin more proud, a Tiberius more crafty, a Caius more dangerous, a Claudius more slothful, a Nero more foul, a Galba more grasping, an Otho more reckless, a Vitellius more extravagant, a Domitian more savage. Yet, what chiefly heals the afflicted, his own Tanaquil tempers our Lucumo, and clears his husband's ears—stuffed with the poisonous dregs of whisperers—by the seasonable opportunity of witty speech. It is fitting that you should know her zeal;
that meanwhile nothing has harmed the peace of our common brethren in the mind of our common patron from the poisons of the younger Cibyrates, nor (God being propitious) will anything do harm; if only, for so long as the present power rules Lugdunensian Germany, the present Agrippina may govern our and her own Germanicus. Farewell. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to his friend Secundinus, greeting. Long indeed has it been since we, in amazement and praise, kept reading you as you devoted yourself quite familiarly to hexameters. For the subject-matter was delightful, whether the nuptial torches of the bridal-chambers were being described, or beasts pierced by royal blows. But in the eleven-syllable measure lately framed from triple trochees, you have made nothing—not even by your own judgement—like it. Good God!
How much of gall, of grace, of peppered eloquence I found lurking there, at no leisurely a glance! Save that the thunderbolt of your seething genius and the salt freedom of your speech were hampered, perhaps, more by the persons than by the causes: so that to me neither did the consul Ablavius seem more figuratively to have pricked the house and life of Constantine with a paired verse, nor to have bitten it with such a couplet secretly hung upon the palace doors. "Who would look for the golden ages of Saturn? These are jewelled, but Neronian." For, to be sure, the aforesaid Augustus, in nearly those same times, had put to death his wife Fausta by the heat of a bath, his son Crispus by the chill of poison. Yet do you, no whit the more slothful, boldly bend your effort at least to the witty colours of satire.
For your writings will be enriched by the growing vices of our petty tyrants. For they do not swell in mediocre fashion—those whom our judgements, ages, and places count fortunate—so that posterity would have to labour some day to recall their very names. For the disgraces of the wicked, no less than the praises of the good, remain immortal. Farewell. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his friend Aquilinus, greeting. I count it in my own gain, O most capacious of all virtues, if you too think it worthy, that we should hold friendships as great as we hold reasons for friendship. It is an ancestral thing that I reclaim: as witnesses to me for the present in this affair our grandfathers, Apollinaris and Rusticus, shall be called;
whom a likeness of letters, of dignities, of dangers, of consciences had joined in praiseworthy intimacy: since together they abhorred the inconstancy in Constantine, the pliancy in Jovinus, the treachery in Gerontius—each fault singly in single men, and all crimes at once in Dardanus. And in middle life, our fathers, under one comradeship, scarcely yet out of boyhood, carried into their whole youth, served the emperor Honorius as tribunes and notaries, with such wandering affection that among them the least cause of concord was that they were called the sons of friends. In the principate of the emperor Valentinian, the one was set over a part of the Gauls, the other over the whole.
But somehow the titles of both were so balanced by brotherly compensation, that he was first in point of the fasces who was later in dignity. It has come down to us, that is, it has come to the grandsons: whom nothing should more befit than to take care lest through us the affection of our forefathers and elders should perhaps seem to grow obsolete. To this same intimacy, besides the hereditary prerogative, we are impelled by manifold opportunity: the age of each of us is no less linked than our fatherland. One sport exercised us, one master taught us; one joy loosed us, one severity restrained, one discipline formed us. For the rest, if God grant it, in years now knocking at the thresholds of old age, let us be—unless you spurn it—two souls, one mind;
and let us imbue our children with mutual love, to will the same, to refuse, to shun, and to pursue the same things. This indeed would be beyond even the prayers of our fathers, if through Rusticus and Apollinaris the hearts, as well as the names, of our praiseworthy great-grandfathers should be renewed. Farewell. LETTER X. Sidonius to his friend Sapaudus, greeting. If the illustrious Pragmatius does anything at all excellently among the other virtues of his mind, it is this: that from love of studies he loves you singularly, in whom alone, or most of all, he perceives the traces of ancient learning and diligence to have settled. And indeed not without cause is he your patron: for from him a most copious honour is owed to letters. Him, once holding forth and shattering the rhetorical benches with applause-winning oration, an eloquent father-in-law of his own accord received into a patrician family:
granted that (to say nothing of birth or fortune) his age, his charm, his modesty pleaded for him to that end. But, as I have learned, even then already this serious man blushed to have pleased by the endowment of good looks; since for him it would have sufficed to be loved by the merit of his genius; and truly every best man pleases more excellently by his character than by his beauty. Moreover, the fleeting adornments of the body totter with the advance and decline of running time. Him too, his opinion remaining firm, Priscus Valerianus, afterwards prefect of the Gauls, associated with his counsels and tribunals; most persistently holding to his ancient judgement, that to the man to whom under the plea of learning he had joined his offspring, he might join dignity as well.
But your diction is now so clear, so admirable, that in comparison with it the analytic art of Palaemon, the gravity of Gallio, the abundance of Delphidius, the discipline of Agroecius, the vigour of Alcimus, the tenderness of Adelphius, the sternness of Magnus, the sweetness of Victorius, would be written down not merely as not superior, but as scarcely equal. Yet, lest I seem to you to have flattered or gratified you in any way under this quasi-hyperbolic catalogue of rhetoricians, I do not doubt—rather I acquiesce—that to you alone the keenness of Quintilian and the pomp of Palladius are compared. Wherefore, if anyone after you favours Latin erudition, he gives thanks to this friendship, and, if he has anything of a man in him, wishes to be admitted as a third to your fellowship.
Although—and this is the more grievous—that ambition of his may not be sufficient to stir up disdain in you, because few now honour studies. At the same time it is fixed and rooted in human breasts by a natural fault, that those who do not understand the arts do not admire the artists. Farewell. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his friend Patentinus, greeting. We love you much: and indeed the affection of this fondness is no wandering or fortuitous feeling. For I judged that I should become the more bound to you as a comrade. For it is my custom to choose first, and to love afterward. "What things approvable in me," you ask, "have pleased you?" I will say gladly and briefly: one of which the grace, the other the paper compels me to make known. I revere in your actions that you do many things imitable by every good man.
You cultivate as one most skilful, you build as one most orderly, you hunt as one most effectively, you feed as one most exact, you jest as one most witty, you judge as one most fair, you counsel as one most sincere, you are moved to anger as one most slow, you are appeased as one most swift, you love in return as one most faithful. If from these years of manhood onward my Apollinaris follows all these examples of living, I rejoice; certainly, that he may follow them, I admonish him. In whose teaching and training—provided, under the aid of Christ, matters proceed as arranged—I most greatly rejoice that I shall borrow from your character the greatest pattern of life. Farewell. LETTER XII. Sidonius to his friend Culminius, greeting.
That a page passes from us to you rather rarely, is caused not by our pride, but by another's violence. Nor should you seek anything plainer about these matters; since a like fear in your quarters interprets the necessity of this silence. This one thing, however, I freely lament: that, made separate by the whirlwind of the contending parties, we by no means enjoy the sight of each other. Nor are you ever offered to the anxious gaze of the fatherland; unless perhaps when, at the pleasure of another's terror, breastplates cover you and battlements cover us. Where you yourself are led captive to this alone, that you are compelled to empty your quivers of arrows, and to fill your eyes with tears; we too not refusing, since your prayers strive after something quite other than javelins.
But since sometimes—even if not through the truth of treaties, at least through the semblance of truces—a certain window of hope for our liberty shines forth: I earnestly beg that, when you most can, you would impart to us the address of a frequent page; knowing that there remains for you, in the hearts of the besieged citizens, that gratitude which forgets the malice of the besieger. Farewell. LETTER XIII. Sidonius to his friend Pannychius, greeting. You know that Seronatus is returning from Toulouse: if not yet (and I believe he is not yet), learn it at least from these lines. Already Evanthius hastens to Clausentia; and now he drives the assembled workmen to clear away, if perchance the embankment has been fouled by any fall of shed leaves.
Certainly, if there is anything full of pits, he himself, trembling, levels it with earth carted in and the holes filled up—as one about to go before his own monster, from the valley of Tarnis, in ducal fashion; like the little fish among the rocks and shallows, that pilot ahead the bulk of the whales. But he—swift with rage, though sluggish with bulk—like a serpent scarcely wriggled out of its cave, is now borne down from close by upon the already bloodless-with-fear Gabalitani: whom, scattered singly and townless, he now exhausts with unheard-of kinds of levies, now ensnares in the winding fraud of calumnies; not even then permitting the harassed to return home, when they have paid the yearly tribute. This too is a sure sign of his impending arrival, that in troops, wherever he turns himself, the bound are dragged along dragging their chains:
at whose grief he rejoices, on whose hunger he feeds; deeming it especially fine to defile the condemned before punishing them: he lets men's hair grow long, and cuts women's; yet of these, if a rare pardon has regarded some, these venality releases, those vanity, none mercy. But to unfold such a beast, neither the prince of orators, Marcus of Arpinum, nor the prince of poets, Publius of Mantua, could suffice. Therefore, since it is said that this very pestilence draws near (may God bar its treacheries), forestall the disease by the wholesomeness of foresight; and against the lawsuits of the quarrelsome, if any are stirred up, take counsel by settlements, and against tributes by receipts of discharge: lest the evil man find in the goods of the good either what to injure, or what to bestow.
In short, do you wish to receive what I think concerning Seronatus? The rest fear to be afflicted through the aforesaid man by loss; to me even a brigand's benefits are suspect. Farewell. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to his friend Aper, greeting. Now the Calensian Baiae delight you, and the sulphur-water belched cavernously from rough pumice-stones, and the pool medicinal for those languishing with liver-complaints and consumption. Or perhaps some mountain seat around the forts, and, in choosing a place of refuge, you suffer a certain difficulty from the multitude of fortifications? Whatever it is that gives you leisure from business, you will nevertheless be recalled to the city, unless I am mistaken, by consideration of the Rogations.
The solemnity of which our first father and pontiff, Mamertus, by a most reverent example and most useful experiment, discovered, instituted, and introduced. There were indeed formerly (be it said with the peace of faith preserved) wandering, lukewarm, and infrequent, and, so to speak, yawning supplications; which were often blunted by the obstacles of interrupting luncheons, chiefly to pray away either rains or fair weather; to which (that I say no more) it did not befit either potter or gardener alike to come together. But in these which the aforesaid highest priest both brought forth and conferred, there is fasting, there is prayer, there is psalm-singing, there is weeping. To these festivals of humbled necks and to the sighing companies of prostrate citizens I invite you:
and if I rightly measure your spiritual soul, you will come the more quickly, because you are summoned not to feasts, but to tears. Farewell. LETTER XV. Sidonius to his friend Ruricius, greeting. Having prefaced the discourse of duty, I commend to you your bookseller, whom I have tested not by favour, but judicially: whose fidelity in his heart, and swiftness in his work, I have proved fully enough toward you his lord, common to me and to himself. This man, then, now himself brings the book of the Heptateuch, written with the utmost speed and utmost elegance; although it has also been re-read and revised by us. He brings also the volume of the prophets, though gone through in my absence, yet by his own care and hand cleared of superfluous readings; nor was the man always reading against him who had promised his help:
I believe that infirmity was the hindrance, whereby he could not fulfil what he had promised. It remains that your exhortation, or pledge, should reward the servant—so eager either to please or to earn merit—with a fitting grace: which, being paid to him for such labour, will begin to look to your recompense. But since I ask this from grace alone, do you look at what he deserves, who, it is clear, seeks his lord's affection rather than reward. Farewell. LETTER XVI. Sidonius to his own Papianilla, greeting.
The quaestor Licinianus, coming from Ravenna, as soon as, the Alps crossed, he touched the soil of Gaul, sent letters heralding his arrival, in which he indicates that he is the bearer of the imperial codicils, at whose coming the patrician honour accrues also to your brother Ecdicius, in whose titles as much as in mine you rejoice; most swiftly, if you consider his age; most tardily, if his merits. For long ago he did not pay the vote for the dignity to be entered upon in the scale, but on the battle-line: and, a private man, he enriched the public treasury not with monies, but with spoils. This, however, holy Julius Nepos—supreme Augustus alike in arms and in character—the more speedily, the more praiseworthily discharged, in that he fulfilled the pledge of his predecessor Anthemius, bound to your brother by his sweat;
since indeed this man fulfilled what that one very often used to promise. Whence it comes about that henceforth every best man can and ought, if he has any strength, to spend it for the republic—being now secure, and therefore eager—since indeed, even when the emperor is dead, whatever the prince has pledged to the devotion of the toiling, the principate always repays. Meanwhile you, if I gather your feeling rightly, upon learning these things, take great solace amid your greatest adversities: nor does the terror of even the nearby siege drive your mind aside from the path of common joys. For I know well that you were gladdened not so much by my own honour, which you share by law, as by this: for although you are a good wife, you are also a most excellent sister.
Wherefore, with Christ our God propitious, I have hastily inscribed in congratulatory letters the enlarged titles of your lineage, at once discharging your anxiety and your brother's modesty: who would disclose nothing of his own dignity, whom, if you happened not to know him to be bashful, you would still not judge impious. But I enjoy not so much your insignia—which you hitherto awaited the more impatiently the more freely (although these too greatly)—as your concord: which I wish equal to our and their children hereafter; demanding it as a common desire in my prayers, that, as we, having obtained a prefectorial rank for each of our two families, have also by divine favour rendered it patrician: so may they make the patrician rank they receive into a consular one.
Roscia greets you, our common care: who, in the most indulgent bosom of her grandmother and aunts—a thing that rarely befalls strangers' grandchildren—is nevertheless reared with severity: by which, however, her tender age is not weakened, but her character is formed. Farewell. LETTER XVII. Sidonius to his friend Eriphius, greeting. You are, my Eriphius, ever the same self: and never does hunting, the city, or the field so distract you, that you are not also, in passing, held by the pleasure of letters; and it comes about, by that zeal, that you do not even disdain our works, which, as you write, smell to you of the Muses. Yet this opinion is largely proved to lack truth: although it also appears to come either from jest, if you are merry, or from love, if you are in earnest.
For the rest, it rebounds far from the just, when you assign to me things which could scarcely be fitly applied even to Maro, scarcely to Homer. Let us leave these things, and let us converse of that whence the occasion arose. You bid verses be directed to you, which I granted to the entreaties of your most excellent brother-in-law: who, mingled in the company of his equals, lives with manners equally ready to command and to obey. But since you desire to know both the place and the cause, that you may the more easily understand a foreign matter, count it rather to your own charge that the preface will be more loquacious than the work. We had met at the tomb of Saint Justus, but infirmity was a hindrance to you, so that you were not then present:
there had been a procession before dawn, the annual solemnity, a huge throng of both sexes, which the most capacious basilica could not hold, and the crypt, however girded with its spreading porticoes. The vigils being performed—which the monks and clerics, as psalm-singers, had celebrated together with alternating sweetness—each of us withdrew in different directions; not far, however, since we were to be at hand for the third hour, when the divine service was to be performed with the priests. Owing indeed to the crush of the place and of the crowds, and to the numerous lights brought in, we were exceedingly out of breath: at the same time the night, still close upon summer, had scorched us shut in with its silent vapour; and even if now, at the first cold, the autumnal dawn was cooling down.
And so, when the various bodies of ranks were dispersing here and there, it pleased the foremost of the citizens to come together to the tomb of Syagrius the consul, which was not separated even by a full bowshot. Here some of us sat down under the shade of a grown vine, whose foliage, drawn over the trellised stakes brought and hung crosswise, had woven a covering; others upon the green turf, but fragrant with flowers. The words were sweet, jesting, teasing: moreover (what was most blessed) there was no mention of powers or of tributes; no talk that would betray anyone, no person who would be betrayed. Assuredly each could have told a tale worthy of the telling and of worthy sentiments: it was listened to most eagerly. Nor for that reason was the narration less distinct, because gaiety was mingled in.
Amid these things, being long grown slack with leisure, it seemed good to do something. Soon, at both parties' clamouring demand, as befitted our age, a ball is brought forth by these, a gaming-board by those. I was the first standard-bearer of the ball, which, as you know, is held my companion no less than the book. On the other side my brother Domnicius, a man of the highest grace and highest charm, had taken up the dice and was rattling them: by which, as by a trumpet-call, he summoned the players to the dice-tower. We with the crowd of scholars played abundantly, so that our limbs, dulled and numbed by sedentary toil, might be quickened by wholesome running. Here the illustrious Philematius, as is that verse of the Mantuan poet—"having dared himself too to attempt the young men's toil with his hand"—steadily mingled himself among the squadrons of the ball-players.
For he had done this handsomely, but while his years were still fewer. And when he was frequently pushed from his standing-place by the impulse of the runner passing through the middle; now too, received into the arena, he neither cut off nor guarded the course of the ball flying past before him, or thrown over him; and to this, often bent forward through a tumble, he could hardly recollect himself from the ruinous stoop; first he withdrew himself from the play's onset, gasping, his inner parts growing hot. For frequent pains kept pricking him, exercised, with the swelling fibre of his little liver. I too straightway desisted, about to do a deed of charity by the fellowship of ceasing, lest my brother's weariness should suffer shame. So, when we had sat down again, and sweat soon warned him to seek water for his face, it was brought to him at his request: