BOOK ONE. N.B. In the Sirmondian edition the notes were published separately after the text. We, consulting the reader's convenience, have restored them to the text. But their pagination, as it stands in Sirmond, we have expressed in bolder type, so that the analytical index may afterwards be reprinted into the notes not without profit. THE EDITOR. LETTER ONE. Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greeting. For a long time now, my honoured lord, you have been urging me with the highest authority of persuasion—as you are, in matters to be deliberated, most full of counsel—that if any somewhat more polished letters have flowed forth on various occasions, as cause, person, and time drew them out, I should, after the copies had been reviewed and refined, enclose them all in one volume, meaning to follow the roundedness of Q. Symmachus,
and to follow, with presumptuous steps, the discipline and maturity of Pliny. For as to Marcus Tullius, I think it better to keep silent in the epistolary style—him whom not even Julius Titianus, under the names of illustrious women, expressed in full with fitting resemblance. On which account all the others of the Frontonian school, emulating him as a fellow-follower, since he imitated the antique manner of speaking, called him 'the ape of the orators.' To all of whom I—monstrous to say—how much I have always yielded in my own judgment, and how much I have proclaimed that each man's prerogative of his own times and merits should be preserved.
But of course I have obeyed you, and have entrusted these to your examination—not to be reviewed (for that is too little), but, as they say, to be purged of dregs and filed down, knowing that you are an immoderate patron not only of studies but also of the studious. Wherefore you now drive me, exceedingly hesitant, into this sea of fame henceforth. Moreover, concerning a little work of this kind, we had more safely kept silent, content with the opinion of verses published more happily than skilfully—about which, for me, long since in the harbour of public judgment, after the Scyllas of envious barkings had been sailed past, the anchor of sufficient glory rests firm.
But if envy shall not have fixed its back tooth in these ravings too, straightway more numerous volumes, teeming with most copious discourses, will be multiplied for you by us. Farewell. LETTER II. Sidonius to his friend Agricola, greeting. You have often demanded that, because the fame of Theodoric, king of the Goths, commends his civility to the peoples, the size of his figure and the quality of his life should be signified to you in a letter. I obey gladly, so far as the epistolary page allows, praising in you the frankness of so delicate a solicitude. He is a man worthy to be known even by those who behold him less familiarly: so has God the arbiter, and reason, heaped up his person with the dowry of a nature's consummated felicity, joined together.
His character, moreover, is of such a kind that not even the envy of his very kingship detracts anything from its praises. If his figure be sought: his body is well-finished; shorter than the very tallest, taller and more eminent than the middling. The crown of his head is round, on which the hair, receding a little from the flatness of the forehead toward the crown, curls. His neck does not sit slack upon the sinews. A bristling arch of eyebrows crowns the twin orbs. But if the eyelashes be bent down, the margin of the lids nearly reaches to the middle of the cheeks. The tips of the ears, as is the custom of his people, are covered by the tresses of overlying hair. The nose is most gracefully curved. The lips are thin, nor widened by the corners of the mouth being dilated. If by chance a row of teeth should stand forth, straightway it presents a snowy colour.
There is a daily cutting of the hairs sprouting beneath the caverns of the nostrils. The beard is shaggy in the hollow temples, which, rising from the roots on the lower part of the face, the assiduous barber plucks out with tweezers, right up to the cheeks. The skin of the chin, throat, and neck—not fat, but full of juice—is milk-white, which, more closely inspected, is suffused with a youthful ruddiness. For this colour is often produced in him not by anger, but by modesty. The shoulders are rounded, the upper arms strong, the forearms hard, the hands broad; the chest advancing while the belly recedes. A lower spine divides the plain of the back amid the excrescences of the ribs. Each flank is knotty with prominent muscles. Vigour reigns in the well-girt loins. The thigh is horn-hard, the joints of the knees quite manly.
The greatest grace is in the scarcely wrinkled knees. His shanks are propped on swelling calves, and the foot that supports his great limbs is of modest size. If you inquire into his daily routine, which is publicly exposed to view: before dawn he seeks the assemblies of his priests with the smallest retinue, and venerates them with great earnestness—though, if the talk be private, you might observe that he keeps up that reverence rather from custom than from principle. The remaining morning he assigns to himself the care of administering the kingdom. His armour-bearer stands about his throne as companion; the throng of fur-clad guards is admitted, that they may be at hand, and shut out lest they make a din: and so before the doors they murmur, excluded by the curtains, enclosed by the lattices.
Meanwhile, the embassies of the nations being admitted, he hears much, answers little. If anything is to be dealt with, he defers it; if anything is to be dispatched, he hastens it. Is it the second hour? He rises from his throne, either to inspect his treasures, or to visit the stables. If the hunt is announced, he sets forth, judging it beneath his royal dignity to fasten the bow to his side: yet if, at close quarters, either you should point out a bird or a beast to him as he hunts, or chance should offer one to him as he travels, a boy inserts it into his hand reached back behind him, the string or thong hanging loose: for as he reckons it a boyish thing to carry it in a case, so a womanish thing to receive it already strung.
So, taking up the bow just now handed to him, he draws it, its ends bent toward him from opposite sides; now, with the knot's part turned toward his dangling ankle, he follows with a roving finger gliding over it the slack loop of the wavering string: and then straightway he takes the arrows, fits them, lets them fly; he warns you beforehand what you wish to have struck; you choose what he shall do, and what you have chosen he strikes: and if either must go astray, the aim of him who fixes the shot errs more rarely than the gaze of him who marks it out. If it comes to a banquet—which indeed on ordinary days is like a private one—there no wheezing servant sets down upon the yielding tables an unpolished heap of livid silver. The greatest weight then is in the words: for there either nothing is narrated, or serious things.
The furnishings are brought out now in embossed and tapestried fashion, dyed with purple, now of fine linen. The dishes please by art, not by price: the courses by their brightness, not their weight. The rare offerings of cups and bowls are such that thirst might more easily accuse them than drunkenness refuse them. Why say more? You would see there Greek elegance, Gallican abundance, Italian swiftness; public pomp, private diligence, royal discipline. But of that Sabbatarian luxury my narration must forbear, which cannot hide even from persons hidden. Let us return to what we began. When the feast is finished, the midday sleep is often none, always slight.
At those hours when the gaming-board is dear to the man's heart, he gathers the dice swiftly, inspects them carefully, rolls them shrewdly, throws them urgently, addresses them jestingly, awaits them patiently. At good throws he is silent, at bad ones he laughs, at neither is he angry, at both he plays the philosopher. He scorns to file down or to make second chances: the opportunities of these, offered, he spurns; opposed, he passes them by. He gets clear without commotion, gets out without collusion. You would think that even at the counters he handles arms. His only care is to win. When it is time to play, he sets aside his royal severity for a while, exhorts to play, to freedom, to fellowship. I will say what I feel: he fears to be feared. In short, he is delighted by the agitation of the man he has beaten:
and then at last he believes his opponent has not yielded to him, when the victory has made trust in another man's vexation. And, what you might wonder at, often that gladness, coming from the smallest occasions, brings good fortune to the deserts of huge affairs. Then petitions long before tossed about through the shipwrecks of patronage—of a sudden absolution a passage is opened. Then even I, about to entreat something, am happily conquered, when the board asks this of me, that a cause may be saved. About the ninth hour that mass of ruling grows raw again. Back come the knockers, back come the removers; everywhere the litigious ambition roars: which, drawn out into evening, grows scanty as the royal supper interrupts it, and thereafter is dispersed through the courtiers according to the variety of the patrons, to keep watch until the time of the dead of night.
To be sure, mimic pleasantries are admitted, though rarely, during the dining, in such a way that no guest is struck by the gall of a biting tongue. Yet so, that there neither do water-organs sound, nor does a chorus of singers, under a choir-master, strike up together a studied entertainment. No lyre-player, flute-accompanist, precentor, timbrel-girl, or harp-girl sings there: the king being soothed by those strings alone, by which he no less charms his mind with virtue than song charms the hearing. When he has risen, the treasure-guard begins the nightly watches; armed men stand at the entrances of the royal house, by whom the hours of the first slumber will be watched over. But now what is this to my part, who promised to disclose to you not much about the kingdom, but a little about the king? At the same time, it is fitting that an end be made to the pen:
because you too wished to become acquainted with no more than the man's pursuits and person, and I took care to make not a history, but a letter. Farewell. LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Philimatius, greeting. Go now, and by the laws of canvassing have me summoned before the senate and set moving, to ask why with sleepless cares I press on to attain hereditary dignity: I, whose father, father-in-law, grandfather, and great-grandfather shone in urban and praetorian prefectures, in palatine and military mastership. And behold, my Gaudentius, hitherto only of tribune's rank, has transcended the yawning idleness of our citizens by the vicarian summit. The trampled nobility of our young men indeed murmurs: but he who passes his detractors is moved in this alone, that he may rejoice.
Therefore they now venerate the man hitherto despised, and, stunned at the gifts of sudden fortune, look up on his seat at one whom they used to look down on in the assembly. He, on account of the barking of thrice-snoring men, lashes the ears with the voice of a hoarse crier: they who, though they be stirred against him by hostile goads, are nevertheless assigned to the friendly benches. Hence it would be fitting that you too, by the privilege of the prefecture, from which you are demanded to share—suffer swiftly the loss of an antiquated honour deferred: lest, if you should come into the council beyond the prerogative of a councillor, you might seem to have discharged only the offices of the vicars. Farewell. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his friend Gaudentius, greeting. Be glorified, most excellent man, in the fasces won by the dowry of your merits:
that you might possess their titles and summits, you counted out no maternal revenues, no ancestral largesses, no wifely gems, no paternal moneys: because for you, on the contrary, at the prince's house, your sincerity inspected, your diligence observed, your fellowship admitted, were to your praise. O thrice and four times blessed you, from whose eminence is given to friends gladness, to the envious punishment, to posterity glory; and moreover, to the vigorous and alert an example, to the sluggish and lazy an incitement; and yet if there are any who will hereafter emulate you with whatever spirit, they may perhaps owe it to themselves, if they should overtake you; to you they will beyond doubt owe this, that they follow.
I seem to myself to behold—with the good men's leave first bespoken—that pride of sloth swelling in the envious, and that fastidiousness of military service familiar to the idle, when, from despair of advancing, philosophizing amid their drinking, they praise the holidays of the unhonoured, from the vice of sloth, not from zeal for perfection. The appetite for which, lest it be of use even to boys, was rejected by the judgment of our elders; so, comparing the little declamations of youths to woven rags, they understood that the eloquence of young men is more laboriously drawn out when brief than cut short when extended. But since these things are enough on this head, I beg you to remember what underlies it: that I wish to repay you the interchange of this pursuit, provided that God, granting favour to my just actions, keeps me both safe and returning. Farewell.
LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Herenius, greeting. I received your letter while stationed at Rome, in which, anxious, you inquire whether the undertakings of my pilgrimage advance according to our common plan. What road I have travelled and how; which rivers I have seen, made illustrious by the songs of poets, or cities famed for the situation of their walls, or mountains renowned in the opinion of their names, or fields notable by the recounting of battles: because you reckon it delightful to have learned by the faithful report of those who inspected them what you have found by reading. Wherefore I rejoice that you desire to know what I am doing; for zeal of this kind proceeds from an inward affection. Well then—and if anything be otherwise, yet under God's help I will begin from favourable things;
with which beginnings even our ancestors were wont to inaugurate the unrolling of the accounts of their own mishaps. When I had gone out from the walls of our own Rhodanusia, the public post was of use to me, inasmuch as I had been summoned by the sacred rescripts, and indeed through the dwellings of my comrades and kinsmen: where indeed no scarcity of post-horses, but a multitude of friends, caused delay to the traveller: who, entwined about me in a close embrace, prayed with contending vows for a happy going and return. So the ridges of the Alps were approached: whose ascent for me was swift and easy, and, between the flanks of the precipice that terrifies on either side, the paths were softened, cut into a track through the snows.
Of the rivers too, any that were not navigable had convenient fords, or at least passable bridges, which antiquity arched with hidden vaults from the foundations up to the embankment, crusted over with a walkable flint. I boarded the courier-boat of the Ticinus (such is the name for the vessel): borne shortly by it into the Eridanus, I both laughed at the Phaethontiades so often sung by us over our cups, and at the fabricated tears of the tree's metal. Ulvous Lambrus, cerulean Addua, swift Athesis, sluggish Mincius—which rose from the Ligurian and Euganean mountains—being carried up a little through their opposing mouths, I inspected even in their own eddies: whose banks and shores were everywhere clothed with oak and maple groves.
Here was a sweet, contented, resounding chorus of birds, whose nest-structure, set now in hollow reeds, now in pricking rushes, now in knotless bulrushes, swayed: all which shrubs, tumultuously along the river-margins, had sprouted, fostered by the sap of the absorbent soil. And presently, being carried onward, I came to Cremona, whose nearness was once sighed for by Mantuan Tityrus. Then at the town of Brixillum, while the Venetian rower gives way to a boatman coming from Aemilia, we entered only to go out, coming a little after to Ravenna by a course more to the right: where you might doubt whether the mid-highway connects or separates the old city and the new harbour. Moreover, a double town: one certain part of the Po flows between it, another washes it:
which, torn asunder from its principal channel by the interposition of public embankments, and drained through the same derived channels, so divides the flowing waters that, encompassing, they afford defence to the walls, and, flowing in, commerce. Hither everything most opportune for trade, and especially what was fit for eating, was conveyed: except that, since here the salt sea dashed against the gates, and there a ditch fanned by the running of skiffs through a sewer-like broth, and the languid gliding of the very stagnant moisture, fouled by the nautical poles, was made turbid with a plugging slime—in the midst of the waters we were thirsty: because nowhere was there either the pure liquor of aqueducts, or a cistern that could be cleared of dregs, or a flowing spring, or an unmuddied well.
Whence, having advanced, we came to the Rubicon, which borrows the origin of its name from the reddish colour of its gravels: and which of old was the boundary to the Cisalpine Gauls and the ancient Italians, when the towns of the peoples of either Adriatic sea were assigned for division. Hence I came to Ariminum and Fanum—the former memorable for Julius's rebellion, the latter stained with Hasdrubal's death. Since there is the Metaurus, whose felicity, won in a single day, is thus prolonged into length, as if even now it were bringing down blood-stained corpses into the Dalmatian sea with its discolouring eddies. Hence the remaining towns of the Flaminian Way—as soon as I entered them, I went out—leaving the Picentes on the left, the Umbri on the right.
Where either the Calabrian Atabulus, or the pestilent region of the Tuscans, with the air's spirit drunk with venomous blasts, and now alternating heats, now colds, infected my steaming body. Meanwhile fever and thirst laid waste the innermost secret of my heart and marrow. To whose greediness we promised—fear beguiling desire—not only the pleasant places of springs, or the hidden depths of wells (though these too), but all those waters, whether neighbouring or in our path, that is: the glassy Fucinus, the icy Clitumnus, the cerulean Anio, the sulphurous Nar, the pure Farfar, the turbid Tiber. Amid these Rome too lay open to view: whose not only shapes, but even naval-battle basins, I seemed about to drink up.
Where, before I even touched the pomerium, having cast myself down at the triumphal thresholds of the apostles, I straightway felt every languor driven out from my ill-strong limbs. After these proofs of heavenly patronage, received in a part of the hired lodging, and even now, while lying down, scribbling these very things, I devote a little effort to rest. Nor do I yet present myself at the tumultuous doors of the prince and his courtiers. For I have arrived amid the nuptials of the patrician Ricimer, to whom the daughter of the perennial Augustus was being joined in hope of public security. Therefore now, amid this gladness not only of persons but even of orders and parties, it has seemed more advantageous to lie low on your Transalpine side:
since at this very time in which these things were being written by me, scarcely through all the theatres, market-halls, praetoria, forums, temples, and gymnasia was the Fescennine wedding-song of the talassio unfolded. And even now, on the contrary, let studies grow silent, business rest, courts hush, embassies be deferred, canvassing be idle, and amid the buffooneries of the players let the whole state of serious transactions go into exile. Now indeed the maiden has been handed over; now the bridegroom is crowned; now the palm-robed consul, now the bridesmaid in her matron's mantle, now the senator is honoured in his toga; now the inglorious man lays aside his cloak: and yet all the pomp of the bridal-chambers has not yet roared itself out, because the new bride has not yet migrated to her husband's house.
When this festival is over, the remaining struggles of my labours shall be disclosed to you—provided that the completed solemnity has at last brought an end to that most engrossing holiday of the whole city. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Eutropius, greeting. I have long desired to write to you, but now I am impelled to do so most of all, that is, now that, with Christ showing favour, my road takes me toward the City. My reason for writing—the sole, or at least the chief—is this: that I may summon you, drawn out from the depths of domestic quiet, to take up the duties of the palatine service. To this is added that, by the gift of God, there belong to you the qualities that befit such an office: an unimpaired vigour of body and of mind;
then, that though equipped with horses, arms, apparel, means, and a household of servants, you—unless I am mistaken—dread only to make the beginning; and though you are brisk at home, when it comes to undertaking a journey a sluggish despair makes you timid. Yet a man of senatorial stock, who is daily thrust among the trabeated images of his forefathers, can rightly say that he has travelled abroad only if once even in his youth he has beheld the dwelling-place of the laws, the school of letters, the senate-house of dignities, the summit of the world, the fatherland of liberty—in which, the one city of the whole world, only barbarians and slaves are foreigners. And now (O the shame of it!) are you to be left behind among rustics who follow the oxen, and swineherds who snore at their hogs?
For if you cleave open the field with the trembling coulter, or, bending low, spread out with the hoe the flowering riches of the meadow, or, a stooping ditcher, turn up the vine heavy with its shoot—then this is for you the highest bliss of your desires. Rather rouse yourself; your spirit, grown flabby from fat leisure and unnerved, will incline to greater things. It is no less proper to a man of your birth to polish his own person than to polish his farm. In fine, what you call the exercise of youth is really the idleness of veterans, in whose worn-out hands rusty swords are too late exchanged for the mattock.
Granted, the new wine will foam for you from your multiplied vineyards; the granaries too, bursting with the heaped harvest, will yield you countless mounds; your fat herdsman will pen up for you the close-packed flock with its swollen udders to fill the milk-pail, amid the reeking caves of the sheepfolds. To what end is it to have enlarged one's patrimony by so filthy a profit—and not merely to have lain hidden amid such things, but, what is baser, to have lain hidden for the sake of such things? Will it not sharply gall you when, at the time of the council, behind the young men who sit and vote, a glorious rustic, an old man standing, a nobleman skulking, you are pressed down by the vote of some poor man who has held honours—when you grieve to have seen precede you those whom it would be shameful to have follow in our footsteps? But why say more? If you allow me to encourage you, I will be the comrade, helper, guide, and partner of your endeavours.
But if, entangled in the alluring nets of pleasures, you prefer, as they say, to attach yourself to the doctrines of Epicurus, who, casting virtue away, fixes the highest good in bodily pleasure alone—then behold, I call our forefathers to witness, I call our posterity to witness, that I am no accomplice in this offence. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his friend Vincentius, greeting. The fate of Arvandus grieves me, and I do not pretend that it does not. For this addition too accrues to the praises of the emperor, that even the condemned may be openly loved. I was the man's friend beyond what the pliancy and inconstancy of his character deserved. This is proved by the ill-will lately kindled against me on his account, whose flame scorched me for being a little too incautious. But that I stood firm in friendship, I owe to myself.
Moreover, he by nature had no diligence in perseverance. I complain freely, not insultingly: for despising the counsels of faithful men, he was in all things the plaything of fortune. In short, I marvel not that he fell at last, but that he stood so long. O how often he himself would boast that he had endured adversity!—while yet, out of a deeper affection, we pitied the rashness that would one day bring him to ruin, judging that man not happy who is more often, rather than always, so judged. But you ask for the order of his administration. Saving faith and the reverence owed even to a friend in affliction, I will set the matter forth briefly. His first prefecture he administered with great popularity, and the one that followed with the greatest depopulation.
Likewise, weighed down by the burden of debt, and in dread of his creditors, he was jealous of the nobles who were to succeed him. He mocked at all men's conversations, pried into their counsels, despised their attentions, and endured suspicion because of the rareness of those who came to him, and disgust because of his own importunity—until, hemmed in by the mass of public hatred, and girt about with a guard before he was ungirt of his office, he was seized, and, marked for judgment, arrived at Rome. There at once he swelled with pride, because he had sailed with a prosperous course past the stormy coast of Tuscany, as though the very elements in some fashion served him, well aware of his own deserts. On the Capitol he was kept under guard by his host Flavius Asellus, count of the sacred largesses, who still reverenced in him the half-smouldering dignity of the prefecture so lately wrested from him.
Meanwhile the envoys of the province of Gaul—Tonantius Ferreolus of prefectorial rank, grandson through the daughter of the consul Afranius Syagrius, and also Thaumastus and Petronius, men endowed with the greatest skill in affairs and in speech, and to be reckoned among the chief ornaments of our fatherland—pursued Arvandus, who had gone before, in order to accuse him in the public name, together with the decrees that had been drawn up. Among the other matters which the provincials had commissioned them to transact, they brought forward intercepted letters, which Arvandus's secretary, when arrested, confessed that his master had dictated. This document appeared to be sent to the king of the Goths, dissuading peace with the Greek emperor, and declaring that the Britons settled beyond the Loire
ought to be attacked; affirming too that the Gauls should be divided with the Burgundians according to the law of nations; and much other mad matter after this fashion, calculated to stir wrath in a fierce king and shame in a gentle one. This letter the jurists were hotly interpreting as a crime of high treason. This affair did not escape me and Auxanius, that most excellent man, who reckoned it to be treacherous, barbarous, and cowardly, to shun Arvandus's friendship, into which we had been drawn in one way or another, now that his fortunes were adverse. We therefore disclose the whole plot to him, who feared no such thing—the plot which those keen and fiery men were with the utmost cunning contriving to conceal until the time of the trial;
namely, that they might entangle their adversary, off his guard and rashly trusting himself alone after rejecting the counsels of his comrades, in a profession of some headlong reply. We therefore told him what we thought safe for ourselves and for our more intimate friends. We advised him to confess nothing as though trivial, if anything, even as most trifling, were demanded of him by his enemies: that very dissimulation would prove most thorny, whereby they might the more easily bring on him a false security of persuasion. On learning this, he flings himself away, and bursting out into sudden abuse: 'Begone, degenerates,' said he, 'unworthy of your prefectorial fathers, with this superfluous trepidation of yours: to me, since you understand nothing, leave this part of the business to be managed. His own conscience suffices Arvandus well enough:
I shall scarcely deign to allow advocates to plead for me in suits of extortion.' We depart sorrowful, confounded no less by grief than by the affront: for who of physicians would rightly be moved, whenever frenzy seizes one given up for lost? Amid all this our defendant paraded across the Capitoline square dressed in white: now feeding on fawning salutations, now gladly hearing the popping bubbles of flatteries as though he took stock of them, now examining silks and gems and all the precious wrappings of the money-changers, and inspecting them as though about to buy, handling them, cheapening them, unrolling them; and, in the midst of his doings, complaining much about the laws, about the times, about the senate, about the prince—because they did not avenge him before they had examined him. A few intervening days;