For long ago, having been bidden to chatter, I did not keep silence, with these preceding letters: which even, when they had come to Riez to be examined, since you were then at Apt, you most aptly were absent from. And it was greatly to my vow and most desired, that the enjoined letter should neither be denied as written to friendship, nor be subjected, once read, to censure. Let us pass these things over. You bid a copious page be sent again. My vows attend me hastening to obey; the occasions are lacking. For a salutation, unless some active matter bring along its material, is brief: and he who spins it out with unnecessary words, wanders off, turned aside from the rule of the Sallustian path—Sallust, who blames Catiline for having had enough of eloquence, too little of wisdom.
Whence, having said 'Hail,' at once we say 'Farewell'—pray for us. But well may it go, well it is, that as I am on the very point of folding up my little sheet, a weighty matter rushes upon me, which I must reproach; and if either my joy or my anger should for too long restrain itself concerning it, I shall judge myself worthy of the very affront I have received. You have come, master, into my hands, and I not only exult but insult: you have come—and indeed such a one as our longings have for a long while now awaited. I doubt, to be sure, whether even unwilling, but certainly like one unwilling;
seeing that by your contrivance—or (if however you too much deny this) by your acquiescence—I was left ungreeted by your books; and by those books, what is far more injurious, when they passed by the territory of Auvergne, they grazed not only my walls but my very flanks. Or were you afraid that we should envy your sayings? But by God's indulgence we are addicted to no fault of this kind: whereas, if in this matter, as in others, my part were subjected to it, so too would despair of attaining make me lose the rivalry of contending. Or were you dreading my haughtiness, as of a difficult and rigid applauder? And is there for anyone so great a stiff neck of expertise, or such a dropsy, that he would not pursue your charming works with the most fervent praises?
Or did you take care to have me disdained and neglected on this ground, that you scorned me as younger? which I little believe. Or as unlearned? which I endure more readily; yet in such a way that, though I know not how to speak, I do not also know not how to listen: for even those who have attended the games of the Circus do not withhold their verdict on the chariots. Or were we at variance through some chance, so that we might be thought likely to disparage those little books which you had published? And yet, with God as our patron, our friendships are so slight that not even an enemy can feign them. To what end these things? you say. Behold, now I unfold it, either what I rejoice to have tracked down, or what I am indignant that you concealed from me. I have read your volumes, which Riochatus, prelate and monk, and twice a pilgrim of this world, is carrying back to your Britons on your behalf;
—Faustus being now for the present rather one who does not grow old, and who, not about to fail the living even after his burial, shall by the very things he has written become surviving to himself. This venerable man himself, therefore, while he was tarrying at our town, until the storm of the roused nations should cease to roar (of which image the whirlwind had then bristled here and there), so uncovered the rest of your gifts, that most urbanely he covered up the more excellent things he was carrying, dissembling that he was illuminating my thorns with your flowers.
But after two months or more than that, when he had thus set out from us in haste, since certain of the travellers had betrayed that he was secretly carrying treasures, the mystic riches in closed wrappings, I pursued him as he departed with swift horses that could easily outstrip the stretches of the previous day's journey, and, seizing the robber occupied by a kiss upon his throat, with human jest but with the gesture of a wild beast; even as a tigress bereft of her cubs, about to shake off any of her whelps from the neck of a ravisher, might dart out above him with flying foot in Parthian style. What need of many words? I embrace the knees of my captured guest, I halt the beasts, I bind the reins, I loosen the packs, I find the volume I sought, I bring it forth, I read it through, I make excerpts, cutting off the greatest heads from the great.
The bounding shorthand of the scribes also afforded a certain abridgment to me as I dictated in haste, they comprehending by signs what they did not grasp by letters. With what tears, indeed, we grew wet, drenched by mutual weeping in turn, then when we were being separated from an embrace often repeated, it is long to have told and matters not: for it suffices for triumphal joy that, laden with the spoils of charity and master of a spiritual booty, I carried myself home. You ask now what I judge of my little clouds? I should not wish yet to divulge it, that you might hang the longer in expectation: for I should avenge myself the more, if I kept silent about what I felt. But now not even you boast in vain;
inasmuch as you understand that there is in you a virtue of pleading in such wise that, whether to your reluctant reader or to your willing one, the force of the delight excludes the necessity of praise. Accordingly, receive what we, though injured, judge concerning your writings. We have read a most laborious work, manifold, keen, sublime, arranged in titles, heaped up with examples, bipartite under the scheme of a dialogue, quadripartite under the theme of the causes. Now you had written very many things ardently, more things pompously; these simply, those neither subtly nor cunningly; grave matters maturely, deep things anxiously, doubtful things constantly, argumentative things disputatiously, some severely, some blandly, all morally, gladly, powerfully, most eloquently.
And so, having followed you through so many kinds of narrating over the whole field of your most ample discourse, I have easily discerned nothing in the eloquence of others, nothing in their talents, equally polished. That I feel these things to be true you sufficiently approve, since not even offended do I judge otherwise. In fine, the oration of an absent man, as far as we suppose, cannot grow greater, unless perchance the voice, hand, motion, modesty, and art of the author speaking in person add something to it. Endowed, therefore, with these gifts of mind and of letters, you have wedded to yourself, my lord bishop, a beautiful woman, but one marrying with Deuteronomy's assent:
whom you, while yet a young man, having caught sight of amid hostile bands, and there loved on the battle-line of the opposing side, in no way repulsed by the resisting warriors, you carried off with the conquering arm of desire. Philosophy, to wit: who, violently exempted from the number of the sacrilegious arts, the hair of her superfluous religion shaved off, and the eyebrow of secular knowledge, and the wrinkles of her most ancient garments cut away—that is, the twistings of gloomy dialectic that veiled false and unlawful things of morals—now cleansed, joined her limbs to yours in a mystic embrace. She for years now has been the attendant of your foremost days; she the inseparable companion at your side, whether you were exercising yourself in the urban wrestling-schools, or wasting away in hidden solitudes:
she the consort of the lecture-hall, she of the monastery, with you she renounces the worldly, with you she proclaims the supernal disciplines. Whoever shall have provoked you, joined to her in this marriage, shall feel that the Academy of Plato does military service for the Church of Christ, and that you philosophize more nobly. First, that you assert the ineffable Wisdom of God the Father together with the eternity of the Holy Spirit. Then moreover, that you neither feed a flowing head of hair, nor glory in the cloak or the club, as in sophistic insignia, nor affect pride from the distinction of garments, pomp from their brightness, boastfulness from their squalor:
nor that you sufficiently emulate this, that throughout the gymnasia are painted the Areopagitica or the Prytaneum—Zeusippus with bent neck, Aratus with stooped, Zeno with contracted brow, Epicurus with distended skin, Diogenes with bushy beard, Socrates with falling hair, Aristotle with arm outstretched, Xenocrates with leg drawn up, Heraclitus with eyes closed by weeping, Democritus with lips opened by laughter, Chrysippus with fingers clenched for the signs of numbers, Euclid with fingers spread for the spaces of measurements, Cleanthes with fingers gnawed on both accounts. Nay rather, let each one who has clashed with you be shown to have been shaken—Stoics, Cynics, Peripatetics, heresiarchs—by their own weapons, by their own contrivances too.
For their followers, if they shall have fought against Christian dogma and sense, straightway, bound by you as master, entangled in their own home-bred snares, headlong shall be enmeshed in their own nets, while the hooked syllogisms of your proposition cry out against the slippery tongue of the shufflers, so long as by categorical coils you rather knot up the slippery questions—after the manner of keen physicians, who, when reason compels, prepare a remedy against poisons even out of the serpent. But this in these times, only under the contemplation of your conscience, or the virtue of your doctrine. For who could follow your footsteps with equal step; to whom alone it is granted to speak better than you have learned, to live better than you speak?
Wherefore all good men will deservedly celebrate you as most blessed, and that above all men in your own time: whose life and deeds have grown illustrious doubly by his sayings, so that, since the right hand has now numbered your years, extolled by your own age, to be longed for by another, you may depart praiseworthy by both kinds of action, about to leave yourself to strangers, your works to those nearby. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER X. Sidonius to his lord bishop Aprunculus, greeting. He has delivered to you my letters, who ought fittingly to have offered yours to me: for our brother Coelestius, lately returned to you from Béziers, drew out of me a certain bond of cession concerning the status of one who had wronged us. This indeed I wrote, broken no less by respect for you than by your goodwill.
For it was fitting that we of our own accord should meet your modesty, as it were with certain feet of compliance. Wherefore, since I too am willing, possess the thing granted—but liberally; for, as I suspect, not even you yourself sought anything more of this kind of solace. Whom I now, already appeased, introduce to you by these letters, not commendatory less than restitutory: yet on this condition, that he attend upon you, obey you, follow you; and so that, if he shall have remained with you, he be judged the servant of neither of us; if perchance he shall have departed, he be sought as a fugitive by both. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his lord bishop Lupus, greeting. On account of the little book which you thought sent not so much to you as through you, I have received your letter as written not so much to me as against me.
To the reproaches I reply for the equity of the cause, not for the equality of eloquence: although who now am I, or how great, that I should presume to plead, while you impute an innocent thing to me as a charge? Wherefore for this fault, however small it be, I straightway among the very beginnings entreat to be forgiven, confessing an error only of diffidence, not also of pride. For although the rigour of your censure, in letters as in morals, is on both sides to be trembled at by me, I yet confess that in the unlocking of the volume and the work itself, that charity of yours was more of a burden to me than you allege. Nor do I conjecture these things beside what is just: since this force is naturally present in the minds of mortals, that if anything be done amiss, friends indulge it the less.
I had written a book, as you pronounce, full and crammed with a varied heaping-up of causes, times, and persons: I seemed about to do a most shameless thing, if all things had so pleased me alone, that I should trust nothing would displease you. Herein likewise, whatever the outcome of your judgment might be, I saw that the reckoning of piety would by no means stand solidly for my part, if the volume were not at least first brought to you, and if it did not seem to be offered: under this tempering, namely, that if I had perchance pleased, you should not be thought to have been passed over by arrogance; if otherwise, you should not be thought to have been sought out by presumption. Nor indeed did I believe I should deprecate by a much broader plea the occasions of blushing that I had avoided.
At the same time I knew that you knew this, that in publishing works modesty rather than boldness befits authors; and that gloomy censors are won to give their marks of approval more slowly by the recitalist's forwardness than by his trepidation. Otherwise, if there be that man who, with the prerogative of confidence, publishes abroad the fruit of a theme unheard before: he begins to owe the public expectation, though he has paid much, still more to render back. Besides, whatever you shall have judged over the tenor of this rescript, I preferred to confess the deed simply, than craftily to deny it. Another would have said: 'I have preferred no one to you, I have given no private letters to anyone':
he whom you suspected to have been favoured, content with the form of a single letter, departed, and that indeed bearing nothing concerning the present business. You, who complain that you were passed over, fatigued by three most loquacious pages, are rather driven to nausea, while you frequently linger upon empty words of an insipid reading. Add that even in this, which perhaps you did not note, the reckoning of your reverence and merits has been preserved: that just as you are the foremost of the other bishops in their chairs, so your title stands first in the book: that other man's name sounds but once only, and the page ascribed to him; but yours, besides those assigned to you, other men's pages are frequently illumined by. Join to these this: that if anything there pleases you even incidentally, so that you read it through by my counsel:
that other man will at some time do so by your benefaction; he who, in vain oppressed by envy of my little gift, has not yet, as I suspect, come even to the ability of reading, whereas you yourself long since have arrived at the abundance of transcribing. I say this, as though he were not going to think the parchments autograph copies; if however he shall have received even a specimen, which you may first run over: for neither in those things which you shall have handled will there be blamed either a rarity of punctuation-marks or a frequency of barbarisms. Assuredly, in the end, the ownership too seems handed over even to you, to whom the use has been transferred without the prescription of a fixed time, and who can use the aforesaid little book so long that not so much your book-niche as your memory may enclose it. These things, and more than these, another might say.
But I pass over all things, and I prefer to pray for pardon rather than to deprecate a charge, if this is believed to be one. The negligence of the present letter, too, I now do not excuse: first, because, even if I should desire it, I can write but little more elegantly: then, because, the bookish work being finished, my mind, at length about to take holiday, now disdains to polish what it dissembles to make public. And yet, since I sufficiently, and indeed deservedly (for what is like it?), yield to you in all things—I who in another kind of virtues, now for ten lustra, have so often been compared and preferred not only to bishops of like age, but even to the ancients;
I wish you to know that, however much you shake the stars with your complaints, and implore the ashes and embers of our forefathers in witness of an injured charity, I shall not draw back my foot from the contest, if we must vie over mutual love: because, as in other things, so it is most foul beyond measure to be surpassed in affection. This—will you, nill you—is my sure profession, weighed against those revilings of yours (which surpass all the honeys of blandishments) not beyond what is fair. Behold, you have letters nearly as chattering as you required: although they all (if however any exist anywhere) are most loquacious.
For into the boldness of discoursing—one whom you yourself do not urge on—you who (for of myself I say nothing) so bring forth the talents of all men of letters, though their eyes may fail, as the solar ray is wont to draw out the water hidden in the earth's bowels through absorbent atoms? By the sting of which light not only the fine sand or the sedentary soil is penetrated; but if a vein of enclosed springs be hidden, pressed down by the rock of a mountain, the more violent nature of the celestial secrets opens the hidden thing of the liquid element. Thus if, most holy man, you have perceived any of the studious to be either quiet, or bashful, or lurking in the obscure recess of a hidden repute; the charity of your eloquence, while by artful conversing it urges these forth, also makes them public.
But to what end these things, why the delay? Let us return to the matter, over whose overflowing babble, since I obey, I pray that, being appeased, you may bestow upon me, who confess my errors, the grant of a clement pardon: although that holy joy of yours, and that communion, may be more copiously glad, if the defence of my fault rather than my satisfaction be written to you. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER XII. Sidonius to his own Oresius, greeting. A page set out from you has come into our hands, which draws much likeness from Spanish salt hewn in the Tarraconensian ridges. For to one perusing it, it is clear and salty, nor yet on this very account any the less honeyed: a speech sweet and keen in its propositions; for it so delights by its eloquence, that it disturbs by its command:
For indeed, taking too little account of what manner of business I am engaged in, he now asks me to compose fresh poems. In the first place, from the very outset of my religious profession I chiefly renounced this exercise, since it might well lend itself to frivolity if the levity of verses were to occupy me, whom the gravity of my duties had begun to claim. And besides, it is agreed that every skill, if it lie idle through a long interval, is resumed only with difficulty. For who does not know that with all craftsmen and all crafts the greatest distinction comes by practice? And that, when accustomed pursuits are not kept up, arms grow sluggish in bodies, and talents in the arts? Whence comes that saying too: when taken up late or seldom, the bow rebels more against the hand, the ox against the yoke, the horse against the rein.
Moreover, modesty, the companion of my sloth, inclines my judgment to this: that, now that I have run three olympiads in silence, I should be as much ashamed to compose a new poem as loath to do so. Yet it is likewise a sin that things hard to accomplish should be refused to you, whose desire it is the less fitting to disappoint the more steadfastly it never fears a rebuff. We shall therefore hold to something in the middle: and just as I shall now enrich you with no recent epigrams, so, if any letters lie about stuffed with verse—composed, that is, before the necessity of my present office—I shall send them to you; asking only that you be not so far a transgressor against justice as to suppose that I shall never abstain from writing of this kind.
For I should not be the less magnified by your favour if perhaps you should now deign to reckon me modest rather than witty. Farewell. LETTER XIII. Sidonius to his friend Tonantius, greeting. There is indeed, I confess, an opinion of yours concerning my verses, so long applauding, so long favourable, that you think me to be compared with the very best of poets, and certainly to be preferred to a good many. I would believe you, did you not, being as wise as you are, also love me as much. Hence it is that your affection may lie about my praises, yet cannot deceive. Besides this you ask that I send you some Asclepiads shaped upon the Horatian anvil, to be declaimed by you while drinking, for practice.
I obey your commands, though—if ever—now above all I am bound fast and busied with the prosaic manner of speaking. In short, you will find that in me, for the most part, the pursuits of metre have grown cold. For it is not easy to do one and the same thing well, and to do it seldom. Long ago we sported with smooth hendecasyllables, the thumb worn thin upon the reeds, which you might chant more nimbly with a shaken foot in place of choriambics. But you wish that henceforth my track should run through the ear of the Calabrian's path;
the path by which Flaccus turned his lyric steeds to the Pindaric strain with plectrum-wielding reins, while the string is struck by the Glyconic metre, and by the Alcaic too, or the Pherecratean, joined to the Lesbian, or the anapaestic, blooming through the eclogues of varied song with the many-coloured violets of words. This—grant me pardon—is hard for the ancient bards to fashion, and hard for me too: that a mouth sounding diverse epigrams should not often stumble because of frequent letters, which manly diction forbids to run wanton with cautious measures and luxuriant modes.
This scarcely Leo, king of the Castalian choir, scarcely Lampridius who follows him, could accomplish, declaiming under the weight of a twofold style before the pupils of Bordeaux. Therefore, as befits both me and you, spare me, I pray, in these jests; I beg that care keep the promised modesty to the very end of the orator's work—than which nothing is worse, if it be at once rigid at the beginning and soft at the end. Nay rather, whenever you are gladdened by the banquet of a more sumptuous table, give yourself, as I more approve, to religious narrations: let frequent conversation serve to bring these forth, and attentive hearing to recite them. Or surely, if—being still young—you incline more charmingly to most wholesome diversions, borrow at least from the Platonist of Madaura the forms of table-questions:
and, that you may be rendered more learned, solve these when they are proposed, propose these to be solved, and exercise yourself in such studies even while you are at leisure. But since mention of banquets has once come up, and you so diligently demand of me a poem composed even for another occasion and person, that you can no longer have me a hesitator in publishing it—receive gladly what, in the days of the Emperor Majorian, when at the request of a certain comrade we had gathered for dinner, in...
when Peter's book—the master of the imperial letters—was suddenly brought forth, I suddenly poured out; my messmates too, while the king of the banquet wove delays over arranging the fish-sauce, namely Domnulus, Severianus, and Lampridius, composing verses of equal worth (I have said this boastfully, nay, better ones)—men whom the Emperor, summoning them from cities on every side into one city, and the host inviting them into one dinner, had by chance drawn together. That was the whole of the delay, while we divided by lot the kinds of metre. For it pleased us, out of affection for the fellowship, that although all had the same subject to write upon, yet the epigrams of each should not be brought forth in one and the same kind, lest any of us who had spoken more meagrely than the rest should first be stung by shame, and afterwards by envy.
For it is more readily recognized in any reciter, whether he sings in the same metre as the rest, or whether he also writes with the same genius. But you will then more opportunely praise what is here set before you, when you have wholly indulged yourself as a companion. For it is not just that you should begin as a censor to sift with severity what a friend could not compose with seriousness. Come, summoned youth—place, hour, table, occasion bid you raise to the stars this volume, which you learn both by ear and by mouth, with your studies. Peter is to be read by you, an author well grounded in either discipline. Let us therefore celebrate, brethren, the holy feasts of letters. Let the festive array carry through the fading day with banquet, cups, and dances.
Let the couch be spread with ruddy embossed work and fine linen, and with purple perchance made ruddy, which the Meliboean wave dyes with borrowed hue as it steeps them anew; that the drinking fleece may be enriched with unmixed colour. Let foreign furnishing supply the woven yokes of Ctesiphon and Niphates, and swift beasts upon empty cloth—beasts for which a plague well feigned in scarlet whets its fury, and, as though a javelin pierced them, the bloodless gore flows forth; where the grim Parthian, bent by art past Aesopic mouths, rides on his horse and returns upon his dart, fleeing and pursuing the images of wild beasts. Let the table's round bear linens fairer than snow, and be wreathed with laurels, ivies, and greening vine-shoots. Let capacious baskets bruise cytisus, crocuses, asters, cassias, privets, marigolds, and let them paint the sideboard and the couches with fragrant garlands.
Let a hand anointed with the juice of amomum tame the rough hair, and let smoke, rich with the harvest of the Arabs, seek the high roof. As night comes on, let a manifold lamp be raised aloft on the gleaming panels, to the top of the ceiling; and let the lamps, that know no oil nor sticky fats, pour balsam-oil from their swelling belly. Let bearers, bending their heads under the embossed metal, bear the too-proud feasts, a burden upon their shoulders. Let bowls, cups, and cauldrons wed the Falernian with nard; and let stitched roses crown the tripods and the tankards. It is a delight to go among the little garlands, fanning alabaster vials; a delight too, with wandering whirl, to yield our limbs, broken, to the dance, or to feign the trembling Bacchantes with foot, garment, and voice.
Let Corinth send from its two-sea'd city its Thymele and its learned Pale to the warm workshops, and its women lyre-players—whose singing fingers, while the tongue sounds in unison, weary the living strings with a stroke in place of the plectrum. Give too the piped bronze, dear to the naked Satyrs; give the raucous flute-players for the flutes, whose caverns of the palate are to be re-blown with rattling cheeks—the flute's breath moans; give the songs set to the comic sock, give the sayings under the tragic buskin, give whatever the advocates and whatever the poets clamour in their varied performance: Peter passes over both these and those. We hold his published work, which, weaving with twofold art, ran its rough road and labyrinthine ways. But labouring in all things and approved by all, he snatches the palm on this side and that, and is borne through learned mouths.
Far hence let us drive away Hippocrene and the Aganippic springs, and melodious Apollo with his attendant Muses, and Minerva—let us remove her, as though the presider over singing, feigned by our speech: this one God supplies. The power of the diadem stood amazed at the man as he spoke; the toga, the soldier, the equestrian order, and the people of Romulus; and to this day forum, temple, field, and camp turn over their 'bravo!' Besides these, the Po gives its uproar to its nursling, and the love of the Ligurian cities. A like applause resounds through the Rhodanian towns, and the fierceness of the Iberians will imitate the Gauls. Nor lingering in this quarter, he will speedily press on to the fields of the East wind, and be borne through the North winds, the South, and the Zephyrs. Behold—while I ask what you should sing, I myself have sung.
For such trifles, gnawed by mice at the very bottom of my chest, I bring forth into the light after about twenty years—such as, being absent for an equal time, Ulysses might have found when he returned home. Therefore I beg that you gladly pardon these present playful pieces. But this I enjoin neither bashfully nor shamelessly: that what I myself have pronounced concerning the whole book of my familiar friend, you likewise, as though urged by the necessity of the example, should feel concerning mine. Farewell. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to his friend Burgundio, greeting. I am doubly tormented that each of us is confined to his bed. For nothing is harder than when friends who are present are divided by a shared sickness.
For if it should happen that they do not even lie sick within one chamber, there are no words, no consolations, no exchange, in short, of mutual entreaty. And so upon each falls a vast grief, and this the more on the other's account; for, though you yourself be sick, you can but little fear for yourself when one you love is in peril. But God, most beloved son, has shaken out for me, as I trembled on your behalf, a most grievous anxiety, because you are beginning to recover your former strength. For you are said now to wish to rise, and—what I more desire—now to be able to. You at least consult me in such a way, and with a solicitude almost premature you exercise me, already as it were wholly vigorous, with little questions of literature, more eager to hear—even though still sick—Socrates disputing about morals than Hippocrates about bodies.