Next, the animate body is set before the merely formed. Thirdly, the human mind goes before the soul of a beast; for as flesh is inferior to life, so is life inferior to reason: to the attaining of which reason God the artificer made our substance capable, but the bestial substance incapable. Yet so, that in the estate of the human mind a twofold condition prevails. For as souls, though reasoning after a human fashion, yet dull and more sluggish, are trodden underfoot by the talent of the prudent and keen-witted; so, if there be any who flourish by natural wisdom alone, these readily grant themselves to be surpassed by the merits of the learned.
Observing the difference of these degrees, I always behold with the eye of the heart that Philagrius, to whom my mind, in its potency, makes me known by the likeness of character. For although you please all good men, no one has been able to gaze upon you inwardly more than he who strives to imitate you outwardly. But in what manner I may become a follower of your pursuits shall be disclosed in the following part of the page. You love, as I have learned, the quiet; I love even the idle. You shun barbarians, because they are thought bad; I shun them even if they are good. You apply diligence to reading; I too in that matter suffer sloth to harm me but little. You fill out the character of a religious man; I only its image. You do not covet others' goods; I even reckon it gain if I lose not my own. You delight in the fellowship of the learned;
I call any crowd, however great, that is untrained in the art of letters the greatest solitude. You are said to be most cheerful; I too pronounce that all tears perish which anyone has shed, except as often as he supplicates God. You are reported most humane; and no guest ever shuddered at our little table, as at the cave of Polyphemus. The utmost gentleness towards your servants is attributed to you; nor am I tormented, if my own, as often as they sin, are not so often tormented. You think one should fast on alternate days? it does not irk me to follow. To dine? it does not shame me to anticipate. For the rest, if it be granted by Christ's gift that I be seen by you, I would rejoice as one from whom no lesser things than concern you have been withdrawn. But further, what greater things are in you I already know well enough.
On which account it can more easily come to pass that, even if at some time, placed before you, I should behold your face, some fresh joy rather than fresh judgement of you would accrue to me. Farewell in Christ. LETTER XV. Sidonius to his friend Salonius, greeting. As often as I come to Vienne, I have bought it at the greatest price to have the dwelling-place of the city hold you and our common brother, a fellow-settler—you who are joined to me not only by love but also by profession. But he too eludes my reproach under the pretext of a frequented suburban estate, whereby it comes about that he is to us neither present himself nor liable; and you have wherewith to excuse yourself meanwhile, because a possession scarcely recovered long holds you. Whatever it is, come now already;
about to obtain your departure hereafter on this condition: that you either return in turn, or return later. For however diligently, placed in the country, you fill the office of strenuous husbandmen, you will then truly make your own land fruitful, if you cultivate the church as much as possible—and cultivate it the more. Farewell. LETTER XVI. Sidonius to Chariobaudus the abbot, greeting. You do, O unique patron in Christ, a thing befitting alike your love and your custom, in that you soothe the cares of a pilgrim friend with consoling letters: and would that you might always so remember me, that the very anxieties chained together by ever-sinking anguish, which as an exhorter you thin out, you might as an intercessor cut through. For the rest, your freedmen, the matters you had enjoined being dispatched, I think are returning;
who, it is agreed, so strenuously accomplished the matter that they had no need of being helped; by whom I have sent across a nightly cowl, wherewith to cover worthily, amid praying and lying down, limbs worn out by fastings; although a shaggy garment is not opportunely sent when winter is finished and the seasons of summer are already drawing near. Farewell. LETTER XVII. Sidonius to his brother Volusianus, greeting. You bid me, my lord brother, by the law of a friendship which it is a sin to wound, to lay my long-idle fingers upon the anvils of the old workshop, and, for holy Abraham now departed this life, to inscribe a sepulchral dirge in mournful verses. Quickly shall I comply with your injunctions, drawn both by your authority, and chiefly forestalled by the devotion of that most eminent man, Victorius the count;
whom by secular right I honour as a patron, as a client; by ecclesiastical right I love as a son, as a father. He sufficiently taught what and what manner of care burned within him toward the servants of Christ, when—bending about the couch of the dying bishop, not less in dignity than in his very limbs, and, over the countenance pale with approaching death, made one in colour with him by grief—he showed by his tears, as tokens, what he wished for the man. And since he himself snatched beforehand for himself the greatest parts of burying the corpse, imparting the whole apparatus of the overflowing outlay that befitted the priest to be buried; we at least contribute to the obsequies the words that remain, about to engrave with the cutting of the scraping pen nothing else than a testimony of mutual affection.
For the rest, the man's character, deeds, and virtues shall be weighed most unworthily by my words. O Abraham, worthy to be joined to holy patrons, whom I should not tremble to call your colleagues; for they go before, that yet soon you may follow after: the portion of martyrdom gives a share of the kingdom. Born by the Euphrates, having suffered dungeons for Christ, and bonds loosened by a five-year famine; escaped from the fierce king of the Susian shore, you hasten even to the western soil of the setting sun. But the signs of virtues follow the confessor: to evil spirits you bring, or have brought, flight. Wherever you come, the throng of ghosts cries out that it yields: you, an exile, bid the demons go into exile. You are sought by all, and no ambition holds you: the honour offered to you is more burdensome.
You flee the din of Romulus's city and of Byzantium, and the walls broken by arrow-bearing Titus. The wall of Alexander does not hold you, nor of Antioch; you spurn the Punic roofs of Elissa's house. The populous countryside of marsh-dwelling watery Ravenna, and the places that take their name from the wool-bearing swine—this corner pleases you, and a poor man's retreat, and a cottage whose roof-peaks would be pressed low with thatch. Here you yourself build a temple venerable to God, yourself having first been made a temple of God in body. Here is the finish of your course and of your life and your journey; a double crown remains for your toil. Now the thousands of holy paradise stand around you; now Abraham holds you, his fellow-pilgrim. Now you enter the fatherland—but that from which Adam fell; now you can go to the fount of your own river.
Behold, as you had enjoined, we have paid the rites that remain to the one now buried; but if in turn it is fitting that brethren, friends, and comrades-in-arms should obey charity in its behests, I beg you also, to the same end: with the institutions in which you are eminent, approach to console his disciples, and swiftly shape the wavering rule of the destitute brethren according to the statutes of the fathers of Lérins or of Grigny: of which discipline, if any be rebels, chastise them yourself; if any be followers, praise them yourself. Over them indeed holy Auxanius seems set as prior—a man who, as you know, is somewhat more than justly weak both in body and modest in disposition, and therefore readier to obey than to command—who requires that you be asked that he himself may enter under your very mastership as master of the monastery:
and if any of the younger ones despise him as unskilled or faint-hearted, let that man, through you alone, feel that neither is contemned with impunity. Why say much? Do you wish to learn in few words what I would have? I ask that brother Auxanius be abbot over the congregation, but you indeed over the abbot. Farewell. LETTER XVIII. Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greeting. From you is the beginning, in you it shall end: for I have sent the work you asked, the models being hastily reviewed again; which came into my hands but few, because, while I meditated nothing about the composition of this little book, hitherto things unguarded cannot be found. Truly these few things, which indeed are also slight, I dispatched quickly; although my mind, once roused, would not yet cease to be eager to write;
keeping this kind of measure diligently, that the text of the letters should not be prolonged, if their number were to be abridged. Likewise I judged that the book, which you, a most fastidious reader, might desire, would be both handy enough and not a little excusable, if—since the fabric of the meanings and the lightness of the matter might offend you—you were the less burdened with a fixed bundle of parchments. I commend, then, to your judgement the various movements of my breast; by no means unaware that thus the mind lies open in a book, just as the face in a mirror. For I have dictated some things by way of exhortation, most by way of praise, some by way of persuasion, a few by way of mourning, and not a few by way of jest.
And if anywhere you have read me somewhat too heated against certain persons, know, I would have you know, that with Christ's right hand helping, I shall never endure servitude of spirit, holding it most fully ascertained that concerning such characters the censure of men is twofold. For as the timid call me rash, so the steadfast call me free. Among which things I myself decree that his person lies low enough whose opinion must needs be hidden. I return to my purpose. Meanwhile, if you take any breath from the continual reading of sacred Scripture, twice may it be permitted you to turn aside to these dirges. Nor will the subject-matter, as if immense, cause weariness: because, since the several causes are almost each finished in a several letter, quickly upon learning that on which you have fixed your eye, you will cease to read before you cease to desire reading. Farewell. LETTER I.
Sidonius to his friend Petronius, greeting. You indeed do finely: this is your custom; and persevere, O man most worthy of praise of all good men who anywhere dwell, in that you lend charm to the glory of friends, wherever there is room. Hence it is that you ask even the Arvernian archives to be sifted; whereas I supposed it would suffice you, if I brought forth something by an earlier publication. And so we shall obey your injunctions—yet about to prolong the action of the pen only so far that the series of letters, begun of course from the very beginning of the volume, may extend to the sum, still of small number, at the outermost end; the work, that is, being finished off, crowned as it were with a kind of border of its own margin.
But more must be guarded against, lest, on account of the additions to the volume now made public, we should perchance fall upon certain revilers, whose tongues—naturally sharpened by the whetstone of spite—not even the sentences of Demosthenes and Cicero, artificers and craftsmen of eloquence, were able to escape: of whom the earlier endured Demades, the later Antony, as detractors: who, though they were of notorious malice and obscure diction, yet came down to the knowledge of posterity through their hatred of virtues. But since you exhort, let us loosen our sails to the whirlwinds resumed; and we who have, as it were, crossed the seas, let us sail through this as though a pool. For I hold it well enough resolved that, as diligence is to be applied in the writing, so constancy is to be maintained in the publishing.
But in truth there is no middle course. For either the least is to be feared from these things, or one must be altogether silent in all matters. Farewell. LETTER II. Sidonius to his friend Joannes, greeting. I believed, most skilled of men, that I should be committing a sin against studies, if I put off pursuing with praises that which you put off letting perish, namely letters; of which, now in a manner already buried, you are celebrated as the reviver, the patron, the champion; and through the Gauls, under this tempest of wars, Latin lips have held you as their one master, though they have borne shipwreck of arms. Our contemporaries, then, and our posterity owe it—universally, with fervent vows—now to consecrate you, if it be allowed, as another Demosthenes, another Tully, in statues, now in portraits:
who, formed and instructed by your teaching, shall now retain in their bosom, in the midst of an unconquered—yet foreign—nation, the tokens of such ancient men. For now that the grades of dignities are removed, by which the highest man was wont to be distinguished from every lowest one, henceforth the sole mark of nobility shall be to know letters. But us, and the rest, the benefits of your teaching bind above all: for us, accustomed to write something, and labouring at what those to come may be able to read, at least from your school or mastership a fitting throng of readers shall arise. Farewell. LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Leo, greeting.
Since you had commanded it, I have sent the Life of Apollonius the Pythagorean, not as the elder Nicomachus copied it out from Philostratus, but as Tascius Victorianus transcribed it from a rough draft of Nicomachus. While I hasten to obey, this translation, hurried and headlong and rough, has cast it out swiftly into a makeshift copy. Do not, I beg, count it a fault against me as though the thing had been labored over too long. For while delay held me shut up within the walls of Livia (whose end, next after the help of Christ, I owe to you), my ailing spirit, worn out with cares, had not the strength to run through even in a leaping fashion what was to be handed on, distracted now by nightly sighs, now by daily duties.
Besides this, when the dawning hour recalled me, wearied from my night-watches, back to my lodging, scarcely was a tiny rest granted to my drooping eyes. For at once there was the din stirred up by two Gothic hags, neighbors to the open court of my bedchamber, than whom nothing will ever be more quarrelsome, more given to drink, or more inclined to vomiting. Indeed, as soon as some leisure returned to me on my return, mindful more of my longing for you than of my duty, I have offered you this unpolished and half-baked book, and, as they say, still new like fresh wine. Wherefore set aside for a while the Pythian laurels and Hippocrene, and those measures of song most intimately familiar to you alone, which nevertheless, for learned persons such as you yourself are, are sweated out not so much from the fountain as from the brow.
Suspend also that most renowned river of your pleading, which is not only your family's but your household's very own, and which has been poured into your breast through successive generations from your ancestor Fronto. Set aside for a little while those most celebrated declamations which you compose in place of the royal mouth: by which the illustrious king himself now strikes terror into the hearts of nations beyond the sea; now, as victor, from a superior position binds a treaty with the barbarians trembling at the Vahalis; now, along the frontier of his enlarged domain, bridles both the peoples under arms and the arms under laws. Withdraw yourself somehow from your unceasing cares, and steal your leisure away from the burdens and stirrings of the court.
Then you will review the history you demanded fitly and suitably, if with our man of Tyana you too, wholly devoting yourself to reading, travel abroad in a sense — now to the Caucasus and its games, now to the gymnosophists of the Ethiopians and the Brahmans of the Indians. Read the man (with peace first bespoken for the catholic faith), in very many respects like yourself: that is, courted by the rich, yet not courting riches; eager for knowledge, restrained toward money; abstemious amid feasts, clad in linen amid the purple-robed, a censor amid the alabaster jars: rugged, bristling, shaggy, in the midst of anointed peoples, and among the satraps of tiara-crowned kings — those men perfumed with myrrh, smoothed with pumice, scented with malobathrum — himself precious in his venerable squalor:
And since he contributed nothing to his own eating or dress from any animal, he was on this account, in the kingdoms through which he wandered, an object not so much of suspicion as of admiration; and though the fortune of kings complied with him in all things, he asked only for those benefits which one is more wont to bestow when offered than to accept. Why say more? If we measure and reckon the truth, whether one who was a contemporary of ancient times has come forward as a writer either of a philosopher's forensic life or of his private life, certainly one equal to my age has come to you as reader. Farewell. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his own Consentius, greeting. Will that field of yours, the Octavian estate, ever, by God's will, my elder lord, look upon us together — that field which is not so much yours as your friends'? It, being nearest to the city, the river, the sea, feeds guests with feasts, feeds you with guests.
Besides this, it is comely in its situation to the eyes of beholders: in the first place, that the dwelling rises with walls skillfully placed for architectural harmony; then, gleaming far and wide with its chapel, its porticoes, and its conspicuous baths: further, most delightful with its fields, its waters, its vineyards and olive-groves, its vestibule, its plain, its hill. Now, over and above its storehouse and abundant furnishings, it is richly stocked with the treasures of a library: where, while you yourself apply yourself no less to the pen than to the plowshare, it is hard to discern whether the master's estate is the more cultivated, or his mind.
Here, then (as far as I recall), you have labored out swift iambics, keen elegiacs, and rounded hendecasyllables, and the rest of your songs, redolent of the flowers of the Muses and of thyme — to be sung now by the people of Narbonne, now by those of Béziers — with more speed than one could doubt, and more beauty; destined to enlarge your favor among your contemporaries, your fame among posterity. Certainly, as often as your verses were brought to me still warm, as it were, from the anvil of your meditation, so it seemed to me — one who, even if I write not well, yet judge well. But it must be confessed that an earlier age justly had leisure for such studies, or, what is truer, was occupied by them:
now it is time for serious things to be read, serious things to be written, and to think rather of eternal life than of memory, and to remember exceedingly well that after our death it is not our little works but our deeds that must be weighed. These things indeed I do not say for the present as though you do not accomplish both worthy of praise: or as if, should the gladness still endure in your speech, the strictness be not preserved in your action: but that you, who by Christ's favor are secretly holy, may now openly, venerable in your piety, submit alike your neck and your heart to the wholesome yoke: let your tongue keep watch over heavenly praises, your soul over holy sentiments, your right hand over offerings — but above all your right hand over offerings; because whatever you scatter to the churches, you gather for yourself:
and toward the exercise of this virtue that consideration above all can inflame you, that we who are placed amid riches of whatever kind (which are falsely called goods by fools) — if we do anything, it is our own; if we possess anything, it is another's. Farewell. LETTER V. Sidonius to his own Fortunalis, greeting. You too shall go into our pages, Fortunalis, pillar of friendship, illustrious glory of the Iberian regions. For your familiarity with letters is not so slight that it should not be fitting that, through these very pages, something of you should survive you after you are gone. It shall live indeed, it shall live into the future — the glory of your name.
For if any grace, reverence, or trustworthiness of any sort is present in our little writings, I would have future ages know that nothing is firmer than your good faith, nothing fairer than your form, nothing juster than your judgment, nothing more enduring than your patience, nothing more delightful than your conversation. This too shall it recognize above the rest: that the praises for your merits have come from the contrariety of your fortunes. For it is nearly the case that a man is more eminently esteemed by the fact that adversities have proved you steadfast, than if prosperity should conceal you as merely happy. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his own Namatius, greeting. Gaius Caesar the dictator, than whom, they say, no one has administered military affairs with more generalship, laid claim in turn for himself to the pursuits of writing and of reading.
And although in the person of one and the same princely man of his time, the care for military and for oratorical science contended almost with equal glory, yet he never deemed himself sufficiently established in the citadel of either art, until by the testimony of your fellow-townsman of Arpinum he should be preferred to the rest of mortals. And to me too, if it is permitted to compare small things with great, something similar has happened after my own measure, however unlike. Which above all men it befitted you to learn as soon as possible, because both my glory and my modesty are of the greatest concern to you.
Flavius Nicetius — a man most distinguished in birth, of respectable rank by privilege, illustrious by merit, and among the men of our homeland well-nigh the greatest in prudence and skill alike — with immense praise, as far as I have learned, extols the volumes of the present little work; moreover proclaiming that I myself have surpassed very many of the young and not a few of the old, in various kinds of writing and of soldiering, since I am still green in age. Indeed, so far as it can be done apart from boasting, I rejoice at the authority of so excellent a man, if he is sure; at his love, if he is deceived: although whoever is challenged now to the deeds of his forebears will not be the most sluggish, and whoever to words will not be the most tongue-tied.
And the Ruler of the ages implanted the virtues of these arts by birth rather in the earlier ages of the world; which, through the age of a world now growing old — its seeds as it were wearied and drained of their pith — now display in this time in any persons whatsoever, and that in few, but little that is wonderful and memorable. Of this man, however — even though he is the head of all studies and of letters, I who have always cultivated the person — I fear the judgment, put forth with too weighty an affection, beyond what the truth holds. Nor for this reason would I deny that I have often stood by at his brilliant pleadings. Of which (even if I seem to be returning the like) it is right that I should be mindful, at least in part, to each one.
I heard him as a young man, and but lately, still just out of boyhood, when my father, as praetorian prefect, presided over the tribunals of Gaul: under whose magistracy, that is, the consul Asterius, robed in the triumphal garb, had opened the votive doors of his year. I used to keep close to the curule chair, and, if not hidden in the rank, certainly not seated by reason of my age: and mingled with the troop of cloaked assessors, I was nearest to those nearest the consul. And so, as soon as the not-so-brief largess had been briefly dispensed, and the fasti given out, it was acclaimed by the whole assembly of Gaul that the chief among the advocates should, with fitting praise of their meritorious insignia, honor the hours before dawn forestalled by the festivity — hours that awaited the late day in silence. The distinguished men at once looked round for Nicetius:
who, being sought not gradually and one by one, but tumultuously and all together, with a kind of prologue of modesty, his face bashfully lowered, blushed. And on this account it was not eloquence sooner than modesty that won him the greatest 'Bravo!' He spoke methodically, gravely, ardently, with great keenness, greater fluency, the greatest discipline; and that toga bordered with palm-broidery, drunk with Sarranian dyes, amid its crackling embroidered fringes, he graced still more with speech more painted than the gold-work, more golden than the paint. About that very time, to speak in decemviral fashion, the law concerning the prescription of thirty years had been proclaimed: by whose peremptory rubrics every lawsuit, abolished, was being brought to an end when drawn out into a sixth five-year period.
This law, before unknown within the Gauls, this orator of whom we speak was the first to introduce into legal proceedings, to publish before the tribunals, to bring forth before the parties, to attach to the titles — in a crowded assembly, with rare sitting, few sentences, but many praises. Besides these things, on other occasions I observed his learning, unnoticed (as a man is learned more quickly by imitation), at that time when the prefecture which governs the provinces with its fasces was being governed by the counsel of Nicetius. Why say much? I heard nothing which I would not wish were my own, nothing which I did not admire. On account of all these good qualities set in the man, I rejoice at the marks of the censor celebrated with one voice by all. For his sentence weighs greatly toward either opinion concerning me:
which, if we find it true, is as much a boon to my security as it would be, if adverse, a source of my dread. For the rest, it stands fixed and settled with me: when I have learned the matter in full, either to loosen my reins by silence, or to tighten the reins upon my chatter. For if I am confirmed by the assent of the aforesaid man, I shall be more talkative than Athens; if not, I shall be more silent than Amyclae itself. But enough has been said about my comrade and about myself. What of your affairs now, amid these things? — matters which it is no less to my heart to know in turn. Do you hunt? Do you build? Do you play the countryman? Or some one of these singly, or each in turn, or all alike? But whether you follow Vitruvius, or Columella, or one of them or both, you do most becomingly:
for you can do both in the way that whoever is best does — that is, as some cultivator among the foremost and an architect. But as to the huntsman's office, I most earnestly enjoin that you flatter yourself as little as possible about it. For in vain do you call boars to your hunting-spears, boars which you are wont rather to move than to rouse with your most merciful hounds — of which you have such abundance, and you alone. Be it so; let it be worthy of indulgence that your dogs shrink from approaching beasts terrible and corpulent: but this I know not how you excuse, that the roe-deer, a timid flock, and likewise the fallow-deer, prone to flight, they pursue with drooping spirits, chests thrown out, rare steps, and frequent barkings.
Wherefore, for the rest, more fruitfully with nets and snares you surround the rugged crags, and as a stationary trapper you beset the woodlands suited for shady coverts; and if there is any shame in you, you refrain from beating the open fields with courses run in the open, and from lying in ambush for little hares in the Olarion woods — hares which it is not worth so much, when you rarely pursue them, that they should be overcome, to be harassed by leashes led openly; unless perchance, while your Apollinaris — yours and his father's — intervenes, it will be more rightly done that they be exercised. Jesting aside, let me know at last what concerns you, what concerns your household. But lo, while I now wished to close this letter, which I have long prattled on, a sudden messenger from Saintes:
with whom, while for your sake we drew out some hours in conversation, he steadfastly asserted that you had lately sounded the war-trumpet in the fleet, and, amid your duties now as sailor, now as soldier, that you were roving along the curving shores of the Ocean against the curved pirate-craft of the Saxons, of whose rowers you might think you saw as many arch-pirates as there were oarsmen: so completely do they all at once command, obey, teach, and practice brigandage. Whence now, moreover, there has arisen the greatest cause for warning you to be as much on your guard as possible. The enemy is more truculent than every other enemy. Unforeseen, he attacks; foreseen, he slips away. He despises those who oppose him, he lays low the unwary. If he pursues, he intercepts; if he flees, he escapes. Furthermore, shipwrecks train them, they do not terrify them.
There is for them with the perils of the deep not only acquaintance but familiarity. For since a tempest, if any there be, on the one hand makes those about to be attacked careless of danger, and on the other forbids those about to attack from being descried, in the midst of the waves and jagged rocks they gladly risk peril in hope of a surprise assault. Moreover, before they loose their sails and weigh their biting anchors from hostile shoal for the return from the continent to their homeland, it is their custom, for those about to sail back, to slay every tenth captive by equal and cross-shaped tortures — the sadder on this account, that it is by a superstitious rite; and over the gathered throng of those doomed to perish, to distribute the iniquity of death by the equity of the lot. With such vows they placate, with such victims they discharge their debt;