and likewise a towel heavy with nap, which, cleansed of yesterday's scaling, by chance dangled by a pulley from the doorkeeper's raised rope, right under the two folding leaves of the little shrine's door. While at leisure he dries his cheek with it, "I could wish," he said, "that you would bid some quatrain of like office be written for me on the cloth." "Let it be done," said I. "But one," he said, "that would hold even my name in the metre." I answered that what he had asked was possible to do. He himself also said, "Then dictate." Then I, smiling, said, "Know straightway that the Muses are stirred, if I have leisure for their choir not without witnesses." He replied vehemently and most wittily, as by nature he is a fiery man, and a kind of inexhaustible fount of eloquence: "See, Lord Sollius, lest Apollo rather be stirred, that you alone solicit his foster-daughters to secret places."
Now you may judge what applause a saying so sudden, so witty, stirred up. And, delaying no longer, having called to me his scribe, who was holding the tablets nearby, I composed the appended epigram thus: "In the fresh morning, or when the seething baths call, or when, after the hunt, the brow grows hot and moist—with this let fair Philematius warm his damp face, that the moisture may pass from his face into the absorbent nap." Our Epiphanius had scarcely finished tracing out what is written above, when it was announced—the hour warning us—that the bishop was coming forth from the reception-hall: and we rose up. Grant pardon for the requested little song.
But that other thing, which is greater—which you both lately bade me dictate parabolically or figuratively, against a certain man ill bearing good days—and which, being ready, will be sent: review it secretly; and if it please you, favour it by publishing; if it displease, forgive it by deleting. Farewell. LETTER XVIII. Sidonius to his friend Attalus, greeting. That you have begun to preside over the state of the Aedui, I have received gladly and with joy. The cause of my gladness is fourfold: first, that you are a friend; second, that you are just; third, that you are severe; fourth, that you are near. Whence it comes about that you would wish, owe, and be able to help our transactions and those of our people very greatly. Therefore, embracing in an old friend the new right of the power obtained, I have long been seeking material for your benefits.
Know that I so trust in these things, that even if I do not find what to ask, you yourself seem to me about to seek what you may bestow. Farewell. LETTER XIX. Sidonius to his friend Pudens, greeting. The son of your nurse has carried off the daughter of my nurse: a shameful deed, and one which would have set you and us at enmity, had I not straightway known that you knew it was not to be done. But, your conscience's clearing being brought forward, you deign to seek impunity for the hot offence. Under a condition I grant it, if you free the ravisher—already a patron rather than a lord—from his original tenancy. The woman, moreover, is now free: who will then at last seem not condemned to mockery, but taken into marriage;
if our defendant, for whom you plead, soon becoming a client instead of a tributary, begin rather to have a plebeian person than a colonary one. For this settlement or satisfaction alone not only in modest measure amends the affront: I who acquiesce in your wishes and friendships in this, if liberty releases the husband, that the penalty may not bind the ravisher. Farewell. LETTER XX. Sidonius to his friend Pastor, greeting. That yesterday you were absent from the deliberation of the state in council, the better part took as done on purpose; which suspected that you were guarding against this, lest the burden of the future embassy should be laid upon your shoulders. I congratulate you that you live by such manners, that you must needs fear your own election:
I praise your efficacy, I look up to your prudence, I attend with praise upon your good fortune. In short, I wish things equal to those whom I love equally. Many, frequently, whom detestable popularity drives, grasp the greatest of the citizens by the hand, likewise draw them aside from public assembly, and press kisses upon those thus set apart, pledge their service—but unasked. And that they may seem envoys in the assertion of the common business, they refund the travelling-allowance, and of their own accord refuse the very expenses, and secretly beg each one individually, that they may be openly asked by all. So too, although their gratuitous importunity could gladly be admitted, yet the modest are chosen more gladly and more lovingly, and that even with expense:
so great is the weight that the impudence of those who thrust themselves forward carries, that not even with the fasces is anything overflowed upon them under the name of tributary. Accordingly, although it has not escaped you what all the good men were meditating, yet give yourself to the prayers of those awaiting you, and prove the charity of those seeking you, you who have already proved their modesty. That you were absent at first, is ascribed to modesty: a second delay looks toward cowardice. Besides, for you about to set out to Arles, there is on the way your venerable mother, brothers, loved ones, and the soil of a fatherland that loves you back, to which one comes with pleasure even apart from occasion: then your own house, whose founder, vineyard, harvest, olive-grove, and even the very roof, it is of some advantage to inspect, even while you pass by.
Wherefore, sent by us, you also arrive for yourself. For such, unless I am mistaken, will be the condition and opportunity of your cause and ours, that you may at some time seem able to charge it up as a benefit to the state that you have seen your own. Farewell. LETTER XXI. Sidonius to his friends Sacerdos and Justinus, greeting. Your uncle Victorius, a man as excellent as he was in every respect most learned, composed the rest of his works powerfully, but verses most powerfully of all. To me too, ever from childhood, there has been a care for the Muses. Now you come as heirs to your kinsman, as much by right as by desert. Straightway I become next of kin to the poet by profession, you by seed. Therefore it is most just that, the day being done, each of us should succeed as he is joined. And so, keep the patrimony, give the songs.
Farewell. LETTER I. Sidonius to his lord and father Bishop Lupus, greeting. Blessed be the Holy Spirit and the Father of Almighty God, that you—father of fathers, and bishop of bishops, and a second James of your own age—from a certain watchtower of charity, and not from the lower Jerusalem, oversee all the members of the Church of our God; worthy to console all the infirm, and deservedly consulted by all. And what now shall I, earth putrid and fetid by guilt, answer worthy of this your condescension? Suffering both the want and the fear of your saving colloquy, I am led by the recollection—punishable of my own accord—to cry out to you what your colleague there said to the Lord: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke v. 8).
But if that fear be not tempered with affection, I dread lest, after the example of the Gerasenes, I should be forsaken and you depart from my borders. Nay rather, by that course which is more to my profit, I shall bind you fast, as it were a fellow-leper of mine, by the condition once set forth, so as to say to you: 'If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean' (Matt. VIII, 2). By which sentence he no more disclosed what he sought from Christ than he published what he believed. Therefore, since beyond all doubt you are the first of all pontiffs throughout the whole world, so far as it extends; since to your prerogative all are subject; since even the throng of the college trembles at your judgment; since in comparison with your gravity the very hearts of the aged grow childlike;
since, after the toilsome watches of the Lérins militia have been sweated through, and after nine lustra already run out in the apostolic see, the spiritual camps of both holy orders venerate you as a certain most renowned chief-centurion of theirs: you nonetheless, withdrawing yourself for a little from the company of the spearmen and the standard-bearers, do not despise your lowest camp-servants and sutlers, and to the outermost of the baggage-draggers, who through their own folly still sit fast to the burdens of the flesh, you carry round the banners of the cross long borne aloft, and you stretch out the hand of the tongue to those wounded in conscience. You know, as it appears, O veteran commander, how to gather up those wounded from the opposing battle-line; and, most skilled trumpeter, to sound the retreat from sins unto Christ;
and after the example of the evangelical shepherd you rejoice no more if the sound remain than if the desperate do not remain. It was you, therefore, whom the rule of morals, you the pillar of virtues, you—if one may flatter the guilty—the true, because holy, sweetness, it did not irk to touch with the fingers of exhortation the sores of a most despicable worm; for you it was no greed to feed with counsels a soul starved by frailty, and from the storehouse of the highest love to pour out for us a measure of the humility we ought to pursue. But pray that at some time I may come to my senses, and how greatly the mass of the burden laid upon me weighs down my neck. By the unbroken continuance of crimes, wretched man, I have come to such a strait of necessity that I am now compelled to pray for the sin of the people—I, for whom the people, even were they innocent, could scarcely obtain pardon though they should supplicate.
For what sick man can rightly impart the cure? Who, being feverish, can distinguish a healthy pulse by his trembling touch? Who would justly praise a deserter for knowledge of the art of war? Who, being full-fed, could fittingly reprove the abstinent? Most unworthy of mortals, I am obliged to say what I shrink from doing; and, damnable by my own words, when I command what I do not fulfil, I am daily forced to pronounce the same sentence upon myself. But if you—between me and Him with whom you are crucified together, Jesus Christ our Lord—for the people of my sins would stand as intercessor, a younger rather than a lesser Moses, we shall descend no further into hell while living; nor, inflamed by the incitements of carnal vices, shall we any longer kindle strange fire upon the altar of the Lord.
For although the scale of glory regards us not, as being guilty, yet we shall rejoice abundantly and more than enough, if by your prayer we are able to relieve our inward man, and if we may present, if not a breast whole for reward, at least one scarred over unto pardon. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER II. Sidonius to pope Pragmatius, greeting. The venerable matron Eutropia—so far as concerns us, of singular example (who, while her thrift and her humanity vie together:
she feeds the poor no less by her fastings than by her food, and, ever-vigilant in the worship of Christ, compels sins alone to sleep within herself)—having had to the sorrows of her bereavement the necessity of a lawsuit added, hastens to seek in remedy of a twofold ill the perfection of your consolation, ready to be grateful whether this be reckoned to you a short journeying or a long duty. Now then, the aforesaid Agrippinus, brother of my venerable now already a presbyter—that it may not be injurious to have spoken of his wickednesses, at least he wearies her with his sophistries: who, abusing the weakness of the matron, does not cease to trouble the serenity of a spiritual soul with the blasts of worldly cunning:
to whom, her son, and not long after her grandson being lost, two fresh wounds alike are added to the wound of a long widowhood. We tried to arrange matters between the two—we especially, upon whom our profession laid a new claim, and the antiquity of friendship an old one—resolving some points, urging others, above all beseeching many; and, which you may marvel at, in every state of concord the withdrawal was more readily made from the woman's side. And although the paternal prerogative boasted that it would profit the daughter more deeply, yet to the daughter-in-law the offering of the mother-in-law's munificence was more pleasing. The quarrel, meanwhile half-lulled to sleep, is now brought into your bosom. Pacify the contending parties, and by the authority of your pontifical censure enjoin favour upon the sides suspicious of one another, speak the truth.
For holy Eutropia—if you give any credit to my surety—reckons it a victory if, even after her losses, she may cease from litigating. Whence also I suspect that one house is to be pronounced by you the quarrelsome one, though you may find both at discord. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER III. Sidonius to the lord pope, from Leontius, greeting. Although by no exhortations do you animate the beginnings of our profession, nor hitherto water with any shower of heavenly doctrine the thirst of our worldly ignorance; yet I am not so unmindful of myself as to presume on my own part that we must contend on an equal balance of good offices. For since our mediocrity is easily surpassed by the age of your life, the length of your dignity, the privilege of your place, the praise of your knowledge, the gift of your conscience;
we merit nothing if we look for an equal exchange of speech. Therefore, not accusing your silence, but rather striving to excuse our own loquacity, I commend the bearer of these lines: whose journeying if you cherish with ready favour, a great harbour of security is opened to his affairs. His business is testamentary: the merits of his own documents lie hidden from him. He has gone thither to consult the merit and the skill of the pleaders speaking there; ready to reckon it a victory if he understand himself to be lawfully overcome; provided only that he be not blamed for having, through the fault of sloth, taken precautions amiss for himself and his own.
Him I presume to commend thus far, that if a counsel once consulted disdains to instruct him with due care, the authority of your crown may strive to hammer out the swiftness of a reply from those who dissemble. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER IV. Sidonius to the lord pope Lupus, greeting. Besides the duty which is owed without end and incomparably to your eminent apostolate, and which, even if it be discharged without intermission, I commend—for a new necessity—the old bond of my suppliant bearers: who, having measured a long journey into the Arvernian region, in these times indeed, have come with fruitless toil.
For they were seeking a certain woman, dear to their affections, whom a sudden raid of the Vargi (for by this name they call the native brigands) had by chance carried off, brought hither some years ago and here sold; and when they had learned this by no false information, they tracked her by sure signs indeed, but by no recent trail. And meanwhile this same toil-worn woman, before they arrived, in the house and ownership of our merchant—openly indeed put up for sale—dies; a certain Prudens (this is the man's name, whom report now spreads abroad to be living at Troyes) applauding the contract of men unknown to us; whose signature, within the formula of the market, is shown as that of a suitable witness.
The authority of your person, the opportuneness of your presence, will avail among those placed face to face, if it be thought worth while to trace out the whole course of the violence. Which—what is graver—has advanced to such a pitch of crime, as far as it is given to know from the report of the bearers, that even in that robbery it is established that a certain one of the number of the travellers was slain. But since they seek the medicine of your judgment, and the civility of one who gives birth to a criminal case; it belongs to your office alike and your character—if I measure rightly—to succour by some harmless settlement the grief of the one party and the peril of the other; and by a certain tempering of a wholesome sentence, to make this side less afflicted, that side less guilty, and both more secure:
lest the state of the quarrel—as the civility of the time and place demands—depart to such an end as it began to have for its beginning. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER V. Sidonius to the lord pope, from Theoplastus, greeting. He pleads my cause unknowing, who carries letters from me to you. For while he becomes the opportune bearer of a service I have vowed, he bestows a benefit which he supposes himself to receive: even as now the venerable Donidius, worthy to be numbered among the most distinguished, whose client and boys I commend, having set out either for their patron's need or their master's. The toil of the travellers guard by what power, humanity, and intercession you can:
and if in any point the friend himself, through inexperience and the newness of public dealing, shall seem less effective, do you rather look to this—what the cause of the absent, not what the person of the present, deserves. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER VI. Sidonius to the lord pope Eutropius, greeting. After I learned that the treaty-breaking nation had returned to its own seats, and was preparing no ambushes for travellers, I judged it wrong to defer any longer the discourse of my duties, lest your affection should draw some rust—by my fault—as an unpolished sword does from the rareness of care. Wherefore, having sent a bearer of letters on this business alone, I anxiously inquire how sound your little body stands, and how far affairs go according to your mind's wish:
hoping that the love once granted me by you may not be thinned either by the length of the interposed journey or by the long duration of our mutual absence: because the goodness of the Creator shuts up rather the dwelling of men than their charity within final narrows. It remains that your beatitude feed the greedy hunger of our ignorance with the wholesomeness of a compunctious discourse. For it is of very great use to you, that the mystic fat and the spiritual suet should full often distend the leanness of my inner man by your exhortations. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER VII. Sidonius to the lord pope Fonteius, greeting.
If the bond of forefathers sent before us bestows anything on posterity toward the beginning of a saving grace, I too approach the fuller knowledge of your apostolate with the prerogative of household familiarity. For thus do I remember you to have been always the strongest patron of my family in Christ, that I think your friendships not so much to be sought by me as to be sought again. To this is added, that the name of the priestly office imposed upon me, most unworthy, compels me to flee to the aid of your prayers: so that the too-gaping wounds of a still-ulcerous conscience may at least be scarred over by your prayer.
Wherefore, commending myself and mine, and excusing these too-late letters, I greatly beseech that, by your accustomed intercession—whose might is immense—you guard the beginnings of clerical apprenticeship still creeping in us: so that if the unchangeable clemency of God shall deign to change anything of the depravity of our morals, we may owe the whole of it to the patronage of your suffrages. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to the lord pope Graecus, greeting. The presenter of these lines sustains a poor life by the sole activity of trading: to him his craft is not for gain, his soldiery not for advantage, his tillage not for profit:
this very thing by which he is known—through hired escorts and rented weariness—increases indeed his own repute, but another's wealth. Yet nonetheless, since his good faith is great, though his substance be small, as often as with other men's monies he attends the markets of a fresh cargo, to well-trusting creditors he lays down as pledge the mere proofs of his character. These things were suggested to me while I was dictating, nor do I therefore doubt to assert confidently things heard: for they act as very intimates to me, to whom he himself is intimate enough. This man's tender brow, then, and his hard beginnings I commend: and because the roll of readers has lately received his name, you will recognize that from me, a fellow-citizen to one setting forth, the letter ought to have been drawn up—as for a cleric.
Whom I reckon—not unjustly—will shortly become a splendid merchant; if this man, hastening to your service, shall often prefer the merchant's fountain to the coldness of his native civic springs. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER IX. Sidonius to the lord pope Lupus, greeting. A now honourable man, Gallus, since when ordered to return to his wife he did not delay, brings back the effect of your letters as the fruit of the obedience of mine. To whom, when the page you had sent was unsealed, straightway, pricked in conscience, he groaned; and he judged it a letter destined not for me, but a sentence upon himself. And so at once he vowed the journey to his fatherland, made ready, snatched it up. Whom, for this very swiftness of repentance, we took care to address not chidingly, but rather consolingly;
because a hasty correction bordered upon innocence. For no one, even well aware of himself, has presumed to do more; if only he has not forsaken the track of your reproof: seeing that those very words which we read—the words of a sparing censure—are the greatest incitements to amendment. For what can be more precious than the tenor of a chastisement of this kind, in which a soul, sick perchance with sin, finds within itself a remedy, when it could not find without a rebuke?
For the rest, we beseech that, by frequent prayer—through which you exercise immense dominion over all vices—you may cause us also, even as it is manifest that the evangelical Magi returned, even now to return by another way of morals into the blessed fatherland. I have almost passed over what least ought to be passed over. Give thanks to Innocentius, a notable man, who, as you had directed, diligently complied with what was enjoined. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER X. Sidonius to the lord pope, from Censorius, greeting. The office of the Levitical order graces the bearer of these letters. He, avoiding with his family the whirlwind of the Gothic depredation, was carried into your territory, by the very weight (so to speak) of his flight;
where, upon the property of the Church over which your holiness presides, the fasting stranger cast a small sowing into a half-worked sod: and he entreats that leave be made him to gather it in whole. Whom if you cherish with the humanity assigned to the household of faith—that is, that the due render of the glebe be not demanded—he reckons so much of a little gain granted to him, a foreign man, that, as his estate, so his spirit is straitened, as if he were farming on his native soil. If to this man you grant, as is the custom, the lawful settlement of his very scanty harvest, he will return, as if sumptuously provisioned for the journey, with giving of thanks. Through whom if you impart to me a line of your accustomed regard, your page will be reckoned by me and by the brotherhood seated here as though a little dew has fallen.
Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER XI. Sidonius to the lord pope Eleutherius, greeting. The present paper commends a Jew: not that the error pleases me through which the entangled perish; but because it becomes none of us to pronounce any of them wholly damnable while he lives. For he is still in hope of absolution, to whom it lies within his power to be converted. But what the course of his business may be, he himself will more rightly set forth, present, by a face-to-face narration. For it is contrary enough to prudence to stretch out with manifold speech the fitting neatness owed to an epistolary formula. Certainly, since according either to worldly acquaintance or to worldly judgments men of this kind are wont to have honest causes;
you too can defend the person of this toil-worn man, even though you assail his perfidy. Deign to be mindful of us, lord pope. LETTER XII. Sidonius to the lord pope Patiens, greeting. One man esteems one thing, another another; but I count that man especially to live by his own good who lives for another's; and who, pitying the calamities and neediness of the faithful, does upon earth the works of heaven. To what end are these things, you say? You especially, most blessed pope, does this sentence seek out; you, to whom it does not suffice to bring aid only to those necessities which you have come to know; you who, having stretched the reach of your charity even to the outermost bounds of the Gauls, are wont first to regard the causes of the needy before you inspect their persons. It hurts no man's slenderness or weakness if he cannot seek you out:
for you forestall with your hands the man who has not been able to reach you with his feet. Your vigilance passes into foreign provinces: and herein the breadth of your care is diffused, that it may console the straits of those set afar: and hence it came about that—because the modesty of the absent moves you no less often than the complaint of the present—you have often wiped away the tears of those whose eyes you have not seen. I pass over those things which daily, on account of the failing of your impoverished citizens, you endure with unresting watches, prayers, expenses. I pass over that you always act with such tempering, that you are ever judged so humane, so abstemious; that it is established the king constantly praises your dinners in his presence, the queen your fastings.
I pass over that you beautify the church committed to you with such adornment, that the beholder may doubt whether new works rise up better or old ones are repaired. I pass over that through you in very many places the foundations of basilicas rise up, their ornaments are doubled. And whereas many things in the state of the faith are increased by your dispositions, the number of heretics alone is diminished: and that by a certain apostolic hunting you entangle the wild Photinian minds in the toils of spiritual preachings, and the barbarians already your followers, as often as they are convicted by the word, depart not from your track, until, most happy fisher of souls, you have drawn them out from the deep gulf of error. And yet some of these things are perhaps to be shared with the rest of your colleagues.
But that this is owed to you—by a certain, as the jurisconsults say, special title—not even your own modesty can gainsay; namely, that after the Gothic devastation, after the crops consumed by fire, at your own peculiar expense you sent free grain, through the desolate Gauls, to the common poverty; when you would have bestowed too much upon peoples wasting away with famine, had that kind been a matter of commerce, not of gift. We saw the roads straitened by your fruits; we saw along the banks of the Saône and the Rhône not one granary alone, which alone you had filled. Let the fictions of the fables of the heathen give place, and that Triptolemus, as it were borne into heaven for the discovery of new grain-ears;
whom his own Greece, illustrious for masons, painters, and sculptors, consecrated with temples, fashioned in statues, portrayed in images; whom doubtful report commends, that through peoples still rude and Dodona-born he carried round, wandering with two ships—which the poets thereafter reckoned to be in the shape of dragons—an unknown sowing. You, that I may be silent of your Mediterranean bounty, being about to dole out sustenance to the cities of the Tyrrhenian sea, filled your granaries with two rivers rather than two vessels. But if perchance a praised religious man is offended by the Achaean examples of the Eleusinian superstition, as by things less fitting;
then, laying aside the reverence of the mystic understanding, let us compare the historical diligence of the venerable patriarch Joseph, who, against the seven barren years about to follow, easily provided beforehand a remedy which he foresaw. Yet according to the moral sense, in my judgment he is nothing less, who in a like necessity coming upon him does not divine, and yet succours. Wherefore, even though I cannot fully conjecture how great thanks the men of Arles, of Riez, of Avignon, of Orange too, and of Alba, and of Valence, and also the dweller of the city of Trois-Châteaux, may pay you; because it is difficult to measure to the full the vows of those to whom you have given nourishment without a farthing.