My modesty utterly forbids these verses to be admitted upon this page, since the comparison of better poems weighs down my own idle trifles as they timidly come forth. For just as nothing less than a prettier bridesmaid befits a new bride, and just as, if any dark man be clothed in white, he becomes the blacker, so my poor stubble, however slight it be, becomes cheapened when set around better trumpets: it must be pronounced middling in place, lowest in merit, and the more contemptible not only by unskilfulness but also by arrogance. Wherefore their epigrams flash more justly than these of mine, which I fashion only in fancy and in a kind of shadowy way. But to what end all this? Rather let the poor straw of the ballad you demand murmur its tune.
Whosoever you are that here praise the labour of our bishop and father Patiens, you shall obtain by fulfilled prayer what you ask. The lofty edifice gleams, and it inclines neither to the left nor to the right, but with its citadel-throne looks upon the equinoctial sunrise. Within, light glitters, and the sun is so drawn to the gilded ceiling that, matching its colour, it wanders over the tawny metal. Marble picked out with varied brilliance runs over the vault, the floor, the windows; and beneath figures of changing colour a verdant crust, green as grass, makes sapphire-hued little stones bend through the leek-green glass. To this is joined a triple portico, proud upon Aquitanian columns; and after its pattern the more distant halls a second portico encloses.
And through columns set far off there stretches a stone forest amid the open space. On this side the causeway resounds, on that the Arar (Saône) re-echoes. Hence the footman and the horseman turn back, and the driver of screeching wains; hence a chorus of bent-backed haulers, while the banks answer back their alleluia, raises to Christ the boatmen's river-chant. Thus, thus sing psalms, O sailor or wayfarer: for this is the place all men must seek, whither the road leads all to salvation. Behold, as a younger man I have obeyed your commands. Only see that you remember I am to be repaid with interest many times over; and that this may be done the more easily and pleasantly, you must read constantly without pretence, be eager to read without end. Nor let a wife, soon to be happily led home, turn you aside from this purpose.
And be very mindful of those who once held the candles and candlesticks for their reading and meditating husbands: Martia for Hortensius, Terentia for Tullius (Cicero), Calpurnia for Pliny, Pudentilla for Apuleius, Rusticiana for Symmachus. Certainly, if — apart from the art of oratory — you complain that your poetic genius, and the polish of your speech refined on the whetstones of frequent studies, are being dulled by the company of women, remember that Corinna often completed a verse with her Naso (Ovid), Lesbia with Catullus, Caesennia with Gaetulicus, Argentaria with Lucan, Cynthia with Propertius, Delia with Tibullus. Hence it is clearly evident that marriage grants to the studious an occasion for learning, but to the idle an excuse. Therefore apply yourself, and let not the crowd of the ignorant cheapen literary devotion in your eyes.
For it is so ordained by nature that in all arts the display of knowledge is the more precious the rarer it is. Farewell. LETTER XI. Sidonius to his friend Rusticus, greeting. If we were neighbours according to the situation and spaces of our regions, and if our mutual presence were not sundered by the vast length of a journey, I would permit nothing to be granted to a scarcity of letters against the offices of a friendship once begun; nor would I cease to build up, with the various kinds of honours, the foundations of a rivalling love once laid down. But a habitation set apart on either side with far-extended bounds stands in the way of the joining of our souls, though it will scarcely hurt hearts once bound together.
Yet nevertheless from this very separation of our common municipalities it comes about that, being the closest of friends, we wish to transfer to a common charge the scarcity of converse which arises from the wide distance of lands — although, given the difficulty of natural circumstances, neither blame nor pardon ought to attach to us. Illustrious lord, the bearers of this letter, formed by the training of your discipline and displaying the modesty of a master's manners, I have opportunely received, patiently heard, and suitably despatched. Farewell. LETTER XII. Sidonius to his friend Agricola, greeting. You have indeed sent a boat, nimble, solid, big enough for a couch, and already stocked with fish.
Besides this, a helmsman by far most skilled, and rowers too, sturdy and ready, who indeed skim past the back of the up-flowing river with the same swiftness with which it flows down. But you will pardon me for declining to come as your companion to the fishing. For nets of a stronger grief hold us fast, while ours lie sick — griefs that must be grieved even by friends and strangers. Whence I think that you too, if you are rightly moved by brotherly affection, will, at whatever point of time you take up this page, rather think of returning. The care that Severiana's illness gives us all, first troubled by the onset of a lingering cough, is now also wearied by fevers, and these growing heavier through the nights; on account of which she longs to go out into the suburban estate.
Finally, just as we were taking up your letter, we were already preparing to go out to the little farm. Wherefore, whether you come or delay, aid our petitions with your prayers, that the very quickening of nature may healthfully favour her who longs for the country air. Certainly I, and your sister too, poised between hope and fear, believed that her weariness would only be increased if we had thwarted the wish of the sick woman. Therefore, with Christ going before, we are removing ourselves, and the whole household as well, alike from the burning heat of the city and its torpor; and at the same time we are shunning the counsels of those middling folk who sit by, agreeing and disagreeing, who, being little learned and quite officious, most obligingly kill many an ailing man.
Indeed, by the right of friendship, Justus will be admitted to our company — a man whom, were it permitted to jest amid sorrows, I could easily convict of having been trained more in the art of Chiron than of Machaon. Wherefore Christ must the more diligently be besought and implored, that His heavenly power may heal the malady for which our care has found no cure. Farewell. LETTER XIII. Sidonius to his friend Serranus, greeting. Marcellinus the Advocate presented to us your letter — a learned man, and a friend of his friends — which, after a salutation offered in its first words, in the rest of its course (a large one indeed) contained the praises of your patron, the emperor Petronius Maximus.
Him, however, you rather obstinately, or rather too fondly than rightly, call the most fortunate of all men who ever lived, for this reason indeed: that through the most exalted titles of office he was raised even to the empire. But I never assent to that broad opinion, that I should reckon fortunate those who stand upon the steep and slippery summits of the commonwealth. For it cannot be told how much this life of theirs bears, hour by hour in this world, of the wretchedness of a 'fortunate' life — if indeed those are so to be styled who, like Sulla, presume this name for themselves: namely those who, having overstepped common right and law, reckon the highest happiness to be the highest power — by this very fact wretched enough, that they too little understand that they lie subject to a most restless servitude.
For as kings lord it over men, so over kings the desires of domination lord it. Here, if we pass over the misfortunes of the princes who went before or came after, this your own Maximus alone will be able to serve us as the greatest proof of these things: who, although he had fearlessly climbed to the prefectorial, patrician, and consular heights, and, insatiable, had repeated the magistracies he had held as though in recurring orbits, yet, when he came with all his strength to the sheer precipice of the highest crown, suffered a kind of vertigo of boundless power beneath the diadem, and could not endure to be lord — he who had not endured to be under a lord.
In short, look in the man aforesaid at the charm, the power, the long duration of his former life, and, on the other hand, at the beginning, the whirlwind, and the end of a principate a little more than two months long: assuredly you will find that the man was happier before he was styled 'most happy.' Therefore he whose banquets, manners, riches, pomps, letters, magistracies, patrimonies, patronages had formerly flourished, whose very spans of life were so kept that they were unfolded through hours measured by set water-clocks — he, being named Augustus and under this guise shut within the palace thresholds, groaned before twilight that he had attained his wishes.
And when, by the mass of his cares, he was hindered from keeping the measured portion of his former quiet, he straightway renounced the laws of his old rule, and clearly saw that the business of a prince and the leisure of a senator cannot go together. Nor did the future deceive him in his grieving. For although he had run through all the other court honours most tranquilly, he ruled the court itself most turbulently, amid the tumults of soldiers, of the populace, of the federate allies — as its outcome too betrayed: new, swift, bitter — an end which the treacherous close of a Fortune long fawning made bloody, that Fortune which, like a scorpion, struck the man with the very last part of itself.
A man of talent, and by the merits of his genius a quaestorian, and certainly a great part of the good party, Fulgentius, was wont to say that he had often heard from his own mouth, when — loathing the burden of empire — he longed for his former security: 'Happy are you, Damocles, who did not endure the necessity of a kingdom for longer than a single dinner.' For this Damocles, as we read, a Sicilian by province, a Syracusan by city, was an intimate of the tyrant Dionysius; who, when with excessive praises he extolled the goods of his patron, like everything else, of course as one who had not tried them, Dionysius said: 'Will you at least today at this table enjoy my goods alike with my ills?' 'Gladly,' he said.
Then Dionysius at once, snatching away the plebeian covering from the joyful — though also astonished — client, enriched him with a robe dyed in the purple of Tyrian or Tarentine murex, and, as he shone with gems and pearls, set him upon a golden couch and silken embossed cushion. And when, to the bidden guest after the manner of Sardanapalus, bread made from Leontine grain was given, and moreover choice viands were served on choicer dishes, and capacious goblets foamed with Falernian, and unguents grew warm in icy crystal cups; when hence the dining-room, perfumed with cinnamon and frankincense, scattered foreign odours to the nostrils, and garlands of flowers set round dried his hair dripping with nard —
there began, over the back of him thus reclining, a drawn sword-point suddenly to quiver from the coffered ceiling, which seemed on the very point of falling upon the throat of the purple-clad man: for it was bound by a thread of horse-hair, and so menacing by its weight that with its point it curbed his throat after the fearful example of Tantalus, lest the food that entered by the mouth should pass out through the wounds. Whence, after prayers mingled with weeping and manifold sighs, scarcely released and starting up with a bound, he fled those riches and royal delights with the same speed with which men are wont to reach after them — brought back, through fear of the highest things, to the desires of the middling, and taking sufficient heed never henceforth to call or reckon that man happy who, hedged about with arms and guards, and thereby brooding over plundered wealth, pressed by iron, presses gold.
Wherefore, my lord and brother, I know not whether it is established that the happy tend toward a state of this kind: it is at least plain that the wretched arrive at it. Farewell. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to his friend Maurusius, greeting. I hear that the vintage answers to your industry and to our common wishes with a richer yield than the barren year had threatened. Whence I suspect that you will stay the longer in the district of Vialoscum, which in an earlier age was called Martialis on account of the winter quarters of the Julian legions. In which place, since you have a fruitful vineyard, you have besides an estate no less profitable to its great master, which may detain you and yours by the manifold dower of its crops and dwellings.
Indeed, if with barns and cellars, or with the storeroom filled, you purpose to pass there, until the coming of the swallow or the stork, the snowy months of Janus and Numa in sooty leisure or in tunic-clad repose, then the causes of our delays, none too profitable here in the town, will be forthwith cut off; so that, while you enjoy the country, we may enjoy you — we to whom, as you know, an estate with ample revenues is no more at heart or a pleasure than a neighbour, our equal, endowed with good character. Farewell. FIRST LETTER. Sidonius to his friend Avitus, greeting. By many bonds of affection, from the very outset of boyhood, all the way as we came into youth, the care of mutual grace had bound us together. First, because our mothers were joined by the closest tie of blood.
Then because we ourselves were born at the same times, had the same masters, were trained in the same arts, took our leisure in the same games, were advanced under the same princes, and discharged our military service together; and — what is more valid and effective for enlarging friendships — in each and every person, whether equally to be sought after or to be guarded against, we vied in likeness of judgement. On account of all which things, besides that inward conscience which is far more excellent and eminent in you, the similarity of our outwardly-run actions had greatly bound our wills together. But — what is well established — after we had long raised on both sides the engines of mutual love, you yourself set the precious pinnacle upon it, by enriching with a most opportune offering the church of the little municipality of Auvergne, over which, though undeservedly, I seem to preside.
To whose possession you have contributed very much by the suburban nearness of the Cuticiacum estate, deigning to enrich the brotherhood of our profession no less by the proximity of the place than by the revenue. And although you two seem to be joint heirs of a sisterly inheritance, yet by the example of your faith your surviving sister has been moved to imitate the good work. And so the merit of your deed and the incitement of another's are by heaven rightly rendered back to you. Whence it comes about that you are found most worthy to be exalted by the divinity through an unwonted kind of succession — which yet has not long put off enriching your religious devotion with hundredfold gifts, and which, as we trust, will no less unstintingly bestow heavenly things, since it has already paid you earthly ones.
For the Nicetian inheritance, in case you do not know, was the surpassing price of Cuticiacum. What remains, we earnestly ask: that just as of our church, so also of the city, the care may be equally your common concern; which both formerly, and now especially from this time, ought to belong to your patronage, or on account of your patrimony. Of what merit this may be — indeed, if your presence frequently visited it — even believe it of the Goths, who very often even disdain or give back their own Septimania, provided that they gain possession, even with desolated ownership, of this envied corner. But it is right, God being our protector, that you, standing between them and the commonwealth, should conceive quieter thoughts in your mind.
For although they, having broken through the boundaries of the old frontiers, with all their might or mass push forward the limits of their turbulent possession to the Rhône and the Loire, yet your authority, in accordance with the dignity of your judgement, will so moderate both sides that our people may learn what it ought to refuse when it is asked, and may cease to demand adverse things when it is refused. Farewell. LETTER II. Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greeting. The people of Auvergne salute you, whose small huts you, a great guest, have filled — not with a retinue of ambition, but as one to be sought after by affection. Good God! what joy it was to the afflicted, when you set your holy foot within the half-ruined walls! How thronged you were by every rank, sex, and age! What a balance of witty speech toward each one!
How affable the boys, how courteous the youths, how grave the old men found you to be! What tears, as the parent of all, did you shed over houses laid low by fire and dwellings half-burnt! How you grieved for the fields buried with unburied bones! What was your exhortation thereafter, what the ardour of one urging their restoration! To this is added that, when you had found the city emptied no less by civic strife than by barbarian incursion, you — persuading peace to all — restored to them charity, and to their country themselves. And when, at your admonition, they returned no less into one counsel than into one town, the walls owe to you the people brought back, the people brought back owe you their concord. Wherefore they reckon you altogether their own, themselves altogether yours.
And — which is your greatest glory — they are by no means deceived. For it presents itself day by day to the minds of each: that a person grave in age, frail in infirmity, sublime in nobility, venerable in religion, for the sole plea of love broke through so many bars, so many difficulties set in the way of coming — namely, the length of the journeys, the shortness of the days, the abundance of snows, the scarcity of fodder, the wide expanses of solitudes, the narrowness of lodgings, the abysses of roads, either rotten with the moisture of rains or made rough by the dryness of frosts; and besides, either causeways sharp with stones, or rivers slippery with ice, or hills rough in the ascent, or valleys worn away by the constant sliding of landslips.
Through all which discomforts, because you sought not private advantage, you carried back public love. As for what remains, we pray God that, your desires being advanced to the goals of your age, you may untiringly seek out, win, and repay the friendships of good men; and that the affection you leave behind may follow you: and that the graces everywhere begun through you may long be rendered back to you — as much their pinnacles as their foundations. Farewell. LETTER III. Sidonius to his friend Ecdicius, greeting. If ever, now most of all you are longed for by my people of Auvergne, over whom love of you holds an immense sway, and that indeed for manifold reasons. First, because the land that bore you rightly usurps for itself the chief share in affection.
Then because in your age you are almost the only mortal who was born to become no less an object of longing to your country than a joy at your birth. To these assertions the times of your maternal childbearing bear witness, which — as the conception advanced — were numbered by the concordant wishes of the citizens. I pass over those things common indeed, yet no slight incitements of affection, the crumbling turf of this soil crawled over by you. I omit that here first you broke the meadows by your walking, the rivers by your swimming, the groves by your hunting. I pass over that here first the ball, the dice-board, the hawk, the dog, the horse, the bow were your sport.
I leave unmentioned that, for love of your boyhood, the studies of letters flowed together from every nation, and that which was once owed to your person, in that the nobility, about to lay aside the scaliness of Celtic speech, was now being steeped in the oratorical style, now even in the measures of the Muses. But that which above all kindled the affection of the whole community toward you was this: that those whom you had once required to become Latins, you thenceforth forbade to be barbarians. For it can never slip from the hearts of the citizens — what and how great a thing every age lately beheld you doing, from the half-ruined ramparts of the walls, when, the plains between being traversed straight against the foe, and accompanied by scarcely eighteen fellow-horsemen, you passed through several thousand Goths —
in the full daylight and across the open plain (a thing posterity will scarcely believe) you passed through. At the rumour of your name and the sight of your person, amazement overwhelmed a most seasoned army; so that, out of admiration, the leaders of the hostile party did not know how many were with you and how few accompanied you. The whole line was straightway withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; and though it had before been drawn up for a siege, at the sight of you it was not deployed for an encounter. Meanwhile you, with certain of their best men cut down — whom not cowardice but boldness had made the rearmost of the column — with none of your own missed in so great a contest, alone possessed the plain, as spacious as could be, since the battle did not give you so many comrades as a table is wont to give banqueters.
Hence, as you were now being brought back at leisure into the city, what a throng of dutiful attentions, of applause, of tears, of joys came out to meet you — this the prayers of your people rather attempt to guess at than words to unlock. For it was possible to behold, in the halls of your most capacious house crammed full, that very most fortunate ovation of your thronged return.
while some snatch the dust from you with kisses, others take up the bits foaming and greasy with blood, others tilt back the saddle-supports soaked with sweat, others unbuckle for you the fastenings of the pliant chin-straps as they come off from the hollow of the helmet, others become entangled in undoing the lacings of the greaves, others count the notched edges of the blunted swords by the slaughter, others with livid fingers measure the pierced rings of the mail-coats, cut through by slash and thrust. Here, though many, dancing for joy, clung to the embraces of their own, yet upon you was heaped the greatest surge of the people's gladness; and at last you had come into an unarmed crowd indeed, but one from which not even armed could you extricate yourself.
And you bore, elegantly indeed, the follies of those who congratulated you; and while you were being torn apart by the tumultuous embrace of those rushing in, you had come, most dutiful interpreter of the public love, to such a condition that it was needful for you to render a richer thanks to him who had done you the freer injury. I say nothing further of your having gathered, by private forces, the appearance of a public army, aided outwardly by the small resources of greater men, and of your having checked the earlier incursions of the enemy by chastised raidings. I say nothing of your having slaughtered, by certain sudden onsets, whole squadrons of cavalry, with scarcely two or three of your own missed after the battle; and of how great a calamity you inflicted on the adverse party by unforeseen contests.
so that they devised, by a more disgraceful plan, to conceal the multitude of the slain. For those whom the swift-girt night had prevented from being buried, they left with their corpses beheaded — as though it were of less telling proof to be recognized as long-haired by the tuft than to have sent away the trunk headless. And when, day being restored, they understood that the theft of their disaster had been laid bare by cruel cheapness, then at last they openly busied themselves with funeral offices, hiding the slaughter by fraud no more than the fraud by haste: yet so that they did not even bury the bones under the mass of a hastily-heaped sod; to which, neither washed did they grant garments, nor clothed did they grant graves, thus justly rendering to the dead such just dues. The bodies lay everywhere, carried on dripping wagons.
which, since you pressed upon the stricken unceasingly, were buried in haste, shut up in kindled dwellings, by the funeral fragments of the roofs sliding down upon them. But why do I prattle of these things a little more than is just? — I who undertook not to weave from the whole reckoning a history of your labours, but in part to make a memorial, that you might the more believe the prayers of your people; to whose sickening expectation no remedies will more healthfully or swiftly minister than those of your coming. Therefore, if you yield at all to the entreaties of our countrymen, hasten straightway to sound the recall into your homeland, and quickly withdraw your constant attendance from the perilous intimacy of kings.
For the most discerning man rightly likens their intimacy to the nature of flames, which, just as they give light when a little removed from oneself, so, when brought sufficiently close, they burn. Farewell. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his friend Felix, greeting. Gozolas, a Jew by nation, a client of your greatness — whose person would be dear to me too, were not his sect an object of contempt — is delivering my letters, which I have penned in great anxiety. For our town, as though set as a barrier against the opposing frontier, the arms of the surrounding peoples terrify. Thus, set in the midst of rival peoples as a pitiable prey, suspected by the Burgundians, next to the Goths, we lack neither the wrath of those attacking nor the envy of those defending. But of this elsewhere.
Meanwhile, if with you at least things are well, it is well. For we are not of such a disposition that — even though we ourselves be struck with open punishments on account of the hidden things of our crimes — we should wish things not to go prosperously, wherever it might be. For it is certain that he is a captive no less of vices than of enemies who has not preserved good wishes even amid evil times. Farewell. LETTER V. Sidonius to his friend Hypatius, greeting. If that estimable man, and one who esteems and admires your character, Donidius, had had regard only to the reason of his domestic advantage, your good faith would suffice abundantly for his interests, even though no intercessor came between. But he was led by love of me, so that what he had obtained through himself, he made me request.
And so now this further weight of obligation is heaped upon us, that we two are made your debtors, though it is but one of us who obtains the benefit. For the estate of Eborolacum, whose half was laid waste even before the barbarians came, and which now looks only to the claims of the patrician house, desires by your support to be joined to its own right. Nor is he drawn to this attempt by the goad of covetousness, but out of regard for ancestral memory; since the whole of that farm belonged to the ownership of his family until the death of his stepfather, who but lately departed this life. But now, being a man who covets nothing that is another's and is sparing of his own, he is tormented less by the loss of the ancient possession alienated from him than by the shame of it:
so that he is driven to attempt its redemption not by the vice of avarice, but by the constraint of modesty. Deign to grant to his prayers, to my entreaties, to your own good character, that under your patronage he may come into the full possession of that land; for having received it, he seems to have gained little profit, and yet not to have earned it seems too craven, since the property was known to his forebears and to himself, and was indeed crawled over among the first rudiments of his suckling infancy. For my part, I shall be as much bound by whatever is granted as if it advanced my own possessions in particular, whatever my brother by age, my son by profession, my fellow-citizen by residence, and my friend by loyalty shall receive. Farewell. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his friend Eutropius, greeting.
If your loyalty rightly recalls our old comradeship, and thereafter the goodwill renewed day by day up to the present, then surely you understand that, even as you rise to the summits of dignities, so we rise to the summits of our desires. For we so rejoice in your high offices that we reckon it is no more your house than our friendship that has been raised up through them. Witness that discussion in which the incitements of my exhortation had no small force, by which you could scarcely be induced to join the prefecture to philosophy, when you, clinging to the doctrines of your fellow-follower Plotinus, had been snatched away by the wrestling-school of the Platonists into the deep leisure of untimely repose; whose discipline I then declared should be your free profession, so long as it owed nothing to your family.