Letters

Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greetings.

1.1.1. For a long time now, my honoured lord, you have been urging me with all the weight of your persuasion—as is fitting, since in matters that call for deliberation you are the most prudent of counsellors—that if any letters of a somewhat polished kind have flowed from my pen on various occasions, drawn out as they were by the subject, the person, or the moment, I should revise the copies, refine them, and gather them all into a single volume, treading with presumptuous steps in the footsteps of the rounded style of Quintus Symmachus and the discipline and ripeness of Gaius Pliny.

1.1.2. As for Marcus Tullius, I think it better to say nothing; for in the epistolary style not even Julius Titianus, writing under the names of illustrious women, reproduced him with any worthy likeness. On that account the rest of the school of Fronto, who imitated Titianus as one of their own, mocked him for copying a worn-out manner of speech and called him "the ape of orators." To all these men, I declare—it is past words how greatly—I have always yielded in my own judgement, and I have always proclaimed that to each of them the prerogative of his own age and merits must be preserved.

1.1.3. But of course I have obeyed you, and have entrusted these letters to your scrutiny, not to be merely reviewed (that would be too little) but, as they say, to be purged and filed down, since I know that you are an immoderate patron not only of studies but of students as well. For which reason you now drive me, very hesitant as I am, out upon this sea of reputation.

1.1.4. And yet over a little work of this kind I had been more safely silent, content with the opinion of verses published more happily than skilfully—an opinion in which, long since, the anchor of sufficient glory has settled for me in the harbour of public judgement, after I had sailed past the Scyllas of envious barkings. But if envy does not fix its grinding tooth in these trifles too, you shall presently have from me volumes more numerous, brimming with abundant discourse. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Agricola, greetings.

1.2.1. Time and again you have asked that, since the fame of Theodoric, king of the Goths, commends his courtesy to the nations, I should describe to you in writing the proportions of his person and the quality of his life. I gladly comply, so far as the page of a letter allows, and I praise in you the refinement of so delicate a curiosity. He is indeed a man worth knowing even by those who see him only in passing; so richly have God, the arbiter, and Nature, our maker, combined to endow his person with the gift of perfect felicity. As for his character, it is such that not even the envy that attends royalty can defraud his praises of anything.

1.2.2. If you ask about his appearance: he is well-built in body, shorter than the very tall, taller and more commanding than men of middle height. The crown of his head is round, and over it the hair, drawing back a little from the level of the brow, curls toward the top. His neck does not sag, slack and sinewless, but stands firm with sinew. His shaggy brows arch over twin orbs; and when his eyelashes droop, the rim of his lids reaches almost to the middle of his cheeks. The lobes of his ears, as is the custom of his people, are covered by the falling locks of hair laid over them. His nose is most gracefully curved. His lips are thin and not widened by any stretching of the mouth's corners. The hairs that sprout beneath the cavities of his nostrils are cut back daily. His beard grows thick in the hollows of his temples, but where it rises on the lower part of his face the diligent barber plucks it out by the roots from cheeks still smooth as a boy's.

1.2.3. The skin of his chin, throat, and neck—not fat but firm—is milk-white, and on closer view is suffused with a youthful blush; for this colour comes to him often, not from anger but from modesty. His shoulders are smooth, his upper arms strong, his forearms hard, his hands broad; his chest swells forward while the belly recedes. The spine, set lower between the ridges of the ribs, divides the expanse of the back. Each flank is well-knit with prominent muscles, and in his trim loins vigour reigns. His thighs are hard as horn, the joints behind his knees thoroughly manly, the knees themselves least wrinkled and most comely. The calves are propped on swelling muscles, and the foot, which sustains such great limbs, is small.

1.2.4. If you would inquire into his daily routine as it is displayed to the public eye: before dawn he seeks out, with a very small retinue, the assemblies of his priests and worships with great earnestness—though, if you could secretly observe, you might mark that he keeps this reverence rather from custom than from conviction. The rest of the morning he assigns to the care of governing the kingdom. An armed companion stands beside his throne; the crowd of his fur-clad guards is admitted so as not to be absent, but kept at the threshold so as not to make a din; and so they murmur before the doors, shut out by the curtains, shut in by the railings. Meanwhile, embassies of the nations being admitted, he hears much and answers little. If a matter is to be considered, he defers it; if to be dispatched, he hastens it. It is the second hour: he rises from his throne, either to inspect his treasures or his stables.

1.2.5. If a hunt has been announced and he sets out, he judges it beneath the royal dignity to sling the bow at his own side; yet if, at close quarters, chance offers a bird or a beast to him as he hunts or travels, a servant places it in his hand drawn back behind him, the string or thong hanging loose; for as he reckons it a boy's task to carry the bow cased, so a woman's to receive it already strung. So, taking it, he now bends it with the ends drawn back in line, now—the knot turned to the dangling end—follows with his roving finger the loosened loop of the wandering string as it slips down; then at once he seizes the arrow, fits it, looses it; and he asks you first which mark you would have struck, that you may choose; you choose what he is to hit: what you have chosen, he hits. And if either of the two must err, the marksman's shot more rarely misses than the chooser's eye.

1.2.6. If one comes to a banquet—which on ordinary days is like a private man's—no breathless servant there piles up upon the tables, as they give way beneath it, a rude heap of tarnished silver. The chief weight then lies in the conversation, since there either nothing is told or only serious things. The couch-coverings are displayed now in embroidery and tapestry, now in purple, now in fine linen. The food pleases by its art, not its costliness; the dishes by their cleanliness, not their weight. The rare offerings of cups and bowls thirst would more readily complain of than drunkenness refuse. In short: you may see there Greek elegance, Gallic abundance, Italian dispatch—public pomp, private care, royal discipline. But of that Sabbath-day luxury of his I must spare my account; it cannot remain hidden even from persons of lower station.

1.2.7. To return to where I began. The feast over, his midday sleep is often none and always brief. At those hours, when the dice-board takes his fancy, he gathers the dice quickly, examines them carefully, rolls them shrewdly, throws them eagerly; he banters playfully, waits patiently; at good casts he is silent, at bad he laughs; at neither is he angry; in both he plays the philosopher. He scorns either to fear or to grant a second throw; he spurns the chances of these when offered, passes them by when set against him; without commotion he is escaped, without collusion he escapes. You would think that even over the counters he is handling arms: his sole care is to win.

1.2.8. When it is time for play, he sets aside for the moment his royal severity and urges freedom and fellowship in the game. I will say what I think: he fears to be feared; and indeed he delights in the agitation of the man he has beaten, and only then believes that his opponent has not given way to him, when the heating of his rival's choler has given proof of his own victory. And—what you may marvel at—often that gladness, arising from the smallest occasions, brings good fortune to the deserts of vast affairs. Then petitions long tossed about through the shipwrecks of advocacy find the harbour of sudden release thrown open; then even I, when I am about to ask some favour, am happily beaten, since the board is lost to me for this, that my cause may be saved.

1.2.9. About the ninth hour that mill of governing grows hot again; the petitioners return knocking, the ushers return forcing them back; everywhere the noise of litigious ambition roars, which, drawn on into the evening, thins out when the royal dinner interrupts it, and is then dispersed among the courtiers, each according to his patron, to keep watch until the hour of deep night. Now and then, though rarely, mimes' jests are let in during the meal, yet in such a way that no guest is wounded by the gall of a biting tongue. Even so, there is there no sound of water-organs, no choir of singers under a master intoning a rehearsed concert; no lyre-player, flautist, choirmaster, drummer, or harpist sings—the king being charmed by those strings alone whose virtue soothes the mind no less than song soothes the ear.

1.2.10. When he has risen, the palace treasure begins the night-watches; armed men stand at the entrances of the royal house to keep guard through the hours of his first sleep. But what has all this to do with my part, who promised to tell you not much about the kingdom but a little about the king? At the same time it is fitting that an end be made to my pen, since you wished to learn no more than the man's pursuits and person, and I have taken care to make not a history but a letter. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Philomathius, greetings.

1.3.1. Go now, and arraign me before the Senate under the law against canvassing for office, asking why with sleepless cares I press toward a dignity that is mine by inheritance—I, whose father, father-in-law, grandfather, and great-grandfather shone in the urban and praetorian prefectures, in the offices of the Palace and of the army.

1.3.2. And behold, my friend Gaudentius, hitherto only of tribune's rank, has overtaken the yawning sloth of our fellow-citizens by the eminence of a vicariate. The trampled nobility of our young men does indeed mutter; but he who has passed them by is moved by their detractors only to this, that he rejoices. And so they now revere one whom they hitherto despised, and, astonished at the gifts of sudden fortune, look up from their seats to the man they once looked down upon from a session beside him. Meanwhile he beats the ears of the snoring detractors with the voice of his hoarse herald; and though they are stirred against him with the goads of enmity, they shall nonetheless be assigned to the benches of his friends.

1.3.3. Hence it would be fitting that you too should swiftly repair the loss of your antiquated honour by the privilege of the prefecture's councils, in which you are summoned to share—lest, if you come into the council without the prerogative of a councillor, you should seem to have performed merely the functions of the deputies. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Gaudentius, greetings.

1.4.1. Be blessed, most worthy sir, in the high office you have won by the merit of your deserts. To gain its titles and its eminence you counted out no maternal revenues, no ancestral largesses, no wife's jewels, no father's moneys; for, on the contrary, with you it was the sincerity examined, the diligence proved, the fellowship received at the prince's house that won you praise. O three and four times blessed are you, by whose elevation joy is given to friends, punishment to the envious, glory to posterity; and besides, an example to the brisk and eager, a spur to the idle and slothful. And yet, if there are any who will hereafter emulate you, in whatever spirit, they may perhaps, if they overtake you, owe it to themselves; but to you, beyond doubt, they will owe the very thing they pursue.

1.4.2. I seem to see—with all reverence for good men premised—that arrogant idleness which puffs itself up in the envious, and that disdain of service familiar to the lazy, when, despairing of advancement, they play the philosopher over their cups and praise the leisure of the unhonoured, doing so from the vice of sloth, not from any zeal for perfection . . . . . . 1.4.3. . . . was rejected by the judgement of our elders, that it might not be of use to boys while they were still children. Thus those who compared the little declamations of young men to woven cloths understood that the brief sayings of the young are produced with more labour than long ones are pruned down. But since this is enough on this head, I beg you to remember what underlies it: that I wish to repay you in kind for this zeal of yours, if only God, favouring my just undertakings, grants me both safe and returning. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Heronius, greetings.

1.5.1. I received your letter while at Rome, in which you anxiously ask whether the beginnings of my journey are advancing according to our common plan, and also what road I have taken and how I have made it—what rivers I have seen that are famous in the poets' songs, what cities renowned for the situation of their walls, what mountains made famous by the report of their deities, what plains made notable by the rehearsal of their battles—since you judge it a pleasure to learn things you have read of more faithfully from the account of those who have seen them. For this reason I rejoice that you wish to know what I am doing; for a curiosity of this kind springs from inner affection. Well then, even if some things should turn out otherwise, yet under God's help I will begin with what is favourable—the beginning with which our forefathers were wont to open even the reports of their misfortunes.

1.5.2. When I had gone out from the walls of our own Rhône-city, the public post was at my service, since I had been summoned by the sacred letters, and it took me through the homes of my comrades and kinsfolk. There, in truth, it was not the scarcity of post-horses but the multitude of friends that delayed my journey—friends who, holding me in close embrace, prayed for my happy going and return with competing vows. So I drew near to the ridges of the Alps, whose ascent for me was swift and easy, and the paths, amid sheer cliffs that terrify on either side, were made soft by ways hollowed in the snow into a track.

1.5.3. The rivers too—where any are not navigable—had convenient fords, or at least passable bridges, which antiquity had vaulted from their foundations right up to the embankment crusted with paving-stone, set on arches of masonry. At the Ticinus I went aboard a "courier" (such is the boat's name), by which, swiftly carried down into the Eridanus, I laughed at the Phaethontiads so often sung by us in our revels, and at the fabled tears of the tree's amber.

1.5.4. The reedy Lambrus, the dark Addua, the swift Athesis, the sluggish Mincius, which rise in the Ligurian and Euganean mountains, I likewise viewed in their own streams, carried up a little against their mouths. Their banks and shoals were everywhere clothed with oak and maple groves. Here sounded the sweet concert of the birds, whose piled nests, set now among the hollow reeds, now among the sharp rushes, now among the smooth bulrushes, swayed; and all these thickets, fostered by the juice of the spongy soil, had sprung up in disorder above the river's margins.

1.5.5. And passing by, I came in due course to Cremona, whose nearness was once sighed after by the Mantuan Tityrus. Then the town of Brixillum, where, as the Venetian oarsman gave place to the Aemilian taking over, we entered only to leave again; coming a little after to Ravenna by a course bearing to the right—a place where you might doubt whether the mid-road of Caesar joins or separates the old city and the new harbour. Moreover, one branch of the Po flows between the double town, another washes its side; for the river, sundered from its main channel by the barrier of public works and drained off through the same by diverted channels, so parts its divided streams that, flowing around the walls, they afford protection, and flowing in, commerce.

1.5.6. Here, while everything convenient for trade was brought in, especially what was fit for eating, yet—since on one side the briny sea drove against the gates, and on the other the sluggish, lazy flow of the water, stirred by the running of the boats through the sewer-like mud of the ditches, was fouled by the slimy bottom pierced by the boatmen's poles—we thirsted in the midst of the waters, because nowhere was there pure water in an aqueduct, nor a cistern that could be cleared, nor a flowing spring, nor an unsilted well.

1.5.7. Going on from there, I came to the Rubicon, which takes the origin of its name from the reddish colour of its gravel, and which was once the boundary of Cisalpine Gaul and old Italy, when the towns of the Adriatic sea were divided between the two peoples. From here I came to Ariminum and Fanum—the one made memorable by the rebellion of Julius, the other stained by the death of Hasdrubal; since there flows the Metaurus, whose felicity, won in a single day, stretches so far into time, as if even now it carried bloody corpses into the Dalmatian sea down its discoloured streams.

1.5.8. From here I left behind, as soon as I entered them, the remaining towns of Flaminia, passing the Picentes on my left and the Umbrians on my right. There, whether it was the Calabrian Atabulus or the pestilent region of the Tuscans, with the breath of the air poisoned by venomous blasts and alternating now heat, now cold, infected my heated body; and meanwhile fever and thirst ravaged the inmost depths of heart and marrow. To their greed not only the pleasant springs or the hidden wells (though these too), but all those flowing waters near or in my path—the glassy Velinus, the cold Clitumnus, the dark Anio, the sulphurous Nar, the pure Fabaris, the turbid Tiber—we kept promising ourselves, though fear cheated the desire.

1.5.9. Amid these things Rome at last lay open to my sight; whose forms—nay, whose mock sea-battles too—I seemed about to drink up. There, before I even reached the city limits, I cast myself down at the triumphal thresholds of the Apostles, and straightway felt all languor driven from my weakened limbs. After these proofs of heavenly patronage I was received in a part of a hired lodging, and even now, writing these things while lying down, I devote a little effort to rest.

1.5.10. Nor do I yet present myself at the tumultuous doors of the prince and his courtiers. For I have arrived during the wedding of the patrician Ricimer, to whom the daughter of the everlasting Augustus is being joined in the hope of public security. So now, amid this rejoicing not only of persons but of orders and parties, it has seemed more profitable for your Transalpine friend to keep to one side—since at this very time, when these lines were being written for me, scarcely through all the theatres, markets, praetoria, fora, temples, and gymnasia could the Fescennine song of Thalassio be unfolded; and now, on the contrary, studies are silent, business rests, the courts are hushed, embassies deferred, canvassing at leisure, and the whole standing of serious affairs goes wandering abroad amid the buffooneries of the players.

1.5.11. Already indeed the maiden has been given away, already the bridegroom lays aside his crown, the consul his embroidered robe, the bride's matron her train, the honoured senator his toga, the inglorious man his cloak; and yet the whole pomp of the bridal has not finished its uproar, for the new bride has not yet moved to her husband's house. When that festivity has run its course, the rest of the struggles of my labours shall be unlocked to you—if, that is, the completed solemnity shall at last have brought an end to this busiest idleness of the whole city. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Eutropius, greetings.

1.6.1. Long ago indeed I was eager to write to you, but now most of all I am driven to it—now, that is, when by Christ's favour my road is being travelled that leads to the City—and the cause of my writing is either the only one or the chief one: namely, that I may call you, drawn out from the depth of your domestic quiet, to take up the duties of service at the Palace. . . .

1.6.2. To this is added that by God's gift there belongs to you the unbroken vigour of an age, a body, a mind; and next, that, furnished with horses, arms, dress, money, and a train of servants, you alone, unless I am mistaken, are afraid to begin, and, though you are brisk at home, an inert despair makes you tremble at undertaking the journey—if indeed a man of senatorial seed, who is daily confronted with the robed images of his forefathers, can justly say that he has travelled abroad, when once and in his youth he has seen the home of the laws, the school of letters, the senate-house of dignities, the summit of the world, the fatherland of liberty: in which one city of the whole earth only barbarians and slaves are strangers.

1.6.3. And now—for shame!—if you are to be left among the herdsmen, the rustics, and the snorting swineherds! For if you cleave the field with the quivering plough-handle, or, stooped and bent, lay low the flowery wealth of the meadow with the curved sickle, or, a stooping digger, turn over with mattocks the vine heavy with its shoot, then for you is the highest blessedness of your prayers. Nay rather, wake up, and let your mind, grown soft and slack with fat leisure, lift itself to greater things. It is no less worthy of a man of your birth to cultivate his own person than his country-house.

1.6.4. Finally, what you call the exercise of youth is the leisure of veterans, in whose worn-out hands the rusty swords are late exchanged for the hoe. Be it so: the new wine shall foam for you from your multiplied vineyards; your barns, bursting with heaped grain, shall yield you countless mounds besides; a fat shepherd shall pen for you the close-packed flock with their heavy udders into the milk-pail through the reeking caves of the sheepfolds. To what end is it to have enlarged a patrimony by so dung-stained a profit, and not only amid such things but—what is baser—on account of such things to have lain hidden? Would it not be unworthy that, at the time of council, you, an inglorious rustic, an old man standing in hiding, should be put down by the vote of some poor man who holds office, while you behind the seated and voting young men—men whom it would be a disgrace if they followed in our footsteps—should see with grief that they have gone before?

1.6.5. But why say more? If you will bear my urging, I will be the partner, the helper, the forerunner, the sharer of your endeavours. But if, wrapped in the alluring nets of pleasures, you would rather, as they say, be wedded to the doctrines of Epicurus—who, once virtue's loss is admitted, defines the highest good by bodily pleasure alone—then, behold, I call our ancestors to witness, I call our posterity to witness, that I am no party to this offence. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Vincentius, greetings.

1.7.1. The case of Arvandus distresses me, nor do I conceal that it distresses me. For this too is added to the praises of the emperor, that it is permitted openly to love even men condemned to death. I was a friend to the man beyond what the easiness and changeableness of his character deserved; witness the envy lately stirred up against me on his account, whose flame scorched me when I was a little incautious.

1.7.2. But in that I stood firm in friendship, I owed it to myself; whereas in his nature he had no care to persevere. I complain freely, not insultingly: for, despising the counsels of the faithful, he was in all things the plaything of fortune. In short, I marvel not that he fell at last, but that he stood so long. O how often did he himself boast that he had endured adversities, while we from a deeper affection pitied his rashness, bound one day to ruin him, declaring that no man is fortunate who is judged to be so frequently rather than always!

1.7.3. But you demand the course of his condemnation. Saving the reverence due to good faith, which is owed to a friend even in his affliction, I will set out the matter briefly. He governed his first prefecture with great popularity, and the one that followed with the greatest ruin; weighed down alike by the burden of debt and by the fear of his creditors, he was envious of the magnates who would succeed him. He laughed at everyone's conversation, marvelled at their counsels, scorned their courtesies; from the rareness of those who met him he incurred suspicion, from his constant presence weariness—until, walled in by the mass of public hatred, and girt with a guard before he was ungirt of his power, he was seized and consigned and brought to Rome, swelling at once because he had sailed safely past the stormy coast of Tuscany on a prosperous course, as though the very elements served him in token of a good conscience.

1.7.4. In the Capitol he was kept by his host Flavius Asellus, count of the sacred largesses, who still revered in him the half-smouldering dignity of the prefecture lately wrung from his hands. Meanwhile the envoys of the province of Gaul—Tonantius Ferreolus, of prefectorian rank, grandson through a daughter of the consul Afranius Syagrius, and Thaumastus too and Petronius, men endowed with the greatest knowledge of affairs and of words, to be ranked among the chief glories of our fatherland—came in pursuit of Arvandus, who had gone ahead, to accuse him in the public name, with the decrees in hand.

1.7.5. Among the other things which the provincials had charged them to do, they brought an intercepted letter, which Arvandus's scribe, when arrested, confessed his master had dictated. This document appeared to be sent to the king of the Goths, dissuading peace with the Greek emperor, declaring that the Britons settled above the Loire ought to be attacked, affirming that the Gauls ought to be divided with the Burgundians by the law of nations, and a great deal more in much the same insane vein, such as to inspire wrath in a fierce king, shame in a peaceable one. This letter the jurists interpreted as burning with the crime of treason.

1.7.6. This proceeding did not escape me and Auxanius, a most excellent man, who reckoned it the part of a treacherous barbarian and a coward to shun, amid his adversities, the friendship of Arvandus, in whatever way it had been incurred. So we report the whole machination quickly to him, who feared nothing of the kind—a machination which those keen and fiery men were planning with the highest artifice to conceal until the time of the trial, so that they might entangle their unwary adversary, who had spurned the counsels of his comrades and rashly trusted himself alone, in some headlong profession of his answer. We tell him, then, what seemed safe to us and to his more intimate friends; we advise him to confess nothing, however trivial, if anything, even the most trifling, were demanded by his enemies; that the very dissembling would be most thorny, by which they might the more easily kindle in him the deadly persuasion of security.

1.7.7. On hearing this he sprang up, and bursting into sudden abuse: "Be off, degenerates," he said, "unworthy of your prefectorian fathers, with this needless alarm! Leave this part of the business to my care, since you understand nothing; Arvandus has enough in his own conscience. I shall scarcely deign to allow advocates to plead for me in actions of extortion." We departed in sorrow, confounded no less by grief than by the affront; for what physician is rightly moved when madness seizes a man given up for lost?

1.7.8. Meanwhile our accused man went hurrying through the Capitoline square, robed in white; now feeding on cunning salutations, now gladly listening, as if recognizing them, to the rattling baubles of flattery; now searching through silks and gems and all the precious wrappings of the bankers, and inspecting, handling, beating down the price, turning over, as if about to buy; and in the midst of his doings complaining much of the laws, the times, the senate, the prince, that they did not avenge him before they examined.

1.7.9. A few days passed, and in the council-chamber a full senate met (so I learned afterward, for I had departed meanwhile). Our man advances to the senate-house, a little before shorn and pumiced, while his accusers, half in mourning and unkempt, awaited the summons from the decemvirs, and, dirty by design, had snatched away from the accused the pity due to him, by casting the odium of squalor on him. The summoned are admitted; the parties, as is the custom, take their stand on opposite sides; before the opening of the charge the prefects are offered the right of sitting. Arvandus, with that unhappy impudence of his, at a quickened pace thrusts himself almost into the very midst of the judges' benches; Ferreolus, his colleagues standing about his sides, modestly and quietly sat down at the lowest end of the benches, so that he might remember he was no less an envoy than a senator—and for this he was afterward the more praised and honoured.

1.7.10. While this went on, those of the magnates who had been absent came in: the parties rise, the envoys set forth their case. The letter, mentioned above, is produced after the provincial mandate; and when it was being slowly read out, Arvandus, not yet even questioned, cries out that he had dictated it. The envoys reply—though most maliciously—that it was agreed he had dictated it. But when the madman, ignorant how far he was falling, transfixed himself by his confession repeated twice and thrice, it is acclaimed by the accusers, proclaimed by the judges, that he is held as confessing himself guilty of treason; and to this he was put to the sword by a thousand formulas of the law that ordain it.

1.7.11. Then at last the wretched man is said to have grown pale with belated repentance for his loquacity, learning too late that even one who has not aspired to the garb of the purple-clad may be pronounced guilty of treason. Forthwith, stripped of the privileges of the double prefecture which he had ruled through five years with renewed authority, and—restored, not so much added, to a plebeian family—he was adjudged to the public prison. This indeed was most pitiable: as those who saw it related, because he had brought himself, adorned and polished, before the judges while his accusers were in black, a little later, when he was led away condemned, the wretch was wretched yet not pitied. For who would be too greatly moved over the state of one whom he saw, trim and perfumed, hauled off to the quarries or the workhouse?

1.7.12. But after the trial had been adjourned scarcely twice seven days, he was sentenced to death and cast onto the island of the serpent of Epidaurus. There, disfigured to the very grief of his enemies, and as it were spat out from human affairs by the vomit of a queasy fortune, he now, by the old senatorial decree of Tiberius, drags out a life of thirty days after sentence, shuddering hour by hour at the hook, the Gemonian steps, and the noose of the turbulent executioner.

1.7.13. We, for our part, so far as we are able, absent and present, make our vows, and double our prayers and supplications, that, the blow of the already drawn sword being held back at the very instant, the Augustan mercy may count him half-dead, though with confiscation of goods or by exile. Yet of that man, whether he awaits each extremity or endures it, nothing is more wretched—if, after so many brands burnt in and so many insults, he now fears anything more than to live. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Candidianus, greetings.

1.8.1. You congratulate me on lingering at Rome—yet as though wittily and with the salt of mockery mixed in; for you say you rejoice that at last your friend sees the sun, which surely I, a drinker of the Saône, have very rarely beheld. For you reproach me with the mists of my people of Lugdunum, and complain that our daylight, blocked by the morning fog, is scarcely unbarred by the noonday heat.

1.8.2. And is it you who babble these things at me—you, a homebred slave rather of Caesena's smoke than of its town? Of whose native pleasantness, or rather of its profit, you yourself judged when you migrated away. And so it is that, exiled more happily at Ravenna, with your ears pierced by the gnat of the Po, the chattering throng of municipal frogs leaps about you. In which marsh, by a perpetual perversion of the order of all things, the walls fall and the waters stand, the towers float and the ships sit fast, the sick walk about and the physicians lie abed, the baths are cold and the dwellings ablaze, the living go thirsty and the buried swim, the thieves keep watch and the magistrates sleep, the clergy lend at interest and the Syrians chant psalms, the merchants serve as soldiers and the soldiers trade, old men play at ball and young men at dice, eunuchs study arms and the federate troops study letters.

1.8.3. See, then, what sort of city it is in which your household hearth is settled—one that could more easily have a territory than land. Wherefore remember that the harmless Transalpines must be spared, who, content with the dowry of their own sky, are granted no great glory if they shine by comparison with worse places. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Heronius, greetings.

1.9.1. After the wedding of the patrician Ricimer—that is, after the resources of both empires had been scattered to the winds—a return was at last made to public seriousness, which opened a door and a field for the transacting of affairs. Meanwhile we, received into the hearth of Paulus, a man of prefectorian rank to be revered as much for his learning as for his sanctity, were graced with the kindly offices of his gracious hospitality. And no one is more excellent than that man in every kind of art. Good God, what riddles he makes in his propositions, what figures in his sentences, what neat phrases in his verses, what devices with his fingers! Yet this surpasses in him the very summit of all his studies: that he keeps a conscience superior to his eminent knowledge. So through him first I explored whether there was any access of favour into the court; with him I conferred which of the magnates might best be able to aid our hopes.

1.9.2. Nor indeed was there much delay, since there were few about whose patronage, were it to be chosen, one might hesitate. There were indeed in the senate many men refined by wealth, exalted by birth, weighty in age, useful in counsel, raised by rank, sociable by courtesy; but—saving the standing of the rest—two most exalted men of consular rank, Gennadius Avienus and Caecina Basilius, were conspicuous above the others. These, in that most ample order, setting aside the prerogative of the military party, were easily the chief men after the purple-clad prince; but among these two also, though both were astonishing, their characters were various, and there was a likeness rather of genius than of disposition. Let me say, briefly, something about them.

1.9.3. Avienus had come to the consulship by good fortune, Basilius by virtue; and so in Avienus a pleasant swiftness of dignities was praised, in Basilius a late abundance of them. Each, when by chance they went out from their houses, was hemmed in by a crowd of clients going before, following after, poured around; but, in equals, the hopes and spirits of their comrades were far unequal. Avienus, if he had any power, exerted it in advancing his sons, sons-in-law, and brothers; and since he was always distracted by his domestic candidates, he was less effectively able to dispatch the needs of suitors from outside.

1.9.4. And in this the Decian family was preferred to that of the Corvini: that such favours as Avienus, while in office, obtained for his own, Basilius, out of office, conferred upon strangers. Avienus's mind was opened wholly and quickly, but with less profit; Basilius's to few and slowly, but with more advantage. Neither was difficult of access, neither costly; but if you courted both, you would more easily get friendship from Avienus, more easily a benefit from Basilius.

1.9.5. After long weighing both on either hand, the mutual deliberation settled it thus: that, the reverence due to the elder consular being reserved—into whose house we came not too seldom—we should rather attach ourselves to the company of Basilius's frequenters. And so, while through this most ample man we were working out something of the petitions of the Arvernian embassy, behold, the Kalends of January, which awaited the name, to be entered in the records, of the Augustus soon to be consul.

1.9.6. Then my patron: "Come now, my Sollius," he said, "though you are pressed by the burden of the office you have undertaken, I would have you put forth your old Muse in homage to the new consul, composing some votive piece even with hasty strings. I will provide access by getting you admitted, comfort to you as you recite, and support to you as you recite; if you believe one who has tried it, many serious matters will be advanced for you by this play." I obeyed his instructions; he did not withhold his favour from the task enjoined, and as the unconquerable surety of the devotion he had imposed he so dealt with my consul as to make me prefect over his senate.

1.9.7. But you, unless I am mistaken, weary of the letter's length, will now more pleasurably dwell upon re-reading the verses of the little work itself. I know it; and on this account the talkative document carries the poem itself in what follows, to converse with you, in my stead, for a few days, until I come. If you would grant the poem too the points of your verdict, it would be as welcome to me as if, while I declaimed in the Comitium or among the Rostra, not only the broad-striped senators but the crash of my tribe-fellows too were roused to my "Bravo!" Yet I warn you, and forewarn you, by no means to set those trifles of mine on a level, in your hexameters, with the work of others. For my songs, compared with yours, will rightly be likened not to the trappings of heroic verse but to the dirges of epitaph-makers.

1.9.8. Nevertheless rejoice that this very panegyric received, if not the verdict, at least the outcome of a good work. Wherefore, if grim things must be sweetened with jests, I would close the page with a glorious—that is, a Thrasonic—ending, in imitation of the Plautine Pyrgopolinices. So then, since by Christ's help I have come to the prefecture by the occasion of my pen, you are of course bidden, with the authority of a girt official, having gathered up from every side the acclamations of all praises, to bear me to the stars: if I please, my eloquence; if I displease, my good fortune. I seem to see you laughing, because you perceive that our boastfulness has run wild along with the comic soldier. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Campanianus, greetings.

1.10.1. I have received your letter through the prefect of the grain-supply, in which you commend him to me, the new judge, as your old comrade. I give great thanks to him, the greatest to you, that you both have resolved either to presume safely upon my friendship or to trust it unimpaired. For my part I embrace the acquaintance and intimacy of the man not only willingly but eagerly, since I know that our own good favour too will be made the closer by this service of mine.

1.10.2. But do you also commend to his vigilance my standing—that is, the standing and cause of my reputation; for I fear lest the roar of the theatre's hollow benches should sound out the hunger of the Roman people, and the public famine be reckoned to my misfortune. Indeed I am preparing to send this very man at once to the harbour, since I have learned that five ships set out from Brundisium with cargoes of wheat and honey have touched the Tiber's mouths. If he does anything energetic, he will have their cargoes hastily offered to the expectation of the populace, thereby commending himself to me, me to the people, and both of us to you. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Montius, greetings.

1.11.1. You ask, most eloquent sir, as you are about to seek out your own Sequani, that some satire or other, if it has been written out by me, be sent to you. And indeed I marvel that you should have made this request; for it is not right that you should so quickly think ill of a friend's character. Was I likely to brood over such a theme—I, now at an age and amid a leisure such that to have written it as a young man on active service would have been presumptuous, and to have published it dangerous? For to whom did that Calabrian poet not say, even to one greeting his teacher: "If a man has composed evil verses against another, there is right and judgement to be had"?

1.11.2. But lest you should believe anything further of the kind about your friend, what that was which the rumour and smoke of a sinister opinion breathed upon me I will set forth somewhat at length, but from the beginning.

In the days of Augustus Majorian there came into the midst of the court a document, but lacking any author's name, full of biting satiric verses—verses which, abusing quite invectively the bare mention of names, carped much at vices, more at men. At this the people of Arles, where the affair was taking place, began to murmur, and to ask which of the poets the weight of public fury deserved to crush—chiefly at the instigation of those whom the uncertain author had exasperated by certain marks of identity.

1.11.3. It happened by chance that Catullinus, then an illustrious man, came thither from Auvergne—always dear to me, but then especially through our recent companionship in service; for travel often makes fellow-citizens into closer friends. And so both Paeonius and Bigerrus laid this snare for the unsuspecting man: that before many witnesses they should ask him, as though of one unwary, whether he recognized this new poem. And he: "If you recite it." And when they poured out various scraps as if in jest, Catullinus dissolved into laughter and with untimely approval began to cry out that it was a poem worthy that the rostral tablet, or even the Capitoline, should justly receive it, to be made everlasting in golden letters.

1.11.4. Paeonius blazed up—he on whom that satirist had the more eagerly pressed the bite of his fiery tooth—and to the bystanders: "I have found, now," he said, "the man guilty of our common injury. You see how Catullinus is dying of laughter: it is plain that he recalls something familiar to him. For what cause has driven him to hurl out a hasty verdict, unless that he already holds the whole, who judges thus from a part? And besides, Sidonius is now in Auvergne; whence it is gathered that, with him for author and this man for hearer, the thing was woven." There is a rush into fury and into abuse of the absent, the ignorant, the innocent; nothing is reserved for conscience, for good faith, for inquiry. So a popular personage drew the levity of the light crowd whithersoever he would.

1.11.5. For Paeonius himself was wholly the people's man, who with his tribunician blasts often drove the sea of seditions. But if you had inquired who he was by birth, whence in his home, he was born no more eminently than from a town family, and one whom, at the outset, the renown of his stepfather rather than of his father had made known. Yet, again and again, by fair means and foul, aspiring to grow, and by avarice the parent of money, by ambition prodigal: for, that he might be joined to a higher family at least through his daughter—most honourable though she was—our Chremes had, against the strictness of civic custom, promised, as they say, a splendid dowry to his Pamphilus.

1.11.6. And when the Marcellinian conspiracy for seizing the diadem was being cooked up, he had offered himself as standard-bearer to the youth of the nobility in the faction—a man still new in his old age—until at last, on account of proofs of his fortunate audacity, the chink of the gaping interregnum gave a flash to the obscurity of his birth. For with the court empty and the commonwealth disturbed, he alone was found who dared to gird himself for the governing of the Gauls with the rods of office before the commission, and for many months mounted the tribunal of the illustrious powers as a respectable prefect; then, the year of his last service being completed, he was scarcely honoured at its very end—after the manner of the accountants, or rather of the advocates, whose dignities begin just when their actions end.

1.11.7. So this man, prefectorian thus, senator thus—whose character, if I do not pay the praises that befit it in full, I owe to the character of his son-in-law—stirred up the hatreds of many men, more than good men, against me, who was still ignorant, still his friend, as though I alone in my age were able to wield the power of verse. I come to Arles, suspecting nothing as yet (for whence should I?), although I was thought by my enemies unlikely to be present; and, having seen the prince after a day, I go down into the forum as usual. When this was seen, at once, as the poet says, the sedition, daring nothing boldly, took fright. Yet some flung themselves at my knees more than was fitting; others, that they might not greet me, fled behind the statues, hid behind the columns; others, gloomy and downcast, walked with their sides pressed to mine.

1.11.8. Here I marvelled what this should mean—this form of excessive pride in those, of excessive humility in these—nor yet did I of my own accord ask the reasons, when one of the factious crowd, suborned, presents himself to me to be greeted. Then, as the talk went on: "Do you see these men?" he said. And I: "I see them," I said, "and indeed marvel at their gestures, yet do not admire them." To this our interpreter: "As a writer of satire," he said, "they either curse you or dread you." "Whence? Why? When?" I replied; "who has recognized the crime? Who reported it? Who proved it?" And presently, smiling: "Go, friend," I said, "if it is no trouble, and deign to consult these swollen men in my name, whether that informer or denouncer who has falsely charged that I wrote a satire has also falsely charged that I published it; whence perhaps it may be safer, if they reconsider, for them to cease their pride."

1.11.9. When the messenger reported this, straightway all of them—not modestly nor singly, but hastily and in throngs—gave me kisses and their right hands. Only my friend Curio, having inveighed against the treachery of the deserters, when evening came on, was carried off and brought home by chair-bearing slaves more foul than corpse-handlers.

1.11.10. On the next day Augustus ordered that we should be present at his banquet during the circus-games. First, on the left horn of the couch, lay Severinus, consul for the year—a man who, amid the vast upheavals of princes and the unequal state of the commonwealth, was ever equal in favour; next to him Magnus, lately ex-consul, before that ex-prefect, a person doubled by his twin honours; reclining behind him Camillus, his brother's son, who, having himself run through two dignities, had likewise adorned his father's proconsulate and his uncle's consulate. Paeonius on this side, and on this Athenius, a man practised in the changes of lawsuits and of times; this one was followed by Gratianensis, a man to be set apart from all infamy, who, just as he came after Severinus in honour, so had gone before him in favour. Last of all lay I, where the left side of the purple-clad emperor stretched out on the right margin.

1.11.11. When much of the meal was over, Caesar's talk was directed to the consul, and that briefly; thence it rolled down to the ex-consul; with whom, often taken up again because it had turned to literature, it passed from the occasion to the illustrious Camillus—so far that the prince said: "Truly you have an uncle, brother Camillus, on whose account I congratulate myself that I have conferred one consulate on your family." Then he, who wished for some such thing, watching his moment: "Not one, lord Augustus," he said, "but the first." With the greatest uproar—so that not even reverence for Augustus stood in the way—the saying was received.

1.11.12. Then, asking Athenius something or other, the Augustan address passed over Paeonius, who had been placed above him—whether by chance or by design I do not know. And when Paeonius had taken this ill, basely—and what was baser, since the man addressed kept silence, made answer himself—Augustus smiled, since, while keeping his authority, he had given himself to fellowship and was full of jests; through which laughter no less of vengeance fell to Athenius than of injury had befallen him. So the shrewd old man gathered himself together, and, as he was ever within seething with the heat of shame that Paeonius should be preferred to him: "I do not marvel, Augustus," he said, "if he tries to snatch from me the place of standing, who does not blush to invade your place of speaking."

1.11.13. And the illustrious Gratianensis: "A wide field," he said, "is opened to satirists by this quarrel." Here the emperor, turning his neck to me: "I hear, count Sidonius," he said, "that you write satire." And I: "I too hear this, my lord prince." Then he, but laughing: "Spare us at least." But I: "In that I abstain from what is unlawful, I spare myself." After which he: "And what shall we do with these," he said, "who provoke you?" And I: "Whoever this man is, my lord emperor, let him accuse me publicly: if I am refuted, let us, convicted, pay the deserved penalties; but if I shall have quashed the charges not improbably, I beg that, by the indulgence of your clemency, I may—saving the injury of the law—write against my accuser what I will."

1.11.14. At this he himself, catching sight of Paeonius, began with a nod to consult him as he wavered, whether the condition pleased him. But when the other, confounded, held his peace, and the prince was consulting him as he blushed, he said: "I grant your request, if you ask for this very thing on the spot in verse." "Let it be," I said; and turning around, as if I were asking for water for my hands, and delaying only so long as the swift servants run around the circle of the couch, I gave my elbow back to the cushion. And the emperor: "You had promised that you would ask leave to write satire in impromptu verses." And I: "Whoever blames me, greatest prince, for writing satire—this I beg you to decree: let him either approve it or fear it."

1.11.15. There followed an uproar—unless to say so is boastfulness—equal to that over Camillus's saying, which indeed earned it not so much by the dignity of the poem as by the brevity of the time. And the prince: "I call God and the public state to witness that I will henceforth never forbid you to write what you will, since the crime laid upon you can in no way be proved; and at the same time it is most unjust that a purple-clad man's verdict should grant this much to private feuds, that an innocent and untroubled nobility should be endangered, on account of certain hatreds, by an uncertain charge." When I, modestly with bowed head, was giving thanks at this very sentence, the face of my haranguer began to grow pale—a face on which, a little before, after anger, sadness had succeeded; and it lacked little but that they froze, as though bidden to offer their necks to the drawn sword.

1.11.16. After this scarcely a few words more: we rose. We had advanced a little from the emperor's sight, and were even now putting on our cloaks, when the consul fell upon my breast, the prefectorians upon my hands; that very accused man, my friend, again and again abjectly humbled himself, while all pitied him, so that I feared lest he should stir up against me by his entreaty the ill-will which he had not roused by his accusation. I said at last, pressed by the entreaty of the assembled magnates, that he should know that nothing would be returned to his attempts in verse—that I would yet detract from my own acts in future, if he had been spared; for it ought to suffice that the charge of satire had won me fame, but him infamy.

1.11.17. In sum, I overthrew, my honoured lord, not so much the maintainer of the calumny as the mutterer of it; but since satisfaction was made to me in such a way that so many summits and rights of powers and dignities were bowed before my breast for his guilt, I confess that the beginning of such an affront was well worth its price, whose end was glory. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Ecdicius, greetings.

2.1.1. Two evils now your Auvergne endures at once. "What are they?" you ask: the presence of Seronatus and your own absence. Of Seronatus—to begin even with his name—Fortune seems to me to have played, as if foreknowing what was to come; just as, on the contrary, our forefathers called those battles "wars" (bella) than which nothing is fouler, and by a like contrariety named the Fates "Parcae" (the Sparing ones), because they do not spare. The very Catiline of our age has lately returned from the country of the Aturres, that here he might mix in full the blood and fortunes of the wretched, which there he had in part begun to drain.

2.1.2. Know that in him, day by day, the spirit of a long-dissembled madness is being laid bare: he envies openly, dissembles abjectly, lords it slavishly, decrees as a master, exacts as a tyrant, condemns as a judge, slanders as a barbarian. All day long, armed by fear, fasting from greed, terrible from cupidity, cruel from vanity, he never ceases at once both to punish and to commit thefts; openly, and with laughers summoned, he belches out among citizens talk of battles, among barbarians talk of letters. His letters—he being not even sufficiently initiated in the first rudiments—he publicly dictates out of boastfulness and corrects out of shamelessness.

2.1.3. Everything he covets he as it were buys, neither paying the price, which he scorns, nor receiving the deeds, which he despairs of. In the assembly he commands, in the council he is silent; in church he jests, at the banquet he preaches; in the bedchamber he condemns, at the inquiry he dozes. Daily he fills the woods with fugitives, the country-houses with guests, the altars with the accused, the prisons with clergy; exulting over the Goths and insulting the Romans, mocking the prefects and conniving with the accountants, trampling the Theodosian laws and proclaiming the Theodoricean, he hunts out old faults and new tributes.

2.1.4. Therefore unwind your delays quickly, and cut through whatever it is that holds you back. The last liberty of your quivering fellow-citizens awaits you. Whatever is to be hoped, whatever to be despaired of, they are content that it be done with you in the midst, with you as president. If there are no forces from the commonwealth, no garrisons, if there are none—as rumour goes—of the resources of the prince Anthemius, the nobility has resolved, on your authority, either to give up its fatherland or its hair. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Domitius, greetings.

2.2.1. You make it a charge against me that I am in the country, when I might rather complain that you are now kept in the city. Already spring gives way to summer, and the sun, raised along its outermost lines, is stretched toward the Scythian pole with a wandering ray. Here, what shall I say of the climate of our region? whose tracts the divine craftsman has so stretched out that we are the more subjected to the heats of the western world. What more? The world has grown white-hot: the Alpine ice is melted, and the earth is written over with the gaping bends of parched cracks; the gravel lies foul in the shallows, the mud on the banks, the dust on the fields; the very water, wherever it slides in a perpetual course, languishes and lingers; now the wave not only grows warm but is boiled.

2.2.2. And now, while one man sweats in linen, another in silk, you—muffled in a thick cloak without and swathed in bands within, and moreover hemmed in the hollow chair of the man of Ameria—begin, yawning, to expound to pupils as pale with the heat no less than with fear: "Samian was my mother." Why rather, if anything wholesome is dear to your heart, do you not swiftly slip away from the panting straits of the city, and, gladly inserted into our company, cheat the dog-day inclemency by a most clement retreat?

2.2.3. If indeed it is your pleasure, hear what is the situation of the estate to which I invite you. We are at Avitacum: this is the name of the property, which, because it came to me with my wife, is sweeter to me than my paternal home. There I have, by God's favour—unless you fear some evil eye—concord with my household. A mountain on the west, earthen though it is, yet steep, pours forth from itself lower hills, as from a twin source, drawn off from it for about four acres in breadth. But until the level space of a forecourt fitting for the dwelling opens out, the sides of the slopes accompany the middle valley in straight lines right up to the edge of the villa, which is extended with its fronts turned to north and south.

2.2.4. The bath clings, on the south-west, to the roots of a wooded rock, and when the wood for cutting is felled on the ridge, it is hurled, as if by a spontaneous fall, with the falling heaps into the mouth of the furnace. From here rises the chamber of the heated waters, which squares with the anointing-room that follows it in an equal extent of space—except for the semicircle of the capacious basin, where the force of the boiling water, wound through a wall pierced with channels of flexible lead, sobs as it comes. Within the heated room there is solid daylight, and such an abundance of enclosed light that it compels all modest persons to think themselves something more than naked.

2.2.5. From here the cold-room is spread out, which might not immodestly rival the swimming-pools built by public works. First, the peak of the roof being pointed into a cone, while the ridges of the crests meeting in four directions from the angles are tiled with intervening tiles (the room itself is squared with most exact spaciousness in fitting measures, so that, without the service of the attendants hindering one another, it can receive as many chairs as the semicircular couch is wont to hold persons), the builder set two windows opposite each other at the junction of the hanging vault, so as to open the skilfully wrought panelled ceiling to the gaze of those who look up. The inner face of the walls is content with the bare whiteness of the smoothed plaster.

2.2.6. There no base scene stands forth in the naked beauty of painted bodies, which, as it adorns the art, so it disgraces the artist. Absent are the actors, ridiculous in dress and faces, counterfeiting with many-coloured pigments the stock of Philistio; absent are the slippery and writhing wrestlers in their bouts and grips, whose struggles—even of living men—if they are entangled too obscenely, the chaste rod of the gymnasium-masters at once breaks up.

2.2.7. What more? Nothing will be found impressed upon those panels which it would not be more holy not to have seen. Yet a few little verses will detain the casual reader, with a by no means displeasing moderation, since neither is there desire to re-read them nor weariness to read them through. Now if you ask after the marbles: there indeed neither Paros, Carystus, nor Proconnesus, nor Phrygians, Numidians, or Spartans laid down crusts of varied rock; nor, over Ethiopian crags and purple cliffs dyed with native shellfish, do the stones feign for me a scattered bran. But even if we are enriched with no hardness of foreign crags, yet my huts—or rather my hovels—have native coolness. Nay rather, listen to what we have rather than what we have not.

2.2.8. To this hall an appendix is joined on the east, outside—a pool, or, if you prefer to speak Greek, a baptistery—which holds about twenty thousand pints. Here a threefold entrance through the middle wall is opened by arched intervals to those who come, washed, from the heat. Nor are there piers in the middle, but columns, which the more skilful architects have named "the purples" of buildings. Into this pool, then, a stream drawn from the brow of the mountain and bent through channels carried around by the outer sides of the swimming-place, six pipes pour forth, jutting out with the feigned heads of lions; which to those who rashly enter will image real lattices of teeth, sheer fury of eyes, and certain manes of necks.

2.2.9. Here, if the household or the guest-throng stands about its master, since by reason of the noise of the falling water the mutual exchange of voices is little understood, the company talks into one another's ears; so, pressed by another's sound, the public talk affects a ridiculous secrecy. From here, to those going out, the front of the women's dining-room presents itself, to which is joined, by a neighbouring weaving-room, the store-chamber, separated only by a partition of camp-style.

2.2.10. On the east a portico looks upon the lake, supported rather by rounded shafts than by single columns that provoke envy. On the side of the forecourt a roofed length lies open within, not interrupted by middle walls, which, because it itself surveys nothing—even if not a hippodrome—shall at least by my own right be called a covered gallery. This, however, defrauding something of its space at the far end of the walk, makes a member well cooled, where, a public couch being set, the most talkative choir of little clients or of nurses sounds the retreat when I and my household have sought the sleeping-chamber.

2.2.11. From the covered gallery one comes into the winter dining-room, which the fire often kindled in the arched hearth has stained with black soot. But what is this to you, whom I now by no means invite to the fireside? Rather let me speak of what pertains to you and the season. From this dining-room a passage is made into a parlour or little supper-room, to which nearly the whole lake, and the whole of the lake's view, lies open. In this is a couch and a shining sideboard, to whose floor or platform one ascends gently from the portico below by steps not shortened or narrowed. Reclining there, if you have any leisure amid your eating, you are occupied with the pleasures of looking out.

2.2.12. Now if water cooled from that most celebrated of springs is brought to you, you will see in the goblets, suddenly poured full, the stains of snow and fragments of cloud, and that slippery brightness of the cups dulled by a kind of fatness of the sudden chill. Then drinks answering to the cups, whose icy ladles would be feared by anyone thirsty—not to say by you, who are grandly abstemious. From here you will now watch how the fisherman pushes his alder boat into the deep, how he stretches his standing nets with their cork floats, or how, with signs set out at fixed intervals, the hooked lines are balanced in a row—namely, that in their nightly excursions across the lake the most rapacious salmon-trout may be driven into snares against their kin: for what could I say more fitting than this, when fish is deceived by fish?

2.2.13. The meal ended, a lodging will receive you, which, because least sultry, is most summery; for by this, that it lies open only to the north, it has daylight, but not sun, with a very narrow ante-room set between, where for the drowsy chamberlains there is a place rather of nodding than of sleeping.

2.2.14. How delightful it is here to have the cicadas sound in one's ears, chirping at noon; the frogs babbling as twilight comes on; the swans and geese clanging in the first watch of night; the cocks crowing at the dead of night; the ill-omened crows with thrice-repeated voice saluting the ruddy torch of rising Dawn; and at daybreak Philomela whistling among the bushes, Procne twittering among the rafters! To which concert you may join the herdsman's pipe of seven reeds, which often, in nightly contests of song, our sleepless Tityri of the mountains ply, re-echoing among the tinkling flocks through the cropped pastures. Yet these varied modulations of voices and songs, by fostering it more deeply, will entice your slumber.

2.2.15. When you have gone out from the porticoes, if you seek the harbour of the shore, in a green meadow there is the common brightness—though not far off a grove: two huge lindens, with their foliage joined but their stems apart, trust to make one shade, though not from one root. In whose shade, when my Ecdicius lights up my house, we give ourselves to ball; but only so far, until the trees' shadow, drawn in, is restrained within the span of the branches and there makes a gaming-place for the weary, the ball-court being used up.

2.2.16. But since, as I have discharged the building to you, so I owe you the lake, learn what remains. The lake flows down toward the south-east, and the alluvial flood, surging as the winds stir it, wets the foundations pressed into its sand-banks of the dwelling. It is indeed, around its beginnings, full of whirlpools in its marshy soil, and unapproachable by the foot of an inspector; so the fatness of the spongy mud coalesces, with cold springs surrounding it and weedy shores. Nevertheless the moving plain of the deep is cut far and wide by roving little skiffs, when the breezes have laid still; but if a southern whirlwind has fouled it, it swells monstrously, so that the crash of the spray flung up rains down upon the leaves of the trees that stand on the margin.

2.2.17. The lake itself, according to what they call nautical measures, runs out to seventeen stadia, entered by a river which, dashed roughly against the barriers of the rocks, grows white with its foamy impulse, and, not long withdrawn from the steep crags, is hidden in the lake; whether perchance it runs into or makes the lake, it at least passes through, forced to be filtered through subterranean strainers, that it may be impoverished not of its floods but of its fishes; which, driven back into the more sluggish pool, stretch out red flesh with white bellies: so, since they are able neither to return nor are permitted to go out, their bulk makes for them a kind of living and movable prison.

2.2.18. The lake itself, where it is on the right, is cut, winding, and wooded; where on the left, open, grassy, level. The surface on the south-west is green along the shore, because, the foliage being stretched over into the wave, as the water bathes the gravel, so the shade bathes the waters; and from the east a like crown of woods continues this colour. Along the northern side, as there is the nature of the open sea, so the look; from the west, a common and disorderly thicket, often bent by the weight of the skiffs gliding over it; about which the slippery tendrils of bulrushes are folded, and at once the fat pages of the sedge float, and the bitterness of the grey-green willows, ever fostered by the sweet waters.

2.2.19. In the midst of the deep is a small island, where, above mill-stones naturally heaped, a turning-post juts up, worn by the navy's circlings, by the prick-marks of the oars driven against it; against which the pleasant shipwrecks of the players dash themselves. For it was the custom here for our elders to imitate the Drepanitan contest of Trojan superstition. Now indeed the estate itself—though this is beyond what is due—is spread out in woods, painted in meadows, rich in flocks in its pastures, wealthy in shepherds.

2.2.20. But I delay no longer, lest, if my pen sets too long a limit, autumn find you re-reading this. Therefore grant me swiftness in coming (for the delay of returning you will yourself provide), about to grant pardon for this, that a letter somewhat too scrupulous has exceeded the brevity owed it, while it anxiously searches out the whole situation of the country—though even so, in zeal to remove tedium, it has not grazed everything. Wherefore a good judge and a craftsman-reader will pronounce great, not the page that describes the spaces, but the villa, spacious, which is described. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Felix, greetings.

2.3.1. I rejoice, my honoured lord, that you have attained the fillets of the most ample dignity; but that this is announced to me by a courier sent for this very purpose, I rejoice no less. For although at present you are the most powerful magistrate, and the patrician eminence has returned to the house of Philagrius, after so many ages, only by your good fortune, yet you find, most faithful of friends, how the summit of your honours grows by sharing it, and by a rare kind of example you make your loftiness sublime by humility.

2.3.2. So once public favour preferred Quintus Fabius, the master of horse, to the dictator's rigour and the pride of Papirius; so a popularity never disdained raised Gnaeus Pompeius above his rivals; so Germanicus, by the love of all, crushed the envy of Tiberius. Wherefore I would not have the principal benefits flatter themselves much over your successes, which could confer nothing further on you than that, if we had not willed it, we should have been passed over against our will. This is your own peculiarly, this of singular grace: that you as little have men to rival you as you find men to follow you. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Sagittarius, greetings.

2.4.1. The most distinguished Projectus, noble at home, conspicuous through his father and uncle, men of senatorial rank, and through his grandfather too, a most excellent priest, casts himself most eagerly into the bosom of your friendship, unless you reject him; and since splendour of family, uprightness of character, the means of a patrimony, and the briskness of youth meet together in him in equal balance toward every honour, yet only then will he seem to himself borne to the citadel of the most exalted felicity, if he obtains the fellowship of your favour.

2.4.2. The daughter of the most distinguished Optantius, lately departed this life—which by God's prospering may turn out well—though he has sought and obtained her in marriage from the girl's mother, yet he reckons the effect of his wishes too little advanced, unless he gains your assent over all these matters, whether by his own diligence or by the entreaty of our intercession. For you yourself, as regards the bringing-up of the girl, succeed in the place of her dead father by sharing the cares, conferring on the maiden a parent's affection, a patron's authority, a guardian's office.

2.4.3. Wherefore, since you are worthy that the most renowned discipline of your house should be sought, by the ambition even of those set far off, as befits men of the good party, grace the suppliant suitor's modesty with the kindness of your answer; and, since, being thus sought, you ought to seek out for him the bride to be promised, securely allow the promise, since the reckoning of his merits has so set you over this match that not even to a surviving Optantius would more have been fitting toward his own children. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Petronius, greetings.

2.5.1. Johannes, my friend, has fallen into the inextricable labyrinth of a manifold lawsuit, and until either your knowledge, or one (if there is any) like to yours, has examined the merits of his documents, he knows not what to refuse, what to choose. So the form of the divided suit confounds him in a certain way, that his own statement of claim does not know which order of action it is to defend, which to attack.

2.5.2. For him I pour out an earnest prayer, that, having looked through his papers, you may instruct him if anything is legally to his advantage—what things and in what way are to be objected, showing what are to be refuted. For we shall not fear that the course of his case, if it flows from the fount of your counsel, may be thinned by any diverting of his opponents. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Pegasius, greetings.

2.6.1. It is proverbially well known that delay is often the better course, as even now we have found by experience. Menstruanus, your friend, observed here over a long time, has earned to be reckoned among the persons dear and bound to us also—obliging, refined, modest, sober, frugal, devout, and endowed with such gifts of character that, as often as he is taken into the friendships of any good man, he himself gains no more of a benefit than he bestows.

2.6.2. These things I have written to you not as to one ignorant, but to satisfy my own judgement. Wherefore there is a threefold cause for gladness: the first yours, to whom it falls so to form or to choose friends; the second the Arvernians', whom I affirm to have been pleased in him by that which I do not doubt you approved; the third his, of whom all good men have judged all good things. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Explicius, greetings.

2.7.1. Since your justice is rightly made venerable to the whole community through many proofs of rectitude, therefore I willingly and eagerly send each several person who demands this very thing into your examination, ambitious that I as soon as possible be relieved of the burden of arbitration, they of that of enmity—which will indeed follow only if you, a modest censor, do not wholly exclude the complaints of the parties; although even this very thing, that you grudgingly grant the means of access to litigants, is a sign of one who will judge well: for who would not seek to be an arbiter, intending to indulge something either to law or to price or to favour?

2.7.2. Therefore pardon those who, to the prerogative of so holy a conscience, hasten swiftly and quickly, since neither does the loser, as a dullard, accuse your verdict, nor the victor, as a sharp man, deride it; and out of regard for truth they pay you, the condemned their reverence, the acquitted their gratitude. Accordingly I earnestly beseech that the matters that come into dispute between Alethius and Paulus you should, as soon as both sides have been set forth, untie. For, unless I am mistaken, above the verdicts of decemvirs and pontiffs, the temperance of your character alone, with its wonted soundness of judging, will heal the sickness of this almost interminable quarrel. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Desideratus, greetings.

2.8.1. Most sorrowful, I announce these things to you: three days ago, not without a suspension of public business, the lady Philomathia died—a complaisant wife, a clement mistress, a useful mother, a dutiful daughter, to whom at home and abroad the lesser person owed obedience, the greater service, the equal affection. She, being long since the only child of a mother already lost, had easily, by various kinds of endearments, brought it about that her father, still young, did not feel the want of offspring of the other sex. But now, by a sudden end, she pierces her husband with widowhood, her father with bereavement. To this is added that, a parent of five children, by her untimely death she has made her fruitfulness unfortunate. Which little ones, if, their mother surviving, they had lost their father, already long since enfeebled, would be reckoned less as orphans.

2.8.2. Her, however—if any honour is not in vain bestowed on corpses—no ominous services of corpse-bearers and bier-men buried; but, while all, even strangers, weeping, kept clutching, delaying, kissing the very bier, she was taken up by the hands of priests and kinsfolk and borne into her everlasting seat, more like one sleeping. After which, at the entreaty of the bereaved father, I composed a funeral dirge, not in elegiacs but in hendecasyllables, to be cut in marble, dictated with the lament well-nigh still warm; which, if you do not sufficiently disapprove, the hireling bookseller will undertake to attach to the other volumes of my epigrams; if otherwise, it is enough that a stony song be contained on stone. For this is the epitaph:

2.8.3. Snatched away by a swift and savage death, known to her five, her father, and her husband, this woman—Philomathia—the hands of her weeping country laid within this tomb.

O splendour of her line, glory of her husband, prudent, chaste, comely, grave, and sweet, to be followed even by her elders, the qualities men think discordant you joined by the kindliness of your ways: for the companions of your good life were a weighty freedom and a witty modesty.

Hence it is that we grieve the tenth triennial of your life scarce ended, and that, in the season of your flourishing years, the last rites were unjustly paid to you.

Whether the poem pleases or not: do you make haste, and visit the city in your haste; for you owe the office of consolation to the afflicted houses of two fellow-citizens—which may you so discharge, I pray God, that it may never be repaid to you. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Donidius, greetings.

2.9.1. You ask why I, who set out for Nemausus long ago, should prolong your longing by my late arrival. I render the causes of my tardier return, nor do I delay to disclose my delays, since what is sweet to me is sweet to you also: amid the most pleasant fields, the most courteous masters, Ferreolus and Apollinaris, I have spent a most delightful time. The rights of their estates are bordering, their dwellings neighbouring, with a drive between them that wearies the walker and yet is not enough for one on horseback. The hills above the houses are worked by vine-dresser and olive-tender: you would think them Aracynthus and Nysa, ridges celebrated in the songs of poets. The one house has its prospect over the plain and open country, the other over the woods; but none the less the unlike situation pleases alike.

2.9.2. But why now say more of the situation of the estates, when the order of their hospitality remains to be unlocked? First of all, most sagacious scouts being sent out for this purpose, to spy out the road of our return, each house beset not only the tracks of the public highways but also the paths winding by short-cuts and the shepherds' by-ways, lest by any chance we should slip past the snares of their courtesies laid in our path. Into which we fell, I confess, but by no means unwillingly, and were at once compelled to give an oath that, before seven days had rolled by, we would meditate nothing of the continuation of our journey.

2.9.3. So every morning there was a first and pleasing contention between the two sides over the guest—whose kitchen, namely, should first smoke for our meals; nor indeed could the alternation set the scale evenly to the division, although to one house I was bound by a tie of kinship through myself, to the other through my own people: for to Ferreolus, a man of prefectorian rank, his age and dignity gave the prerogative of being the first inviter, besides the kinship owed him.

2.9.4. So we were hurried from delights to delights. Scarcely had any forecourt been entered, and behold, here the pairs of contending ball-players were redoubled amid the wheeling turns of their feints; here, amid the rivalries of dice-players' voices, was heard the frequent rattle of the clattering dice-boxes and dice; here books in abundance ready to hand (you would have thought you saw either the bookshelves of grammarians, or the wedge-rows of an Athenaeum, or the built-up cabinets of booksellers). So it was, however, that the volumes which were among the chairs of the ladies were found to be of a religious style, while those that were among the benches of the heads of households were ennobled with the buskin of Latin eloquence; though certain volumes of certain authors preserved, in unlike subjects, an equality of style: for men of like learning—here Augustine, there Varro, here Horace, there Prudentius—were read.

2.9.5. Among whom Adamantius Origen, interpreted by Turranius Rufinus, was diligently examined by readers of our faith; and, as each had it at heart, we discoursed, judging various things—why he was disapproved by some of the chief mystics as a perverse and dangerous expositor, although he had been so translated to the word and the sense that neither did Apuleius transcribe the Phaedo of Plato so, nor Tullius the Ctesiphon of Demosthenes so, to the use and rule of Roman speech.

2.9.6. While each of us was busied with these studies, as it had pleased, behold, one came from the head cook to warn that the time pressed for refreshing our bodies; whom indeed, a messenger keeping the increments of the hours by the spaces of the water-clock, the departing fifth hour proved to have entered fittingly. We lunched, briefly yet abundantly, after the senatorial manner, whereby it is inbred and established that many viands be set on in few dishes—though the banquet was varied by foods now roasted, now in sauce. Amid the drinking, little tales, by the knowing of which we were made merry and instructed; for, woven in a twofold strand, gaiety and skill accompanied them. What more? Holily, beautifully, abundantly we were received.

2.9.7. Then rising, if we were at Vorocingus (this was the name of one estate), we carried our foot back to our baggage and lodging; if at Prusianum (so the other farm was called), we cast Tonantius and his brothers, the choicest princes of our noble coevals, out of their own couches, since not easily could the furniture of our beds be carried about so often. The midday torpor being shaken off, we rode a little while, that we might the more easily whet our palates, sluggish with food, to a dinner-time hunger.

2.9.8. Each host had baths in process of building, neither in use; but when the throng of my followers and servants, drinking-companions—over whose brains the hospitable bowls, too deeply plunged, lorded it—had ceased to drink even a little, a pit was quickly dug near a spring or river, into which, when a heap of heated stones chanced to be let down, the trench, kindling, was covered over with a vault woven into the form of a hemisphere from flexible hazel-rods, yet so that, with Cilician hangings thrown over, the open intervals of the rods were darkened, the light shut out, to drive back the rising vapour which is struck off the flaming flints by the sprinkling of the boiling water.

2.9.9. Here the hours were drawn out for us not without salt and jesting talk; among which, the place being filled and wrapped with the breath of the hissing mist, a most healthful sweat was drawn out; when which, poured forth as it pleased, we were thrust into the heated waters, and, dissolved by their warmth wiping away our crudity, we were afterward braced either by the cold of spring and well, or by the abundance of the river: since between the houses runs the river Vardo, which—except when, fed by melted snow, it grows pale—is red over its yellow gravel, and clear through its channel, quiet and pebbly, yet none the less productive of delicate fish.

2.9.10. I would tell of the dinners too, and those most richly dressed, had not the page set a limit to our loquacity which modesty does not apply; the recounting of which also would be pleasant in the telling, did we not blush to soil the back of the letter with wet pens. But since we ourselves are on the point of setting out, and it pleases us, by Christ's help, to visit you straightway, the dinners of friends will be more readily recounted to you at my dinner and yours—provided only that the completed spaces of the past week restore us as soon as possible to a longed-for hunger, since nothing is wont better to repair a stomach burst by gluttony than abstinence. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Hesperius, greetings.

2.10.1. I love in you that you love letters, and I strive everywhere, with most heaped-up praises, to honour the nobility of so great a diligence, by which you commend to us not only your own beginnings but our own studies. For when we see the talents of the young growing up into a discipline of this kind—for which we too withdrew our hand from the cane—we reap the most abundant fruit of our labour. Add this, that the multitude of the slothful has so increased that, unless even a very few of you vindicate the pure propriety of the Latin tongue from the rust of common barbarisms, we may soon lament it abolished and slain: so all the purple robes of noble speech will be discoloured through the carelessness of the crowd.

2.10.2. But of this elsewhere. Meanwhile receive what you ask. You ask that, if any little verses have flowed from me since we parted from each other, I should count them out to you as a kind of payment for the delays. I obey the word; for you are endowed, though young, with such maturity of mind that we are eager to humour you even before your elders. A church has lately been built at Lugdunum, which by the zeal of Bishop Patiens has reached the summit of the work begun—a man holy, energetic, severe, merciful, and one who, by abundant munificence toward the poor and by kindness, raises summits of good conscience no less lofty. At the request of the aforesaid prelate, then, I inscribed for the outer parts of this building a hasty poem in trochaic triplets, very familiar by now to me and to you.

2.10.3. For from the hexameters of the eminent poets Constantius and Secundinus the neighbouring sides of the basilica grow bright next to the altar; whom my modesty most of all forbids to be admitted to this page—a modesty which, as I tremulously publish my idle pieces, the comparison of better songs oppresses.

2.10.4. For just as nothing less becomes a new bride than a matron of honour fairer than herself; just as, if a man be clothed in white, every dark man is made darker; so my stalk of straw, however small it is, surrounded by mightier trumpets, grows cheap—which to be pronounced middling in place, lowest in merit and more contemptible, not only ignorance but arrogance brings about. Wherefore more justly do their epigrams gleam than these of mine, which I fashion only in imagination and, in a manner, in shadow. But to what end this? Rather let the beggarly stalk of the demanded song murmur on:

"Whoever you are who here praise the labour of Patiens, our bishop and father, may you, with your wish fulfilled, experience by supplication the thing granted that you shall ask.

The lofty church shines, and is drawn neither to the left nor to the right, but with the height of its front looks upon the equinoctial east. Within, the light gleams, and the sun is so drawn to the gilded panelled ceiling that it strays, one-coloured, over the tawny metal. The marble, marked with varied brightness, runs through the vault, the floor, the windows; and beneath the varied figures the springing green crust bends sapphire-blue stones through the leek-green glass.

To this a threefold portico is joined, proud with Aquitanian columns; after whose model the more distant courts enclose a second portico, and the stony grove, far set among the columns, clothes the middle field.

Here the highway sounds, here the Saône re-echoes, here the foot-traveller and the horseman turn back, and the driver of the screeching carts; here the choir of bent bargemen lifts to Christ, with the banks answering "Alleluia," the river boat-song.

So, so sing psalms, sailor or wayfarer; for this is the place all must seek, whither the way leads all to salvation."

2.10.5. Behold, I have obeyed your commands like a younger man: only do you take care to remember that I am to be repaid with multiplied interest; and that you may do this the more easily and pleasurably, you must read without dissembling, and crave to read without end; nor must you suffer your wife, soon to be happily led home, to turn you from this purpose; and you must be exceedingly mindful that once Marcia held the candles and candelabra for Hortensius, Terentia for Tullius, Calpurnia for Pliny, Pudentilla for Apuleius, Rusticiana for Symmachus, as they read and meditated.

2.10.6. Surely, if you complain that, besides oratory, in the fellowship of women your poetic talent and the file of your tongue, polished on the whetstones of frequent studies, is blunted—remember that often Corinna completed a verse with her Naso, Lesbia with Catullus, Caesennia with Gaetulicus, Argentaria with Lucan, Cynthia with Propertius, Delia with Tibullus. So it would clearly grant that, through marriage, occasion of learning is given to the studious, an excuse to the slothful. Therefore apply yourself, nor let the crowd of the unskilled cheapen literary pursuits with you; for it is so ordered by nature that in all arts the display of knowledge is the more precious, the rarer it is. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Rusticus, greetings.

2.11.1. If we were neighbours, according to the situation and spaces of our regions, and our mutual presence were not sundered from each other by the length of a vast journey, I would allow nothing to the rareness of my letters in the offices of our begun friendship, nor would I cease to build up, with diverse kinds of honours, the foundations once laid of an emulous friendship. But our settled habitation, separated for each of us by farther-stretching bounds, opposes itself to the conjunction of our minds—though indeed it will harm little hearts once bound together.

2.11.2. But nevertheless from the very separation of our common towns it comes that, although we are most friendly, the rareness of converse, coming from the long interposition of lands, we wish to transfer into a common fault, though, by reason of the difficulty of natural things, neither blame nor pardon ought to remain with us. Illustrious lord, the bearers of this letter, formed by the training of your discipline and bearing the modesty of their master's manners, I have admitted in good time, heard patiently, and dispatched suitably. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Agricola, greetings.

2.12.1. You did indeed send a skiff, swift and solid, large enough for a couch and now stocked with fish; and besides a steersman far skilled, oarsmen too sturdy and ready, who fly past the back of the adverse river with the same swiftness as they do downstream. But you will pardon me that I decline to come as your companion to the fishing when you invite me; for nets of grief, far stronger, hold me, because of those of mine who are lying ill—nets to be grieved over by friends and even by strangers. Hence I think that you too, if you are moved rightly by brotherly affection, at whatever point of time you take up this page, will think rather of returning.

2.12.2. Severiana, our common care, disturbed first by the assault of a slow cough, is now wearied by fevers also, and these growing worse through the nights; on which account she longs to go out into the suburb. Finally, when we were taking up your letter, we were already preparing to go out to the little villa. Wherefore whether you come or delay, aid our prayers with your orations, that, as she desires the air of the country, the very restoration may wholesomely follow. Certainly I, or your sister, suspended between hope and fear, believed that her weariness would be increased if we opposed the will of one lying ill.

2.12.3. So, by the leading of Christ, we are taking out from the heat and torpor of the city both ourselves and the whole household alike, and at the same time we shun the counsels of the physicians who sit by and disagree, who, too little learned and quite too zealous, most officiously kill many sick men. Indeed, by the right of friendship, Justus will be added to our company, whom, if it were lawful to jest in sad matters, I could easily convince to be trained rather in the art of Chiron than in that of Machaon. The more diligently, therefore, must Christ be asked and besought that the supernal power may heal a health whose cure our care does not find. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Serranus, greetings.

2.13.1. Marcellinus, an advocate, presented to us your letter—a man skilled, and one of friends—which, the salutation tasted in its first words, in the rest of its course, which indeed is large, contained the praises of your patron Petronius Maximus, the emperor; whom, however, you call most fortunate, more persistently or affectionately than rightly and truly, namely on this account, that he was carried up through the most ample titles of office even to the empire. But to such a sentence I never assent, that I should think those fortunate who stand upon the headlong and slippery summits of the commonwealth.

2.13.2. For it cannot be told how much, hour by hour, the life of those fortunate ones in this life bears of miseries—if indeed those are so to be pronounced who, like Sulla, presume this name for themselves: those, namely, who, having overstepped common right and law, esteem the highest power the highest blessedness, by this very thing the more wretched, that they too little understand themselves to be subject to a most restless servitude. For as kings lord it over men, so the desires of domineering lord it over kings.

2.13.3. Here, if we pass over the misfortunes of preceding princes or of those who followed, this peculiar Maximus of yours alone could be the greatest proof to us of these things; who, although he had ascended fearlessly to the prefectorian, patrician, and consular citadel, and, unsatisfied, had repeated the magistracies he had held as if in recurring orbits, yet, when he came with all his might to the precipice of the principal eminence, suffered a kind of vertigo of immense power under the crown, nor could he endure to be a lord, who had not endured to be under a lord.

2.13.4. In short, seek out in the aforesaid the grace, power, and long duration of his former life, and on the other side the origin, the whirlwind, the end of a principate a little more than two months long: assuredly you will find that the man was happier before he was named most happy. So he, whose feasts, manners, moneys, pomp, letters, offices, patrimonies, patronages flourished before, whose very spaces of life, in short, were so guarded that they were unfolded by the water-clocks set out hour by hour—he, named Augustus, and under this appearance shut within the Palatine thresholds, groaned before twilight that he had come to his wishes; and since, by the mass of cares, he was prevented from keeping the measure of his former quiet, he at once renounced the laws of his old rule and perceived alike that the business of a prince and the leisure of a senator cannot go together.

2.13.5. Nor did the future deceive him as he mourned; for whereas he had run through the other court honours most tranquilly, he ruled the court itself most turbulently, amid the tumults of soldiers, of the people, of the federates; which his end too betrayed—new, swift, bitter—stained with blood by the treacherous end of a Fortune long flattering, who struck the man, like a scorpion, with her last part. A man learned, and through the merits of his talent of quaestorian rank—certainly a great part of the good party—Fulgentius was wont to say that he had often heard from his mouth, when, hating the weight of empire, he longed for his old security: "Happy you, Damocles, who endured the necessity of a kingdom no longer than one luncheon."

2.13.6. For this Damocles, as we read, was by province a Sicilian, by city a Syracusan, and a familiar of the tyrant Dionysius. When he was extolling the goods of his patron, like everything else of course untried by him, with too great praises: "Will you," said Dionysius, "today at least at this table enjoy my goods alike with my evils?" "Gladly," he said. Then he at once enriches the joyful client—though astonished—his plebeian covering being snatched away, with a robe dyed in the shellfish of Tyrian or Tarentine purple, and sets him, gleaming with gems and pearls, on a golden couch and a silken tapestry.

2.13.7. And when, as he was about to dine, bread made from the Leontine harvest was given him after the manner of Sardanapalus, and besides choice viands were set on in choicer dishes, and the capacious gems foamed with Falernian, and the unguents grew warm in the icy crystals, and the dining-room, perfumed with cinnamon and frankincense, scattered foreign odours to the nostrils, and the garlands of flowers poured round dried his hair wet with nard—there began, above the back of him as he thus reclined, suddenly to be brandished a drawn sword-point from the panelled ceiling, which seemed about to fall, at any instant, into the throat of the purple-clad man; for, bound by a thread of horse-hair and so threatening by its weight, it bridled with its point the throat of the frightened man after the example of Tantalus, lest the food entering should go out through the mouth, through the wound.

2.13.8. Whence, after prayers mingled with weeping and manifold sighs, scarcely released and leaping out at a bound, he fled those riches and royal delights with that swiftness with which they are wont to be sought, brought back to the desires of the middling by fear of the highest, and taking sufficient care lest he should hereafter call or count happy one who, hedged about with arms and guards, and on that account brooding over plundered wealth, pressed by the steel, pressed the gold. Wherefore, toward a state of this kind, my lord brother, I know not whether it is agreed that the happy strive; it is at least plain that the wretched arrive. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Maurusius, greetings.

2.14.1. I hear that the vintage answers to your industry and our common wishes with a richer yield than the barren year threatened. Whence I suspect that you will tarry rather long in the district of Vialoscum, which in nearer times was called Martialis on account of the winter quarters of the Julian legions; in which place you have both a fruitful vineyard, and besides it an estate worthy of no small master, which detains you and your household with a manifold dowry of crops and of lodgings.

2.14.2. So if, with barns and store-rooms or larder filled, you intend to pass there, until the coming of the swallow or the stork, the snowy months of Janus and Numa in sooty leisure or in tunicked quiet, the causes of our delays in the town—of little profit—will likewise be at once cut off, so that, while you enjoy the country, we may enjoy you; to whom, as you recognize, a field with ample revenues is no more at heart or a pleasure than a neighbour, my equal, with good morals. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Avitus, greetings.

3.1.1. By many bonds of affection, from earliest boyhood right up to the time we came into youth, the care of mutual goodwill had knit us together: first because between our mothers there was the highest tie of joined blood; then because we ourselves, born at the same times, used the same masters, were trained in the same arts, took our leisure in the same sports, were advanced by the same princes, and served out the same terms of military pay. And—what for enlarging friendships is more powerful and effective than these—in each and every person, whether equally to be sought or to be guarded against, we strove with a like parity of judgement.

3.1.2. On account of all which (I pass over our shared conscience, which inwardly is far more excellent and eminent for you) the multitude of public actions run through together had greatly coupled our wills. But—what must be confessed—when the engines of love had long been raised on either side, you yourself placed the precious summit, enriching with a most opportune gift the church of the little township of Auvergne, over which, though undeservedly, I seem to be set; to whose possession you contributed very greatly by the suburban estate of Cuticiacum, deigning to enrich the brotherhood of our profession no less by the nearness of the place than by its revenue.

3.1.3. And although you two seem to be the joint heirs of a sister's inheritance, yet, by the example of your faith, your surviving sister was stirred to the imitation of a good work. So to you, by heaven's justice, is repaid the merit of your own deed, the incitement of another's; whence it comes that you are found most worthy to be one whom the Divinity exalts by an unusual kind of succession—which, however, has neither long deferred to enrich your religious devotion with hundredfold gifts, and which, as we trust, will no less readily bestow heavenly things, when it now pays the earthly. For the Nicetian inheritance, if you do not know, was the heavenly price of Cuticiacum.

3.1.4. For what remains, we beg that, as of our church, so also of our city, the care may be alike common to you—a city which, both formerly and now especially from this time, ought to belong to your patronage, or for the sake of your patrimony, of what merit that may be able to be, namely if your presence frequently visits it. Or believe the Goths, who often even disdain or give back their own Septimania, provided they may possess, even in its desolate ownership, the property of this enviable corner.

3.1.5. But it is right, by God presiding, for you, set in the midst between them and the commonwealth, to conceive quieter things in your mind; for, even if they, the bounds of the old frontiers being broken, with all their force or with the whole mass of a turbulent possession push forward their boundaries to the Rhône and the Loire, yet your authority, by the dignity of its judgement, will so moderate each party that ours may learn what it ought to deny when it is asked, and the adversary may cease to demand when it is refused. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greetings.

3.2.1. The people of Auvergne salute you, whose small huts you, a great guest, filled—not ambitious in your retinue but to be courted for your 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, beset by every order, sex, and age! What a balance of salt in your speech toward each! How gracious the boys, how courteous the young men, how grave the old men measured you! What tears, like a father of all, you shed over the houses thrown down by fire and the half-burnt dwellings! How you grieved over the fields buried with unburied bones! What was then your exhortation, what the spirit of one urging restoration!

3.2.2. To this is added that, when you had found the city emptied no less by civic feud than by barbarian incursion, by persuading peace to all you restored to them affection, and them to their fatherland. And as, at your warning, they returned no less to one counsel than to one town, the walls owe you the people brought back, the people brought back owe you their concord. Wherefore they reckon you altogether their own, themselves altogether yours; and—what is your greatest glory—they are by no means deceived.

3.2.3. For it is set before the minds of each, day by day, that you, a person grave with age, frail with infirmity, sublime in nobility, venerable in religion, by the plea of love alone burst through so many bars, so many opposed difficulties of coming—namely, the length of the journeys, the shortness of the days, the abundance of snows, the scarcity of fodder, the breadth of the wastes, the narrowness of the lodgings, the gulfs of the roads, either rotten with the wet of rains or rough with the dryness of the frosts; and besides, either embankments rough with stones, or rivers slippery with ice, or hills rugged in the ascent, or valleys scraped bare by the constant fall of landslides. Through all which discomforts, since you were not seeking private comfort, you carried back the public love.

3.2.4. For what remains, we pray God that, the goals of your life being advanced according to your wishes, you may unweariedly seek, gain, and bring back the friendships of good men, and that the affection which you leave behind may follow you; and that the favours begun through you, wherever they be, may long be repaid to you—both the foundations and the summits. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Ecdicius, greetings.

3.3.1. If ever, now most of all you are longed for by my Arvernians, over whom love of you holds monstrous dominion—and that multiplied for many reasons: first because the land that bore him rightly usurps to itself the chief part in a man's affection; then because in your age you are almost the only mortal who made his fatherland feel no less longing before his birth than joy at his birth. The witnesses of these assertions are the times of your mother's travail of old, which, as the conception advanced, were numbered with the concordant prayers of the citizens.

3.3.2. I pass over those things common indeed, but no slight incitements of affection—the clods of this turf crept over by you; I pass over that here you first broke these grasses in your walking, these rivers in your swimming, these woods in your hunting. I pass over that here you first had ball, dice-tower, hawk, dog, horse, and bow for your sport. I omit that here, for the favour of your boyhood, the studies of letters flowed together from all nations, and that what was once owed to your person—that the nobility, about to lay aside the scale of Celtic speech—was imbued now with the orator's pen, now even with the measures of the Muses.

3.3.3. This kindled the affection of all toward you chiefly: that those whom you had once compelled to become Latins, you henceforth forbade to be barbarians. For it can never slip from the breasts of the citizens, what manner of man, and how great, all ages, orders, sexes lately beheld you from the half-ruined embankments of the walls, when, the intervening plains being traversed in the opposite direction, and accompanied by a fellowship of scarcely eighteen horsemen, you crossed through some thousands of Goths in mid-day no less than in mid-field—a thing posterity will hardly believe.

3.3.4. At the rumour of your name and the sight of your person, amazement overwhelmed a most practised army, so that, for wonder, the leaders of the enemy party did not know how many accompanied themselves and how few you. The whole battle-line was at once drawn up onto the brow of a steep hill, which, though it had first been applied to a siege, when you were seen was not deployed for the encounter. Meanwhile you, with all the best of them slain—those whom not cowardice but audacity had made last in the column—none of your own being missed in so great a contest, alone possessed the plain, however open it was, when the battle did not give you so many comrades as the table is wont to give guests.

3.3.5. From here, now brought back at leisure into the city, what offices, applauses, weepings, joys went forth to meet you, prayers rather attempt to conjecture than words to unlock; since one might see, in the crowded courts of a most capacious house, that very most happy ovation of your thronged return, while some snatch your dust with kisses, some take the bridle fat with blood and foam, some lay back the supports of the riding-saddles wet with sweat, some unbuckle the bands of the bending plates for your helmet about to come off your head, some are entangled in unfastening the knots of your greaves, some count up the toothed sides of the swords blunted with slaughter, some with livid fingers measure the rings of the breastplates pierced by cut and thrust.

3.3.6. Here, though many, dancing for joy, clung to the embraces of their own, yet upon you the greatest rush of popular gladness was heaped; and at last you had come into a crowd unarmed indeed, but from which not even armed could you extricate yourself; and you bore, with elegance no doubt, the absurdities of those who congratulated you; and while you were torn apart by the tumultuous embrace of those rushing in, you had come to such a condition, most loving interpreter of public love, that it was necessary for you to return a richer gratitude to him who had done you the freer injury.

3.3.7. I pass over next that you gathered, by private forces, the appearance of a public army, aided from outside by the small resources of greater men, and that you checked the unbridled forays of the enemy by chastising their ravages. I pass over that, with some surprise attacks, you slaughtered squadrons in their bands, scarcely two or three of your own being missed after the battle, and brought so much calamity, by unexpected contests, on the unconquered adverse party that they planned, by a more shameful counsel, to hide the great number of their slain. Since those whom the hurried night had forbidden to bury, they left with their corpses beheaded, as though it were a smaller token to be recognized by their hair than to have sent away the long-haired man truncated.

3.3.8. And after, the light returned, they understood that the theft of their own ruin had been laid bare by a cruel cheapness, then at last they were openly occupied with funeral offices, hiding the disaster no more by fraud than the fraud by haste; yet so that they neither entombed the bones with a mass of hurried turf, to which, neither washed, did they grant garments, nor, clothed, sepulchres—paying such just rites justly to the dead. The bodies lay everywhere, carried together in dripping wagons, which, since you pressed unceasingly upon the stricken, were hastily shut up in kindled dwellings and buried with the funeral fragments of the gliding roofs.

3.3.9. But why do I prattle of these things a little more than is just—I who have presumed not to weave a complete history of your labours, but to make a memorial in part, that you might the more believe the prayers of your own people, to whose ailing expectation no remedies will heal more wholesomely and swiftly than your arrival? Therefore, if you yield anything to the entreaties of our countrymen, make haste straightway to sound the retreat into your fatherland, and quickly take away your constant attendance from the dangerous familiarity of kings, whose intimacy each most experienced man rightly compares to the nature of flames, which, as removed a little from themselves they give light, so brought too near themselves they burn. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Felix, greetings.

3.4.1. Gozolas, a Jew by birth, a dependant of your eminence—whose person would be at heart to me also, were not his sect a thing of contempt—delivers my letter, which I wrote out grandly anxious; for the arms of the nations poured around us terrify our town as a kind of barrier of their frontier. So, set in the midst, a lamentable prey of peoples that rival one another, suspected by the Burgundians, neighbours to the Goths, we lack neither the wrath of attackers nor the envy of defenders.

3.4.2. But of this elsewhere. Meanwhile, if at least with you things are right, it is well. For we are not of such a breast that, although we ourselves are punished with open penalties on account of the hidden things of our crimes, we should not wish things to go prosperously even anywhere; for it is certain that he is no less a captive of vices than of enemies who has not, even amid evil times, kept good wishes. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Hypatius, greetings.

3.5.1. If the distinguished Donidius, an admirer and reverer of your character, had had regard only to the reckoning of his own domestic advantage, your good faith would suffice abundantly and to spare for his interests, even if no intercessor were added. But he was led by his love for me to make me request what he had himself by his own means obtained; and so now this addition accrues to your honour, that we are made two debtors, although yet one of us obtains the benefit.

3.5.2. He desires that the desolate half of the Eborolacan estate—even before the barbarians desolate, and which now looks to the rights of a patrician house—be joined, by your support, to his own right. Nor is he led to this bargain by the spur of cupidity, but by regard for ancestral remembrance. Since the whole of that farm looked, as the dominion of his own family, to the death of his stepfather, who lately departed this life; but now the man, not coveting another's, sparing of his own, is distressed by the loss of an old possession alienated from himself not so much by the damage as by the shame; and that he should attempt to redeem it, he is compelled not by the vice of avarice but by the necessity of modesty.

3.5.3. Deign to grant to his wishes, my prayers, and your own character, that, by your patronage, he may attain to the entirety of that estate—of which, since his parents' property is known to himself and even crept over among the rudiments of his joyful infancy, as to have recovered it would be little profitable, so not to have earned it would seem too slothful. But I shall be so bound by your indulgence as if it profited my own property peculiarly—whatever my brother in age, my son in profession, my fellow-citizen in standing, my friend in good faith shall have received. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Eutropius, greetings.

3.6.1. If of our old fellowship in service, if of the favour renewed since then day by day, your good faith rightly remembers at present, assuredly you understand that, as you ascend to the summits of dignities, so we to those of our desires. For we all so congratulate you on your high office that we reckon raised through it no more your house than our friendship. Witness is that deliberation in which the incitements of my exhortation availed not a little.

3.6.2. By which you could scarcely be induced to join the prefecture to philosophy, when the wrestling-school of the Platonists, your fellows clinging to the doctrines of Plotinus, had snatched you into the profound leisure of an untimely quiet—of which discipline I then asserted that the free profession would be when you owed nothing to your family. For, moreover, that contempt of public service was thought nearer to sloth, to which men of the good party boast that they cannot, rather than will not, ascend.

3.6.3. Therefore—what it is right should be done in the first place—we give abundant thanks to Christ, who, as he hitherto adorned the state of your loftiness with the nobility of your parents, so now crowns it with a parity of titles; and at the same time, the hopes of our minds being raised, it is right henceforth to hope better things. Certainly there is a frequent saying of the provincials, that a good year is to be reckoned not so much from great fruits as from great powers. On which account it is yours, my honoured lord, to reward our expectation with suitable arrangements. For, mindful of your origin, the whole community of the nobles has persuaded itself that, so long as the family of the Sabini rules us, the family of the Sabiniani is not to be feared. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Felix, greetings.

3.7.1. It is long since you abstained from letters. So each of us keeps his own custom: I prattle, you keep silence. Whence, too, a man distinguished in the other offices of good faith as you are, I reckon it a kind of virtue that you cannot be wearied by so much leisure. Will you indeed never be moved by regard for our old intimacy, so that at last you may draw back your foot from the purpose of continued silence? Or do you not know that not to answer a chatterer is an affront? You keep silence, whether amid libraries or amid law-gowns, and expect from me the office of beggarly speech, who, if you well perceive, have for writing rather facility than means.

3.7.2. At least let even our fear make matter for your pen, and remember to load the hands of travellers with papers, that the care of friends may be relieved; and hasten to tell whether, by God going before, the quaestor Licinianus has opened to our mutual alarm any door of security. He is indeed a person, as they report, greater in his coming than in great expectation, more sublime in inspection than in report, and remarkable for all the gifts of fortune and of nature.

3.7.3. His censorship is supreme, his courtesy equal, and his prudence and good faith befitting both the man sent and the man sending; nothing affected or feigned, and to the weight of his words a true severity rather than an imitation of severity; and not, as very many, who, when they allege things entrusted to them distrustfully, wish to seem to have acted more cautiously; nor yet of that number, as they say, who, peddling the secrets of the princes who direct them, court the barbarians, that things may go well rather with the envoy than with the embassy.

3.7.4. This tenor of the man's character favourable rumour has brought us. Send word swiftly, if indeed the deeds square with the sayings, that for so long they may take breath from their sleepless station whom from the walls' watches neither a snowy day nor a moonless and stormy night persuades to sound the retreat; because, even if the barbarian withdraws into winter quarters, they rather put off than abandon the dread once rooted in their hearts. Soothe us with prosperous things, since our cause is not so far from you as our country. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Eucherius, greetings.

3.8.1. I revere the ancients, yet not so as to set after them the virtues or merits of my coevals. Nor, if the Roman commonwealth has flowed down to these extremities of misery, so that it never rewards those zealous for it, do my ages on that account fail to bring forth Bruti and Torquati. To what end these things? you ask. Of you, to you, is my speech, most effective sir, to whom the commonwealth owes what history praises as paid by the aforesaid men.

3.8.2. Wherefore let those ignorant of affairs suspend their rash judgements, nor persist either to look up too much to the men of the past or to look down on those of the present; since it easily becomes clear that the commonwealth delays its benefits, that you deserve them—although it ought not greatly to be wondered at, when a nation of federates not only uncivilly administers the Roman forces but even fundamentally uproots them, if of noble and military men, and warlike beyond either our party's hope or the adverse party's opinion, not so much the deeds as the rewards have been lacking. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Riothamus, greetings.

3.9.1. The custom of our speech is kept; for I mix complaint with greeting—not at all studying this, that my pen should be courteous in the salutations and harsh in the pages, but because there always befall things about which it is agreed that a man of my place or order is set at odds: if he speaks, he sins; if he is silent, he suffers. But I myself look upon the burden of your modesty, whose shame has always been this, that you should blush for the faults of others.

3.9.2. The bearer of this letter, humble, obscure, and despicable even to the loss of an innocent helplessness, deplores that his own slaves have been led away by the Britons who secretly solicited them. It is uncertain to me whether the charge is sure; but if, between persons set face to face, you untie the objections with even mind, I think this toil-worn man can prove what he objects—if, that is, amid sharp, armed, tumultuous men, defiant in valour, number, and fellowship, a man alone, unarmed, abject, a rustic, a stranger, a pauper, can be heard in equity and good. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Tetradius, greetings.

3.10.1. Our young men add very much of praise to their own character as often as, doubting about the merits of their affairs, they have recourse to the counsels of the skilled, as now the most distinguished Theodorus, noble at home indeed, but more highborn by the repute of a most modest manner of life, who, by my letter, sets out to your letter—that is, to the purest fount of knowledge—with laudable eagerness, not only to find there himself what he may learn, but perhaps also to bring back thence what he may teach.

3.10.2. To whom, against the powerful and the factious, if your skill did not abundantly aid him, the prudence of counsel would suffice. Answer, we beseech—unless, however, the joint prayers of both of us shall be reckoned by you a burden or a weariness—by your own judgement, on my testimony; and prop up the substance and the wavering cause of the suppliant with the wholesomeness of a healing reply. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Simplicius, greetings.

3.11.1. Even if so great an adversity attends our desire that even now you are grudged to our gaze, you are not on that account such a man, best of men, of whose character the things lofty in the telling should lie hidden from us; so do all our countrymen, and likewise our chief men, attend you with concordant praise as the most excellent head of a household of the best and most exact party.

3.11.2. There supports this verdict about you of good men either a son-in-law so chosen or a daughter so brought up; in whose union your prayers have brought you so happy a controversy that you may doubt whether you have prevailed by judgement or by training. But yet hence chiefly, both venerable parents, be secure: you surpass the rest for this reason, that your children have passed you by. Therefore grant pardon for the first letters, which, as not yet to have sent was sloth, so I fear lest to have sent be loquacity. Indeed our office will lack the blemish of talkativeness if, by the example of an answering address, you absolve the impudence of the present page. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Secundus, greetings.

3.12.1. The tomb of my grandfather, your great-grandfather, yesterday—alas the grief!—a profane hand had almost violated; but God was at hand, that so great a wrong should not be perpetrated. The field itself, long since filled both with the ashes of pyres and with corpses, had for a long time now received no trench; but yet the earth, which is drawn over the buried, had returned to its former level, stretched out, the heaps settling under the weight of snow or the long flux of rains: which was the cause that the corpse-bearers dared, with their funeral mattocks, to defile the place as though vacant of bodies.

3.12.2. What more? Already the turf was black instead of green, already fresh clods above the ancient sepulchre, when, chancing to be going to the city of Auvergne, I caught sight of the public crime from the brow of a neighbouring hill, and, hurling myself with loosened rein as much over level as over broken ground, and even thus impatient of the slightest delay, before I arrived, I checked the bold deed with a clamour going before me. While those caught in the crime hesitate whether to slip away or to stand, I came upon them too (I confess the error): I could not defer the punishments of the captives, but above the very covering of our old man I racked the robbers, so far as could suffice for the care of the survivors, for the security of the dead.

3.12.3. Moreover, in that I reserved nothing for our bishop, foreknowing my own case and his person, I took counsel for the common good, lest either this should be avenged more mildly than was just, or that should avenge more severely than was just; to whom, however, when I had communicated the whole order of the matter, as one making satisfaction from the road, the holy and just man gave glory to my anger, when I asked nothing more than pardon, pronouncing, after the manner of the elders, that men guilty of so great a rashness were seen rightly slain.

3.12.4. But lest anything in future should be permitted to chances, which we ought to shun by example, I ask that straightway, even in my absence, by your care but at my cost, the scattered heap may rise again into a mass, which a smoothed slab may cover. I have left with the venerable Gaudentius the price of the stone and the wage of the work. This song, indeed, which follows, I made the last night—not, I believe, an unsuitable one, since I was not a little intent on my journey.

3.12.5. Which I beg may be quickly set on the tablet, of whatever quality it is; but see that the stone-cutter make no fault in the marble; which fault, whether from industry or through carelessness, a malicious reader will ascribe to me rather than to the mason. But if, with pious zeal, you take care of what is asked, I shall give thanks as if nothing of praise or glory accrued to you also—you to whom, your uncle removed, the entire care of the present office would have remained, in the degree of kinship.

A late song, after uncles and a father, I, a grandson not unworthy of his grandsire, have dedicated, lest perchance in after time, O traveller, not knowing the reverence due to the buried, you should tread the earth that has not been raised.

Here lies the prefect Apollinaris, who, after rightly governing the Gauls, was received into the bosom of a mourning fatherland, most wise and most useful, a cultivator of country, of warfare, and of the forum, and, by an example perilous to others, free under tyrant lords.

But this is proved his greatest dignity, that, cleansing his brow with the cross, his limbs with the font, he first of the number of his fathers renounced the sacrilegious rites.

This is the first glory, this the proud virtue, to go before in hope those whom you join in honour, and to surpass yonder, in merits, those parents who here are equal to you in titles.

3.12.6. I know indeed that the quality of the epitaph does not answer to the learning of its author; but a skilled soul does not refuse musical funeral-rites. To you also it ought not to seem slow, that I, a third and fourth heir, pay it, since, the cycle of so many years being rolled round, we have learned that the great Alexander made offering to the shade of Achilles, and Julius Caesar paid the rites to Hector as his own. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greetings.

3.13.1. I singularly approve, rejoice, and marvel that, from love of chastity, you flee the company of the unchaste, especially those with whom there is nothing weighed, nothing holy, in the seeking and prattling of foul things, and who, because by shameless words they defile the reverence of public ears, think themselves grandly witty. Understand that the chief standard-bearer of this vileness in our country is Gnatho.

3.13.2. For this whirlpool of a man is of the cobblers of fables, of the concocters of crimes, of the doublers of sinister opinions—talkative himself yet not witty, ridiculous yet not gay, arrogant yet not steadfast, curious yet not perspicacious, and, with his unbecoming, affected charm, the more boorish; courting present times, carping at the past, disdaining the future; of a benefit, if he is about to ask one, importunate in the asking, a disparager of what is denied, a cunning contriver of recasting what is received, querulous when dunned, garrulous when it is restored; but if he is to be asked, a feigner of readiness, a dissembler of the request, a vaunter of what he has lent, a publisher of what was hidden, a slanderer of the man who delayed, a denier of what was paid.

3.13.3. A hater of fasts, a follower of feasts; bringing forth a praiseworthy sentence not about one who lives well but about one who feeds well; among which things yet himself most avaricious, whom no good bread feeds so much as another man's bread, eating this alone at home, if he has sent ahead anything from the dainties snatched amid the storms of slaps. But surely the man's frugality is not in all to be passed over in silence, praiseworthy as it is: he fasts as often as he is not invited; but even so, with parasite's levity, excusing himself if he is invited, spying out if he is shunned, reproaching if he is shut out, exulting if he is admitted, biding his time if he is beaten.

3.13.4. When he has reclined at table, he is straightway carried, if he eats slowly, into rapine; if he is quickly filled, into tears; if he thirsts, into complaints; if he is made drunk, into vomiting; if he wearies others, into insults; if he is wearied, into furies—altogether like the filth of a sewer, which the more it is stirred, the more foul it is. So living, a pleasure to few, a love to none, a laughingstock to all; a burster of bladders and a breaker of canes; greedy of drinking, greedier of detracting; with rabid mouth alike breathing mire, foaming wine, speaking poison, he makes it doubtful whether the more rotten, the more drunken, or the more wicked he is to be esteemed.

3.13.5. But you say: the quality of his body colours the disgraces of his mind, and the appearance of his person deprecates the ineptitude of his mind—an elegant man, no doubt, and most graceful, whose person is to be admired by those who behold it. But in truth that person of his is more sordid and more deformed than a funeral corpse which, the torches applied, half-burnt, and presently, the pile of brands settling, rolled off, even the by-now disdainful undertaker shudders to give back to the pyre. Besides this, he carries eyes that lack the light, which, in place of a Stygian marsh, roll tears through the darkness.

3.13.6. He carries ears too, elephantine in their monstrousness, whose two-fold opening an ulcerous skin surrounds, with stony knots and tufaceous warts jutting out from their wet along the curved margin. He bears a nose too, which, since it is ample in its openings and tight along its ridge, so opens to horror that it is narrowed to smelling. He thrusts forth a mouth too, leaden in its lips, beast-like in its gape, festering in its gums, boxwood-coloured in its teeth, which a mephitic odour, breathed frequently from the hollow of the rotting molars, befouls, and which a belching from the dishes of yesterday is heaped up by the eructation of food and by the bilge of overflowing dinners.

3.13.7. He produces a forehead too, which by a most foul gesture folds the skin and stretches the brows. He nourishes a beard too, which, now growing grey with age, yet is made black by Sulla's disease. In short, the whole face of the wretch is so pallid as though, hour by hour, saddened by ghostly shades. I pass over the rest of his bulk, bound by gout, dissolved by fatness; I pass over his brain, furrowed with frequent weals, which it is agreed is covered little more by hair than by scars; I pass over that, for the shortness of his neck, the joinings of his shoulder-blades cling to his back-turned occiput.

3.13.8. I pass over that honour has fallen from his shoulders, grace from his arms, strength from his upper arms; I pass over his gout-ridden hands wrapped in the greasy rags of poultices as if in boxing-gloves. I pass over that, fenced about at his captive sides by the goatish and sour caves of his armpits, he makes deadly, with the fanned plague of a twofold Ampsanctus, the nostrils of those who sit about. I pass over that his breasts, broken by the weight of their fat, hang down—breasts which it would be foul on a man's chest even to jut out, but these to have fallen like a mother's udders. I pass over that the hanging nets of his curved belly afford, to his genitals—since they are feeble, twice shameful—a covering more shameful by their foul wrinkles.

3.13.9. Now why should I here recall his back and spine? Although, bursting out from the joints of its vertebrae, the curvature of the ribs weaves the chest's coffer, none the less this whole branching frame of bones lies hidden under one, as it were, sea of an overflowing abdomen. I pass over the corpulence of his loins and buttocks, compared to whose thickness the belly is reckoned slender. I pass over his dry and bandy thigh, his huge knees, his delicate hams, his horny legs, his glassy ankles, his small toes, his large feet; and although he bristles with such distorted lineaments, and through a manifold pestilence is bloodless and half-alive, and neither, carried, sits, nor, supported, walks—yet he is more execrable in his words than in his limbs.

3.13.10. For although he labours under an itch of dishonourable speech, yet he is chiefly to be guarded against in the secrets of patrons, of whom he is a praiser in prosperity, a betrayer in doubtful times; and if the reckoning of the moment solicits to publish the hidden things of one's intimates, presently through this Spartacus whatever things are shut are broken open, and whatever are barred are unbarred; so that those houses which he cannot assail with the engines of open enmity he attacks with the mines of clandestine treachery. By this contrivance our Daedalus builds up the summit of friendships, who, as he is joined to his comrades like a Theseus amid prosperity, so afterward, like a Proteus, slips away from them amid adversity.

3.13.11. Therefore you will do according to my wish if you join yourself to the fellowship of such men not even in a first meeting—especially of those to whose prostituted and theatrical speech modesty sends ahead no reins, no bars; for those in whom, boasting without the brightness of honour, the unbridled tongue is polluted with the dregs of talkative petulance, have a conscience too most befouled. In short, it more easily happens that someone speaking serious things lives obscenely, than that one can be shown who is alike wicked in words and upright in character. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Placidus, greetings.

3.14.1. Although your own Gratianopolis holds you, yet I have learned, by the faithful report of old guests, that you deign to deem my trifles—whether finished in prose work or made tuneful by the poet's pen—worthy more than the reading of stored volumes. I rejoice in this very thing, that I have recognized your leisure to be occupied with my little papers; but I well understand that, with your character, it is not the effect of the work that strikes out this pleasure, but the author's affection; and therefore I owe the more, since you give to friendship the point of glory which you would deny to the composition.

3.14.2. But of the other disparagers of our study, what I should fully pronounce I have not yet deliberated. For he who seems to himself most learned re-reads sound and unsound composition with almost equal appetite, no more desiring the lofty that he may praise it than the despised that he may laugh at it. And in this way the knowledge, the display, the propriety of the Latin tongue is held in the greatest contempt by the verdicts of the idle, whose scurrility carelessness accompanies—wishing to read only that which it may carp at; so it does not use letters, in that it abuses them. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Probus, greetings.

4.1.1. The sister who is mine is the wife who is yours: hence between us there is the highest and chiefest tie of kinship—and that indeed a cousin's, not a brother's, brotherhood, which most often loves itself the more purely, strongly, and unmixedly. For, the strife over property between brothers having first been laid to rest, those who are now born of brothers contend with one another over nothing; and hence often the affection among cousins is greater, because the feud ceases with the division, while the affection does not cease from the common seed. A second bond of minds was added to us from the parity of our studies, since we feel, blame, and praise the same things in letters, and any composition pleases or displeases us alike.

4.1.2. Although I claim too much for myself in weighing my own judgement against yours. For who of the young or the old does not know that you were my own particular master, when you seemed to be a master shared by us in common—and that, whatever the heroic poet made lofty, the comic playful, the lyric tuneful, the orator declamatory, the historian truthful, the satirist figurative, the grammarian regular, the panegyrist applaudable, the sophist serious, the epigrammatist wanton, the commentator lucid, the jurist obscure, in their manifold ways, that you handed on to each in every way—unless someone lacked talent and himself? Good God! How our fathers gloried in this, when they saw that by Christ's help you could teach, I could learn; and that not only did you do what you could, but you also willed what you did, and were therefore pronounced good no less than skilled!

4.1.3. And truly, within the household of Eusebius, a certain mint of such disciplines had received you, formed on whose philosophic anvil you now unfolded to us the various reckonings of things and of words, with even the very man who had taught you approving; now, as Plato the disciple, now well-nigh superior, under Socrates, so you, under our Eusebius, a craftsman dialectician, atticized amid the Aristotelian categories, while he still seasoned our age—mobile, tender, raw—now boiling it down with chastening severity, now flavouring it with the wholesomeness of his precepts.

4.1.4. But of what kind, good God, and how precious, were these things—which, if anyone, to play the philosopher, were to carry off either to the marsh-dwelling Sygambri, or to the Caucasus-born Alani, or to the mare-milking Geloni, the horny hearts and icy fibres of those bestial and rigid nations would beyond doubt be softened and thawed, nor would we laugh at, despise, and dread their ferocity and stupidity, which, after the manner of beasts, plays the fool, grows brutish, and is inflamed.

4.1.5. Therefore, since both affinity and studies have joined us, I pray, in whatever place you are, that you keep the rights of friendship unshaken, and that long, even if we are absent in dwelling, we may be present in affection: whose unviolated part, so far as concerns you, shall by us be made everlasting for an age, if any of life remains. Farewell.

Claudianus to Sidonius the Bishop, greetings.

4.2.1. If it were possible to be done that I should meet you, my lord, even sometimes and a little, I should not inquire from anywhere the wishes or needs of any persons that could be of use to me in the matter of my due; since the power of revisiting is, in many ways and by wretched causes alike, cut off. Indeed the means of writing either rarely is fittingly at hand, or is not at hand at all. Whether these very things are pardonable or not, you yourself will have judged.

4.2.2. Moreover indeed, that very often your writings are imparted to others, who neither seek that very thing as much as I myself perhaps do, nor deserve it more, I do not think is committed with impunity against the laws of friendship. This, too, I shall make a grievously silent reproach: that those little books which you do not refuse to be ennobled with my name you have never imparted by any rescript. But perhaps you have no empty time, which you, a little, might spend upon a very great friendship.

4.2.3. With what business do you ever swell, anywhere, in which you are entangled, but that it turns back to the advantages of others? When by entreaty you appease God, you reconcile the same not only to friends but to strangers also. When you search out the mysteries of the heavenly scriptures, the more studiously you imbue yourself, the more abundantly you pour out learning into others. When you lavish your wealth on the uses of the needy, you indeed take counsel chiefly for yourself, but for others also. Accordingly, nothing—plainly, assuredly nothing—is so unfruitful of all your actions that it bears rich fruit to you alone and not to many others with you.

4.2.4. No occasion, therefore, of anyone's impediment can be alleged even falsely, why I myself, your special and intimate friend, should bear no fruit from my special one, from whom strangers too, very many, take much; but, as I suppose, after the form of the evangelical giver, what you do not give to a hungry friend you will give to a shameless knocker. Moreover, if you still grow hard as usual, I shall do something you will regret, since, if you sin further by keeping silent, I shall straightway avenge myself by writing; for it is without doubt that you are as much to be punished by my writing as I myself am punished by your silence. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Claudianus, greetings.

4.3.1. You pronounce, my honoured lord, that an offence is committed against the rights of intimacy, in that, as regards the greeting owed you, I long abstain from pen and tablets, and that henceforth no palms of travellers has my paper burdened, which should impart to you the homage of an earnest salutation. You conjecture these things beyond what is fair, if you reckon that any mortal—who yet has it at heart to converse in Latin—is not afraid when, written, he is brought into the examination of your ears; of your ears, I say, to whose skill—if the prerogative of the ages run down to this time does not overwhelm me—I would not match the thunderbolt of Frontonian gravity or of Apuleian weight, beside which the Varros, whether of Atax or of Reate, the Plinies, whether the uncle or Secundus, set at present would play the rustic.

4.3.2. This judgement of mine is supported by that volume which you, most rich in the knowledge of things and of words, published on the state of the soul. In which, while you make a preface to my name, I received this gift above all: that the fame of my person, which it was not worth the labour to make famous by the titles of its own books, was perpetuated by the benefit of yours. But what, great God, and how great a work that is—shut up by its subject, conspicuous by its declamation, blocked by its proposition, unlocked by its disputation; and, although thorny by reason of the hooked points of its syllogisms, yet softened by the flower of a vernal eloquence!

4.3.3. There the words are new, because old, and compared with which even the style of the old literature might rightly be made to seem antiquated; and—what is more precious—that whole composition is so terse, cut into clauses, that it flows on; which, ample in matter and strict in sentences, you would feel teaches more than it speaks. In short, this was once, and not unjustly, reckoned the chief eloquence, whose care—comprising many things in few—was rather to fill the cause than the page.

4.3.4. But truly in your books, what manner of thing is this too, that a continuous maturity admits tenderness, and inserts a seasonable sweetness amid its censure, so that it suddenly fosters the reader's attention, wearied through the threshed-out members of the disciplines of philosophy, with pleasurable digressions, as with certain harbours of its own sea? O book powerful in many ways, O eloquence not of a thin but of a subtle wit, which neither swells with hyperbolic gushings nor is thinned by depressed tapinosis!

4.3.5. Besides this, a unique and singular learning, remarkable in the assertion of diverse matters, whose custom it is to philosophize about each art with the masters of each, and which, if chance demands, does not refuse to hold with Orpheus the plectrum, with Aesculapius the staff, with Archimedes the rod, with Euphrates the horoscope, with Perdix the compasses, with Vitruvius the plumb-line; and which has never ceased to investigate with Thales the seasons, with Atlas the stars, with Zetus weights, with Chrysippus numbers, with Euclid measures.

4.3.6. In short, no one in my age was able so to affirm what he wished; since, while he exerts himself against the man he speaks against, he rightly claims for himself the token of the character and studies of both tongues: he perceives like Pythagoras, divides like Socrates, unfolds like Plato, involves like Aristotle; like Aeschines he flatters, like Demosthenes he is angry; he blooms like Hortensius, he burns like Cethegus; he urges like Curio, he delays like Fabius; he feigns like Crassus, he dissembles like Caesar; he advises like Cato, he dissuades like Appius, he persuades like Tullius.

4.3.7. Now if one comes for comparison to the most holy fathers: he instructs like Jerome, he destroys like Lactantius, he builds up like Augustine; he is exalted like Hilary, he is humbled like John; like Basil he rebukes, like Gregory he consoles; like Orosius he flows, like Rufinus he is restrained; like Eusebius he narrates, like Eucherius he stirs; like Paulinus he provokes, like Ambrose he perseveres.

4.3.8. Now indeed, if you ask what I think of your hymn: it is concise, copious, sweet, exalted, and it surpasses any lyric dithyrambs whatever in poetic charm and historical truth; and this is your own peculiar excellence in it, that, the feet of the metres being kept, the syllables of the feet, and the natures of the syllables, a poor verse shuts up, within the limit of its own space, rich words; nor does the brevity of the cramped song banish the length of the bedizened speech. So it is easy for you, with little trochees and littler pyrrhics, to surpass not only the molossic and anapaestic groupings of three, but even the four-fold junctures of epitrites and paeons.

4.3.9. The amplitude of the discourse outgrows the regular straits, and, like a great gem in a little gold, is scarcely contained and flashes forth like the spirit of a powerful horse, which, neighing—if it be held, by the law of the bridle, among wastes or rough ground—you understand to lack not so much the course as the field. What more? With me for judge, in both kinds of speaking neither will Athens be judged so Attic nor the Muses so musical—if only a too-long sloth has not taken from me the means even of judging. For while, under the cover of an imposed profession, I gradually seek a new manner of writing and unlearn the old by leaps, of a good orator I have nothing more left than that I have begun the more to be a bad poet.

4.3.10. Therefore, I pray, grant me the favour of this offence, that, mindful of myself for a little while, I more rarely mingle my dry little vein with your river. Your trumpet the whole world, so far as it extends, will rightly venerate, which it is agreed sang with a twofold felicity, since it found neither rival nor equal, when long ago it ranged through the ears and mouths of peoples, with me too carrying it about. But for us it is great audacity if we so much as prattle even among municipal and chair-bound orators or forensic ranters, who, even when they make their perorations—saving the peace of their betters—are, a most numerous crowd, occupied with most unlettered letters. For you, to whom, whether it please you to alternate free or bound speech, it is at hand to thunder both ways, are among the few whom kindly favour has loved—the few who shall be changed. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friends Simplicius and Apollinaris, greetings.

4.4.1. Here at last is my promise, your expectation—Faustinus, a father of a household noble at home, and now to be numbered among the greatest ornaments of a country shared by me and by him. He is my brother by the parity of birth, my friend by the likeness of minds. Often have I mixed serious matters with him, often jests too; and when, long ago, we were young men, in ball, in dice, in leaping, running, hunting, swimming, there was always to us both a holy contention, because affection remained. He is indeed somewhat older than I, yet only so much that it was not so much necessary to honour him as a delight to imitate him; and at the same time he himself was the more taken with this, that I understood myself to be loved by him rather than, as it were, courted. But by the advance of age and by his clerical service, when he was lovable before, he has now begun to be venerable.

4.4.2. Through him I send greeting, desiring, by Christ's help, to see you as soon as ever possible, if the public state permits. Wherefore, unless my desire seems burdensome, when the aforesaid returns, I shall be made acquainted with the state of your places and times. It is my fixed resolve to struggle through the opposing difficulties of private occupations, and to assign to the embracing of your hearts a duty however long—if, however (what even now we fear), no greater force confounds my arrangements.

4.4.3. Which it is not unfitting that you too, with brother Faustinus, as the times warn, deliberate, the matter being shared in conference. Whom, because I love, I have sent as one who loves me: if he answers to my judgement, I give thanks; moreover, since a good man is so judged by all, no man is the worse if he is not the best. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Felix, greetings.

4.5.1. A repeated greeting repeats its bearer: your Gozolas—may God grant that he be ours—is made for the second time the carrier of my letters. Therefore take away from both of us the shame we share; for if you still intend to keep silence, all will judge unworthy both me, to whom, and him, through whom, you ought to write.

4.5.2. Of the state of the times I now ask nothing, as before, lest it be a burden to your character, if you should signify adverse things, when prosperous ones do not follow. For since it does not befit you to send false reports, and likewise things to be wished for are wanting to relate, I flee to learn, by the tidings of good men, whatever that evil is. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greetings.

4.6.1. Through Bishop Faustinus—bound to me no less by the fellowship of our old companionship than by the communion of his new profession—I had charged him by word with certain things to be guarded against: that you obeyed the word I rejoice. Since to the prudent it is inwardly inborn to avoid chance accidents, as likewise it is absurd, if the outcome opposes bold undertakings, to rise up into complaints and to turn the blameworthy issues of ill-advised arrangements into the defaming of the uncertain things of chance.

4.6.2. To what end these things? you say. I confess that I came too much in fear, lest, in a time of public fear, you should not fear, and the unshaken security, to this age, of a solid house should, for an untimely devotion, tremble at the tempestuous incursions of enemies, and the longed-for solemnity should begin to grow cheap among the tenderness of matronly minds—although in their breasts a native holiness has so measured out for itself a peculiar dwelling that, if anything had befallen them as they travelled, they would have rejoiced that they had endured a kind of martyrdom for a martyr. But I, to whom a lesser innocence makes greater diffidence, in this doubtful matter more gladly cling to the more cautious counsel, and am not with difficulty attached even to those who fear safe things.

4.6.3. Accordingly it was well done that you wholesomely deferred the doubtful journey, and that the state of so great a household was not within the cast of so great a die. And although the journey, once begun, might have prospered, yet I will by no means cast a white pebble for a counsel of this kind, whose rashness cannot be absolved except by the benefit of good fortune. The Divinity will indeed grant such vows to be advanced by worthy successes, and it will be permitted yet to remember these terrors amid the pleasantness of peace; but present things make those cautious whom future things shall see secure.

4.6.4. Meanwhile, for the present, the bearer of my letter sighs over certain damages inflicted on him through your Genesius. If you perceive that his complaint does not differ from the truth, grant, I pray, reformation to the man who convicts, swiftness to the stranger; but if punishable envy fans a calumny, in that vengeance has already gone before the man assailed, since the impudent suitor, worn out by cost and journey, sweats out the inconveniences of a suit rashly proposed—and this in the greatest harshness of winter and the highest heaps of snows and crusts of ice; which time, so far as concerns the followers of lawsuits, is indeed often short for a hearing, but always long for an injury. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Simplicius, greetings.

4.7.1. He is wont to say "You warn one already running" who is asked to do what he was going to do even unasked. You may inquire, perhaps, to what these prefatory words tend. The bearer of this letter earnestly entreats that he may carry to you a letter from me; his journey to you having been learned by us, he was in any case to be entreated for this very thing, even if he had kept silent; for it is your love rather than regard for the bearer that has drawn out this office. Moreover, this very man reckons that he, who granted, has earned a benefit, although again and again he received what he asked—but as one by no means recognizing the rights of our friendships.

4.7.2. Whence, although absent, I easily conjecture with what sudden amazement he will be struck when, deigned admittance for our sake, he understands that he has begged for my page more idly than for the delivery of it. I seem to see how all things will be new to a man not facetious to the point of envy, when, a stranger, he will be invited to a dwelling; alarmed, to conversation; a rustic, to gaiety; a pauper, to a table; and when, whereas among men coarse and gorged with the surfeits of onions this man plays the common sort, there he will be entertained with such courtesy as if among Apician feasters and Byzantine carvers he had hitherto belched.

4.7.3. Yet such and so great as he himself is, he has most abundantly made me partaker of a wished-for office. But although persons of this kind are often well-nigh despicable, yet in the cultivating of comrades by letters affection sustains much loss if it is recalled, by the meanness of the bearers, from the practice of more frequent address. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Evodius, greetings.

4.8.1. When the courier delivered to me your letter, which confessed to certain friends that you would soon set out for Toulouse at the king's command, we too were seeking the country far removed from the town. Me indeed, at first light, the occasion of your page scarcely shook out of the clinging crowd of escorters who delayed me, that I might be able to satisfy your charge at least as a traveller, at least as a horseman.

4.8.2. For the rest, at daybreak my household had gone before, to pitch the tent at eighteen miles, in which place many conveniences attend the loosening of one's little baggage: a cold spring on a wooded hill, a field below abounding in grass, a river before the eyes filled with many birds and fish; besides these, having a house joined to its bank—a new house, an old friend, to whose immense kindness you can set no measure, whether you yield or whether you refuse.

4.8.3. So, our people having gone ahead to this place, when we had halted for your sake, that a boy might be sent back more quickly even from the head of the village, already two hours after noon had easily passed, already the grown sun, with its increasing ray, had drunk up the moisture of the dewy night: the heat and the thirst grew strong, and in the profound serenity there was, against the heat, only such cloud as the dust made for cover. Then the length of the way, displayed to those who looked over the green plain of the open country—since for this very reason we were to lunch late—was groaned over; for though it did not yet wear the travellers down with labour, yet it already terrified them with expectation.

4.8.4. All which prefatory things, my lord brother, tend to this: that I may prove to you that I was not at leisure much, either in mind, or in body, or in time, when I obeyed your demands. So, to return now to the tenor of your letter: after the words which first brought a greeting, you asked this, that I should send an epigram ended in twelve verses, which could be fitted to a capacious shell, which through each side of its handles, to the outermost of its circuit, is hollowed from the wheel of its base with six flutings.

4.8.5. Of which I think you intend to inscribe either the curved bellies with single verses, or, by a better counsel—if that should be more becoming—the curved heads; and, polished with this adornment, you arrange to offer it to Queen Ragnahild, about to prepare an invincible patronage for your vows and likewise your acts. I serve your injunctions as best I can, not as I wished; but first pardon your own fault, you who gave more space to the silversmith than to the poet, since beyond doubt it did not escape you that, within the workshop of men of letters, if the metrical anvil has produced any song, it is polished by a file no less strong and rasping. But to what end these things, or the like? Behold, now sing:

The shell which on the fish-bearing Triton bears Cytherea— let it not doubt, compared with this, to yield. We beg you, incline a little while your mistress' height, and, great patroness, receive a small gift, and do not gladly spurn Evodius your client, whom, making him great, you yourself will be the greater. So may the son too, for you—whose father, father-in-law, and husband is a king—be a king with his father and after his father. Happy the waters, which, enclosed in the light of the metal, yet foster the brighter face of their mistress! For when the queen deigns to dip her countenance herein, brightness is sent into the silver from her face.

If you are so far held by love of me that you do not blush to write these trifles, conceal the author, more rightly secure of your own part; for in such a forum, or Athenaeum, your dish will be more praised than my writing. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Industrius, greetings.

4.9.1. I lately visited Vettius, an illustrious man, and inspected his daily doings most thoroughly, and as it were at leisure. Which, since I found them worthy to be known, I have judged not unworthy to be reported. In the first place—what we shall rightly set before his other praises—the household keeps unimpaired a chastity equal to its master's; the slaves useful: the country ones obedient, the town ones friendly, compliant, and content with their patron; a table feeding the guest no less than the client; great kindness, and greater sobriety.

4.9.2. Those are the lighter things: that the man himself of whom we speak is second to none in training, watching, and parading horses, dogs, and hawks; the highest neatness in his garments, elegance in his belts, splendour in his trappings; a stately gait, a serious mind (the latter asserts his public good faith, the former his private dignity); a relaxation that does not corrupt, a rebuke that does not draw blood, and his severity of such a temper as is not loathsome but austere.

4.9.3. Amid these things, a frequent reading of the sacred volumes, by which, while eating, he more often takes the food of the soul; he frequently reads the psalms, more frequently sings them; and by a new kind of life he fulfils the monk, not under the little cloak but under the war-cloak; he abstains from the flesh of wild beasts, he gives himself to coursing; and so, secretly and delicately religious, he uses the hunt and yet does not use the venison.

4.9.4. His only little daughter, left as the solace of his widowhood after his wife's death, he rears with a grandsire's tenderness, a mother's diligence, a father's kindness; toward his household neither menacing in uttering speech, nor scornful in admitting counsel, nor too eager in investigating a fault; the state and condition of his subjects he rules not by lordship but by judgement; you would think that he does not possess his own house but rather administers it.

4.9.5. Which industry and temperance of the man, observed, I judged to pertain also to the instruction of the rest, if such a life were even superficially published to others—to whose following all men of our profession would, most usefully, be incited, besides the habit by which meanwhile one is set above the present age; for—be it said with the peace of my order—if there shall be only single good things in single men, I more admire a man of priestly quality than a priest. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Industrius, greetings.

4.10.1. I burst forth into a greeting, though late, my lord—I myself now for many years ungreeted—not daring to keep up the frequency of the old office, after the adversities of exile broke me, banished from the bounds of my native soil. Wherefore it is fitting that you too pardon those who blush, since it is fitting that the humbled follow humble ways, nor hold an equal constancy of intimacy with those to whom it might perhaps be shameless to spend more of love than of reverence. On this account, in short, I have now long been silent, and I bore it more patiently than gladly that you too were silent, when my son Heliodorus came hither.

4.10.2. But you used to say, though in mockery, that you stood, as it were, in awe of my eloquence. That excuse, even if it had been true, had passed away; since, after the little book I finished—which is too little polished—I weave the rest of my letters again in everyday speech, although, careful, I am not made better; for it is not worth so much to polish formulas that will lack publication. For the rest, if you restore the manner of your affection to the old course of our conversations, we too shall run back into the ruts of our old loquacity; and besides this, eagerly, by Christ going before, wherever you may be—provided only that my patron, now returned, indulge it—we shall fly to you, that friendship may be invigorated by deeds, which, unused in words, had grown torpid. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Petreius, greetings.

4.11.1. The loss of my age distresses me exceedingly, your uncle Claudianus being lately snatched from our eyes—I doubt whether they will hereafter behold any equal. For he was a man provident, prudent, learned, eloquent, keen, and the most ingenious of the men of his age, his place, his people, and one who unceasingly played the philosopher, his religion being kept safe; and although he did not nourish hair and beard, now derided, now even execrated the cloak and the club, yet from the college of his fellow-Platonists he was separated by habit and faith alone.

4.11.2. Good God, what a thing it was, as often as we came together to him for the sake of consultation alone! How he opened the whole to all at once, not doubting, not disdaining, reckoning it most pleasurable if perchance, by the labyrinthine insolubility of some questions that had arisen, the treasures of his knowledge were aired. Now if we had sat down in numbers, assigning to all the office of hearing, to the one alone whom we had perhaps chosen the right of speaking, man by man and in turn, not tumultuously, nor without the artful gesture of some figure, he would dispense the riches of his learning.

4.11.3. Then whatever he had said, we straightway met with the contrarieties of resisting syllogisms; but he repelled the rash oppositions of us all: and so nothing was received that was not weighed and proved. Hence also there was to him among us the greatest reverence, that he did not too ill bear with a sluggish docility in any. With him this was a pardonable fault; whence it came that his patience was praiseworthy to us without being imitable. For who would unwillingly consult a man about hidden things, from the fellowship of whose disputation not even the inquiry of laymen and the unskilled was rejected?

4.11.4. These few things of his studies; but for the rest, who could extol the rest with fitting praise—that, mindful in all things of the human condition, he consoled the clergy by deed and word, the people by exhortation, the bereaved by solace, the captives by ransom, the fasting by food, the naked by covering? And at the same time I resolve that to unfold more concerning these things is superfluous. For his own merits, by which he enriched a rich conscience, though impoverished in goods, he the more studied to conceal, in the hope of a future recompense.

4.11.5. . . . observing his elder brother, the bishop, most affectionately, whom he loved as a son, while he venerated him as a father. But that one too looked up to him greatly, having in him a counsellor in judgements, a deputy in churches, a procurator in business, a steward on the estates, a registrar in the tributes, a companion in readings, an interpreter in expositions, a tent-mate on journeys. So to each, by the other, the mutual offices of brotherhood were rendered, by a good faith even to the point of being an enviable example.

4.11.6. But why, intending to moderate our grief, do we rather supply fuel to the causes of grief? Therefore, as we had begun to say, for him now—as is that Maronian phrase—"to the thankless ash" (that is, to one who will return no gratitude) we have composed a dirge, sad and well-nigh sorrowful, with labour, because disuse of composition made difficulty—save that grief, heavy with weeping, kindled a mind by nature most slothful. This is his song:

Glory and grief of his brother Mamertus, the singular pomp of admiring bishops, to this turf Claudianus gives his limbs, under whom as master a threefold library— Roman, Attic, Christian—shone; all of which, a monk in his green years, he drank in by a hidden discipline; orator, dialectician, poet, expositor, geometer, and musician, skilled to loose the bonds of questions and with the sword of the word to cut the sects, if any assail the catholic faith. Here the modulator of psalms and the choir-trainer, before the altars, his brother rejoicing, taught the instructed companies to sound. Here for the yearly solemnities he prepared what readings should suit each season. He was a bishop in the second rank, relieving his brother of the episcopal burden; for of the supreme pontiff's office the one took the insignia, the other the labour. But you, whoever you are who grieve, friendly reader, as though of so great a man almost nothing remained, spare to water the marble with wet cheeks: the mind and the glory cannot be buried.

4.11.7. Behold what song, when I first arrived, I wrote over the bones of my soulmate brother; for then I was absent, when they were performing his funeral; nor on that account, however, did I altogether lose the most longed-for occasion of weeping. For while I chanced to be meditating it, my soul, bringing forth, loosed the reins to my tears, and I did at the epitaph what others did at the sepulchre. These things, then, I have written to you, lest perhaps you should think that we cultivate only the fellowship of the living, and that we should be at fault in your judgement, did we not always remember our friends who lack life equally as the safe. For even from this, that the imaginary good faith is scarcely preserved even to survivors, you will not think beyond what is fair, if you conjecture that they are very few who love the dead. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friends Simplicius and Apollinaris, greetings.

4.12.1. Good God, how conformable to a shipwrecking sea is the motion of our minds, since by the adverse whirlwinds of tidings it is confounded as by its own storm! Lately I and our common son were ruminating the wit of the Terentian Hecyra; I was sitting beside him as he studied, mindful of nature and forgetful even of my profession, that he might the more freely follow, with quickened docility, the comic rhythms; I myself too had in hand a play of like argument, that is, the Epitrepontes of Menander.

4.12.2. We were reading together, praising, and jesting; and—what are the common wishes—the reading took him, he took me; when suddenly a household boy stood by, with a long face. To whom we: "Why so?" And he: "I saw," he said, "a reader, Constans by name, before the doors, returning from the masters Simplicius and Apollinaris; he gave indeed the letters which he had received, but he lost those he had been given to bring back."

4.12.3. On learning which, the serenity of my gladness was straightway befouled by the cloud of overspread grief, and the contrariety of this news stirred up in me so much bile that for very many days I, inexorable, kept that most stolid blockhead himself from coming before my eyes, about to bear it ill if he did not deliver to me letters either any whatever or from anyone whatever—I say nothing of yours, which, while a mind sound and master of itself endures, will be judged by me, even if least frequent, most desirable. But after, by the interval of time, my anger gradually died down, I asked, the man being admitted, whether he had brought any word besides. He answered himself—though he was trembling and grovelling, and for guilt stammered with his mouth, was blind in his gaze—that all by which I could be instructed, by which I could be delighted, had been entrusted to the pages which had been lost. Wherefore have recourse to your tablets, unfold your parchments, and re-write what was written. For so long I admit with even mind that an unlucky chance should stand in the way of my desire, until it come to you by my speech that yours did not come to us. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Vectius, greetings.

4.13.1. Lately, at the request of the distinguished Germanicus, I inspected the church of Cantilla. He himself is easily first of those settled there, who, though he is now passing his twelfth lustrum, yet daily, with conspicuous habit and grooming, not only grows young but in a manner grows boyish again. For indeed his garment is close-fitting, his buskin taut, his hair cut to the likeness of a wheel, his beard, with the shears sunk to the skin within the hiding-places of his wrinkles, trimmed.

4.13.2. To this, too, by the supernal gift, a solid joining of limbs, unimpaired sight, an ample stride in his swift gait, gums of an uncorrupted, milky structure of teeth; his stomach does not turn, his vein is not inflamed, his heart is not struck, his lung does not gasp, his loin is not stiff, his liver does not swell, his hand does not soften, his spine is not bent; but, endowed with youthful health, he claims for himself, out of old age, reverence alone.

4.13.3. On account of which peculiar benefits of God, since between you great rights of friendship flourish—for you are neighbours—I beseech and warn that, by your counsel, to whose following he gives, through a great conscience, the greatest authority, he should not trust much to doubtful things, nor believe too much in too great a soundness, but at last, the profession of religion being seized, should rather grow strong by the forces of a rising innocence, and make himself, old in years, new in merits.

4.13.4. And since there is well-nigh no one who lacks punishable hidden things, let him be loosed, by openly making satisfaction, concerning those things which he remembers to have committed in secret. For the father of a priest and the son of a bishop, unless he is holy, is made like the bramble, which, sprung from roses and bringing forth roses, and amid begotten and begetting flowers, the harshness of the thorns, comparable to sins, fences about with its pricking. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Polemius, greetings.

4.14.1. Gaius Tacitus, one of your ancestors, a consular of the times of the Ulpii, reported in his history under the words of a certain German leader, saying: "Between me and Vespasian there was an old friendship; and, while he was a private man, we were called friends." To what does it look, you say, to preface these things? Namely, that you may remember that, at the time when you bear a public character, you ought always to be mindful of private favour. Nearly two years are now drawing to a close in which we rejoice that you are prefect of the praetorium of the Gauls—not by your new dignity but by our affection, still old—and we, if the adversity of Roman affairs allowed it, would scarcely endure it, were not single persons—I will not say provinces—amplified by various benefits through you.

4.14.2. And now, since what your means do not have modesty does not ask for, I should like you to say how kind you would have been in deeds, who hold out avaricious in words; for, compared with the skill of your kindred, you can surpass not only the Cornelian orators but the Ausonian poets too, if a new glory for your jurisdiction has suddenly taken you, who have hitherto played the philosopher: we too have borne some name and honour.

4.14.3. But if the humility of our profession is to be held in contempt, because to Christ, who is to heal human affairs and lives, we of our own accord lay open the squalid ulcer of rotting consciences—which, in the men of our order, even if something still reeks of negligence, yet now swells with nothing of pride—I would have you know that it is not, as it is before the president of the forum, so before the judge of the world; for as he who has not kept silent his own crimes before you is condemned, so with us he who shall have confessed the same to God is absolved. Whence it plainly appears that it is incongruous for him to be pronounced by your party too much a culprit, whose cause looks rather to another's tribunal.

4.14.4. Wherefore you will by no means be able further to pour out the threatening complaint of our grief, since, prosperous things succeeding, whether you forget or neglect the old favour, it is alike bitter. Accordingly, if you weigh future things as great, write to a clergyman; if present things, write to a colleague; and cultivate this virtue in yourself—if it is natural; if not, add it as something grafted—by which you may never disdain old comrades for the novelty of those who follow. For otherwise you will seem to use friends as flowers, welcome only so long as they are fresh. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Elaphius, greetings.

4.15.1. Prepare a manifold feast and most capacious banqueting-couches: by very many roads, by many throngs (so it has settled, in the fellowship of good men), one comes to you, since the time of the future dedication has become known to all. For the baptistery which you were once building, you write can now be consecrated. To which festival your vow, our ministry, the office of many, the cause of all the faithful solicits; since it is a thing of great example that, at this time, new summits of churches should be built by you, when scarcely another would dare to repair the old.

4.15.2. For what remains, we wish that, as you render your vows to our God through abundant years, so you may vow to render them—and that not only by a hidden religion, but by a manifest conversion; and, the state of the times being mitigated, may Christ indulge both my desire and that of the Ruteni, that you may be able to offer sacrifices also for those for whom you now offer altars.

4.15.3. For the rest, although the latest autumn now shortens the day, and surrounds the anxious ears of travellers with the crackling crash of leaves falling throughout the whole grove, and into the fortress to which you invite—girt as it is with Alpine crags—it is harder to ascend in the wintry season, yet we, with God going before, coming along the rugged sides of your mountains, shall fear neither the rocks below nor the snows above, although the deep declivity of the ridges must often be retraced by an embankment broken in a spiral; for, even if there were no solemnity, you yourself are sufficiently worthy—as is that Tullian phrase—"for whose sake Thespiae is visited." Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Ruricius, greetings.

4.16.1. I received through Paterninus your page, which it is uncertain whether it has more honey or more salt. For the rest, it shows this abundance of eloquence, smells of these flowers, so that it well appears that you profit not only by open but by stealthy reading too—although even this theft, which, deprecating, you confess about a copied little book, glory rather than pardon ought to regard; for what would you do without virtue, who do not commit even your very sins without praise?

4.16.2. But I gladly hear of whatever fraud has been imposed on me, absent as I was, and embrace it as a princely gift, that in some way I have endured an unharmed harm. For neither has what accrued to your use departed from our property, nor have you come to the increase of your knowledge through the loss of another's; nay rather, you yourself by right will not henceforth lack rich praise, who have, by a fiery wit, becomingly imitated the nature of fire—from which, if you wish to take anything away, it remains whole, and is wholly transferred. Wherefore now cease to be alarmed, and to believe a little wrongly about the character of a friend; for in this deed the wound of fault would the more pollute us, if the blow of envy should strike. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Arbogast, greetings.

4.17.1. Your friend Eminentius, my honoured lord, presented to me the lettered letters which you yourself dictated, filled with the cultivation of a grace shining threefold. Of which virtues the love is surely the first, which compelled you to deign to notice things humble in us—who are strangers, or who now desire to lie hidden; then your modesty, by whose impulse, while you tremble undeservedly, you praise deservedly; the third, your urbanity, by which you most wittily allege that you play the fool, and, filled from the fount of Quirinal eloquence, a drinker of the Moselle you belch the Tiber—so familiar with the barbarians, yet ignorant of barbarisms, equal to the ancient leaders in tongue and hand—but those whose right hand was wont to handle the pen no less than the sword.

4.17.2. Wherefore the pomp of Roman speech, if any anywhere still survives, once abolished in the Belgic or Rhenish lands, has settled in you; by whom, whether safe or making your peroration, even if at the very frontier the Latin rights have fallen, the words do not stumble. Wherefore, returning your greeting in turn, I greatly rejoice that at least in your illustrious breast the traces of fading letters have remained; which, if you continue by frequent reading, you will experience day by day that, by as much as men excel beasts, by so much the trained are to be preferred to rustics.

4.17.3. As for what you wish—that I, a wicked interpreter, should prattle something on spiritual pages—these things are more justly asked of priests near in place, advanced in age, famous in faith, well known in their work, ready in speech, retentive in memory, and, in short, more powerful by every gift of sublime merits. For, to leave aside the bishop of your city—a most consummate man, and by the conscience and fame of all virtues alike blessed—it is much more opportunely that, about any questions whatsoever, the renowned fathers and chief mystics of the Gauls are consulted by you—Lupus, set not too far off, and Auspicius, not a little near; to the airing of whose abundant learning not even your consultation suffices. Accordingly, that I have not obeyed in this part of your requests, pardon me—kindly indeed, but just too; for, if it is right for you to flee unskilfulness, it also befits me to shun boastfulness. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Lucontius, greetings.

4.18.1. You forget what you ask, and, on the contrary, if you enjoin anything, you remember it to the full. It is too long to recall what you and yours promised to me and mine about a quick return, of all which not even the least things have been fulfilled. Nay rather, when you were contriving your flight from us—whereby we thought you would return at holy Easter—no heavy baggage was led from the town to the estate, no wagons, no carriages were brought up to carry the loads.

4.18.2. And, that I may complain nothing of the fraud of the matronal party, which you carried off with your light impedimenta, both you and our common brother Volusianus were attended by a retinue scarcely of single clients and boys apiece; whereby you presently cheated the solicitude of those who followed you with the vain hope of returning soon. Certainly brother Volusianus, chancing to be going to the estates of Bayeux and about to range through the whole province of Lugdunensis Secunda, eluded our expectation under the appearance of a shorter journey.

4.18.3. And now you yourself, thus idling against your faith for many days, say that, if I have sportively made any trifles in metre afterward, they ought to be sent to you. I grant your injunctions, since you are worthy to read such things; for the very song which now slips from my hands is so rustic and so unpolished that you would think I send it, not to a country-house, but rather from a country-house.

4.18.4. The basilica of the holy bishop and confessor Martin, Bishop Perpetuus—a most worthy successor to so great a predecessor—has rebuilt much more capacious than the former which it was hitherto. It is, as they say, a great work, and to be named, which, made in honour of such a man, such a man ought to have made. The aforesaid priest compels me to inscribe on its walls this epigram, which you will review—being, as he is in these things, in whatever he demands, most imperious by the privilege of affection.

4.18.5. And would that the offering of this homage of mine in no way disfigure the pomp or the votive gifts of that mass—which I greatly fear will be otherwise, unless perhaps among all things beautiful the foulness of this epigram so pleases as a black mole on a white body, which indeed is wont so to cause laughter as to receive approval. But what more of this? Lay aside your shepherds' pipes yourself, and stretch out a hand to my elegy, since it limps on its foot.

Martin's body, venerable in all lands, in which, after the times of life, honour lives, a building first covered here with plebeian adornment, which was not equal to its confessor. Nor did it cease to burden the citizens with shame— the great glory of the man, the scant grace of the place; but the bishop who is reckoned sixth from himself, Perpetuus, took away the long reproach, removing the inner shrine of the modest chapel and raising ample roofs with an outer house; and there grew together, the strong patron granting it, the building in space, the founder in merits— a building able to contend with Solomon's temple, which was the seventh wonder of the world. For if that shone with gems, gold, and silver, this surpasses all metals in faith. Begone, biting envy, and let the former men be absolved, let chattering posterity make nothing new or add nothing; and, while Christ comes, who shall raise up all peoples, let the summits of Perpetuus endure perpetually.

4.18.6. We have offered, as you see, what of a recent song was at hand; but no less than this, if you weave delays, will we shake the stars, about to use even satiric verses, if the matter demands—which you will falsely think are to be equalled to this song in mildness; for the nature of mortals blames some things more effectually, quickly, and ardently than it praises. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Florentinus, greetings.

4.19.1. You accuse both our delays and our silence; each is excusable; for both we come and we write. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Domnicius, greetings.

4.20.1. You, to whom it is frequently a pleasure to look upon arms and armed men, what delight, do we think, you would have conceived in your mind, if you had seen Sigismer, the royal youth, adorned in the fashion and dress of his people, as a bridegroom or suitor, seeking the praetorium of his father-in-law! Him a horse indeed, decked with trappings—nay, horses laden with radiant gems—preceded, or even followed; while yet this was seen there more becoming, that he himself, on foot, walked in the midst of his runners and footmen, flame-coloured with scarlet, ruddy with gold, milk-white with silk; then, to so great an adornment, his hair, of one colour with his ruddiness and his skin.

4.20.2. But the form of the chieftains and allies accompanying him was terrible even in peace; whose feet were bound, first, up to the ankle with hairy buskins; the knees, legs, and calves without covering; besides this, a high, close, many-coloured garment scarcely reaching to the bare knees; sleeves veiling only the beginnings of the arms; green cloaks bordered with crimson hems; their swords, hanging from the shoulder by overlapping baldrics, had girt their sides shut with studded skins. By the very adornment with which they were decked, they were defended.

4.20.3. Their right hands were filled with barbed lances and throwing-axes, their left part shadowed by shields, whose snowy light on the rims, and tawny on the bosses, so betrayed both their wealth and their zeal—everything altogether of this kind, that in the action of the nuptials the pomp of Mars seemed not less than that of Venus. But why these things at greater length? To such a spectacle your presence alone was lacking; for when I saw that you did not see the things which are beautiful to you, at that time I longed for the very impatience of your longing. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Aper, greetings.

4.21.1. There is indeed a chief prerogative of the father's side in showing one's lineage; but yet much is what we owe to our mothers too; for it is not right that anything in us be honoured the more meanly because we are the burdens of the one rather than the seeds of the others. But let the matter or reason of defining our origin be with the natural philosophers: let us pursue the point from which we set out.

4.21.2. Your father is an Aeduan, your mother an Arvernian. You are owed to the Aedui first—therefore not to them alone—even on account of that example of our Maro, by whose witness Pallas, thus reckoned an Arcadian because at once a Samnite too, could have moved against Mezentius, as a stranger, the arms of the Etruscans, had he not, mingled with a Sabellian mother, drawn thence also a part of his fatherland. Behold, you have a great proof, with the greatest author, that the region of one's mother too is to be reckoned a part of one's fatherland—unless you will judge that the poets lie even when they do not depart from history.

4.21.3. Therefore if the Arvernians in turn rightly claim for themselves at least a portion of you, patiently admit the complaint of those who long for you, who, through the office of one mouth, have poured out the secret of not one breast—whom imagine to be saying, openly and to your face: "What so great evil have we committed against you, ungrateful man, that for so many years you flee, as though enemy soil, the ground that once nursed you? Here we cherished your cradle; here we shaped the boastful limbs of your wailing infancy; here you were carried as the burden of citizens' arms."

4.21.4. Hence your grandfather Fronto, gracious to you, severe to himself, who could have been an example to those whom we have as an example; hence your grandmother Auspicia, who, after the death of your mother left you orphaned, paid alone the care of two; but your aunt too was from here, and from here was Frontina, holier than holy virgins, whom her mother feared, her father venerated—a girl of the highest abstinence, of the highest rigour, and with such great faith so fearing God that she was feared by men. Here, that you might be imbued with the liberal disciplines, the flourishing studies of the grammarian and the rhetor fostered you by a rivalling warning; whence you came forth not so meanly trained that it is permitted you not to love the Arvernians even on account of letters.

4.21.5. I pass over the peculiar pleasantness of the territory; I pass over that plain of the fields, in which without danger the gainful waves of the standing crops billow, which each industrious man, the more he frequents, the less he suffers shipwreck; soft to travellers, fruitful to ploughmen, delightful to hunters; which the backs of mountains gird with pastures, their sides with vineyards, the level land with villas, the rocky with fortresses, the shady with lairs, the open with cultivation, the hollow with springs, the precipitous with rivers; which, in short, is of such a kind that, once seen, it often persuades many strangers to forget their fatherland.

4.21.6. I pass over the city itself, always so most loving toward you that you ought to prefer to it nothing of the fellowship of the nobles, into which you, a hand laid upon you, were happily snatched and inserted; and so the pleasure of your presence is to all such that yet no satiety has taken any. Now what shall I say here of your private property, whose state is this, that it would endure your expenditure by that very offence by which it is more frequent? For a master, a husbandman, if he cherishes his hearth here, so makes his expense as to increase his revenue too. These things I, one of all the citizens—certainly of the good ones—prattle by their wish, their petition, in their stead; who, since with so great honour they demand you, with so great love long for you, it is given to understand that you yourself will obtain more of joy, while you grant what you are asked. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Leo, greetings.

4.22.1. The magnificent Hesperius, a gem of friends and of letters, when he lately returned to the city from the country of the Toulousans, said that you charge me that, the books of letters now being finished, I should turn my pen to the style of history. With the highest reverence, and with the highest affection, I embrace so great a counsel; for you pronounce him fit for greater works whom you think ought to leave middling ones. But—what must be confessed—I dare to look up to a judgement of this kind rather than to undertake the counsel.

4.22.2. The thing is indeed worthy that you should bid it, but no less worthy that you should do it; for of old too, when Gaius Cornelius had urged the like on Gaius Secundus, he himself afterward seized upon what he enjoined; and this, by the example, you will now better attempt, since both I rise as a disciple to Pliny, and you, by your ancient kind of narrating, rightly outstrip Cornelius—who, if he came back to life in our age and beheld of what quality and how great you are held to be in letters, would now be more truly a Tacitus.

4.22.3. And so you rightly take up the mass of the theme proposed, you who, besides singular eloquence, have a great opportunity of vast knowledge; for daily, through the councils of a most powerful king, you, anxious for the whole world alike, learn its affairs and rights, treaties and wars, places, distances, merits; whence who would more justly gird himself to these things than he who, it is agreed, has learned the movements of nations, the varieties of embassies, the deeds of leaders, the pacts of rulers—in short, all the secrets of public affairs—and who, set on an excellent summit, has no need either to suppress the truth or to concoct a lie?

4.22.4. But our condition is far unequal, to whom this new exile is a grief and the old reading no use; then religion is for profession, humility for ambition, mediocrity for obscurity; nor in present things is so much of substance placed as in future things of hope; finally, languor is an impediment, and now, even late, on account of this very thing, sloth is at heart; and certainly there is now no praise of care, even contemporary, over my studies—nay, not even posthumous.

4.22.5. Chiefly it is fixed that I should seek small glory from history, since through men of clerical office our own things are rashly, others' things boastfully, past things unfruitfully, present things half-fully, false things basely, true things dangerously told. For the theme is of such a kind that, in it, if you make mention of good men, scant favour is prepared; if of the notable, the greatest offence; so straightway a satiric colour and odour mingles itself with that composition. So it is: historical writing seems much to abhor from our order, whose beginning is envy, whose continuation is labour, whose end is hatred.

4.22.6. But these things come about, if anything is composed with clergymen for authors; who, fixed by the snaky molars of revilers, if we publish anything simply, are called madmen; if anything exactly, presumptuous. But if you yourself, to whom it is given to be able by leaps to trample, or to overrun, the necks of disparagers, should willingly draw by lot the province of this matter, no one would write more loftily than you, no one more in the ancient manner—even if it should please you to speak of recent things; since, filled before with abundance of words, now of matter, you have left no reason for being cut by a venomed bite. And therefore for the future it will be a profit to consult you, a pleasure to hear you, an authority to read you. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Proculus, greetings.

4.23.1. Your son—nay, our common son—has run to me, who, having left you, grieves that he has erred, overwhelmed by the shame of penitence for his desertion. So, the tenor of his fault being heard, I rebuked the man as he hid himself—loving in words, with a menacing face—and with my own voice but in your stead, crying out that he was worthy of disowning, of the cross, of the sack, and of the other parricidal punishments. At this he, confounded, blushed, deprecating his error by no shameless excuse; but when I refuted him, convicted on all points, he joined to his modesty the companions of tears, so flowing and abundantly streaming that they gave faith to a correction to follow.

4.23.2. I ask, then, that you be merciful to one severe upon himself, and, following God, not hold guilty, with you for judge, one who professes himself worthy of condemnation; whom, if, inexorable, you should bid receive unheard-of kinds of punishments, he cannot be tortured more by grief through you than by shame through himself. Free your own despair from fear, free my confidence; and, if I rightly interpret the necessity of fatherly love, absolve yourself too, who are consumed by a hidden grief, by which your son is consumed in a public one. To whom it is agreed I have done very much injury, if you nevertheless do even a little—which certainly, as I hope, you will not do, unless you are harder than the rocks, or persist more rigid than the unbreakable adamant.

4.23.3. Therefore, if of your character and of your friendships I justly presume better things, propitiously indulge the excused, whom, reconciling, I steadfastly pledge will be faithful for the future; and, he being quickly loosed from his fault, I am bound by the benefit, greatly demanding not only that you pardon, but that you do so straightway, and that you admit him, returning, not only to your house but to your heart. Great God, how joyful will the day rise for you, the message for me, the spirit for him, when, cast at his father's feet, from that wounded mouth, that terrible mouth, while he expects a reproach, he shall have received a kiss! Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Turnus, greetings.

4.24.1. Well does that Mantuan phrase agree with your name and your business: "Turnus, what none of the gods would have dared to promise to one who wished it, behold, the rolling day has brought of its own accord." Your father Turpio, a man of tribune's rank, asked of old, if you remember, for money on loan from Maximus the Palatine, and obtained it, setting aside or pledging nothing—neither of silver, nor binding any of his estates—by way of surety and pledge; but, as is shown by the bond made, the interest is secured to the lender, which, drawn out over a ten-year period, brought the amount of the principal up to double.

4.24.2. But when your father, the disease pressing on him, was sinking down to a near death, and on this very account public authority was the more violently constraining the failing head of the household to make good the debt, nor could the wickedness of the executors be sustained, he, now despaired of, commanded me by letter, as I was setting out for Toulouse, that, at my request, your creditor should grant at least a modest respite. To the prayers of the petitioner I quickly assented, since with Maximus I had old rights not only of acquaintance but of hospitality. So I gladly proceeded to my friend out of my way, although the villa was distant not a few miles from the public highway.

4.24.3. When I came, he himself met me, whom I had known before erect in body, free in step, free in voice, liberal in face—much unlike his old self in his gait, in his garb a man, in his pace modesty, in his colour and speech religious; then short hair, a long beard, three-legged chairs, Cilician hangings hung at the doors, a bed having nothing of feather, a table nothing of purple, kindness itself so benign as to be frugal, abounding not so much in flesh as in pulse; certainly, if there was anything richer in the food, indulging not himself but his guests.

4.24.4. When we rose, I secretly inquired of the bystanders which kind of life, out of the three orders, he had seized—whether he played the monk, or the clergyman, or the penitent. They said he was lately fulfilling a priesthood thrust upon him, to which civic love had bound him, refusing, by faction. The light returned, while the boys and clients were occupied in catching the animals, I sought the means of a secret conversation; he granted it. I embraced him, suspecting nothing; and I first confirm that I congratulate him for the height of his rank, then I mingle the prayers that followed.

4.24.5. I set forth the request of our Turpio, I allege his necessities, I deplore his extremities, which seemed the harder to his grieving friends for this, that, bound by usury, he was being loosed by his body: he should remember, then, his new profession, his old fellowship, and should moderate, by granting a respite for a while, the barbarous instance of the exactors barking around him; and, if the sick man should die, he should grant to the heirs a year of mourning free; if—as I would wish—Turpio should have recovered his former health, he should indulge the exhausted man, by leisure, the means of growing strong again.

4.24.6. I was still asking, when suddenly the man of charity began to weep greatly—not over the delay of the debt but over the danger of the debtor; and, his sob bridled: "Far be it from me," he said, "that I, a clergyman, should demand back from a sick man these things, which I should scarcely have asked, as a soldier, from a man in health. But I love his children too in such a way that, even if anything turn out adverse to my friend, I am about to ask of them nothing more than the reckoning of my office permits. Wherefore write to the anxious (and, that they may believe your letter more, join mine), that, whatever the issue of his sickness shall be—which, however, we wish prosperous for our brother—I will both prolong the space of a year for payment, and remit the additional half which has accrued under the name of interest, content with the restitution of the simple principal alone."

4.24.7. I gave at this the greatest thanks to God, great thanks to my host, who so loved both his fame and his conscience, confirming that the friend sends ahead of himself what he remits to you, and from this buys the supernal kingdom, in that he does not sell earthly benefits. Therefore, for what remains, strive that, on your initiative, at least the loaned sum be paid straightway, in such a way that you nonetheless give immense thanks even in the name of those who, joined to you by brotherhood, cannot perhaps, by reason of their age, understand what gift they obtain.

4.24.8. There is no reason why you should begin to say: "I have joint-heirs, the division has not yet been celebrated; it is agreed I have been treated more avariciously than my co-heirs; my brother and sister still act under their years of tutelage; for my sister no husband, for my brother no guardian, for the guardian no surety has yet been found." Which indeed is altogether said well to creditors, but to bad ones; but when such a person has a contract, who would relax the half when he could exact the whole, if he suffers delay, whatever he had conceded mercifully out of pity, he justly demands back on account of the injury. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Domnulus, greetings.

4.25.1. I cannot put off imparting to you in haste, a partaker of a great joy, what our father in Christ and likewise bishop, Patiens, having set out for Chalon after the manner of religion, after the manner of his own steadfastness, did—when he had come into the aforesaid town, the college of provincial priests partly going before, partly accompanying, namely that some supreme bishop might be ordained for the township, whose church-discipline was tottering after the younger bishop Paulus had departed and died. The pontifical council was met by the various wishes of the townsmen, and also by those private interests which always overturn the public good;

4.25.2. which a kind of triumvirate of competitors had kindled, of whom this one belched out the ancient prerogative of his birth, destitute of the remaining gift of character; this one, by parasitic uproars procured by the suffrage of his kitchens, was thrust forward with Apician applause; this one had promised, by a tacit compact, that, if he obtained the wished-for eminence, the church's estates would be a prey to his applauders.

4.25.3. When holy Patiens and holy Euphronius saw this—who held the rigour and firmness of the sounder judgement, free from hatred and favour—the counsel being first secretly shared with their fellow-bishops before it was openly disclosed, and the clamour of the raging crowd being despised, suddenly, with joined hands, they seized holy John, a man distinguished for honesty, kindness, and gentleness—who then wished and suspected nothing less than what was being done.

4.25.4. (He was here first a reader, then a minister of the altar, and that from infancy; afterward, by the advance of labours and times, archdeacon; in which degree or ministry, much held back on account of his industry, he could long not be augmented in dignity, lest he could be released from the office.) Yet him, now a priest of the second order, amid the discordant voices of the parties—which deferred to praise one not ambitious, but did not dare to blame one praiseworthy—the factious being astonished, the bad blushing, the good acclaiming, none crying out against it, they consecrated as their colleague.

4.25.5. Now therefore, if the Jura monasteries now send you back—into which you were gladly wont to ascend, now playing a prelude to the heavenly and supernal dwellings—it is fitting that you rejoice over the concord of our common fathers or patrons, whether so feeling in agreement or so agreeing in feeling; and exult also in the name of him whom Euphronius created by his testimony, Patiens by his hand, both by their judgement; in which Euphronius did what would befit not only his own old age but also the longevity of his dignity; and Patiens too did—a man equal, however, to even great praises—what well befitted a person to do who is the head of our city through his priesthood, and of the province through the city. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Petronius, greetings.

5.1.1. I hear that you spend a pleasurable patience in reading through my letters. This is a great thing, and most befitting a man of letters, that, though you yourself excel in the greatest studies, you should embrace these things, even the least, in others; but from this very thing the most consummate glory is repaid to you, for he stands out sufficiently by the merits of his own talent who has been the patron of another's.

5.1.2. I commend Vindicius, my kinsman, a religious man, and most suited to the levitical dignity which he has lately attained. To copy out for him from my tablets what you had bidden was a task that did not suit a province at leisure; here I have delivered to you some trifles by way of a little gift—although, such is your holiness, you always reckon our letters great rewards.

5.1.3. Meanwhile I make known the need of the aforesaid bearer, whom a twofold condition of business that has arisen has drawn hither; since he set out on this determination, either to enter a suit or to enter upon an inheritance. For, a paternal cousin having died unmarried and intestate, he prepares to succeed by the prerogative of agnation, unless, however, factious force opposes his undertakings. Against all which difficulties, you alone, after the help of Christ, suffice for your suppliant; of whom I am confident that, if the person earns favour, the cause will obtain victory. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Nymphidius, greetings.

5.2.1. The book on the state of the soul, illustrious in its three volumes, Mamertus Claudianus—the most skilled of Christian philosophers and the first of all learned men—took care to adorn and embellish with all the members, arts, and parts of the philosophy he pursued, revealing the nine, which they call Muses, to be disciplines, not women. For in his pages the watchful reader will find the truer names of the Camenae, which beget for themselves their own proper appellation about themselves. For there grammar divides, and oratory declaims, and arithmetic numbers, and geometry measures, and music weighs, and dialectic disputes, and astronomy foreknows, and architecture builds, and metric modulates.

5.2.2. Gladdened by the novelty of this reading and excited by its maturity, you asked that it be hastily reviewed and copied, as you had seen; as you had asked, you obtained it, under the promise of a swift return. It is fitting neither that I be deceived nor that you deceive me. It is time that what was lent be restored, since the book itself, if it pleased, ought to have given satiety; if it displeased, ought to have stirred distaste. But you, whatever the case is, discharge your faith quickly, lest, if you prepare to return the requested little book too late, you should seem to love the parchment rather than the letters. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greetings.

5.3.1. It were fitting indeed that our garrulity should be bridled by the retaliation of your silence. But since perfect love ought not so much to reckon up what offices it pays as to remember what it owes, even now, the reins of modesty being loosed, we repeat the homage of an impudent address. Whose shamelessness is from this most of all discerned, that you keep silent. Did I, then, not deserve to know what you were doing in the time of hostility, brother? Did you conceal from a friend alarmed on your behalf either your security or your fear?

5.3.2. What else is it, if to one who inquires you suppress your doings, than to suspect that he who is anxious for you would either not rejoice on learning of prosperous things, or would not be sad if adverse ones turned out? Let this opinion of impiety depart from good morals, and let true affection banish, from its own brightness, the blemish of so wretched a suspicion. For, as your Crispus affirms, "to wish the same and to refuse the same—that, in the end, is firm friendship."

5.3.3. Meanwhile, if at least you are well, it is well. But I, weighed down by the mass of an unhappy conscience, lately, by the force of fevers, came near to the extremity of my safety—as one upon whom, most unworthy, the weight of so great a profession has been thrust, who, wretched, compelled to teach before to learn, and presuming to preach the good before to do it, like a barren tree, since I have not works for fruits, scatter words for leaves.

5.3.4. For what remains, pray that it be worth the labour that we have returned almost from the infernal seat, lest, if we remain in our past crimes, what we live should begin to pertain rather to the death of the soul. Behold, what I do I declare; behold, I still inquire what you do. From our part is done what is pious; do you henceforth do what seems good. But that, indeed, believe to be cut in bronze, like the Attic laws: that we, by Christ's help, will never admit an end of the love whose beginning we have striven to found. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Simplicius, greetings.

5.4.1. That I have not received writings, who had sent them, I impute to friendship, but I rather assign to modesty; for, unless I reckon beyond what is fair, that the greeting owed me was withheld, that was not contumacy but bashfulness. But if you further close your door to my prattling page, and set up the bolt, I yield, not unwillingly, to your quiet indeed; but I declare that I shall find my culprits not far from you.

5.4.2. For it is not unjust to turn all the odium of your silence to the pride of your sons, who, feeling themselves loved, suffer a kind of distaste at our earnestness; whom you ought to admonish, by your fatherly authority, that they cease not to sweeten, with polished addresses, the bitterness of the offence contracted with us. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Syagrius, greetings.

5.5.1. Since you are the great-grandson of a consul, and that by the male succession (although that matters little to the case I am about to set forth), since therefore you are of the seed of a poet, to whom letters would beyond doubt have given statues, if the consular robes had not given them (as even now the words of that author, polished in verses, attest), from whom the studies of his posterity have not degenerated even a little—at least in this respect—it is monstrous to tell how greatly I am astonished that you have seized the knowledge of the Germanic tongue with such ease.

5.5.2. And yet I remember that your boyhood was fittingly imbued with the liberal schools, and I have it sufficiently ascertained that you often declaimed keenly and eloquently before the orator. And since these things are so, I should like you to say whence your breast suddenly drank in the euphony of an alien race, so that now, after the canes of the Maronian reading, and after the toiled-over copiousness and loquacity of the varicose man of Arpinum, you burst forth to me like a new falcon from an old eyrie.

5.5.3. It can by no means be reckoned how much of a laugh it is to me and to others, as often as I hear that, in your presence, the barbarian fears to make a barbarism in his own tongue. The bent old age of the Germans is amazed at you when you interpret their letters, and takes you, in their mutual affairs, as arbiter and umpire. A new Solon of the Burgundians in expounding laws, a new Amphion in tuning lyres—but three-stringed ones—you are loved, you are sought out, you delight, you are chosen, you are called in, you decree, you are heard. And although they are alike stiff and unhewable in body and in mind, they embrace in you, and at once learn, the tongue of their fathers, the heart of a Latin.

5.5.4. This one thing remains, most witty man: that, no less diligently, even when you have leisure, you spend something on the reading of literature, and keep, as you are most elegant, this measure—that this tongue be held by you, lest you be laughed at; that the other be exercised, that you may laugh. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Apollinaris, greetings.

5.6.1. As soon as summer gave way to autumn, and the fear of the Arvernians could for a little while be tempered by the reckoning of the season, I came to Vienne, where I found Thaumastus, your brother—whom, by the right of blood and of age, I embrace with a reverend intimacy—most sorrowful; who, although he was greatly afflicted by his recent widowhood, was yet little less anxious on your behalf: for he feared and dreaded lest the barbarian whirlwind or military wickedness should concoct some calumny against you.

5.6.2. For he affirms that it was secretly whispered to the master of soldiers Chilperic, a most victorious man, by the venomous report of certain wicked men, that, chiefly by your machination, the town of Vaison was being attached to the party of the new prince. If from this any suspicion is struck into you and yours, swiftly inform me by the return of a familiar page, lest the opportunity of my solicitude or my presence be lost to you. It will be peculiarly my care—if, however, you shall judge anything must be guarded against—to make you either secure by favour obtained, or more cautious by anger explored. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Thaumastus, greetings.

5.7.1. We have at last tracked down who, before our tetrarch, slandered the friendships of your brother and, on the other side, those of the party of the new prince—if, that is, the clandestine footprints of the informers have not cheated the faithful sagacity of our comrades. These men, surely, are—as you yourself, set face to face, heard—those whom Gaul has long groaned to endure even among the more clement barbarians. These are they whom even those who are feared, fear. These are they whom this province peculiarly awaits: to bring in calumnies, to denounce persons, to bring on threats, to carry off property.

5.7.2. These are they whose occupations in leisure, whose plunderings in peace, whose flights amid arms, whose victories amid wine, you hear praised. These are they who delay causes when called in, hinder things omitted, disdain things charged, forget things admonished, once enriched. These are they who buy lawsuits, sell interventions, appoint arbiters, dictate what is to be judged, tear up what is dictated, drag in those about to litigate, drag out those to be heard, draw the condemned, draw back those settling. These are they whom, if you ask, even with no one opposing, a benefit, it irks them to promise, shames them to refuse, repents them to have granted.

5.7.3. These are they to whose comparison Narcissus, Asiaticus, Massa, Marcellus, Carus, Parthenius, Licinus, and Pallas would raise the finger in surrender. These are they who envy the tunicked their leisure, the war-cloaked their pay, the couriers their travel-money, the merchants their markets, the envoys their little gifts, the informers their customs-dues, the provincials their estates, the townsmen their priesthoods, the keepers of records their weights and measures, the enrolled their salaries, the praetorian accountants their arrangements, the cities their gratuities, the publicans their respites, the clergy their tributes, the nobles their reverence and their lineage, the elders their seat of honour, their equals their meeting, the girt their rights, the ungirt their privileges, those to be instructed their schools, the teachers their fees, the instructed their letters.

5.7.4. These are they who, drunk with new wealth, that you may know even the least things, by the intemperance of using betray their unskilfulness of possessing; for they gladly come armed to feasts, white-robed to funerals, fur-clad to churches, in mourning to weddings, in beaver-skins to litanies. No kind of men, of orders, of seasons is at heart to them. In the forum Scythians, in the bedchamber vipers, at the banquet buffoons, in exactions Harpies, in disputes statues, in inquiries beasts, in negotiations snails, in contracts money-changers; for understanding stony, for judging wooden, for being kindled flaming, for forgiving iron; for friendships leopards, for pleasantries bears, for deceiving foxes, for pride bulls, for consuming minotaurs.

5.7.5. They hold firm hopes in the upheavals of affairs, they love doubtful times the more surely; and, trembling alike from cowardice and from conscience, since they are lions in the praetoria, hares in the camps, they fear treaties, lest these be discussed; wars, lest they fight. Of whom, if the breeze of a rusty money-bag has anywhere breathed upon their nostrils, you will straightway see there applied both the eyes of Argus, and the hands of Briareus, and the claws of the Sphinxes, and the perjuries of Laomedon, and the cunning of Ulysses, and the deceits of Sinon, and the good faith of Polymestor, and the piety of Pygmalion.

5.7.6. By these morals they overwhelm a man excelling no less in goodness than in power. But what can one man do, fenced about on all sides by a venomous interpreter? What, I say, can he do, whose nature is with the good, whose life is with the bad? By whose counsels Phalaris would be made more bloody, Midas more covetous, Ancus more boastful, Tarquin more proud, Tiberius more cunning, Gaius more dangerous, Claudius more dull, Nero more impure, Galba more avaricious, Otho more audacious, Vitellius more extravagant, Domitian more truculent.

5.7.7. Surely—what chiefly heals the afflicted—his own Tanaquil tempers our Lucumo, and clears away the ears of her husband, filled with the poisonous dregs of whisperers, by the opportune use of salted speech. By whose zeal it is fitting that you know that meanwhile nothing of the poisons of the younger Cibyratans has harmed the quiet of our common brothers in the mind of our common patron, nor will anything harm, God being propitious—if only, so long as the present power rules Lugdunensian Germany, our and his own Germanicus is governed by the present Agrippina. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Secundinus, greetings.

5.8.1. It is long indeed since, astonished and proclaiming you, we used to read you serving more familiarly the hexameter. For the matter was pleasant, whether the nuptial torches of the bridal chamber were described by you, or wild beasts pierced by royal blows. But in the triple trochees lately compacted into the hendecasyllabic metre you have made nothing like, not even by your own judgement.

5.8.2. Good God, what of gall, of charm, of peppered eloquence I, by no means silent, beheld therein! save that the thunderbolt of your fervent wit and the salted freedom of your eloquence were hampered perhaps by the persons rather than by the causes; so that to me neither does Ablabius the consul seem to have more figuratively pricked the house and life of Constantine in a twin verse, nor to have bitten it with such a distich, secretly hung at the Palatine doors:

"Who would ask back the golden ages of Saturn? These are of gems—but Neronian."

since, namely, the aforesaid Augustus had, at well-nigh the same times, destroyed his wife Fausta by the heat of a bath, and his son Crispus by the cold of poison.

5.8.3. You, nevertheless, no less diligently, undaunted, spend your labour at least on the witty colours of satires; for your writings will be enriched by the increasing vices of our tyrant-townsmen. For those whom our judgements, by the fault of the age, think fortunate, swell with no such mediocrity that posterity will one day have to labour to recall their very names; for the disgraces of the wicked, equally as the praises of the good, remain immortal. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Aquilinus, greetings.

5.9.1. I reckon it to my own credit, most capacious of all virtues, if you too think it worthy, that we should have as many friendships ourselves as we have causes of friendship. It is an ancestral thing that I demand back; my witnesses in this matter at present shall be called our grandfathers, Apollinaris and Rusticus, whom a likeness of letters, dignities, dangers, and consciences had joined in a praiseworthy intimacy, when they execrated together, in Constantine inconstancy, in Jovinus pliancy, in Gerontius perfidy—single faults in single men, all crimes at once in Dardanus.

5.9.2. In the age that was the middle, our fathers, under one fellowship, scarcely yet borne from boyhood into full youth, served the prince Honorius as tribunes and notaries, sojourning together with such affection that among them the least cause of concord was that they were recalled to be the sons of friends. In the principate of the emperor Valentinian, the one presided over a part of the Gauls, the other over the whole; but the titles of both were so in a manner balanced by a brotherly compensation, that he was first in the time of his office who was second in dignity.

5.9.3. It has come to us—that is, it has come to the grandsons, whom it would befit to guard against nothing more than lest, through us perhaps, the affection of our parents and our forefathers should seem antiquated. To this, into a like intimacy, besides the hereditary prerogative, we are compelled by a manifold opportunity: the age of each of us no less joined than our fatherland; one sport exercised us, one master trained us; one gladness relaxed us, severity restrained us, discipline formed us.

5.9.4. For the rest, if God grants, in the years now knocking at the thresholds of old age, let us be, unless you reject it, two souls, one mind; and let us imbue our children, loving one another, to wish and to refuse the same things, to flee and to follow the same. But this would be of our fathers now above their prayers: if, through Rusticus and Apollinaris, the hearts of our praiseworthy great-grandfathers are reformed as well as their names. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Sapaudus, greetings.

5.10.1. If the illustrious Pragmatius does anything at all well among the other virtues of his mind, this he does best: that, from love of studies, he loves you singularly, in whom alone, or most of all, he marks that the traces of old skill and diligence have settled. And indeed not unjustly is he your patron; for a most copious honour is owed by him to letters.

5.10.2. Him once, declaiming and breaking the rhetorical benches with applaudable oratory, his eloquent father-in-law of his own accord admitted into a patrician family—although age, comeliness, and modesty pleaded for him to this end, to say nothing of his birth or wealth. But, as I have learned, even then the serious man blushed to have pleased by the gift of his form, since by the merit of his talent it would have sufficed him to be loved. And truly each best man pleases more excellently by his character than by his beauty; moreover, the passing adornments of the body waver with the advance and decline of running time. Him too, his judgement remaining, Priscus Valerianus, afterward prefect of the Gauls, joined to his counsels and tribunals, most perseveringly holding the old judgement, that to whom he had joined his offspring under the plea of knowledge, he should join also dignity.

5.10.3. But your composition is so bright, so distinguished, that, compared with it, the division of Palaemon, the gravity of Gallio, the abundance of Delphidius, the discipline of Agroecius, the strength of Alcimus, the tenderness of Adelphius, the rigour of Magnus, the sweetness of Victorius would write not only nothing superior but scarcely things equal. Indeed, lest I should seem to you, under this as it were hyperbolic catalogue of rhetoricians, to have flattered and gratified you in anything, I do not doubt—nay rather, I acquiesce—that to you alone the keenness of Quintilian and the pomp of Palladius are to be compared.

5.10.4. Wherefore, if anyone after you favours Latin erudition, he gives thanks to this friendship, and, if he has anything of a man, wishes to be added as a third to your fellowship; although—what is the more grievous—that ambition of his will not be enough to stir distaste in you, since few now honour studies, and at the same time it is fixed and rooted in human breasts, by a natural vice, that those who do not understand arts do not admire artists. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Potentinus, greetings.

5.11.1. We love you much; and indeed the affection of this love is not erroneous or fortuitous. For, that I might be made a comrade the more bound to you, I made a judgement—for it is my custom to choose first, to love after. "What, then," you say, "in me pleased you, to be approved?"

5.11.2. I will say gladly and briefly—of which one thing favour, the other the paper, compels me to make. I revere in your doings that you do many things imitable by every good man: you cultivate as one most skilful; you build as one most orderly; you hunt as one most effective; you feed your household as one most exact; you jest as one most witty; you judge as one most fair; you advise as one most sincere; you are moved to anger as one most slow; you are appeased as one most swift; you love in return as one most faithful.

5.11.3. All these examples of living, if my Apollinaris from these years of his youth follows, I rejoice; certainly I admonish him to follow them; in the teaching and training of whom—provided only that, by Christ's help, what is arranged succeeds—I most greatly rejoice that I shall borrow the greatest pattern of life from your character. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Calminius, greetings.

5.12.1. That a page travels to you from us more rarely, it is not our pride but another's tyranny that brings about; nor should you seek anything plainer concerning these things, since an equal fear with you interprets the necessity of this silence. This alone, however, I freely groan: that, made separate by the whirlwind of dissenting parties, we by no means enjoy a mutual sight of each other, nor are you ever offered to the anxious gaze of your fatherland—except perhaps when, at the will of another's terror, the breastplate covers you, the battlements us; where you yourself, brought captive to this alone, are compelled to empty your quivers of arrows, to fill your eyes with tears—we too not refusing it, since your wishes contrive something far other than your javelins.

5.12.2. But since meanwhile, even if not through the truth of treaties, at least through the semblance of truces, a certain window of the hope of our liberty shines out, I earnestly beg that you impart to us, when most you can, the address of a frequent page, knowing that there remains for you, in the minds of your besieged fellow-citizens, that gratitude which forgets the besieger's enmity. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Pannychius, greetings.

5.13.1. Do you know that Seronatus is returning from Toulouse? If not yet—and I believe that not yet—learn it at least by this: already Euanthius is going to Clausetia, and already gathering the assembled labour-gangs to clear, if perchance the embankment has been fouled by any fall of dropping leaves. Certainly if there is anything full of holes, he himself, alarmed, levels it, earth being carried in, the pits filled—as one who, like a leader, is about to go before his own monster from the valley of the Tarn—like the little mussels that pilot the bulk of whales amid rocks or shallows.

5.13.2. But that man—so swift in anger, so slow in bulk—like a serpent scarcely unrolled from its cave, is now borne in from close at hand upon the Gabalitani, expiring with fear; whom, single, scattered, townless, he now drains by unheard-of kinds of taxes, now nets about with the winding fraud of calumnies, not permitting the toil-worn to return home even then, when they have paid the yearly tribute.

5.13.3. And this too is a sure sign of his impending arrival: that in droves, wherever he turns, the bound are dragged, dragging their chains; in whose pain he rejoices, on whose hunger he feeds, reckoning it especially fine to disfigure those to be condemned before punishing them. He nourishes the hair of men, cuts that of women; of whom, however, if a rare pardon has regarded some, these venality looses, those vanity, none mercy. But to unfold such a beast neither the prince of orators, Marcus of Arpinum, nor of poets, Publius of Mantua, can suffice.

5.13.4. Accordingly, since this very plague is said to be drawing near—against whose treacheries may God interpose—forestall the disease by the wholesomeness of foresight, and against the suits of the quarrelsome, if any are stirred, take counsel by agreements; against tributes, by receipts; lest the evil man find, in the affairs of good men, either what to harm or what to bestow. In sum, do you wish to receive what I think about Seronatus? The rest fear to be afflicted, by his agency, with loss; to me even a robber's benefits are suspect. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Aper, greetings.

5.14.1. Does warm Baiae now delight you, and the sulphur-water belched, cavern-wise, from the rough pumice, and the pool medicinal for the liver-sick and the consumptive feeble? Or perhaps a mountain seat among the fortresses, and, in choosing a seat of refuge, do you suffer a certain difficulty from the multitude of strongholds? Whatever it is, whether you are at leisure or at business, you will yet, unless I am mistaken, be recalled to the city by the consideration of the Rogations.

5.14.2. Of which solemnity Mamertus, father and bishop, first found, instituted, and brought in for us, by a most reverend example, by a most useful experiment. There were indeed before—be it said with the peace of the faith—wandering, lukewarm, infrequent, and (so to speak) yawning supplications, which were often blunted by the interposing obstacles of luncheons—chiefly to deprecate either rains or fair weather; to which, to say nothing more, it was not fitting that the potter and the gardener alike should come.

5.14.3. But in these which the aforesaid supreme priest both brought forth and bestowed on us, there is fasting, praying, psalm-singing, weeping. To these festivals of humbled necks and the sighing companies of prostrate citizens I summon you; and, if I rightly measure your spiritual mind, you will now come the sooner, since you are called not to feasts but to tears. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Ruricius, greetings.

5.15.1. The word of office being premised, I commend our bookseller—tested by me not by favour but as a judge—of whom I have proved well and abundantly the good faith in his breast, and likewise the swiftness in his work, toward you, his master and mine and his own in common. This very man, then, carries hither a book of the Heptateuch, written with the highest speed and the highest neatness, although it has been re-read and revised by us also. He brings too a volume of the Prophets, although run through in my absence, yet by his own care and hand cleared of superfluous readings—and not always with the man reading against him who had promised his help; I believe, because his infirmity was an impediment, that he should not fulfil what he had promised.

5.15.2. It remains that your exhortation or your pledge should reward the servant, thus either studying to please or deserving, with a fitting grace; which, at any rate, if it is paid for such labour, will begin to look to your own recompense. But since I beg this from favour alone, do you look at what he deserves, of whom it is agreed that he seeks rather his master's affection than a reward. Farewell.

Sidonius to his wife Papianilla, greetings.

5.16.1. The quaestor Licinianus, coming from Ravenna, as soon as he touched the soil of Gaul, the Alps being crossed, sent a letter ahead of his coming, in which he indicates that he is the bearer of the imperial codicils, at whose arrival the patrician honour accrues to your brother Ecdicius too—in whose titles you rejoice equally as in mine—most swiftly, if you consider his age; most slowly, if his merits; for he long ago paid the suffrage for entering upon this dignity, not in the scale but on the sword's edge, and he himself, a private man, enriched the public treasury, not with moneys, but with spoils.

5.16.2. This, however, the holy Julius Nepos—supreme Augustus alike in arms and in character—did, in that the good faith of his predecessor Anthemius, pledged to your brother's toils, he discharged the more praiseworthily the quicker; since this man fulfilled what that one most often promised. Whence it comes that henceforth, for the commonwealth, every best man can and ought, if there is any strength in anyone, to spend it—being secure, and hence eager—since, even when an emperor is dead, the principate always repays whatever the prince has pledged to the devotion of the labouring.

5.16.3. Meanwhile you, if I well gather your affection, on learning these things take great solace amid the greatest adversities, nor does the terror even of the neighbouring siege swerve your mind from the path of common joys. For I know well that you were not so gladdened even by my own honour, which by the law you share, since, although you are a good wife, you are a most excellent sister. On which account, by Christ our God being propitious, I have hastily inscribed with congratulatory letters the enlarged titles of your line, at once absolving your solicitude and your brother's modesty; who would indicate nothing of his own dignity—and if perchance you did not know him to be modest, you would not on that account judge him impious.

5.16.4. But I enjoy not so much your insignia—which you have hitherto awaited, the more freely the more impatiently (although these too greatly)—as your concord; which I wish in future to be equal for our children and his, demanding by our common prayers that, as we, having attained the prefectorian rank for each of our families, have by divine favour rendered it patrician too, so they may make the patrician rank which they receive into a consular one.

5.16.5. Roscia salutes you, our common care; who, in the most indulgent bosom of her grandmother and aunts—what rarely befalls grandchildren to be reared—is yet brought up with severity. By which, however, her tender age is not weakened but her character is formed. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Eriphius, greetings.

5.17.1. You are, my Eriphius, ever yourself, and never does the hunt, the city, the country call you away so much that you are not, by the way, held by the pleasure of letters; and it comes by this zeal that you do not even disdain our writings, who, as you write, smell to you of the Muses. Which sentence, however, is amply proved to lack truth, and which it also appears comes either from jest, if you are merry, or from love, if you are serious; but for the rest it recoils far from what is just, when you assign to me things that would scarcely be fittingly accommodated even to Maro, scarcely to Homer.

5.17.2. Let us leave these things, and converse of that whence the occasion arose. You bid verses be directed to you which I granted to the prayers of a most distinguished man, your father-in-law; who, mingled in the fellowship of his equals, lives with manners alike ready to command and to obey. But since you desire to know both the place and the cause, that you may the more easily understand a very small matter, lay it rather to my fault that the preface will be more talkative than the work.

5.17.3. We had come together at the sepulchre of holy Justus (but infirmity was an impediment to you, that you were not then present); the procession had been before dawn, the solemnity the yearly one, the people huge, of either sex, whom the most capacious basilica could not hold, however girt with spreading covered galleries. The worship of the vigils being performed—which the monks and the clergy, psalm-singers, had celebrated together with alternating sweetness—each of us withdrew in different directions, yet not far off, since at the third hour we were to be present, when the divine service was to be performed with the priests;

5.17.4. exceedingly out of breath, indeed, from the press of the place and the crowds, and from the numerous lights brought in; and at the same time the night, still close upon summer, had scorched us, shut in under a roof, with its vapour, even though now, with the first chill, the autumnal Dawn was nonetheless growing cool. And so, when the various bodies of the orders were dispersed here and there, it pleased us, with the chief of the citizens, to come together at the tomb of the consul Syagrius, which was not separated even by a full bowshot. Here some of us had sat down under the shade of a grown vine, which, the stems being raised high and hanging trellis-wise, the foliage drawn over had woven; some on the green turf, but fragrant with flowers.

5.17.5. The talk was sweet, jocular, bantering; and besides—which was the most blessed thing—no mention of the powers or of the tributes, no speech that could be betrayed, no person who would betray. Anyone, certainly, could have related a tale worthy of relating and worthy in its sentiments: it was listened to most ambitiously; nor for that reason was the narration the less distinct, that gladness was mingled with it. Amid these things, to us long languid from leisure, it seemed good to do something.

5.17.6. Presently, two parties being formed—as the age allowed—amid the acclamations demanding it, there is brought forth to these the ball, to those the dice-board. Of the ball I was the first standard-bearer, which, as you know, is held my companion no less than the book. On the other side my brother Domnicius, a man of the highest grace, of the highest charm, had taken the dice and was shaking them, by which, as by a trumpet, he called the gamesters to the dice-tower. We, with a troop of scholars, played abundantly, so much as our limbs, dulled by the torpor of stationary labour, might be invigorated by wholesome running.

5.17.7. Here the illustrious Philomatius—as is that phrase of the Mantuan poet, "daring himself too with his hand to try the labour of the young men"—steadfastly mingled himself with the bands of the ball-players, for he had done this beautifully, but when his years were still younger. Who, since he was frequently thrust from the place of those standing by the impulse of one running in the midst, now too, received into the field, neither cut off the path of the ball flying past before him or thrown over him, nor avoided it, and, often bent forward through a tumble, scarcely gathered himself up again from the ruinous swerve, was the first to remove himself from the noise of the game, sighing, his inwards growing hot. For frequent pains, the fibre of his little liver swelling, pricked the exercised man.

5.17.8. I straightway stopped too, about to do, by the fellowship of resting, a deed of charity, lest the brotherly weariness should suffer shame. So, as we sat down, sweat soon admonished him to ask for water for his face: it was brought to him as he asked, and likewise a towel heavy with nap, which, polished by yesterday's washing, chanced to be swaying under the very double-leaved doors of the little house, from the porter's upright rope, pulley-wise.

5.17.9. While at leisure he dries his cheeks with it: "I should wish," he said, "you would bid some quatrain of like office be written for me on the cloth." "Let it be," I said. "But," he said, "let it hold my name too in the metre." I replied that what he had asked were things possible to do. He himself too said: "Dictate, then." Then I, smiling: "Know at once that the Muses are stirred, if I am at leisure with their choir not without witnesses." He answered vehemently and most urbanely—as he is by nature a fiery man and a certain inexhaustible fount of eloquence: "See, lord Sollius, lest Apollo perhaps be the more stirred, that you alone solicit his foster-children to secrets." Now you can know what applause a sentiment so sudden, so charming, stirs up.

5.17.10. And, delaying no longer, presently his scribe, who held the tablet at hand, being called to me, I composed the following epigram:

In the new morning, whether the warm baths call, or when the brow, heated with hunting, runs with sweat, let fair Philomatius foster his moist face with this, that the moisture may pass from his face into the thirsty fleece.

Our Epiphanius had scarcely written out the above, and it was announced, the hour warning, that the bishop was coming forth from the retiring-room, and we rose.

5.17.11. Do you grant pardon for the requested song. But that other thing—which is the greater, and which you both lately bade me write, in parable or figure, against a certain man who bears good days ill, and which, finished, shall be sent tomorrow—review in secret; and, if it please, fostering it, publish it; if it displease, deleting it, forgive. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Attalus, greetings.

5.18.1. That you have begun to preside over the Aeduan city I 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 that you would, and ought, and are able to aid very much the dealings of us and of our people. Therefore, embracing in an old friend the new right of the power you have attained, I have now long sought matter for your benefits—in which know that I trust so much that, even if I do not find what to ask, you yourself seem to me about to seek what you may bestow. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Pudens, greetings.

5.19.1. The son of your nurse has carried off the daughter of mine: an unworthy deed, and one that would have made us and you enemies, had I not at once known that you knew not it was to be done. But, the purgation of your conscience being premised, you deign to seek impunity for the still-warm fault; on a condition I grant it: if you, now a patron, loose the ravisher, as your dependant, from the bond of his original tenure.

5.19.2. But that woman is now free; who will then at last be seen not consigned to mockery but taken into marriage, if our culprit, for whom you intercede, presently made a client, from a tributary should rather begin to have a plebeian person than a colonary one. For this alone, whether composition or satisfaction, even moderately amends my affront; I, who acquiesce in your wishes and friendships in this, if liberty looses the husband, that punishment may not bind the ravisher. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friend Pastor, greetings.

5.20.1. That on yesterday you were absent from the deliberation of the city in the council, the better part took to have been done on purpose, suspecting that you guarded against this, lest the burden of the future embassy should be laid upon your shoulders. I congratulate you that you live with such morals that you must needs fear your own election; I praise your efficiency, I look up to your prudence, I attend with praise your good fortune; in short, I wish things equal to these for those whom I love equally.

5.20.2. Many men frequently, whom an execrable popularity drives, grasp by the hand the greatest of the citizens and lead them aside from the public assembly, and, having sequestered them, press kisses upon them, pledge their own service—but unasked; and, that they may seem to be sent as envoys for the assertion of the common business, they pay back the travel-warrant and of their own accord refuse the very expenses, and secretly, out of ambition, beg single men that they may be begged openly by all.

5.20.3. Even so, although a gratuitous toil could be gladly admitted, yet the modest are more gladly and lovingly chosen, and that even with cost; so much weight has the impudence of those who thrust themselves forward, that not even with the tributary burden is anything paid out under their name. Accordingly, although it has not escaped you what every good man was planning, render yourself nevertheless to the wishes of those who await you, and prove the affection of those who seek you, you who have now proved your modesty. That you were absent first is ascribed to modesty; a second delay looks toward cowardice.

5.20.4. Besides, for you, about to set out for Arles, there is on the way your venerable mother, your loving brothers, and the soil of a fatherland that loves you in return, to which, even apart from the occasion, one comes with pleasure; then your own house, whose steward, your vineyard, harvest, olive-grove, and even the roof itself, even while you pass by, it is a matter of convenience to inspect. Wherefore, sent by us, you arrive also for yourself; for the condition and opportunity of your journey and of our cause will be such, unless I am mistaken, that you may seem able to charge it to the city as a benefit at any time, that you have seen your own. Farewell.

Sidonius to his friends Sacerdos and Justinus, greetings.

5.21.1. Victorius your uncle, a man as excellent as he was everywhere most learned, as he composed other things powerfully, so most powerfully composed verses; to me too the care of the Muses has always been a concern from my childhood. Now you come heirs to a parent, as rightly as deservedly: so I become next to the poet by profession, you by descent. Therefore it is most just that, the dead being departed, each of us should succeed in the way he is joined to him; and so hold your patrimonies, give the songs, farewell.

6.1.1. Blessed be the Holy Spirit and the Father of God Almighty, that you, the father of fathers and bishop of bishops, a second James for your age, look down from a certain watchtower of charity—and not from the lower Jerusalem—upon all the members of the Church of our God; you who are worthy to console all the weak, and who deservedly receive the homage of all. And what answer worthy of such condescension can I now make, who am but rotten earth, fetid with guilt?

6.1.2. Suffering both the want of your saving converse and the fear that the memory of a blameworthy life inspires, I am driven to cry out to you what your colleague once said to the Lord: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Yet if that fear is not tempered by love, I am afraid that, like the Gerasenes, I may be abandoned by the example and you depart from my borders. Rather let me bind you by the more profitable course, setting before you the condition my fellow-leper proposed, and saying to you: "If you will, you can make me clean"—a sentence by which he revealed no less what he asked of Christ than he made public what he believed.

6.1.3. Since then you are beyond all doubt the first of all bishops throughout the whole extent of the world, since to your precedence all submit, since even the throng of your colleagues trembles before your judgement, since in comparison with your gravity the very hearts of the aged turn childlike, since after the hard-won vigils of your service at Lérins and now nine lustres run out in the apostolic see the spiritual camps revere you as a most renowned veteran centurion of both the holy orders—you nonetheless withdraw a while from the company of the spearmen and the front-rank standard-bearers, and do not despise your lowliest drudges and camp-followers, and to the very last of the baggage-train, who in their folly still sit fast among the burdens of the flesh, you carry round the standards of the cross you have so long borne, and stretch out the hand of your tongue to those wounded in conscience.

6.1.4. You know, it seems, veteran commander, how to gather up those struck down from the opposing line, and, most skilled of trumpeters, to sound the retreat for sinners coming back to Christ; and after the example of the gospel shepherd you rejoice no more over those who remain sound than over those, given up for lost, who do not stay away. You then, the standard of conduct, you, the pillar of the virtues, you—if it is permitted to flatter the guilty—true sweetness, because holy: you did not shrink to handle with the fingers of exhortation the ulcers of the most despised of worms; you were not so grudging as to refuse to feed with counsel a soul starved by its own frailty, and from the storehouse of your loftiest love to pour out for us the measure of the humility we should pursue.

6.1.5. But pray that I may one day come to my senses, weighed down as my neck is by the mass of the burden laid upon me. By the unbroken sequence of my misdeeds I have come, wretch that I am, to such a pass of necessity that I am now compelled to pray for the sins of a people for whom a people of innocents could scarcely obtain pardon, even were they to make supplication. For who, being sick, can well administer a cure? Who, in a fever, can with arrogant touch tell the healthy pulse from his own? Who that has deserted can rightly praise the science of war? Who that is gorged can fitly reproach the abstinent? Most unworthy of mortals, I must say what I refuse to do, and, damnable in my own words, since I do not fulfil what I counsel, I am daily forced to pronounce against myself the very sentence I pronounce on others.

6.1.6. But if you would stand between me and Him with whom you are crucified, our Lord, as an intercessor for the people of my sins—younger rather than lesser than Moses—we shall go down no further into hell while yet alive, nor, inflamed by the incitements of the vices of the flesh, shall we any longer kindle strange fire upon the altar of the Lord; for although the balance of glory does not regard us, guilty as we are, yet we shall rejoice abundantly and more than enough if by your prayer we can lift the breast of our inward man—if not whole, for reward, at least scarred over, for pardon. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.2.1. The venerable matron Eutropia—a woman, as far as I can see, of singular example, who, in a rivalry of thrift and kindness, feeds the poor no less by her fastings than by her food, and, ever watchful in the worship of Christ, alone compels sin to sleep within herself—now, to the griefs of her bereavement there being added the burden of a lawsuit, hastens to seek out the perfect remedy of your consolation against this twofold evil, and will be grateful whether you reckon this a short journey or a long service.

6.2.2. For the said venerable woman is wearied—if it would do injury to call it knavery, let us at least call it sharp practice—by my brother Agrippinus, now indeed a presbyter; who, abusing the weakness of the matron, does not cease to trouble the serenity of her spiritual soul with the gusts of worldly cunning, and to whose long-standing wound of widowhood two fresh blows are added alike—the loss of a son, and not long after, of a grandson.

6.2.3. We have tried to bring about a settlement between the two parties—I above all, upon whom my profession imposed a new claim, and friendship an old one—proposing some terms, urging others, and beseeching most of all; and, what may surprise you, it was from the woman's side that a readier descent was made to every condition of concord. And although a father's privilege might boast that it would profit a daughter more deeply, the mother-in-law's offer of generosity nonetheless found greater favour with the daughter-in-law.

6.2.4. Meanwhile the quarrel, half-laid to rest, is now brought into your bosom. Make peace between the contending parties, and by the authority of your pontifical judgement enjoin upon parties suspicious of one another the grace of reconciliation; speak the truth. For holy Eutropia, if you put any faith in my surety, counts it a victory if, even after losses, she does not go to law. Hence too I suspect you will have to pronounce one household quarrelsome, though you find both at odds. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.3.1. Although you have encouraged the first beginnings of my profession by no exhortations, nor watered with any rain of heavenly doctrine the thirst of my hitherto worldly ignorance, I am nonetheless not so unmindful of myself as to presume that the exchange of services should be conducted on an equal scale between my part and yours. For since my mediocrity is easily surpassed by you in the age of my life, in the date of my dignity, in the privilege of place, in the renown of learning, in the gift of conscience, we deserve nothing if we expect an address as between equals.

6.3.2. Therefore, not blaming your silence but rather striving to excuse my own loquacity, I commend the bearer of this note; if you cherish his journey with ready favour, a great harbour of security is opened to his affairs. His business concerns a will. The merits of his own documents are hidden from him: he has gone there to consult the skill of advocates pleading their cases, ready to count it a victory if he learns that he is rightly defeated, provided only he be not blamed for having through the fault of his own sloth wrongly failed to safeguard himself and his people. I venture to commend him so far that, if learned counsel should disdain to instruct him kindly, the authority of your crown may strive to wring from the negligent a speedy answer. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.4.1. Besides the homage which is owed without end to your incomparably eminent apostolate—even though it be paid without intermission—I commend, by reason of a new connection, the old need of suppliant bearers, who have made a long journey into the region of Auvergne (long indeed in these times) and have come with their labour wasted. For when they had learned by no false report that a woman of their own affections, whom by chance an incursion of the Vargi (for by that name they call the native brigands) had carried off, had been brought here some years ago and here sold, they tracked her by certain signs, though by traces not recent.

6.4.2. And, as it happened, before these men arrived, this same unfortunate woman died in the house and ownership of a trader of ours, having been quite openly sold there—one Prudens (this is the man's name), who, fame now spreads abroad, dwells at Troyes, approving the contract of men unknown to us; whose signature, within the form of a market sale, is produced as that of a fitting witness. The authority of your person and the opportunity of your presence will easily prevail among parties brought face to face, if it shall deign to investigate the old man's whole act of violence—which, what is graver, mounted to such a pitch of crime that, as far as the bearers can attest from report, even in that brigandage a certain one of the number of the travellers is known to have been killed.

6.4.3. But since those who are giving birth to a criminal case seek the medicine and civility of your judgement, it is your part, if I judge rightly, no less than the part of your character, to come to the aid both of the grief of the one side and the danger of the other by some harmless settlement, and by a certain temperance of a salutary sentence to make this party less afflicted, that one less guilty, and both more secure; lest the state of the quarrel, as the quality of the time and place bears, come down to such an end as it began to have for a beginning. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.5.1. He who carries this letter from me to you pleads my cause without knowing it; for, while a longed-for occasion of duty is granted me, he confers the benefit which he thinks he is receiving—as now the venerable Donidius, worthy to be numbered among the most distinguished, whose dependant and slaves I commend, who have set out either on their patron's business or their master's. Protect the toil of these travellers with what aid, kindness, and intercession you can; and, if in anything the friend himself, through inexperience and his newness to public dealings, shall seem less effective, look you rather to this—what the cause of the absent, not what the person of the man present, deserves. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.6.1. After I learned that the treaty-breaking people had returned to their own seats and were preparing no ambushes for travellers, I thought it wrong to put off any longer the discourse of my services, lest your affection should, by my fault, contract a kind of rust, as an unburnished sword does from the rarity of care. So, having sent a bearer of this letter on this errand alone, I anxiously inquire how sound the state of your poor body is, and whether your affairs go as your mind would wish—hoping that the love once granted me by you may not be thinned either by the length of the road that lies between or by the long duration of our common absence; for the goodness of the Creator shuts up within narrow bounds the dwelling-place of men rather than their charity.

6.6.2. It remains that your beatitude feed the eager hunger of our ignorance with the wholesomeness of a discourse that pricks the heart. For it is greatly to your use that by your exhortations a mystic fatness and a spiritual richness should often distend the leanness of the inward man. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.7.1. If a connection handed down by elders bestows on their posterity anything toward the beginning of friendship as a saving, I too approach the fuller acquaintance of your apostolate with the privilege of a household intimacy; for I remember that you were always, in Christ, the most steadfast patron of my family, so that I think your friendships are not so much to be sought by me as reclaimed. To this is added that the name of priestly office, imposed on one most unworthy as I am, compels me to take refuge in the support of your prayers, that the wounds of my still ulcerous conscience, gaping all too wide, may be scarred over at least by your intercession.

6.7.2. Therefore, commending myself and mine and excusing the lateness of my letter, I earnestly beseech that by your accustomed intercession—in whose strength you are immensely powerful—you guard in us the still-crawling first steps of a clerical novitiate, so that, if the unchanging mercy of God shall deign to change anything in the depravity of our character, we may owe it all to the patronage of your supplications. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.8.1. The bearer of this note sustains a poor life by the single occupation of trading; he has no craft for gain, no military service for profit, no farming for advantage. For this very reason, that he is known by his hired escorts and the labour he lets for hire, his reputation indeed grows, but with another's substance. Yet because his honesty is great, even if his means are small, as often as he goes to the markets of a freshly arrived cargo with other men's money, he deposits with his too-trusting creditors, in place of a pledge, only the proven testimony of his character.

6.8.2. These things were suggested to me as I was dictating, and I do not on that account hesitate to assert with confidence what I have heard, because those who have him for an intimate are no slight intimates of my own. His tender brow, then, and his hard apprenticeship I commend; and, since the roll of lectors lately received his name, you will recognize that I, to a citizen about to make his way, owed a letter shaped for a cleric—one whom before long I think, not unjustly, will become a splendid merchant, if, hastening from here to your service, he prefer to the cold of his civic springs the spring of a purer wisdom. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.9.1. The now honourable Gallus, because, being bidden to return to his wife, he did not delay, brings back the obedience to my letter and the effect of yours; for when the page you had sent was opened to him, he at once groaned, pricked at heart, and judged that the letter was directed not at me but as a sentence against himself, and so straightway he promised, prepared, and undertook the journey to his native country. Him, on account of this very swiftness of repentance, we took care to address not in reproach but rather in consolation, since a hastened correction comes close to innocence.

6.9.2. For no one, even one well aware of his own fault, has presumed to do more, provided he has not abandoned the track of your reproof; indeed, since the very words we have read, the words of a sparing censure, are the greatest spurs to amendment. For what can be more precious than the tenor of this very chastisement, in which a soul sick perchance with sin found within itself the remedy, when outside it could find no rebuke?

6.9.3. For the rest, we beseech that by frequent prayer—through which you immensely lord it over all the vices—you make us too, even now, as the gospel magi are shown to have returned, go back by another road of conduct into the country of the blessed. I had almost omitted what should by no means have been passed over: render thanks to Innocentius, a man of standing, who, as you had directed, diligently complied with your charge. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.10.1. The office of the levitical order ennobles the bearer of this letter. He, fleeing with his household the whirlwind of the Gothic ravaging, was carried into your territory by the very weight, so to speak, of his flight; where, upon land of the church over which your holiness presides, the hungry stranger has cast a little seed into the half-worked turf, and he begs that he be granted the means of gathering it in full.

6.10.2. If you cherish him with the kindness allotted to those of the household of the faith—that is, that the tax owed for the ground be not demanded—he counts so great a profit bestowed upon him (for a stranger's mind, like his estate, is narrow) as though he were farming on his native soil. If you grant him the lawful settlement, as is the custom, of so very small a crop, he will return with thanksgiving as though richly provisioned for the road. And if through him you favour me with a letter of your wonted condescension, your page will be reckoned by me and by the brotherhood settled there as though it had fallen from heaven. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.11.1. The present letter commends a Jew—not that I am pleased by the error through which those entangled in it perish, but because it is not fitting for us to pronounce any one of them wholly damnable while he yet lives; for he is still in hope of absolution who has it in his power to be converted.

6.11.2. What the course of his business is, he himself will more rightly lay open by present narration face to face; for prudence is much opposed to extending to many words a matter that owes its fitness to the brevity of an epistolary form. Indeed, since men of this sort are wont to have honourable causes in worldly business or worldly suits, you too can defend the person of this poor man, even though you assail his faithlessness. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

6.12.1. One man thinks one thing, another another; I think that he above all lives by his own good who lives for another's, and who, pitying the calamities and want of the faithful, performs on earth the works of heaven. "To what end this?" you ask. This sentence seeks you most of all, most blessed Bishop, for whom it is not enough to bring aid only to those necessities you have come to know, and who, with the reach of your charity extended even to the farthest bounds of Gaul, are wont to consider the causes of the needy before you regard their persons.

6.12.2. To no one's poverty or weakness is it any hindrance that he cannot seek you out, for you anticipate with your hands the man who could not reach you on foot. Your vigilance passes into other provinces, and in this the breadth of your care is poured forth—that it may console the straits of those set far off; and hence it comes about that, since the modesty of the absent moves you no less often than the complaint of those present, you have often wiped away the tears of those whose eyes you never saw.

6.12.3. I pass over the things you daily endure for the want of impoverished citizens, with sleepless vigils, prayers, and outlays. I pass over that you always act with such moderation, are always judged so humane, so abstemious, that it is agreed without ceasing that the present king praises your dinners and the queen your fasts. I pass over that you adorn the church entrusted to you with such splendour that the beholder doubts whether new works are rising or old ones being restored.

6.12.4. I pass over that through you in many places the foundations of basilicas rise and their ornaments are doubled; and that, while many things in the state of the faith are increased by your dispositions, the number of heretics alone is diminished, and that you, in a kind of apostolic hunt, entangle the wild minds of the Photinians in the nets of your spiritual preaching, and that the barbarians, now your followers, as often as they are convinced by your word, do not depart a footstep from your track, until you, that most blessed fisher of souls, have drawn them up from the deep gulf of error.

6.12.5. And some of these things, perhaps, may be shared with your remaining colleagues; but that the following is owed to you under a certain title, as the jurists say, of a special claim, not even your modesty will be able to deny: that after the Gothic devastation, after the crops consumed by fire, you sent at your own private cost free grain to the common need throughout the desolated lands of Gaul, having bestowed too much on peoples wasting away with hunger—had that produce been a matter of commerce and not of gift. We have seen the roads narrowed by your grain; we have seen along the banks of the Saône and the Rhône more than one granary, which you alone had filled.

6.12.6. Let the fictions of the pagan fables give way, and that Triptolemus, all but borne up to heaven for the discovery of the new ears of corn, whom his own Greece—illustrious for masons, painters, and sculptors—consecrated in temples, fashioned in statues, figured in images; whom doubtful fame frames as wandering through peoples still rude and Dodona-born, in two ships, to which the poets afterwards assigned the form of dragons, and carrying round an unknown seed. You—to say nothing of your bounty inland—when about to dispense sustenance to the cities of the Tyrrhenian Sea, filled with your granaries two rivers rather than two ships.

6.12.7. But if perchance the religious man, when praised, takes offence at the Achaean examples of the Eleusinian superstition as unfit, then, setting aside the reverence due to the mystic meaning, let us compare the historical diligence of the venerable patriarch Joseph, who against the coming barrenness easily provided, for the seven plentiful years that were to follow, the remedy he foresaw. Yet, according to the moral judgement, in my opinion he is nothing less who, when a like necessity comes upon him, does not divine it and yet relieves it.

6.12.8. Therefore, although I cannot fully guess what thanks the people of Arles and Riez, of Avignon too and Orange, and of Alba, and the inhabitant of the city of Valence and of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, pay you—since it is difficult to measure to the full the prayers of those to whom you know nourishment was given without a penny—yet I, in the name of the town of Auvergne, render most abundant thanks: a town which neither the common bond of a province, nor the nearness of a city, nor the convenience of a river, nor any offer of payment moved you to think of succouring.

6.12.9. And so through me they render immense thanks who have had it fall to them, through the abundance of your bread, to reach their own sufficiency. Therefore, if I seem to have sufficiently fulfilled the duties of the office laid upon me, from an envoy I shall become a reporter. Let me say outright: throughout all Aquitaine your glory is borne abroad; you are loved as you are praised, longed for, honoured; in the hearts of all, in the prayers of all, amid these evil times you are a good bishop, a good father, a good year to those for whom it was worth their while to make their own famine, by its peril, the proof of your bounty, if it could be no otherwise. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.1.1. There is a rumour that the Goths have moved their camp onto Roman soil: to this incursion we wretched Arvernians are always the gateway, for we ourselves supply special fuel to the hatreds of our enemies, since—because they have not yet bounded their territory from the Ocean to the Rhône by the channel of the Loire—they suffer, under the help of Christ, only a single delay, and that from our resistance alone; the spaces and tract of the surrounding regions the grievous pressure of a menacing kingdom long ago devoured.

7.1.2. But against an animosity so rash and so perilous we trust to be aided neither by the scorched face of our walls, nor by the rotten lattice of our palisades, nor by ramparts worn smooth by the breasts of our watchmen; we are soothed only by the help of the Rogations, brought in on your authority, in the beginning and the establishment of which the people of Auvergne, though not with equal effect, certainly with no unequal devotion, have begun to be initiated; and on this account they do not yet turn their backs to the terrors poured round about them.

7.1.3. For it does not escape our inquiry that, in the first days of these supplications established by you, the city committed to you by heaven was being emptied through the alarms of prodigies of every kind. For now the stage-backings of the public walls were shaken by frequent earthquakes; now fires, often kindled, buried the falling crests of the roofs beneath a heaped mountain of ashes; now the fearful tameness of bold stags set their astonishing lairs in the forum: when you, amid these things, the city emptied by the departure of the leading men and the flight of the people, swiftly had recourse to the new examples of the ancient Ninevites, lest your own despair should also reproach the divine admonition.

7.1.4. And in truth you could no longer distrust God without sin, after the proofs of his power; for when on one occasion the city had begun to blaze, your faith glowed the hotter in that burning; and when, in the sight of the terrified people, the fire, driven back by the mere interposition of your body, was bending in fugitive coils upon itself, it was granted by a miracle dreadful, new, and unheard of, that the flame yielded through reverence to him to whom it lacked the power to do harm by nature.

7.1.5. So first you forbid fasts to the men of our order and to those few judges, you denounce sins, you proclaim punishments, you promise remedies; you set forth to all that neither the penalty nor the pardon is far off; you teach that the threats of the desolation foretold are to be removed by frequency of prayers; you warn that the constant assault of a raging fire can be quenched by the water of the eyes rather than of rivers; you warn that the menacing onset of earthquakes must be steadied by the firmness of faith.

7.1.6. The humble crowd, at once following this counsel, became a spur even to their betters, who, having felt no shame to flee, were not ashamed to return; and the God who looks into hearts, appeased by this devotion, made your supplication a salvation to yourselves, a model to others, and a defence to both; in short, thereafter there were neither losses for calamity nor portents for fear. Knowing all this to have happened before to your people of Vienne and to have ceased afterward, this people embraces the footsteps of so sacred a teaching, earnestly asking that the beatitude of your conscience send the support of those prayers by which you transmitted the example.

7.1.7. And since to you alone—after the memory of our forefathers, and after the confessor Ambrose, the discoverer of two martyrs—was granted, in the regions of the western world, the unbroken translation of the martyr Ferreolus, with the head of our Julian added (because from here the bloody hand of the executioner once carried it back to a turbulent persecutor), it is no injustice that we ask, by way of recompense, that a share of patronage come to us from there, since a share of the patron came back to you from here. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.2.1. You burden my modesty, most consummate of bishops, by heaping manifold praise upon me if I have ploughed anything with my rustic pen. And would that it were free of fault, that, in the first encounter of our letters, though circumvented, I yet joined together things at odds with the truth and discordant; for a cunning traveller imposed upon my ignorance. For while he put forward only the office of a merchant, he drew out my letter as a kind of testimonial—that is, that he was a lector—when it should rather have contained some expression of thanks. For, as I learned afterward, he had been advanced more by the kindness of the people of Marseilles than the condition of his estate, whether by census or by household, would warrant.

7.2.2. Yet were any worthy narrator to unfold these things as they happened, they would make a pleasant tale. But since you yourselves bid that my page bring you something cheerful and full, grant me pardon if, saving the severity of your ears, I touch upon this very hospitality of our courier as a thing to be compared with the wit of comedy—lest I should seem to know him now for the first time, when he was introduced a second; and at the same time, if it is the custom of the rules of art that openings of speech be drawn from the whole matter, why here too, when I am about to discourse, should any matter be sought and fetched from afar, except that he himself may be the subject of my speech, who will be its burden?

7.2.3. Auvergne is his homeland; his parents of birth not proud but free, and, as boasting nothing illustrious, so fearing nothing servile, content with a modest fortune, but that fortune sufficient and unencumbered. Their service had been run in the clerical rather than the palatine train. His father was greatly thrifty and to his children little liberal, and through excessive parsimony chose rather to profit his young son than to please him. When his father died, this boy then sought you out all too lightly equipped—which was the greatest hindrance to his first attempts; for nothing is heavier than a light travelling-purse.

7.2.4. Nevertheless his first entrance within your walls was prosperous enough; the holy Eustachius, who has passed away before you, was at once, in word and deed, a twofold blessing. Lodging, briefly sought, was, by Eustachius' care, easily found, swiftly entered, civilly let. Now first he began to cultivate his neighbours by frequent visits, and was repeatedly, not disdainfully, greeted back by them. He dealt with each man as the reckoning of age allowed: binding his elders by attentions, his equals by services.

7.2.5. He pursued chastity and sobriety above the rest—a thing as praiseworthy in youth as it is rare—and was thereafter, by attendance no less timely than frequent, recognized, made known, and made familiar to the leading men and then to the count of the city; and so his diligence from day to day was advanced by the fellowships of his betters; the best men cherished him in rivalry, all by their good wishes, very many by their counsels, private men by gifts, the great by benefits; and through these things his hopes and means were heaped up by sudden leaps and bounds.

7.2.6. It chanced that next to the lodging which he had taken there dwelt a certain woman, of no less means than character, whose daughter, having now passed the time of infancy, was nonetheless not yet drawing near to marriageable years. To her this man, flattering (since that was the child's age, as is still seemly), gave now some trifles, now playthings suited to a girl's game; and by these gifts, slight in their occasion, the little girl's heart was bound most fast to him.

7.2.7. Meanwhile the years grew equal for the marriage-bed. Why should I linger over many words? A young man, alone, poor, a stranger, a son under his father's authority, departing from his homeland not only against his father's will but without his knowledge, sought as wife a girl no lower in birth, higher in means, with the bishop for go-between (because he was a lector), with the count for support (because he was his dependant), the mother-in-law not examining his substance, the bride not despising his person; he asked, he obtained, the marriage was completed, the nuptial documents were drawn up; and if there is in our little town any suburban property, it is there, inserted in the marriage records, recited with the lavishness of a stage-comedy.

7.2.8. The lawful circumvention and the solemn fraud accomplished, the poor and beloved man lifts up his rich wife, and, diligently rummaging and packing up all that pertained to his father-in-law, and wringing besides no small bonus from the easiness and credulity of his mother-in-law's munificence, the unconquered trickster sounded the retreat to his homeland. At this the girl's mother, on account of these hyperbolical settlements, began to wish to bring an action for extortion, and only then to grieve at the fewness of the slaves in the dowry-gift, when she was already rejoicing at the multitude of grandchildren. To pacify her our Hippolytus had set out, when he first presented my letter.

7.2.9. You have the history of an outstanding youth, a tale equal to a Milesian or an Attic fable; and at the same time forgive one who extends the epistolary form beyond its measure—a thing I have drawn out with a lingering pen for this reason, that you may not receive as a stranger one whom by your benefits you have restored to citizenship; and likewise it is established by nature that we bestow our affection on those for whom we have spent our care. But you will show that the bishop Eustachius died leaving you as his worthy heir to the full, if to your dependants you pay the legacies of patronage as you would to kinsmen the legacies of a will.

7.2.10. See, I have obeyed, and fulfilled the duty of compliance with garrulity—although one who lays upon an unlearned man the task of prolixity ought not to take it ill if he receives letters not so much eloquent as wordy. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.3.1. I deliberated long and much—though my mind was urged by affection and the zeal to obey—whether I should send, as you enjoin, the little petitions which I myself composed. In the end the opinion prevailed which determined that I should comply with you. So I have sent what you asked: and what shall I now say? Is this obedience great? It is great, I think; but greater still my effrontery, for with such a face we might pass on water to rivers, wood to forests; with such rashness we would present Apelles with a brush, Phidias with a chisel, Polyclitus with a hammer.

7.3.2. You will therefore grant pardon to a presumption which prates with its native garrulity before your most learned scrutiny, holy, eloquent, venerable Bishop. Our custom holds it for a rule that, though it publish little, it should write much—just as it is inborn in dogs that, even if they do not bark, they yet growl. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.4.1. I am now afraid to introduce anyone, because we who commend give words, while you give gifts—as if the chief part of the benefit were not to be reckoned in this, that to those who depart from me, a sinner, a portion of holy communion lies open. Witness to this is our Vindicius, who returned home the more slowly for the load of your munificence, constantly affirming, wherever he is, that, though you are great in repute and greatest in rank, you are nonetheless to be praised no more for your dignity than for your condescension.

7.4.2. He proclaims the honeyed, holy, and flowering blandishments that proceed from your tempered communion; and that nothing of the pontifical person is lost thereby, because you do not break the height of the priesthood by your affability but bend it. Knowing these things, I am so inflamed that I shall judge myself most happy when, set before you under God's help, it falls to me to cherish in close (though presumptuous) embraces a breast so secure of its God.

7.4.3. Receive my confession: I am suspicious indeed of the too severe, and, conscious of my own weakness, I bear with equanimity those who are harsh to me; but, as must be owned, by such characters we are more easily brought low through humility than joined through familiarity. In sum, let him see by what gift of conscience he swells, who makes himself rigid to those who seek him; yet I should rather choose to be an imitator of the character of the man who strives to kindle affection toward himself even in those set far off.

7.4.4. This too is greatly at heart among my chief joys: that I have learned you confer the abundant patronage of your apostolate, with unending intercession, upon the truest lords of my soul, Simplicius and Apollinaris. If it is true, I ask that your charity have no end; if it is false, I beg that it not delay to have a beginning. Besides, I commend the bearer of this letter, for whom a certain need that has arisen there—that is, in the town of Vaison—can be healed by the weight of your authority and reverence. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.5.1. Sought by the decree of the citizens, I have come to Bourges: the cause of my summons was the tottering state of the church, which, lately widowed of its supreme bishop, has sounded a kind of trumpet-call of canvassing for the priesthood among the orders of both professions. The people, divided by their partisanships, are in an uproar; a few put forward others, many not only offer but thrust forward themselves. If, according to your portion of strength, you should consult anything in God's name and the truth, all things present themselves as trivial, fickle, and disguised; and—what shall I say?—there alone is plain shamelessness.

7.5.2. And did I not think you would judge me to complain without cause, I would dare to say that very many are of so headlong and perilous a temper that they do not shrink from coveting the sacrosanct see and dignity by an offered price, and that the thing might long ago have been put up for sale and auction, had a seller been found as desperate as the buyer is found ready. Therefore I beg you to adorn with your company the newness, the modesty, and the necessity of my office at your most longed-for arrival, and to protect it with your aid.

7.5.3. Nor, although you are the head of the Senonian province, withdraw yourself amid these uncertainties from the efforts to heal the disorders of the Aquitanians; for it matters very little that the province is divided in our dwelling-place, when in religion the cause is joined. To this is added that, of the cities of Aquitania Prima, the wars have left to the Roman side only the town of Auvergne; wherefore in appointing a bishop for the aforesaid city we are deficient in the number of provincial colleagues, unless we are reinforced by the assent of the metropolitans.

7.5.4. For the rest, as concerns the prerogative of your honour, no one has hitherto been named by me, no one called in, no one chosen; everything is kept whole, undiminished, and entire for your judgement. This only I count as mine: to invite your persons, to await your wishes, to praise your decisions; and, when anyone is appointed to the place and state of the bishop, that the command proceed from you, the compliance from me.

7.5.5. But if—though I think this least likely—an evil-counselling interpreter should stand against my prayers with you, you will be able to excuse your absence rather than your fault; just as, on the other hand, if you come, you show that an end could be set to your region indeed, but could not be set to your charity. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.6.1. We have, by the gift of God, in a fresh example for our times, the old laws of friendship; and it is long since we loved one another in equal measure. Moreover, as concerns our common conscience, you are my patron—though I say this very thing presumptuously and arrogantly; for my iniquity is so great that, from the constancy of its lapses, scarcely even the efficacy of your supplication can heal it.

7.6.2. Therefore, since you are doubly my lord, both by patronage and by love, and since I well remember with what fire of perception and fountain of words you abound—I who saw Modaharius, a Gothic citizen, brandishing the darts of the Arian heresy, with what blade of spiritual testimonies you transfixed him—keeping both the reverence and the peace of the other bishops, I lament to you, not without cause, how the wolf of this age, who is fattened by the sins of perishing souls, gnaws at the sheepfolds of the church with the secret bite of a tooth not yet understood.

7.6.3. For the ancient enemy, that he may the more easily leap upon the bleating of abandoned sheep, first begins to threaten the necks of sleeping shepherds; nor am I so set above myself as not to remember that I am one whom a conscience yet to be washed with long weeping weighs down—whose filth, however, under the help of Christ, will one day be cleared away by the mystic rakes of your prayers. But since the public safety overtops the modesty of a private man's guilt, I shall not fear, though some sinister interpreter of the faith carp at my zeal, to betray, under the odium of vanity, the cause of truth.

7.6.4. That Euric, king of the Goths, defends or extends the frontier of his kingdom by the right of arms—the ancient treaty broken and dissolved—it is permitted neither for us sinners here to accuse nor for you holy men here to discuss. Nay rather, if you ask, it is a matter of the divine order, that here the rich man should be clothed in purple and fine linen, and Lazarus here be smitten with sores and poverty; it is a matter of order, that, while we are turned about in this allegorical Egypt, Pharaoh should march with his diadem, the Israelite with his basket; it is a matter of order, that, while we are baked in this furnace of figurative Babylon, we should bewail with Jeremiah, with sighing howls, the spiritual Jerusalem, and that Assur, thundering in royal pride, should trample the holy of holies of the saints.

7.6.5. With these vicissitudes of present and future blessings set before me, I bear our common misfortunes the more patiently; first, because, to one looking into what I deserve, whatever adversities have befallen will be reckoned the lighter; next, because I know for certain that it is the greatest remedy of the inward man, if on this threshing-floor of the world the outward is threshed by the various flails of suffering.

7.6.6. But, as must be confessed, I dread the aforesaid king of the Goths, though he be terrible by the merits of his strength, as one who will lay ambush not so much against the Roman walls as against the Christian laws. So sharp, they say, is the mention of the catholic name to his mouth, so sharp to his breast, that you might doubt whether he holds the headship more of his nation or of his sect. To this add that, keen in arms, eager in spirit, vigorous in years, he labours under this one error alone—that he thinks the success of his negotiations and counsels is granted to him for his lawful religion, which he rather attains for his earthly good fortune.

7.6.7. Wherefore learn quickly the hidden sickness of the catholic state, that you may hasten to apply an open medicine. Bordeaux, Périgueux, the Rutenians, Limoges, the Gabalitanians, the Helusans, the Vasates, the Convenae, the Auscenses, and now a far greater number of cities, shorn by death of their chief bishops, with no bishops thereafter appointed in the offices of the deceased—through whom, of course, the ministries of the lesser orders were supplied—have dragged out a broad boundary of spiritual ruin, which, it is generally agreed, advances day by day through the failure of dying fathers in such fashion that it could bend not only the heretics of the present but even the heresiarchs of former times: so heavily does a sad despair of an interrupted faith press upon peoples bereaved by the death of their bishops.

7.6.8. There is no care in the desolated dioceses and parishes. You may see in the churches either the rotted collapses of the roofs, or the entrances of the basilicas, their door-hinges torn off, blocked by the brambles of rough thorn-bushes. The very herds—alas for the grief—you may see lying not only in the half-open vestibules, but even grazing on the grassy sides of the green altars. But now the solitude is not through the country parishes alone: the very assemblies of the city churches besides grow thin.

7.6.9. For what comfort remains to the faithful, when not only the discipline but even the memory of the clergy perishes? Indeed, when any cleric dies, if by a succeeding blessing the office receive no heir to its dignity, in that church the priesthood dies, not the priest; and so what hope you would pronounce to remain, where the end of a man makes the end of religion. Look more deeply at the losses of the spiritual members: surely you will understand that, as great as are the bishops stolen from us, the faith of as many peoples is in peril for you. I say nothing of your colleagues Crocus and Simplicius, whom, expelled from the seats handed over to them, a like punishment of an unlike exile torments; for one of them grieves that he does not see whither he may return, the other grieves that he sees whither he does not return.

7.6.10. You are found, of the most holy bishops—Leontius, Faustus, Graecus—in the middle, by city, by order, by charity. Through you the evils of the treaties run their course; through you the pacts and conditions of both kingdoms are carried. Act, then, that this be the chief concord of friendship, that, episcopal ordination being permitted, we may hold by faith the peoples of Gaul whom the boundary of the Gothic lot has shut in, even if we do not hold them by treaty. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.7.1. Behold, once again Amantius, our trifle-bearer, makes for his own Marseilles, about to carry home, as is his way, some spoil from the city, if only the cargo proves to his liking. Through him I would jestingly chatter at greater length, if one and the same mind could at once both ply cheerful matters and bear up under sad ones; for such is now the state of our unhappy corner, whose condition, as wretched report confirms, was less hard under war than under peace.

7.7.2. Our servitude has been made the price of another's security—the servitude, alas for the grief, of the Arvernians, who, if old things were unrolled, dared once to call themselves brothers of Latium and to reckon their peoples descended from Trojan blood. If recent things are recalled, these are they who by their own strength held back the arms of the public enemies; the people to whom the Goth was often no terror, shut within the walls, while in turn he himself became a terror to his besiegers set within their camp. These are they who, against the line of their neighbours, were to themselves both leaders and soldiers; yet of their lot in those contests, if anything prosperous fell out, your successes consoled it, if anything contrary, their adversities crushed them. They, out of love for the commonwealth, did not fear to hand over to the laws Seronatus, who was offering the provinces to the barbarians—whom, convicted thereafter, the commonwealth scarcely presumed to put to death.

7.7.3. Was this what they earned—want, fire, sword, pestilence, swords fat with slaughter and warriors lean with fasting? For the expectation of this so renowned a peace did we draw into our food the herbs torn from the chinks of the walls, often infected through ignorance with poisonous grasses, which, green with leaves and juices indistinguishable, the hand, sallow as our hunger, often gathered? For all these so many and so great proofs of our devotion, has there been, as far as I hear, a sacrifice made of us?

7.7.4. Be ashamed, we beseech you, of this treaty, neither useful nor seemly. Through you the embassies go to and fro; to you first the peace, though the prince is absent, is not only laid open as a thing negotiated, but even entrusted as a thing to be negotiated. Let the harshness of truth, we ask, be pardonable at your ears, from which grief snatches the odium of reproach. You take too little thought for the common good; and when you come together in council, the care is not so much to heal the public perils as to study private fortunes; which, indeed, doing often and long, you have begun to be no longer the first of your fellow-provincials, but the last.

7.7.5. But how long will these deceits be able to last? For our elders themselves will not much longer glory in this name, who begin to have no juniors. Wherefore, by the counsel by which you can, cut off this state of so shameful a concord. Still, if it must be, to be besieged, still to fight, still to hunger, is pleasing; but if we are handed over, we who could not be overcome by force, it is certain you have found something barbarous to advise, you cowards.

7.7.6. But why do we loosen the reins to excessive grief? Nay rather, forgive the afflicted, and lay nothing to the charge of the mourning. For another region, handed over, hopes for servitude; the land of Auvergne, for punishment. Indeed, if you cannot heal our extremities, at least bring this about by diligent prayer, that the blood live of those whose liberty is about to die; prepare for the exiles a land, for the captives a ransom, for the wanderers a viaticum. If our wall is opened to the enemy, let not yours be closed to guests. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.8.1. Since the bonds of clerical office bind me, I would pronounce the state of my mediocrity most happy, if we had walls as near as we have neighbouring territories—namely, that I might consult your crown about the smallest matters and the greatest, and that the course of my actions might become like that of some calm and unhindered river, if it flowed from your counsel as from a most healthful spring. Beyond doubt it would then be neither foaming with boastfulness, nor turbid with pride, nor muddy with conscience, nor headlong through youth; nay rather, if anything squalid and rotten were filthy in it, the admixed vein of your counsel would wash it all away.

7.8.2. But since long spaces are interposed as a hindrance to wishes of this kind, I diligently pray that you free me, as I consult you, from the scruple of a doubt that has befallen me; and, since the people of Bourges demand that Simplicius, a man of standing, be ordained their bishop, decide what I ought to do in so great a matter. For such is your condescension toward me and your authority toward the rest that, if you wish anything to be done (and you will wish whatever is most just), you ought not so much to advise as to command.

7.8.3. Of this Simplicius, however, know that very many good things are told, and those indeed by very many good men—testimonies which at the first encounter of conversation I judged not very pleasing to me, because they were too partial. But after I saw that his rivals did nothing more than keep silent, and those above all who cherish the faith of the Arians, and that nothing unlawful was alleged against the man named—although he is not yet of our profession—I noticed that a most exact man might be reckoned, of whom a bad citizen could not speak, nor a good one keep silent.

7.8.4. But why have I, foolish, added these things, as though I were giving counsel who asked for it? Nay rather, all things will be arranged at your nod, judgement, and letter, made manifest to the bishops and the people. For we are not so wholly without sense as to decide that you must first be summoned, if it is possible to come, and then, if anything is otherwise, at least consulted—unless we mean to comply in all things. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.9.1. By the desire for spiritual readings—of which a library of the catholic faith, both in its authorities and its disputants, is most familiar to you—you wish to know even those things which are least worthy to occupy the censure of your ears; for you enjoin that I send you the sermon which I am thought to have delivered to the people at Bourges in the church; to which no rhetorical division, no oratorical menaces, no grammatical figures supplied a fitting grace and discipline.

7.9.2. For there, as is the custom of those who plead with exactness, it pleased me to fit neither historical weights nor poetic figures nor the sparkles of controversial perorations. For when the seditions, partisanships, and divisions of the parties dragged me in different directions, the very wrong I suffered supplied me with matter for composition, just as my occupation withdrew the time. For so great was the throng of competitors that not even two benches could have received the most numerous candidates for a single seat. All were pleasing to themselves, all displeasing to all.

7.9.3. Nor should we have been able to consult anything in common, had not the people, making a sacrifice of its own judgement and soothed, submitted itself rather to the priestly judgement—a few presbyters indeed stammering in corners, but openly not so much as muttering, because most feared their own order no less than the rest. And so, while in public each man took heed for all, it came about that all listened not disdainfully to what they would afterward expound with canvassing zeal.

7.9.4. So take the page joined to the volumes appended below, which—composed, with Christ as witness, in two watches of a single summer night—I greatly fear you will credit more to the reading itself, which proves this of itself, than to me. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop. The Sermon

7.9.5. Secular history relates, dearly beloved, that a certain one of the philosophers showed to his disciples, when they came to him, the patience of silence before the doctrine of speech, and so endured each of his beginners in mute silence for five years among the chairs of his arguing followers, that not even the quicker wits of some might be praised before it became fitting that they be known. So it came about that whoever had begun to hear those same men speak after their long silence did not keep silent; for, until nature has drunk in knowledge, there is no greater glory in having said what you know than in having kept silent about what you do not know.

7.9.6. But now a far different condition awaits my mediocrity, upon whom, as I walk through the sighing whirlpools and the wallowing-places of my misdeeds, the weight of this profession has been thrust; and before I render to any of the good the compliance of a learner, I am compelled to owe to the rest the office of a teacher. To this impossibility is added the weight of shame: that you have particularly entrusted to me, by the offering of a decretal page, the judgement of choosing a bishop, in the presence of a most holy father, most worthy of the highest pontificate; who, since he is the head of his province, is to me also superior in usage, instruction, eloquence, privilege, time, and age—and I, about to speak both before and concerning the metropolitan, both a provincial and a junior, bear alike the modesty of one undeserving and the odium of one too forward.

7.9.7. But since it has so pleased your error that I, myself lacking prudence, should seek out for you, under the help of Christ, a prudent bishop, in whose person many good qualities concur, you will know that by an assent of this kind I take up much honour, but more burden. In the first place, weigh the great load of public opinion, that you have enjoined consummate judgements upon a beginner, and from him you demand the straight track of counsel, in which you recollect there was an error but lately. Therefore, since this was your heart's desire, I beseech that, as you believe us in faith, so you make us by intercession; and that you deign to lift up our humility into heaven by prayers rather than by applause.

7.9.8. First, however, it is right that you know into what Scyllas of detraction, and into what barkings of tongues—but human ones—the whirlwind of certain men trying to defame you has cast you. For there is a certain force in evil characters, that the crimes of a few should disfigure the innocence of the multitude, when yet, on the other hand, the rarity of the good cannot excuse the misdeeds of the many by virtues held in common.

7.9.9. If I name any of the monks—though one to be compared with the Pauls, the Antonys, the Hilarions, the Macarii, attended by the prerogative of an anchoretic life pursued—at once a confused uproar beats upon my ears, the murmur of ignoble dwarfs complaining: "This man who is named," they say, "fulfils the office not of a bishop but rather of an abbot, and can intercede for souls before the heavenly judge more than for bodies before the earthly one." But who would not grow exasperated, seeing the sincerity of virtues soiled by the accusation of vices?

7.9.10. If we choose a humble man, he is called abject; if we bring forward an upright one, he is judged to be proud; if one less instructed, he is thought, for his unskillfulness, fit to be mocked; if one somewhat learned, he is cried up, for his knowledge, as puffed up; if a severe man, he is shuddered at as cruel; if an indulgent one, he is blamed for his easiness; if a simple man, he is despised as dull; if a keen one, he is shunned as crafty; if a diligent man, he is set down as superstitious; if a slack one, he is judged negligent; if a clever one, greedy; if a quiet one, he is pronounced cowardly; if we put forward an abstemious man, he is taken for a miser; if one who feeds by dining, he is assailed for gluttony; if one who fasts by feeding others, he is accused of vanity.

7.9.11. They condemn freedom as wickedness; they disdain modesty as boorishness; the rigid, for their austerity, they do not hold dear; the gentle, by their affability, grow cheap with them. And so, in whichever manner one lives, here nonetheless the character of the good will always be hooked, as by twin-barbed hooks, on the stinging tongues of the slanderous. Amid these things, the stiff-neckedness of the people and the licence of the clergy are hardly brought under monastic discipline.

7.9.12. If I name a cleric, those who follow him are envious, those who went before disparage him. For so few of these—be it said with the rest's leave—judge that mere length of clerical service is to be reckoned in place of merits, that, in consecrating a bishop, they would have us choose not usefulness but age, as though to have lived long rather than well ought to be taken as the prerogative, the adornment, the allurement of all the favours, for obtaining the highest priesthood. And so certain men—slack in ministering, swift in detraction, idle in deliberations, busy in seditions, weak in charity, robust in faction, steady in keeping their rivalries, wavering in the assertion of opinions—strive to rule the church, men whom it will soon be necessary to rule on account of their old age.

7.9.13. But it does not please me longer, on account of the ambition of a few, to brand the persons of the many: this only I add, that, since I name no one by name, he confesses the rebuff who professes the offence. Indeed I say this the more freely: that of the multitude standing around, many are episcopal, but all cannot be bishops; and that, while individual men possess the property of diverse gifts, all suffice for themselves, no one for all.

7.9.14. If perchance I name a military person, at once they rise to these words: "Sidonius, because he was transferred to the clergy from a secular profession, on that account makes a show of taking to himself a metropolitan from the religious congregation; he swells with his birth, is haughty with the insignia of his dignities, despises the poor of Christ."

7.9.15. Wherefore in the present I will pay the faith I owe not so much to the charity of the good as to the suspicion of the slanderous—the Holy Spirit lives, our almighty God, who by the voice of Peter condemned in Simon Magus his thinking that he could purchase for himself the grace of blessing by a price—that in him whom I have judged opportune for you I favour neither money nor favour, but, the condition of the person, the time, the province, the city being weighed over and over, I have believed a man most fitting, whose life will be briefly unfolded in what follows.

7.9.16. The blessed Simplicius—hitherto to be held of your order, and from now of ours, if only God assent through you—answers so well to both sides, whether in deed or in profession, that both the commonwealth can find in him what to admire, and the church what to love.

7.9.17. If reverence is to be kept for birth—since the evangelist showed that this too is not to be omitted (for Luke, undertaking the praise of John, reckoned it the most excellent thing that he came of priestly stock, and, about to proclaim the nobility of his life, yet first extolled the dignity of his family)—his parents presided either over chairs or over tribunals. An illustrious lineage in both walks of life flourished either with bishops or with prefects: so always to this man's forefathers it was the custom to dictate either human or divine law.

7.9.18. But if we weigh his person by a more careful consideration, we find that he holds there the chief place among the men of rank. But you will say that by right Eucherius and Pannychius are held superior as illustres; let it be that they have been so esteemed hitherto, but now, for the present cause, they are not required by the canon, since both have passed to second marriages. If we count his years, he has the efficacy of youth, of old age the counsels; if we compare letters or talent, his nature contends with his learning.

7.9.19. If humanity is to be sought, to citizen, cleric, stranger, the least and the greatest, it is offered even beyond his means; and his own bread, more often than not, that man rather knew it who was not going to repay it. If the necessity of undertaking an embassy pressed, not once did he stand for this city, whether before the skin-clad kings or before the purpled princes. If it is doubted under what master he was steeped in the rudiments of the faith: to speak proverbially, he had at home whence to learn.

7.9.20. Lastly, this is he, dearly beloved, to whom, set in the darkness of the prison-house, the bolts of the barbarian gaol, many times barred, were opened by divine power. Him, as we have heard, you cried out that he ought to be led to the priesthood, his father-in-law and father alike set aside—at which time, indeed, he brought home much praise, when he chose to be honoured by the dignity of his parents rather than his own.

7.9.21. I had almost passed over what ought not to have been passed over. Under Moses of old, as the psalmist says, in the ancient days, that the form of the tabernacle of the covenant might rise, all Israel in the desert, before the feet of Bezalel, heaped up the contribution of their offered expense. Solomon thereafter, that he might build the temple in Jerusalem, exhausted the whole strength of the people upon the work, although he heaped up the captive wealth of the Philistines and the tributary functions of the surrounding kings and the riches of the southern queen of Sheba. This man built a church for you, a young soldier, of slender means, alone, still a son under authority and already a father; nor did either the tenacity of the old or the regard for his little ones hold him back from his proposed devotion—and yet there would be a fashioning of his character which kept silence.

7.9.22. For he is, unless I am mistaken, of brass against all mere popularity; he does not catch at the favour of all but of the good; not growing cheap by indiscriminate familiarity, but precious by tested fellowship, and, with a good manhood, desiring rather to profit his rivals than to please them; to be compared with severe fathers, who think not so much of the wishes of their young sons as of their good; in adversity steadfast, in doubt faithful, in prosperity modest, in dress simple, in speech sociable, in fellowship an equal, in counsel pre-eminent; he eagerly seeks proven friendships, steadfastly retains them, perpetually keeps them; he carries on declared enmities honourably, is slow to believe, quick to lay aside; most to be courted because least ambitious, he is eager not to take up the priesthood, but to deserve it.

7.9.23. Someone says: "Whence have you learned so much about him so quickly?" To whom I reply: I knew the people of Bourges before I knew Bourges. Many on a journey, many in fellow-service, many in contract, many in deliberation, many in their wandering, many in ours, do we come to know; very many short cuts to acquaintance are given even by reputation, since nature has set not so narrow bounds to fame as to one's homeland. Wherefore, if the standing of cities is to be assessed not so much by the circuit of their walls as by the renown of their citizens, I have recognized not only who you were, but where you were.

7.9.24. His wife descends from the stock of the Palladii, who held the chairs either of letters or of altars with the praise of their order. Indeed, since the person of a matron demands a modest and brief mention of herself, I would steadfastly affirm that that woman answers to the priesthoods of both families, both where she was reared and grew, and where, chosen, she removed. The two of them rear their sons well and prudently; compared with whom the father begins to be the happier for this, that he is surpassed.

7.9.25. And since you have sworn that the opinion of my littleness shall prevail in this election—seeing that it is no more binding to speak the sacrament than to write it—in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it is Simplicius whom I pronounce ought to be made metropolitan of our province, supreme bishop of your city. Do you, however, concerning the man of whom we speak, if you follow my new opinion, sound in unison with your old.

7.10.1. I envy the good fortune of the habitual courier, by whom it has fallen to you to be seen the more often. But what shall I say of Amantius, when I am jealous of my very letters themselves, which will be opened by sacrosanct fingers, inspected by your eyes? And I, shut here among the half-burnt straits of a fragile wall, by the terror of a war close at hand, am by no means permitted to satisfy my longing for you. And would that this were the form or the cause of the Arvernian region, that we might be excused as men less excusable.

7.10.2. But, what is harder, it is brought about by the deserts of our injustice that a just excuse is not wanting to us. Wherefore, the salutation premised, as the custom of duty demands, I greatly beg that meanwhile you remit the debt of a meeting to one who pays it even with words. For if the liberty of going and coming should be recalled by peace, this I shall the more fear—that the constancy of my presence might prove rather a cause of distaste. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.11.1. If the reckoning of times and regions allowed, I would take care to cultivate friendships once entered not by mere offices of words alone; but since the storm of clashing kingdoms makes too much uproar against the wish for fraternal peace, at least among men separated and set apart the letter of habitual converse will rightly be retained, which long ago, introduced deservedly under the pretext of charity, conforms to the old examples. It remains that you indulge to an anxious admirer the fault of a rare meeting—one who, that he may the less assiduously enjoy the sacrosanct contemplation of your countenance, now fears danger from his neighbours, now odium from his patrons; but of these, so much: even these are many words.

7.11.2. Meanwhile I introduce Peter, a man of tribunician rank, the bearer of our discourse, who diligently asks this same thing, and who can more compendiously make known by present narrative what business he carries. To him, I pray, let what help is in you accrue, in view of the present page—the regard for equity nonetheless remaining, against which I have not been wont to commend the causes even of my friends. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

7.12.1. If we considered the time, order, and rank of our friendship and kinship rather than of your person, then by right, in this work, however small it is, the first headings, the first offices of address would be dedicated to you. My pen would have gone through your ancestral curule chairs, no less about to enumerate the patrician fillets; it would not have kept silence about the threefold prefectures, and would not have denied to your Syagrius praises in return for praeconia so often changed; thence it would have run through your father and uncles, by no means to be passed over.

7.12.2. And although it might be wearied by the triumphal honours of your family, it would not, however, be so exhausted in unfolding the pedigrees of the ancients as to become on that account the blunter for narrating your glory; which pen, if even in writing the virtues of your forefathers it had been dulled, would again be brought to a point by your own merits. But, about to send you a public salutation, it considered not what you had been, but what you now rather are.

7.12.3. It passed over that the Gauls were administered by you at the very time when they were most unharmed; it passed over that, by the wholesomeness of your dispositions alone, you bore with Attila, the enemy of the Rhine, Thorismund, the guest of the Rhône, Aetius, the liberator of the Loire; and that, for so great a prudence and foresight, the provincials with the loudest acclaim of applause put your chariot under their own willing necks, because you so guided the reins of the Gauls that the exhausted landowner was relieved of his tributary yoke. It passed over that the most ferocious king of Gothia was bound by your speech—honeyed, weighty, witty, unwonted—and that you removed him from the gates of Arles by a dinner, whom Aetius could not by a battle.

7.12.4. All these things it passed over, hoping it more fitting that your "Hail" be joined now to the names of bishops than of senators; and it judged it done more justly, if you were set among the perfect ones of Christ than among the prefects of Valentinian. Nor let a malicious interpreter turn it to your discredit that you have been rather mingled with the priests; for a great ignorance of the orders holds those who would hence detract somewhat, because—just as, when a public festivity holds a banquet, the last guest at the first table is before him who shall have been first at the second—so, without dispute, by the judgement of the good, the least religious is reckoned more excellent than the greatest of the honoured. Pray for us.

7.13.1. The bishop Himerius, your son, hitherto little known to me by face, well enough by repute (which indeed was extended to the good side), came lately to Lyon from Troyes; where, hastily and briefly inspected by me, he restored to us, by the imitation of his character, the holy bishop Lupus, easily the prince of the Gallican bishops, the master alike of his profession and the author of his dignity.

7.13.2. Good God, what judgement in the man, joined with charm, if he should perchance deliberate or advise! He abounds in the salt of mind when he is consulted, in honey when he consults. His highest care is for letters, but most of all for religious ones, in which the marrow of meanings occupies him more than the foam of words. His whole intention of his actions—their swiftness and their delay—is Christ. And, what you may wonder at or praise, he does nothing idle, since he does nothing not tranquil.

7.13.3. He delights in fasts, he acquiesces in foods; to those he cleaves on account of the custom of the cross, by these he is bent on account of the grace of charity: each with the highest moderation, for he represses, as often as he resolves to dine, his appetite, as often as to abstain, his ostentation. He multiplies his own services, he avoids those of others; and, though it is fitting that he be met in turn, he holds it more pleasing if a mutual honour be owed to him rather than repaid.

7.13.4. At banquet, on the road, at the table, he yields to his inferiors; whence it comes that the crowd of his superiors the more pleasurably set themselves after him. He dispenses his speech with the greatest moderation toward his interlocutor, in which he suffers neither the stranger to take any shame nor the familiar any injury, neither the credulous any envy nor the curious any rebuff, neither the suspicious any malice, neither the skilled any calumny nor the unskilled any disgrace. He keeps the simplicity of the dove in the church, the cunning of the serpent in the forum; to the good he is judged prudent, to the bad cautious, to neither crafty.

7.13.5. Why more? He has now given you back to us entire; he has copied out, by a pleasant resemblance, your whole temperance and religion, your liberty and modesty, and that most chaste tenderness of a delicate mind. Wherefore, however much you may henceforth wish to enjoy your retirement and indulge your seclusion, you may indulge it; since in my brother Himerius we now hold you—your grandfather in name, your father in face, both in prudence. Farewell.

7.14.1. Lately, among the leading men (and the gathering was full), there was mention of you. All the good men in common felt all good things of you, though each one named various kinds of virtues. Indeed, when someone boasted, beyond what was fair, of your presence, as though they knew you better, I grew hot; for I admitted with no equanimity its being said that a man of all letters should become better known to neighbouring rustics than to more remote men of cultivation.

7.14.2. The contention proceeded further; and when some obstinately disputed about this error (for it is the way of the ignorant, as they are easily refuted, so they are hard to restrain), I steadfastly asserted that, if a contemplative acquaintance should never come to eloquent friends, it is harsh somehow, yet tolerable, because their own talents prevail—before whom civic inexperience travels abroad—to extend, with the pen's assistance, to the desires of remote provinces; through which often so great an affection of the absent, of the cultivated at least, is gathered as is not produced even by present assiduity. Therefore, if it is so, let those preachers of faces rather than of characters cease to calumniate the necessity of our common absence.

7.14.3. Indeed, if human substance is to be assessed more rightly by mass than by mind, I am much at a loss what, according to bodily bulk over however extended spaces, we should admire as final in man, than whom the condition of birth has produced nothing equally wretched and destitute; since, by contrast, it provides the ox with hair, the boar with bristles, the bird with feathers for clothing (to which, moreover, that they may either inflict or repel force, horn, tooth, claw are inborn weapons), while our own limbs you would judge to have been cast out into this world alone, not brought forth; and while, for the begetting of the limbs of other animals, nature meets them with manifold protection, like a mother with open bosom, she poured forth human bodies alone, to whose weakness she was in a manner a stepmother.

7.14.4. For that, as I judge—I who lead your mind to be preferable to your limbs—has no equality, that the reasoning of an intellectual soul, knowing the true and the false, has raised our state above the beasts; and if those men, who look upon their friends mockingly, not so much with judgement as with the eye, should for a moment remove its dignity, let them say, I pray, what in the form of man they think sufficiently pre-eminent, what worthy of regard.

7.14.5. His height? As though this were not often more fittingly suited to beams. Or his strength? Which reigns more vigorously in the sinews of a lion's neck. Or the beauty of his features? Which clay often more skilfully fixes in images, and wax in pictures. Or his swiftness? Which is more competently ascribed to dogs. Or his vigilance? With which even the owl contends. Or his voice? To which the ass would not yield in clearness. Or his industry? With which, after its own measure, not even the ant fears to be compared.

7.14.6. But perhaps they prefer the power of seeing: as though the sight of eagles were not more eminent. They prefer the efficacy of hearing: as though the bristly swine did not surpass us in hearing. They prefer the subtlety of smelling: as though the vulture did not precede us in scent. They prefer the discernment of tasting: as though we did not here yield much even to the ape. What shall I say of touch, the fifth sense of our body? Which the philosopher and the little worm claim for themselves indifferently. I say nothing here of the alluring appetites, which, in coition, the bowed-down pleasure of human flesh shares with the beast's impulse.

7.14.7. See what misery they prefer and cultivate, who, puffed up, insult me because you are known to them by sight alone. But I always see that Philagrius whose face, if I saw it silent, I would not see as Philagrius. Whence that common saying, which a certain man uttered, in a different case but with a like opinion: "The Roman people did not recognize the son of Marcus Cicero when he spoke." For by universal judgement the dignity of knowledge, virtue, prerogative are renowned, to whose highest summit one ascends by the steps of merits.

7.14.8. First, even the bestial body, if it is now perchance formed, transcends in dignity the unformed matter; next, before the formed is set the animated body; thirdly, the human mind precedes the soul of the beast, because, as the flesh is inferior to life, so life to reason, of which our substance God the Maker made master, but the beast's incapable; yet so that in the state of the human mind a twofold condition prevails; for as souls that reason in a human way, but are dull and rather sluggish, are trodden down by the talent of the prudent and the keen, so, if there are any that flourish by natural wisdom alone, these easily concede that they are surpassed by the merits of the skilled.

7.14.9. Observing the difference of these grades, I always behold with the eye of the heart that Philagrius, to whom my mind makes me potentially known by likeness of character; for, although you please all good men, no one has been more able to look upon you within than he who strives to imitate you without. Indeed, in what manner I become a follower of your pursuits, will be disclosed in the following part of the page.

7.14.10. You love, as I have learned, the quiet; I, even the indolent. You avoid the barbarians, because they are thought evil; I, even if they are good. You give diligence to reading; I too suffer my own sloth to harm me little in that part. You yourself fill the person of a religious man; I, at least the image. You do not desire the goods of others; I even count it as gain if I do not lose my own. You delight in the company of the learned; I call any crowd, however great, lacking in literary art, the greatest solitude.

7.14.11. You are said to be most cheerful; I too define that all tears perish which anyone has shed, except as often as he supplicates God. You are reported to be most humane; no guest has shuddered at our little table, as at the cave of Polyphemus. The highest clemency is attributed to you toward your servants; nor am I tortured, if mine, as often as they sin, are not as often tortured.

7.14.12. You think one ought to fast on alternate days? It does not irk me to follow. To dine? It does not shame me to be the first. For the rest, if it is granted me, by the gift of Christ, to be seen by you, I shall so rejoice as one from whom no lesser things have been withdrawn concerning you. Moreover, what greater things are in you, I now know well enough. On account of which it can the more easily come about that, even if at some time, set before you, I look upon your face, some fresh joy concerning you, rather than opinion, accrues to me. Farewell.

7.15.1. As often as I come to Vienne, I would wish, at the greatest price purchased, that the dwelling of the city held you and our common brother as settlers the more—you who are joined to me not by love only but also by profession. But that one eludes my reproach under the pretext of his frequented suburban estate, by which it comes about that he is to us neither present himself nor accountable; and you have wherewith meanwhile to excuse yourself, that a possession scarcely recovered now possesses you long. Whatever it is, come now, henceforth to obtain a departure on this condition, that you either return in turn or stay longer. For however much, set in the country, you make your husbandmen industrious, then truly will you make your own land fruitful, if the church, which you cultivate much, you cultivate more. Farewell.

7.16.1. You do, my only patron in Christ, a thing alike of your love and of your custom, in that you soothe the cares of a wandering friend by consoling letters. And would that you always so remember me, that the very anxieties, chained together by a succeeding anguish, which as an exhorter you make thin, you may, as an intercessor, cut off!

7.16.2. For the rest, I think your freedmen, the business you had enjoined being despatched, are returning; who, it is agreed, performed the matter so vigorously that they did not even need to be helped. Through them I have sent the nightly cowl, with which you may worthily cover your limbs, worn out by fasts, between praying and lying down—although the shaggy garment is sent not opportunely, the winter being ended and the seasons of summer now drawing near. Farewell.

7.17.1. You bid me, my lord brother, by the law of friendship, which it is a sin to wound, to set my long-idle fingers upon the anvils of the old workshop, and to inscribe for the holy Abraham, his day fulfilled, a funeral dirge in mournful verses. Quickly will I comply with what is enjoined, both drawn by your authority and chiefly forestalled by the devotion of that most distinguished man, the count Victorius, whom by secular right I honour as a patron, by ecclesiastical right I cherish as a son, as a client, and love as a father; who sufficiently showed what and how great a care burned within him toward the servants of Christ, when, bending about the couch of the dying bishop, no less than about his limbs, and made one colour with grief, growing pale at the death close above his face, he showed by his indicative tears what he wished for the man.

7.17.2. And since he himself snatched for himself the greatest parts of burying the body, bestowing the whole apparatus of the abundant expense that befitted the bishop to be buried, we confer, at least to the obsequies, the words that remain, about to scratch with the impress of the engraving pen nothing other than a testimony of mutual love; for the rest, the character, deeds, and virtues of the man will be most unworthily weighed by the meanness of my words. Abraham, worthy to be joined to the holy patrons, whom I would not tremble to call your colleagues: for so they go before that you may soon follow them; a share of martyrdom gives a share of the kingdom. Born by the Euphrates, having suffered prison for Christ and bonds loosened only by a five years' famine, escaped from the truculent king of the Susian shore, you hasten alone all the way to the western land. But the signs of his powers follow the confessor, and to evil spirits you bring, fugitive, their flight. Wherever you come, the throng of Lemures cries that it yields: you, an exile, bid the demons go into exile. You are sought by all, yet no ambition takes you; the honour thrust upon you is more burdensome. You flee the uproars of Rome and Byzantium and the walls broken by arrow-bearing Titus. The wall of Alexander and of Antioch holds you not; you spurn the Byrsa-roofed house of Dido, you scorn the populous fields of marsh-dwelling Ravenna and those that take their name from the wool-bearing sow. This corner pleases you, and a poor man's retreat, and a hut whose roof was pressed low with straw. Here you yourself build a temple venerable to God, having yourself first been made by your body a temple of God. Here ended the course of your life and your journey: a double crown remains for your toil. Now the thousands of the holy paradise stand around you; now Abraham, your fellow-pilgrim, holds you; now you enter the homeland, but the one from which Adam fell; now you may go to the fount of your own godhead.

7.17.3. See, as you had enjoined, the rites that remain we have paid in full to the buried man; but if in turn it is fitting for brothers, friends, and fellow-soldiers to comply with the commands of charity, in your turn, I pray, do you too, by the institutions in which you excel, undertake to console his disciples, and swiftly form the wavering rule of the abandoned brothers according to the statutes of the fathers of Lérins or of Grigny; of which discipline, if any are rebels, do you yourself chastise; if any are followers, do you yourself praise together.

7.17.4. The holy Auxanius is indeed seen to be set over them; who, as you know, being somewhat more than is just both weak in body and modest in disposition, and thereby readier to obey than to command, requires that you be asked that he himself come as master of the monastery under your own mastership, and that, if any of the younger ones should despise him as unskilled or faint-hearted, he may feel, through you alone, that both are not contemned with impunity. Why many words? Do you wish to learn in a few what I want? I ask that brother Auxanius be abbot over the congregation, but you over the abbot. Farewell.

7.18.1. From you the beginning, with you it shall end; for I have sent the requested work, the copies hastily chosen, which on this account came few into my hands, because, while I meditated nothing about the writing of this little book, things hitherto unkept cannot be found. Indeed these few, which are also slight, I quickly finished, although my mind, once spurred, did not yet cease to wish to write—keeping diligently this kind of moderation, that the text of the letters should not be drawn out, if the number were shortened.

7.18.2. At the same time I judged that the book, which you, a most delicate reader, would desire, would be both handy enough and not a little excusable, if—since the lightness of the senses and the structures could offend you—you were at least the less burdened by the bundles of parchments. I commend, therefore, the various motions of our breast to your judgement, by no means unaware that the mind lies as open in a book as the face in a mirror; for I have composed some things by exhorting, very many by praising, and some by advising, a few by mourning and not a few by jesting.

7.18.3. And if anywhere you have read me as somewhat too vehement against certain men, know that I wish you to understand—the right hand of Christ aiding—that I shall never endure a servitude of the spirit, holding it most certain that the judgement of men upon these characters is twofold; for as the timid call me rash, so the steadfast call me free; among which I myself decide that his person lies low enough, whose opinion must needs lie hidden.

7.18.4. I return to my purpose. Meanwhile, if you take any breathing-space from the continuation of sacred reading, you may be diverted by these trifles. Nor will the matter, as being boundless, cause distaste, because, since the several causes are finished almost in single letters, the eye, quickly recognizing the things on which it is bent, will cease to read before it ceases to wish to read. Farewell.

8.1.1. You do well (this is your way; persevere in it), a man most worthy of the praise of all good men who dwell anywhere, in that you flatter the glory of your friends wherever there is room. Hence it is that you ask even the Arvernian writing-cases to be aired out, although we supposed it would suffice you if we had brought forth something by the earlier publication. So we will comply with what is enjoined, yet prolonging the work of the pen only so far that the series of letters—begun, of course, from the beginning of the volume—may at the very end be drawn out by the sum of a number still small, namely so as to crown the finished work with a kind of fringe upon its own margin.

8.1.2. But more care must be taken lest, on account of the additions to a volume already made public, we should perhaps late fall foul of certain fault-finders, whose tongues, naturally sharpened on the whetstone of envy, not even the artful maxims and well-wrought eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero could escape—of whom the earlier orator endured Demades, the later Antonius, as his detractors; and these men, though envious with a famous malice and an obscure diction, have nonetheless run down to the knowledge of posterity through their hatred of virtues.

8.1.3. But since you exhort me, let us loose our sails to the storms revisited, and we who have, as it were, crossed seas, let us sail across this as though a pond. For I have sufficiently resolved that, as diligence is to be applied in the writing, so steadfastness is to be kept in the publishing; and indeed there is no middle course: for either the least is to be feared from these things, or one must be wholly silent in all. Farewell.

8.2.1. I believed, most skilful man, that I should commit a sin against learning if I delayed to pursue with praises that which you have prevented from being abolished—I mean letters, of which, as of something already in a manner buried, you are celebrated as the reviver, the patron, the champion; and through you, one master, in this storm of wars, Latin shores have kept their harbour, though arms have suffered shipwreck.

8.2.2. Therefore our contemporaries and our posterity universally ought, with fervent prayers, now to consecrate you—a second Demosthenes, a second Cicero—if it be allowed, with statues, now with portraits; you, by whose teaching they have been formed and instructed, will, in the very midst of an unconquered though foreign nation, retain the tokens of their ancient birth: for now that the grades of dignities are removed, by which each highest man was wont to be distinguished from each lowest, the only mark of nobility henceforth will be to know letters.

8.2.3. But us above the rest the benefits of your teaching bind, who, accustomed to write something and labouring at what those to come may read, shall have at least a competent throng of readers proceeding from your school and instruction. Farewell.

8.3.1. The Life of Apollonius the Pythagorean—not as Nicomachus the elder copied it from the draft of Philostratus, but as Tascius Victorianus from that of Nicomachus—I have sent, because you had bidden it; which, while I hastened to obey, a translation turbid, headlong, and uncouth quickly cast out into a hasty copy. And do not turn it to my discredit, as though a thing long elaborated, believe me: for while the delay of the Livian walls held me shut in (the end of which inconvenience, after the help of Christ, I owe to you), my mind, sick with cares, had not the strength to run through, even by snatches, what was to be rendered, distracted now by nightly sighs, now by daily duties.

8.3.2. To this add that, when the dusk-bringing hour had recalled me, worn out from my watches, to my lodging, scarcely was a little rest granted to my drooping eyes; for at once there was an uproar, which two certain old Gothic women, neighbours to the open court of my chamber, would raise—than whom nothing will ever be more quarrelsome, more bibulous, more given to vomiting. Indeed, when first there was some leisure on my return, this unpolished and half-raw book—a book, as they say, still new like must—mindful more of your desire than of my own duty, I have offered.

8.3.3. Wherefore lay aside for a while the Pythian laurels and Hippocrene, and those modes of song most intimately familiar to you alone, which yet, with learned persons such as you are yourself, are sweated out not so much from the fount as from the brow. Suspend that too most renowned river of pleading, which is poured into your breast not only as your nation's but as your household's, transmitted through the succeeding ages from your forefather Fronto. Lay aside for a very little your most celebrated declamations, which you compose in the king's stead—by which the renowned king himself now strikes terror into the hearts of nations beyond the sea, now, from a position of superiority, binds a treaty as victor with the barbarians trembling at the Waal, now, along the boundary of his advanced lot, as he curbs peoples under arms, so curbs arms under laws.

8.3.4. Strip yourself somehow from your most continual cares, and steal your leisure from the burdens and motions of the court. You will then recognize the history you demanded, opportunely and competently, if with our man of Tyana you now travel to Caucasus and the Indus, now to the gymnosophists of the Ethiopians and the brahmans of the Indians—wholly given to the reading, and yourself in a manner a wanderer.

8.3.5. Read of a man—peace be first granted to the catholic faith—in very many things like yourself: that is, courted by the rich, yet not courting riches; desirous of knowledge, continent of money; abstemious among feasts, linen-clad among the purple-robed, censorious among the alabaster vases; thick-coated, rough, shaggy in the midst of perfumed nations, and among the satraps of kings tiara'd, scented with myrrh, smoothed with pumice, anointed with malobathrum, precious with a venerable squalor; and since he contributed nothing of his own from a beast for food or clothing, he was on this account to the kingdoms through which he wandered not so much an object of suspicion as of awe; and, with the fortune of kings obsequious to him in all things, demanding only those benefits which he was more wont to bestow when offered than to take.

8.3.6. Why many words? If we measure and assess truly, it may chance that the writer of the philosopher's life approached, equal to the men of greater times; certainly an equal to my age has fallen to me as a reader, through you. Farewell.

8.4.1. Will that field of yours, the Octavian estate—and not so much yours as your friends'—ever, by God's will, my lord, see us together? It, near to the city, the river, and the sea, feeds guests with feasts and feeds you with guests; and besides this, it is, to the eyes of the beholders, fair in its situation: in the first place, in that the dwelling rises with walls skilfully placed for architectural harmony; then it gleams far and wide with a chapel, with porticoes, and with conspicuous baths; to this add that, with fields and waters, with vineyards and olive-groves, with vestibule, plain, and hill, it is most delightful; and now, above its provision and its plentiful furniture, it is largely stocked with the treasures of a library, where, while you yourself bend no less to the pen than to the plough, it is hard to discern whether the master's land or his mind has been the more cultivated.

8.4.2. Therefore here, as far as I recall, swift iambics, sharp elegiacs and well-rounded hendecasyllables and other songs, redolent of the flowers of music and of thyme—now to be sung by the people of Narbonne, now by those of Béziers—you laboured into being, doubtful whether more swiftly or more beautifully, about to enlarge your favour with your equals and your fame with posterity. Certainly so it seemed to me, as often as your verses were brought, still as it were warm from the anvil of meditation; for though I write not well, I judge well.

8.4.3. But, as must be confessed, an earlier age might justly be at leisure—or, what is truer, was occupied—with such studies; now it is time for serious things to be read, serious things to be written, and for thought to be given to eternal life rather than to memory; and to remember overmuch that, after our death, not our little works but our works are to be weighed. Which indeed I do not say of the present as though you did not accomplish both that are to be praised, or, if cheerfulness still endures in your speech, censure were not kept in your action; but that, as one who by Christ's favour is secretly holy, you may now be openly venerable for your religion, submitting alike neck and heart to the healthful yoke, and that your tongue keep watch upon heavenly things as their herald, your soul upon their maxims, your right hand upon offerings—chiefly, however, your right hand upon offerings, because whatever you scatter to the churches, you gather for yourself; to which exercise of virtue this above all can kindle you, that, set amid riches of whatever kind, which fools falsely call goods, if we give anything, it is our own; if we have anything, it is another's. Farewell.

8.5.1. You too shall go into our pages, pillar of friendship, Fortunalis, illustrious glory of the Iberian regions; for your familiarity with letters is not so small that it should not be fitting, through these very letters, that something of you survive after you. There shall live at once, shall live for posterity, the glory of your name.

8.5.2. For if there is in my pages any grace, reverence, or trustworthiness whatever, I wish a future age to know that nothing is firmer than your faith, fairer than your form, juster than your judgement, more enduring than your patience, weightier than your counsel, more cheerful than your feast, more pleasant than your converse. This too, above the rest, it will recognize: that the heralding of your praises came from the contrariety of fortune; for it is well-nigh the case that a thing is the more eminently esteemed which adversities proved you steadfast, than if prosperity were concealing you happy. Farewell.

8.6.1. Gaius Caesar the dictator, than whom, they say, none administered military affairs with more generalship, the studies of composing and of constant reading claimed by turns for themselves. And although, in the person of one and the same man, the leading man of his time, the care of camp and of oratorical science contended with well-nigh equal glory, yet he never deemed himself sufficiently placed at the summit of either art, before, by the testimony of your man of Arpinum, he was preferred to all other mortals.

8.6.2. Which has likewise befallen me too—if it is permitted to compare small things with great—after my measure, though by a most dissimilar likeness; and it was fitting, before all, that you first of all should learn of it, because my glory is as much your care, and my modesty very much. Flavius Nicetius, a man most illustrious by birth, of the rank of spectabilis, illustrious by his merit, and well-nigh the greatest of the men of our homeland in prudence and skill alike, extols, as far as I have learned, the volumes of my present little work with immense heralding; declaring, besides, that I have surpassed very many of the young and not a few of the old in various kinds of composing and of soldiering—I being still green in age.

8.6.3. Indeed, as far as it can be done without boasting, I rejoice in the authority of a most excellent man, if he is sure; in his love, if he is mistaken: although who, challenged now to the deeds of his forefathers, will be most inert? Who, too, will be most speechless at words? For the Ruler of the ages engendered the virtues of these arts rather in the ancient times of the ages, which—through the age of a world already growing old, the seeds, as it were, wearied and drained of marrow—show at this time something small, and that in only a few, to be admired and remembered.

8.6.4. Of this man, however—although he is the head of all studies and letters, because I have always cherished his person—I fear his opinion, uttered with too weighty an affection, beyond what truth holds. Nor on this account would I deny that I have often stood by his brilliant pleadings, of which, though I seem to render a mutual return, it is right that I be made mindful, at least in part and in passing.

8.6.5. I heard him as a young man, and then but lately a boy, when my father, prefect of the praetorium, presided over the Gallican tribunals; under whose magistracy, of course, the consul Asturius, robed in the trabea, had opened the doors of his votive year. I clung to the curule chair, if not concealed by my place in the order, certainly not seated by reason of my age, and, mingled with the troop of the cloaked assessors, I was next to those nearest the consul. So, when first the brief largess (and it was not brief) had been completed and the fasti given, it was acclaimed by all the assembly of Gaul to the leading advocates that, the festivity being forestalled, they should grace the hours before dawn—they who awaited the late day in silence—with a fitting praise of the merited fasces.

8.6.6. The conspicuous men at once looked round for Nicetius; who, sought not gradually and one by one, but tumultuously and all at once, modestly cast down his face and blushed, with a kind of preface of bashfulness. And on this account modesty, before eloquence, gave him the greatest "Bravo." He spoke in order, gravely, ardently, with great keenness, greater eloquence, the greatest discipline; and that palm-bordered robe, drunk with Tyrian dyes, amid its rustling fringes, he made the more comely with a speech more painted, more golden.

8.6.7. Through that very time, to speak in the manner of the Decemvirs, the law concerning the prescription of thirty years had been promulgated, by whose peremptory rubrics every suit abolished was bounded, drawn out to the sixth lustrum. This law, before unknown within Gaul, the orator of whom we speak first introduced into the proceedings, published at the tribunals, set forth to the parties, added to the records—with a full assembly, the bench seldom sitting, with few decisions, with many praises.

8.6.8. Besides these things, on other occasions I observed his learning unnoticed—in the way by which a man is more quickly learned—at the time when the prefecture which governs the provinces with its fasces was governed by Nicetius' counsel. Why many words? I heard nothing that I would not wish to be my own, nothing that I did not admire.

8.6.9. On account of all these good things set in the man, I rejoice that, at the marks of a censor, he is celebrated by the voice of all. For his opinion of me, in either direction, weighs greatly; which, if we find it true, is as much a favour to my security as it would be, opposed, a cause of fear. For the rest, it stands fixed and settled with me, according as I shall come to know the matter to the full, either by silence to slacken the reins or to tighten the bridle on my chatter. For if I am confirmed by the assent of the aforesaid, I shall be more talkative than Athens; if not, more silent than Amyclae itself.

8.6.10. But of my comrade and of myself enough has been said. You, now, amid these things, what of your affairs? Which it is no less at my heart to know in turn—do you hunt, do you build, do you play the countryman? Or any one of these alone? Or each in turn? Or all alike? But whether you follow Vitruvius or Columella, or one or both of them, you do most becomingly; for you can do either in the way that he who is best does it—that is, as some first-rate husbandman and architect.

8.6.11. For the rest, that you may flatter yourself as little as possible on the office of huntsman, I particularly enjoin. For you call the boars in vain to your hunting-spears, whom you have been wont rather to start than to set in motion with your most merciful hounds, of which you abound—and indeed alone. Be it so, let it be worthy of indulgence that your whelps shrink from approaching beasts terrible and corpulent: but I know not how you excuse this—that they pursue the roes, the flat-nosed flock, and the does alike, prone to flight, with downcast spirits, breasts erect, sparse steps, frequent barkings.

8.6.12. Wherefore, for the rest, more fruitfully with nets and toils, a stationary applauder, you beset the rocky crags and the woods fit for shading lairs, and—if there is any shame—you forbear to beat the open plains in your runnings and to lie in wait for the little hares of Oléron; whom it is not worth while to disturb (since they would be overcome though you seldom give chase) by leashes led openly—unless perhaps, while our Apollinaris comes between you and your father, it will be done more rightly that they be exercised.

8.6.13. Jesting apart, let me at last know what concerns you, what concerns your household. But behold, while I now wished to close a letter which has long chattered, a sudden messenger from the Santones; with whom, while in regard to you we draw out some hours in conversation, he constantly affirmed that you had lately sounded the trumpet in the fleet, and that, amid your duties, now of a sailor, now of a soldier, you rove along the winding shores of the Ocean against the curved skiffs of the Saxons, of whom you may think that, however many oarsmen you see, you behold so many arch-pirates: so do they all at once command and obey, teach and learn brigandage. Whence now even a very great cause has arisen for warning you to take the utmost heed.

8.6.14. The enemy is more truculent than any enemy. Unforeseen, he attacks; foreseen, he slips away. He scorns those who oppose him, he overthrows the unwary; if he pursues, he intercepts; if he flees, he escapes. To this add that shipwrecks exercise them, they do not terrify; with the perils of the sea they have a certain not acquaintance only, but familiarity. For since any storm renders the secure ripe to be caught, and forbids those who would catch them to be seen, in the midst of waves and broken reefs they take joy in the hope of a surprise and gladly run risks.

8.6.15. Moreover, before they loose their sails from the continent toward their homeland, and pluck up their biting anchors from the hostile shoal, it is the custom of those returning to slay every tenth captive by drowning and crucifixion—sadder for this, by a superstitious rite—and over the gathered crowd of those about to perish, to scatter the iniquity of death by the equity of the lot. By such vows they bind themselves, by such victims they discharge them; and, purified by sacrifices of this kind not so much as polluted by sacrileges, the perpetrators of an ill-omened slaughter deem it a religious thing to exact tortures rather than ransoms from a captive's head.

8.6.16. Wherefore I fear many things, suspect various ones, although on the contrary great things urge me: first, that you accompany the standards of a victorious people; next, that I allow it less lawful for chance accidents to assail wise men, among whom you are rightly reckoned; thirdly, that for comrades joined by faith, parted by abode, even safe things frequently strike grief, because fear the more readily augurs every sinister thing concerning distant and doubtful actions.

8.6.17. But you will say that the things at which I shudder are perhaps not so greatly to be cared for. That indeed is true; but neither is this false, that for those whom we love more, we fear more. Whence nonetheless, I pray, for your sake remove as soon as you can, by a prosperous report, the anguish arisen in my senses. For I can never anew be bent to this, that, concerning friends abroad—since, indeed, the trumpet and the military watchword wear them down—until I learn the favourable, I should not fear the adverse.

8.6.18. Varro the logistoricus, as you had asked, and Eusebius the chronographer I have sent; whose polish, if it reach you—if, amid your watch-cares, as in camp, you have at least some leisure by lot—you will be able, after you have wiped your arms, to remove from your mouth too the rust of speaking. Farewell.

8.7.1. Where now, I would have you say, in the world do they hide, who often flattered themselves on the masses of their heaped-up means and on the piled-up stacks of silver now blackening? Where, too, is the prerogative of those who, against the natural gifts of their juniors, swelled on the mere occasion of their precedence in age? Where are those whose kinship is recognized by no greater token than enmity?

8.7.2. Surely, when first there was room for good deeds, and at last there was weighed at the balance of the imperial judgement not a pound of coins but of characters, there remained those who most proudly thought that they were to be assessed by their fortune alone, and who, brooding thus on their vices as on their riches, wish another's person to be seen to have risen out of vanity, when they are unwilling to be branded with covetousness, that their own substance has grown; in which, however, exercised in the wrestling-school of detraction, they are wasted away, as if by oil, so by the infused venoms of their rivalries.

8.7.3. But you, amid these things, all hail—you who, enlarged with the titles of the prefecture, although hitherto you were reckoned of an illustrious lineage, have particularly, no less actively, laboured that your posterity might be the more gloriously numbered from you. For nothing is, by the opinion of every good man, more nobly born than he, whoever he is, who, with a steadfast and combined effort of mind, body, and means, exercises himself to this end—to be preferred to his own forefathers.

8.7.4. For the rest, I ask God that your sons may match you, or—what it more befits you to wish—surpass you; and that whoever cannot endure to love one advanced, seething to the marrow, may always exact from himself the penalties of his own envy; and, since he will never have any causes of pity in you, may have causes of envy; for justly, under a just prince, that man lies low who, by himself least and only by his possessions greatest, lives small in spirit and very great in patrimony. Farewell.

8.8.1. Tell me, flower of the Gallican youth, how long at last, busied with rural works, will you disdain the city? How long will the implements of grain claim for themselves, against right and divine law, hands once worn smooth by the throws of the dice? How long will your Taïonnacus weary you, a farmer of patrician stock? How long will you, not as a knight but as a herdsman, bury the spoils of the maned meadow in the wintry fallows? How long will you lay down the weight of a blunt mattock not before the headlands are dug through?

8.8.2. Why, a rival of the Serrani and the Camilli, since you guide the plough-handle, do you make a show of not wishing for the palm-bordered robe? Forbear only to play the countryman to the envy of nobility. If you cultivate your field moderately, you possess it; if too much, you are possessed by it. Give yourself back to your father, give yourself back to your homeland, give yourself back even to faithful friends, who are rightly placed among the affections. Or if the life of the dictator Cincinnatus alone delights you so, first bring along a Racilia to yoke the oxen.

8.8.3. Nor would I say to a wise man that domestic matters are not to be cared for, but with that moderation by which he considers not only what he ought to have, but what he ought to be; for if, the other arts of noble pursuits being repudiated, the nettle of propagating his estate alone solicits you, although you recall your name derived from the trabeae and the ivoried curule chairs and the gilded litters and the purple-dyed fasti, you will assuredly be found such a man that a censor ought not so much to honour you, industrious as you are because hidden, as a tax-assessor to burden you. Farewell.

8.9.1. As soon as I came to Bordeaux, your courier presented me a letter full of nectar, flowers, and pearls, in which you blame my silence and demand some of my verses for your verses—which are wont to be poured forth for you, ringing with a varied voice through the musical hollow of your palate, as if from many-holed pipes. But this you now do, abusing the royal munificence enough, secure after your gifts; because perhaps you do not recall that satiric saying about the satirist: "He is full when Horace cries euhoe."

8.9.2. Why many words? You rightly bid me sing out of leisure, because it now delights you to dance. Whatever it is, I obey nonetheless, and that not only not under compulsion but even of my own accord; only do you somehow moderate the Catonian judgement of your supercilious brow. For you know well the cheerfulness of poets, whose talents are wrapped in griefs as little fishes in nets; and if anything is harsh or sad, the tenderness of poetry does not at once unloose itself from the bond of the anguish that has befallen it. For I have not yet obtained anything from my mother-in-law's inheritance, even for the use of a third part at the price of half.

8.9.3. Meanwhile do you see how the theme of the epigram you demand will please you; me, however, my anxiety by no means permits to have one thing now in my business, another in my song. That indeed you would do beyond justice, if for the present you should, as it were, compare our writings in turn: I act the toiling man, you yourself act the happy one; I act still an exile, you yourself act already a citizen; and on this account I sing unequal things, because I ask for like ones and do not obtain equal ones.

8.9.4. But if by any chance you should receive, with a more indulgent nod, these trifles which I have written amid the torments of my mind, you will persuade me that they were like the songs of swans, whose tuneful clangour is in their pains; like too the lyric string more violently stretched, which the more it is twisted, the more musical it is. For the rest, if verses devoid of leisure or cheerfulness cannot be approved, you too, in the page which I have woven below, will find nothing to please you.

8.9.5. To these add still this, that, for matter which has fallen not to a hearer rather but to a reader, the delivery of an absent author in nowise helps; for after the work is sent, there remains nothing which a poet, even the most vocal, may do, whom distance of place does not permit even to do this—what the choirs of pantomimes are wont to do, who by good singing commend things ill written. Why do you try now to stir to song Cirrha, or the Hyantian Muses, or the learned waters of the Heliconides, carved out by the stroke of the neighing winged steed, O Lampridius, glory of our Thalia, and so again and again compel me to write, as if I had brought the Delphic instruments to your Delian, and, a new Apollo, should drive the tripod, cauldron, lyre, quiver, bows, and griffins, and shake from the double foliage on this side the berries, on that the clusters? You now, Tityrus, your fields recovered, roaming through myrtles and the plane-grove, strike the lyre, and as you sing together your lips and quill ring back the measures to you, astounding harper in string, voice, and metre: but us, set here and seen but once, the monthly moon already beholds twice over, nor has the lord himself much leisure, while the subjugated world seeks his answers. Here we see the dark-blue Saxon, accustomed to fear before only the sea, now the land; along the outermost edges of whose crown the razor, not content to keep its own bite, narrows the margin of the hair, and so, the locks cut to the skin, the head shrinks and the face is added. Here, the back of his head shorn, the aged Sygambrian, after you are conquered, draws back new hair to his old neck. Here the Herul wanders with grey-green cheeks, dwelling in the lowest recesses of the Ocean, nearly one colour with the weedy deep. Here the seven-foot Burgundian often, with bent knee, supplicates for peace. Under these patrons the Ostrogoth flourishes, and pressing in turn the neighbouring Huns, because they are subject to him, hence grows proud over those. Hence, Roman, you seek your safety, and against the throngs of the Scythian region, whatever tumults the Parrhasian bear bears, Euric, your hands are entreated, that, strong through his settler's warfare, the Garonne may defend the slender Tiber. Here the Parthian Arsaces himself prays that he may hold the height of the Susian court under a tributary treaty. For because he perceives that arms rise hence against the Bosphoran regions with great preparation, sorrowful Persia, at the sound of war, scarce thinks the Euphrates' bank to be defended; who, though he feign that the stars are kindred to him, and swells with his nearness to Phoebus, yet here, mortal, fills the air with his supplication. Amid these things we wear away empty delays; but you, Tityrus, forbear to provoke me; for I do not envy, and rather marvel that I, while I deserve nothing and spend my prayers in vain, have begun to be a Meliboeus.

8.9.6. There is the poem, which you may review at your leisure, and, gazing at my sweat and dust, like a charioteer already crowned from the platform. For the rest, there is no reason you should suspect that I will repeat a like kind of service, even though you be delighted with the present one, unless I myself first cease to prophesy losses rather than songs. Farewell.

8.10.1. That letters are alike of use and at heart to you I greatly rejoice; for what flame of meanings or wave of words accompanies your pen I would more freely assert, did you not, while you study not a little to praise me, forbid yourself to be praised at all. And although in your letter charity preserves its sweetness, nature its eloquence, skill its discipline, yet in the choice of matter alone you have erred—although this very thing can be proclaimed in your intention, that you seem to have erred in judgement. You apply huge titles of heraldings to my character; but if you had taken any account of my modesty, it would have been fitting for you to think of that saying of Symmachus: "As true praise adorns, so false chastises."

8.10.2. In which place, however, if I measure your mind well, beyond the affection which you show as the greatest, you have also done this with art; for it is the custom of eloquent men to prove the faculty of their talents by the difficulties of their tasks, and there to fix their skilled pen, like a kind of ploughshare of a fertile breast, where the argument of a barren matter, like the dry clod of a lean turf, starves. The world gushes with like examples: the physician is known in desperation, the helmsman in a tempest; the fame of all these the preceding perils extol, which assuredly lies hidden, unless it find where it may be proved.

8.10.3. So too the great orator, if he undertakes a narrow business, then more applaudably makes manifest his ample talent. Marcus Tullius, in his other pleadings, conquered the rest; in defence of Aulus Cluentius, he conquered himself. Marcus Fronto, while he was eminent in his other orations, in the Pelops preferred himself to himself. Gaius Plinius, on behalf of Attia Viriola, brought home more glory from the centumviral platform than when he delivered before Marcus Ulpius, the incomparable prince, a comparable panegyric.

8.10.4. So too you yourself have done, who, while you wish to exercise your knowledge, have not feared that even my conscience would be a hindrance to you. Nay rather, by supplicating, heal my languors, and do not, by the snare of an ill-flattering eloquence, weigh down the frailty of a soul still sick with the burden of false glory. Indeed, since with you, though your speech is beautiful, your life is more beautiful, you indulge me more, if for my sake you would rather pray than plead. Farewell.

8.11.1. What do your people of the Nitiobroges, what your people of Vesunna do, among whom, in claiming you for themselves on either side, a holy contention always arises? One people holds you by patrimony, the other even by matrimony; and while this holds you by origin, that by marriage, better is this, that both hold you by judgement—you, however, by the gift of God happy amid these things, over whom, to be the longer engaged and possessed, it is worth while that the votive zeal of the peoples should clash!

8.11.2. But you, having disposed your presence to both, parted by turns, now restore to those a Drepanius, now to these an Anthedius. And if rhetorical instruction be demanded of you, these do not require a Paulinus, those an Alcimus. Whence I marvel the more at you, whom daily the riddling of so manifold a library, aired out, wearies, that you demand of me some of the old ditties. I obey indeed, although the recollection of jests seems unseasonable at a time of grieving.

8.11.3. The orator Lampridius is now first known to me to have been slain; whose death would consume my love with the highest anguish, even had not a violence inflicted snatched him from human affairs. He once, as jests among friends, called me Phoebus, himself having received from me the name of the Odrysian bard. Which it suits to be told beforehand, lest the figured names obscure the poem set below. To him, at a certain time, visiting Bordeaux, I sent, as it were with the Muse going before, a billeting page. I think this is more freely offered than if, composing something mournful upon the death of one departing, I, who did not please by my eloquence, should displease by my matter. Phoebus' reminder to his too-beloved and special Thalia. Lay aside a while your quill, foster-child, and bind your scattered hair with a green fillet, and let the readier ivy gird up for you the wrinkles of your trailing robe. Beware to wear the comic sock, nor, as it was wont, let your high foot swim in the loose buskin; but take care to bind such sandals as Harpalyce, or as that maiden bound, who cut down with the sword her vanquished suitors. So will you go better with flying leap, if the bandaged steps of your bare toe guide you over the surface, with firm and quickened gait, and the chain, bent back by the meeting loops of the bindings, rise to your leg through the arch. Remember, nimble in this guise, to visit my Orpheus, who daily softens stones and oaks and horny fibres, tuneful, by his sweet-speaking art; whom now the Arpinate enriches with thundering tongue, now the pen of Maro, or that with which you bless Latium, Horace, a better lyrist than Alcaeus himself; and now he swells the epic of tragedies, now jesting comedy tempers him, now satires inflame him, and the declamation of tyrannical controversies. Say: "Phoebus comes, and after his post-horses beats the sail-winged Garonne with oars; he bids you come to meet him, but with lodging made ready at once beforehand." And to Leontius, whom old Livia gives from the ancient senate, say: "He will be here even now." And see Rusticus, witty enough in his very name. But if they refuse their roof as occupied, go straightway to the thresholds of the bishops, and, holy Gallicinus' hand kissed, ask the loan of a small roof, lest, if I am abandoned, my home denied, mourning I go to the dripping taverns and, holding both nostrils shut again and again, groan because of the smoking kitchens, where in the thyme-bearing dishes the red sausage smells among twin berries, or the clouds of the pots, their vapour joined, smoke with the crackling pans. Here, when the festal day has begun to rouse the hoarse songs and to clatter the pleasurable complaint of the buffoons, then, then, stirred by the Muse of a wine-soaked host, songs more worthy of you I, a barbarian, would whisper more than they.

8.11.4. O abject necessity of being born, wretched of living, hard of dying! Behold to what point the wheel of the volubility of human affairs is led. I loved the man, I confess, well enough, though he was entangled by certain—yet pardonable—errors, and mingled lesser things with his virtues. For he was often roused by light causes, but lightly; which I nonetheless studied rather to persuade was nature rather than vice; and I urged the better view, so that the wrath which reigned in the man's breast as in its native matter, because it had been infected with a blemish of cruelty, might at least under the pretext of severity be cleansed of its spot. Besides, though frail in counsel, he was most firm in faith; most incautious, because credulous; most secure, because doing no harm. No one was so his enemy as could wring from him a curse; and yet no one so his friend as could escape his reproach. Difficult of approach, though easy when inspected, and to be borne indeed, but bearable.

8.11.5. For the rest, if you measure his orations, he was keen, well-rounded, well-ordered, vigorous; if his poems, tender, of many metres, witty, an artist. For he made verses thoroughly exact, with a marvellous variety both of feet and of figures: hendecasyllables smooth and without knot; hexameters resounding and buskined; elegiacs indeed now echoic, now recurrent, now connected by anadiplosis at end and beginning.

8.11.6. Hither, as the work he had seized counselled, he varied his ethical diction according to the quality of person, time, and place; and that not with words of any sort, but with grand, beautiful, elaborated ones. In controversial matter he was strong and brawny; in satire careful and biting; in tragedy savage and tearful; in comedy urbane and multiform; in fescennine verse blooming with words, seething with wishes; in bucolic watchful, sparing, song-full; in georgic so playing the rustic much, that he was in nothing rustic.

8.11.7. Besides, as for epigrams, he pleased not by abundance but by sharpness, which were finished neither shorter than a distich nor longer than a tetrastich; and these, though you saw not a few peppered and many honeyed, you saw all salted. In lyrics, however, following Horace, he was now borne swift in the iambic, now grave in the choriambic, now winding in the alcaic, now swelling in the sapphic. Why more? Subtle, apt, well-furnished, and most eloquent wherever his mind carried his pen—so that one might rightly judge him, after the Horatian and Pindaric swans, about to fly forth on the wings of glory.

8.11.8. To dice and ball he was not equally given; for while with the dice he was occupied to his labour, with the ball only to his pleasure, he gladly wearied others, and—what is more sweet—was the more gladly wearied himself. He wrote assiduously, although more frequently he wished to write. He also read the authors incessantly, the ancients with reverence, the recent without envy, and—what among men is most difficult—he yielded to none with difficulty the praise of talent.

8.11.9. This indeed was not only blameworthy in the man, but fatal, that he once consulted the astrologers about the end of his life—citizens of African cities, whose mind, like their region, is the more ardent; who, the constellation of the inquirer being inspected, named alike the year, month, and day which—to use a term of the mathematic art—he would have as climacteric, inasmuch as to them, the theme being offered, the scheme as of a bloody nativity had lain open; because, of course, in the year of the friend's birth, whatever gentle globe of the planetary stars a prosperous rising had raised into the zodiacal intervals, this, at its setting, the reddening with learned fires—whether disjoined Mercury over the diameter, or retrograde Saturn over the square, or restored Mars over the centre—had exasperated.

8.11.10. But of these things, if any or in any way they are—although they are utterly false and therefore deceiving—if anything more fully and plainly, better face to face; though you yourself too study arithmetic and, with your diligence, anxiously unroll Vertacus, Thrasybulus, Saturninus, as one who always meditates nothing but the arcane and the lofty. Meanwhile, for the present, nothing was done conjecturally, nothing by riddles, since the time and the manner of his foretold death entangled this our rash inquirer into the future, who long shuffled in vain.

8.11.11. For at home, pressed and strangled by the hands of his slaves, his breath stopped, his throat constricted, he perished—not to say by the end of Lentulus, Jugurtha, and Sejanus, certainly by that of Numantine Scipio. In this slaughter these things were the less sad, that the crime itself, with the author of the parricidal deed, was discovered at daybreak; for who is so far from the sense of men, who so blinded in both eyes, as not, the corpse of the dead man inspected, at once to gather the signs of a life wrung out?

8.11.12. For at once the livid skin, the protruding eyes, and, in the buried face, traces no less of wrath than of grief, were the proof. The earth indeed was found wet with the falling gore, because after the deed the brigands themselves had turned the dead man's face to the pavement, prone, as though an overboiling flux of blood had emptied him. But, the man at once seized who had been the kindler, instigator, and standard-bearer of that very faction, and the other accomplices oppressed and separately examined, the terror of torments dragged the truth of the crime from unwilling breasts.

8.11.13. And would that, while he imprudently, trusting, consulted vain things, he had not deserved to meet this end! For whoever shall have presumed to pry into the forbidden, the secret, the prohibited, I fear that he will swerve from the rules of catholic faith, and be made worthy to have adverse things answered concerning his state, while he seeks the unlawful. Vengeance indeed followed the dead man, but these things rather profit those who are to live. For as often as a murderer is punished, it is not a remedy but a solace to be avenged.

8.11.14. Love has impelled me to go on rather far, whose anguish I could not breathe out in silence. You meanwhile, if there is anything there worthy to be known, indicate it quickly, writing at least for this, that the reading may lighten my mind, heavy with sadness. For there was much grief, and rightly, to my confused breast, when I committed these things to the page alone. For nothing else at this time does it please me to write, speak, or revolve by hand, speech, or counsel. Farewell.

8.12.1. Does the city of Bazas so much possess you—a city set not on turf but on dust—does the Syrtic field and the wandering soil and the sands flying in the wrangling winds so much possess you for themselves, that you, demanded by great prayers, parted by small spaces, awaited for many days, neither powers, nor friendships, nor oysters fattened in their preserves can draw to Bordeaux? Or do the uncertainties of the roads hold you in suspense in the wintry seasons; and, because the Bigerric whirlwind is wont to confuse the tokens of the shifting causeways, do you fear a kind of pedestrian shipwreck on an earthly journey?

8.12.2. Where, we ask, has Calpe, lately subdued by your steps, so quickly departed from your mind? Where the tents fixed in the western bounds of the Gaditanians? Where that same limit of wandering for my Trygetius which once was Hercules'? Do you so much differ from your very self, that you have wholly yielded to the laws of sloth—you, in whose roaming through the secrets of fabled regions the work of toil failed sooner than the intent of fatigue?

8.12.3. And after these things you tread so sluggishly the harbour of Alingo, as if you had now to set out to the Danube frontier against the raiding Massagetae, or as if even now the pools of the Nile's water, feared by the native crocodiles, were to be crossed by your ship. And since you are not so retarded even by the interposition of twelve miles, what, do we suppose, would you have done with the army of Marcus Cato in the Leptitan Syrtis?

8.12.4. But however you tremble at the mere names of the winter months, so mild is the face of the sky, so warm, so clear, and it has breezes rather than winds, so that the season cannot retain you more strenuously than the mildness can invite you. But if you spurn the summoning letter, I believe you will not resist even verses—coaxing impellers and, as far as I suspect, strenuous executors of my desire, whose camp will be moved against you after two days.

8.12.5. Behold, my Leontius, easily first of the Aquitanians, behold Paulinus, now but little inferior to his father, to the place I named above, through the ebbing currents of the Garonne, will come to meet you not only with a fleet but even with the river. Here, in measured rowing-chant, the rowers among the benches, the steersmen among the stern-ornaments, will sing your praises. Here a couch built up with cushions, here a board strewn with two-coloured counters, here frequent dice, about to rebound from the ivoried steps of the towers, await you; here, lest the rolling bilge-water wet your dangling foot, the curved bellies of the firwood timbers will be platformed with a woven texture; here, by the lattice bent over the awnings, you will avoid the treachery of a wintry calm.

8.12.6. What more can be spent upon your delicate idleness than that you find you have arrived, when you scarce feel that you are coming? Why do you mutter? Why do you delay? The very creeping snails, with their native houses, seem to me about to outstrip your arrival. There is besides for you a most copious larder, abundantly stuffed with heaped-up dainties, if only there be a spirit equal to the spending in airing them out.

8.12.7. Why many words? Come either to be fed or to feed; nay, what is more pleasing, to do both; come with your inland equipment to war down and subjugate these gluttons of the Médoc furniture. Here let the Adour fish insult over the Garonne mullets; here let the throng of cheap crabs yield to the supplies of the Labourd lobsters.

8.12.8. You, however, though you are to fight against the rest in this kind of battle, if you think anything is to be conceded to my judgement (for it is not unjust to trust one who has experience), will make our senator, my host, exempt from this conflict; whose feast and roof, if you enter under them, you would deem the dishes of Cleopatra and lavish quarters. For although both he himself and his homeland contend over this pursuit, it was long ago a settled opinion that he surpasses the rest of the citizens, though that town too surpasses the rest of the cities. Farewell.

8.13.1. We rejoice, most blessed Bishop, that many kinds of virtues are heaped up in you by the supernal gift; since you are said to act the nobleman without pride, the powerful man without envy, the religious man without superstition, the lettered man without ostentation, the grave man without ineptitude, the witty man without effort, the steadfast man without harshness, the affable man without seeking popularity.

8.13.2. Besides, to these goods fame heaps this most excellent thing, that it asserts you to transcend all these so many graces by the topmost height of your charity—fame, I say, which, when it sings of your praises, says much and keeps back more. For to those set farther off it can assign the design of your actions, not their number; by the relation of which, kindled, I of my own accord first run forward, as becomes one far inferior, to discharge my duties; nor do I fear to be charged with garrulity at any time, who could hitherto be blamed for taciturnity.

8.13.3. I commend Promotus, the bearer of this letter, indeed already known to you before, but lately made, by your prayers, our fellow-tribesman; who, though by race a Jew, has nonetheless chosen rather to be reckoned an Israelite by faith than by blood, and, aspiring to the citizenship of that heavenly city, and disdaining the killing letter for the quickening spirit, contemplating alike the rewards set before the just here, and foreseeing here that, unless he made his desertion to Christ from circumcision, he would through eternal ages suffer everlasting torments, chose that his homeland should be reckoned to him Jerusalem rather than Hierosolyma.

8.13.4. These things known, let the spiritual Sara receive into her maternal arms the now truer son of Abraham as he draws near; for he ceased to belong to Hagar the handmaid when he exchanged the servitude of legal observance for the liberty of grace. For the rest, what cause of coming hither he himself had, he will be able more profitably to explain by present narration; but to us, for the reasons I have written above, he is held most dear—which I therefore signify, because he commends each man most effectively who has laid open the pure causes of a just commendation. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

8.14.1. Long since, venerable Bishop, though your face has not yet been beheld by sight, yet your conduct has been inspected. For the praise of holy merits, when diffused, is not content to be bound within final spaces. Hence it is that, because a measure is not set to a good conscience, neither is a term found to a good repute.

8.14.2. Deem what I say false, unless a competent witness has come to my profession—a head once conspicuous enough in that monastery of Lérins, a fellow-monk of the Lupi and the Maximi, and aspiring to follow in the woodland glades of parsimony the Memphitic and Palestinian archimandrites. This is the bishop Antiolus, by whose account I anxiously studied to learn who was your father, and who and of what sort you brothers are, by what prerogative of character you both discharge the highest pontificate; and I remember rejoicing that I have learned it.

8.14.3. To which father once—namely, having you—scarce would the house of Aaron, the ancient bishop, deservedly be compared; whom, though the right hand of his law-giving brother first lost in the midst of the eremite people by the oil of sanctification, calling his sons to the duties of a like office, yet the felicity of that man over Ithamar and Eleazar was discoloured by Nadab and Abihu, smitten with the thunderbolts; whose souls, however slain, we believe to be absolved, yet we know their persons to have been punished.

8.14.4. But you, about to touch the page of the altar, offer nothing, as I hear, of strange fire, but, with the accompanying victims of charity and chastity, burn the most fragrant incense in the censers of the heart. To this, as often as you bind the yoke of the law upon the necks of the proud by the bonds of preaching, then you spiritually immolate bulls to God; as often as you drive those polluted by the stench of a luxuriant conscience to the sweet odour of chastity by the goads of correction, Christ reckons that you have offered him the violence of he-goats.

8.14.5. As often as, at your exhortation, in any pricked man the soul, penally recalling its faults, sighs, who would doubt that you have, by a mystic sacrifice, offered up the pairs of turtle-doves or the two young pigeons, which assign the double substance of each of our men as much by number as by groaning? As often as anyone, at your warning, shall have scorched his fat body and the seething suet of his swollen belly, to be boiled down by the frequent fire of fasts, it is doubtful to none that you then consecrate the fine flour fried in a certain frying-pan of continence.

8.14.6. As often as you persuade someone who sets aside the figments of a faithless mind to answer to sound doctrine, to believe the faith, to hold the way, to hope for life, who would doubt that, in the amendment of this converted man—who is now free from heresy, free from hypocrisy, free from schism—you consecrate the most purified bread of the show-bread with the unleavened cakes of sincerity and truth?

8.14.7. Lastly, who would not know that whatever in the days of the law was figuratively immolated in bodies, all that you, in the time of grace, manifestly offer in characters? And therefore I render abundant thanks to God, that according to the quality of your page I easily recognize that the aforesaid bishop, when he said great things of you, kept silent about greater; wherefore no one would doubt that you, who are good when judging, and better when reading, are best when seen.

8.14.8. Megethius the cleric, the bearer of your eloquence, his business prospering as he wished, since he brought the gifts of your letter, carries back my compliances; whom we have at least helped by our wish, because by the deed perhaps we cannot. Through him I earnestly beseech that you both, brothers, may irrigate our thirst frequently with lettered letters—you the more frequently. But if the difficulty of the intervening journey resists our wishes, at least sometimes supplicate for your suppliants; and it is the greater thing if you deign to grant us salvation by rare intercessions rather than dignity by frequent addresses. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

8.15.1. While you wish the holy Anianus—the greatest and most consummate bishop, equal to Lupus and not unequal to Germanus—to be celebrated with the highest praises, and desire that the character, merits, and virtues of so great a man be fixed in the hearts of the faithful—to whom even this is given for glory, not without justice, that he died with you as his successor—you had demanded of me that I should promise you to make known to posterity, with my pen, the war of Attila, in which, namely, were contained the siege, the assault, the breaking in but not the plundering of the city of Orléans, and that famous prophecy of the bishop heard from heaven.

8.15.2. I had begun to write; but, the burden of the undertaken work perceived, it irked me to have begun. On account of this I have trusted to no ears what I had first, by my own censure, condemned. It will be granted, as I hope, to your prayer and to the merits of the highest bishop, that on whatever occasion, and indeed a swift one, we may serve his heralding. For the rest, you, a just creditor, will laudably have indulged this to the imprudence of a rash debtor, that what seems to me insoluble may seem to you too irreclaimable. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

8.16.1. I had promised Petronius, an illustrious man, that I would despatch the present little work in a few letters; whose ears I have not spared, while I spare yours; for I preferred that the labour of correction should regard him, the honour of publication you, and that this volume should come into your hands at another's risk, by my compliance. The promise is fulfilled; for if your skill should inspect the marks of the headings collected onto the parchments, already, unless I am mistaken, a copious copy knocks at you; already one comes to the margins of the rollers; already it is time, as the satirist says, for our Orestes to be finished even upon the back.

8.16.2. Here I have not, in the manner of the old study, summoned a feigned Terpsichore, nor, beside the gushing of the Aganippic fount, have I drawn my pen through dewy banks and mossy pebbles. And would that here nothing soft, nothing greedy, nothing borrowed from the crossroads were found! For to a ripe reader, such as you are yourself, not so much a boneless, tender, nerveless diction pleases, as one a little old-fashioned, brawny, and as it were masculine. But let these things be reserved for better men; it suffices me, if you quickly forgive that we are slow.

8.16.3. Besides, if the illustrious man had demanded that something more amply be written in addition, we should have fallen into great delays. For through our little cupboards and chests there remained nothing worthy of being brought forth. Whence learn that, though we have not yet begun to be silent, we have certainly begun to wish for silence, from a twofold cause: that, if we please, the few may incite the pleasure of those about to read; if we are refused, the many may not excite distaste; since in this style there is not urbane wit, but rustic simplicity.

8.16.4. For whence to us that grim and most ancient kind of speaking? Whence those Salian or Sibylline words, or those fetched from the Sabines all the way from Cures, which, the masters for the most part keeping silence, some fetial or flamen or aged riddler of legal questions would more readily lay open? We have composed our little works in a speech dry, slender, and certainly for the most part common, of which on this side the honour is rare, that the use is frequent; on this side the grace is difficult, that the invention is easy.

8.16.5. Indeed I profess boldly that, as here there is nothing keen, nothing eloquent, so there is nothing set down that is not finished, not according to a model. But why these things with more words? My diction—which suffices me—pleases my friends, in whom, however, I embrace either case: whether they do not deceive me by their examination, or are deceived by their charity. And God, for what remains, I ask, in time to come, that those who follow may either be deceived likewise or pass judgement. Farewell.

9.1.1. You require, my lord son, that, the boundary of the earlier letters broken through, our pen run forward into further matter, not content to be enclosed by the privilege of the number aforesaid. You add also causes by which this ninth book should grow upon the eight earlier volumes: namely, that Gaius Secundus, whose course you pronounce us to follow in this work, bounds his epistolary work with like headings.

9.1.2. What you bid is not unworthy of approval; although this very thing which you piously enjoin proves arduous and not opportune for whatever little praise has now once been won: first, because there is a late conjoining of the present increase to a little work already published; next, because, before any judges whatever, unless I am mistaken, it is most unseemly that, for one matter, a single beginning and three epilogues should be found.

9.1.3. Likewise too I know not how it can be made pardonable that our garrulity will not endure to be restrained even after the term has been announced—unless because perhaps the measure which can be set to pages cannot itself be set to friendships. Wherefore it befits you to be in a kind of watchtower, as it were, for guarding my reputation, and to make manifest to the curious the reason of this deed, and what all the best men think on this point, to lay open to me by a most frequent reply.

9.1.4. Moreover, if, when I am compelled to chatter, you yourself persist in keeping silent, it is not over-unjust that you too should be punished in turn by the retaliation of our silence. So do you first, you above all, forgive the task you impose and the service. But we, if any copy fall into our hands, will quickly add it to the margins of the eighth book.

9.1.5. Although your Apollinaris, who has zeal in all other things, in this at least is most negligent, since he is held by very little reading, whether compelled or willing—yet, as far as it seems to me, I would not refuse to be joined to those fathers to whom, by their zeal, wish, and fear, it is laboriously, though with difficulty, persuaded that something praiseworthy is enough in their sons, and with more difficulty enough. Farewell.

9.2.1. The bishop Albisus and the deacon Proculus—on this account to be pronounced our masters of conduct, because they deserve to be your disciples—have brought letters, with whose sacrosanct address you have gifted me; which letters, however, impose on me very much honour, more burden. Whence too I rejoice at their blessing in such a way that I am confounded by their injunction, since, wholly disturbed, I do not even in part obey. For you bid things as diverse as they are excessive, and decree that a work be unfolded which is as hard for my extremity to complete as it is imprudent to begin.

9.2.2. But if I measure well the amplitude of the proven piety in you, you have laboured more that the affection of your heart, rather than the effect of our work, should be made public. For when Jerome the translator, Augustine the dialectician, Origen the allegorist bring forth for you, in a wholesome harvest of doctrine, the heavy ears of spiritual meanings—shall now, forsooth, the dry stubble of a fasting tongue crackle for you from my part? In this manner you would also rightly join the hoarse geese to the songs of swans, and the chattering whispers of base sparrows to the measured plaints of nightingales.

9.2.3. What of this—that it would even thus be done arrogantly and unseemly, if I should undertake the weight of the enjoined task, a new cleric, an old sinner, of light knowledge, heavy conscience—namely so that, if I sent anything written anywhere, my person would not even then be absent from the laughter of the judges, when it had been absent from their sight? Do not, I pray, my Lord Bishop, demand too much that my modesty, suckling somehow as it is, be disfigured by the rashness of beginning this work; for so great is the envy of detractors that the matter you send would more swiftly obtain disgrace when begun than approval when finished. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.3.1. Your eloquence keeps its custom, as does your piety; and on this account we greatly esteem your speech, because you write eloquently; your affection, because you write willingly. For the rest, at present, pardon first asked and obtained, I think it most cautious and most wholesome—especially through these cities which, much segregated by their situation, are cut off, while the routes are suspect through the movements of the nations—to renounce a more frequent pen, and, the assiduity of mutual converse being deferred for a while, to undertake rather the care of keeping silence. Which, among persons bound by intervening affection, although it is most harsh and most bitter, is yet not brought about by causes of any sort, but by very many sure and necessary ones, each of which proceeds from a different origin.

9.3.2. Of these this will be numbered first in the reckoning: that no courier passes the guards of the public causeways uninterrogated; who, though there is no danger, inasmuch as he is free of crime, is yet wont to suffer very much difficulty, while a wakeful searcher tracks out every secret of the bearers. And if perchance their answer should waver ever so little from the questions, what is not found written is believed to be commanded by word of mouth; and through this the one who is sent generally suffers injury, the one who sends, odium—and more in this time, in which the treaties of kingdoms long ago established between rivals are again rendered doubtful through discordant conditions.

9.3.3. Besides this, my very mind lies wounded by domestic losses on this side and that; for, by the image of duty or, what is truer, the necessity, driven from my native soil, here relegated, I am broken by various anguishes in every direction, because I suffer here the inconveniences of a stranger, there the losses of an outlaw. Wherefore to pay you now letters a little more polished is either unseasonably asked of me or impudently undertaken by me—letters which, whether pleasant in their jesting or cultivated in their style, it belongs to the happy to exchange. Moreover, a pleasant speech, when the mind is in mourning, is a kind of barbarism of conduct.

9.3.4. Nay rather, endow a soul ill-conscious of itself, and trembling hourly at the recollected debts of a penal life, with those most frequent and most powerful supports of your prayers—you who are skilled in the prayers of the islands, which you have transferred from the wrestling-school of the eremite congregation and from the senate of the Lérins cell-dwellers into the city too, over whose church's holy things you keep watch—in nothing changed from an abbot by being a priest, since under the pretext of a new dignity you have not relaxed the rigour of the old discipline. By these prayers, then, as I said above, most efficacious, obtain that the Lord be our portion, and that, enrolled in the troops of our fellow-tribesmen the deacons, we may not remain earthly, we for whom no earth remains, and that we may begin to be exiles, as from the gains of the world, so too from its faults.

9.3.5. The third cause, or even the greatest, why I have forborne to write to you, is that I immensely fear that tropological and figured kind of composing in you—most eminent and many ways polished with words—which the letter we received from you shows: although long ago I, a hoarse applauder, have heard your sermons, now sudden, now, when reason demanded it, laboriously elaborated—then especially when, at the weekly festivals of the dedicated church of Lyon, at the request of your sacrosanct colleagues, you were entreated to preach. Where, while you discoursed of something midway between the spiritual and the forensic rules—since you are most learned in both disciplines—we surrounded you, our minds alike erect and our ears bent, here doing too little for our desire, because you had satisfied our judgement.

9.3.6. For these causes I have tempered my pen and will temper it, speaking briefly that I may obey, about to be silent long that I may learn. For the rest, it is your part, my Lord Bishop, to bend yourself sufficiently to works that will live, of wholesome and singular doctrine; for whoever listens to you teaching and disputing learns to do praiseworthy things more than to speak. But now, for what remains, grant with pardon a page that plays the rustic and complies with you, in which, on my own authority, if it be compared with your letters, there is a most infant style. But whither, stupid that I am, do I allege these things? For to deprecate ineptitudes overmuch is itself most inept—in which, if you, the unmixed arbiter, unloose the matter to the full, you will laugh at very many things, blame more. But this too I embrace, if, for the charity in which you abound, you are not everywhere most continent of judging—that is, if your opinion should annul anything upon these pages. For then I shall the more surely rejoice that you have approved the rest, if I learn that you have crossed out some. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.4.1. Our traveller and courier wears the tracks of his accustomed journey, often retracing the space of road and of regions that separates our towns. Wherefore it befits us too to follow the duties of a diligence once proposed, which we ought to redouble, with a certain intentness of mind, both with the other travellers and especially when Amantius runs between, lest perchance he himself should seem to demand letters from custom more than we to dictate them from love, my Lord Bishop; and therefore remember more those of your own, among whom we presume to be reckoned, and who, as we are raised by your prosperities, so are cast down by your adversities.

9.4.2. For that you have lately, by the necessity of certain brothers, endured many anguishes, has come, by a tearful report, to us who weep. But you, flower of priests, gem of bishops, strong in knowledge, stronger in conscience, spurn the threats and waves of the world's storm-clouds, since you yourself have frequently taught that one comes to the promised banquets of the patriarchs, or to the nectar of the heavenly cups, through the goblets of earthly bitternesses.

9.4.3. Willy-nilly, whoever attains the kingdom of the despised Mediator follows his example. However much the affliction of the present life may pour out for us the bowls of anxieties, we endure small things, if we recall what He drank at the gibbet who invites us to heaven. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.5.1. Although we dwell, perchance, in a seat a little more separated than our common mind could wish, yet our diligence would not, as far as it concerns the discharge of duty, be hindered by the obstacle of the intervening journey, were it not that, divided by kingdoms, we are recalled, by the law of our different lots, from a more frequent exchange of speech; which lots now at least—because, after the pact of peace entered into, they will be allied with faithful minds—our letters will begin to pass frequently, since they cease to be suspect. Accordingly, my Lord Bishop, join with your sacrosanct brothers prayers that will alike supplicate Christ, that, deigning to prosper what we do, and tempering the disputes of our dominion and checking arms, He may endow them with innocence, us with quiet, and all with security. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.6.1. Your holiness availed before Christ, by the effect of its intercession, on behalf of our most beloved one (why should I speak the name, the person? you will recognize all)—of whose youthful looseness you often used now to complain openly before witnesses called in, now to groan in silence. So lately, the company of a most shameful handmaid being broken off, to whom, bound by obscene habit, he had wholly given himself over, he by a sudden correction of himself took counsel for his patrimony, his posterity, his fame.

9.6.2. For, emptied through the losses of his estate, as soon as he began to understand and reconsider how much of his little goods, from grandfather and father, the costliness of the domestic Charybdis had licked away, though coming to his senses late, yet at last, as it were, he bit the bridle and shook free his neck, and, fixing in his ears, as they tell, the wax of Ulysses, fled, deaf against the vices, from the blandishments of the harlot shipwreck, and—as was fitting—the praiseworthy man took to wife, untouched, a girl as supreme in character and birth as she was foremost in fortune.

9.6.3. This indeed would be glory, if he had so left his pleasures as not even to be joined to a wife; but, even if it chance to migrate from error to good character, it is the lot of few to begin with the greatest things, and for those who have long indulged themselves in everything, straightway to cut off everything and all at once.

9.6.4. Wherefore it is your part to obtain as soon as possible, by diligent prayer, the hope of children for the wedded pair; the consequence will be that, one or another son being born (and I have said too much), he may henceforth abstain from things lawful, who presumed upon things unlawful. For the spouses themselves, although wedded but lately, conduct themselves with such character, with such modesty, that truly you would recognize, if you saw them but once, that there is very much that distinguishes that most honourable wedded love from the figments and allurements of concubinage. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.7.1. A certain man, going from Auvergne to Belgica (the person is known to me, the cause unknown; nor does it matter), after he had come to Reims, wheedled out of your scribe or bookseller—won over, be it by a price, be it by a favour—a most copious draft of your declamations, willy-nilly. He, returning to us and exceedingly boastful, since so many volumes had been obtained, whatever he had brought (though we were ready to buy it), yet, as a citizen (nor was it unjust), pressed upon us as a gift. It was at once my care, and that of those who study, since we deservedly wished to read, to hold very much, to transcribe all.

9.7.2. By the assent of all it was pronounced that few like things can now be composed. For there is one rare, or none, to whom, as he meditates, there stands by abundantly an equal arrangement through the causes, a placing through the letters, a composing through the syllables; to this, opportunity in examples, trustworthiness in testimonies, propriety in epithets, urbanity in figures, force in arguments, weight in meanings, a river in words, a thunderbolt in clausulae.

9.7.3. The structure, indeed, strong and firm, and knit by the cuttings of most witty conjunctions with indissoluble caesuras, yet nonetheless slippery and light and in all ways well-rounded, and such as fittingly speeds the reader's tongue unimpeded, lest, suffering rough junctures, it stammer as it is rolled through the vault of the palate; in fine, wholly liquid throughout and ductile, as when a finger, with no driven nail, glides over crystalline or onyx surfaces, since no tenacious fracture, caught by chinky obstacles, holds it back.

9.7.4. Why more? There exists at present no oration of any living man which your skill could not pass and outstrip, not without labour. Whence too I almost suspect, my Lord Bishop, that on account of your overflowing and ineffable eloquence (pardon be granted to the saying) you are proud. But although you shine with a good thing, as of conscience so of a most well-ordered diction, you should nonetheless by no means flee from us, who praise things well written, even if we do not write things to be praised.

9.7.5. Wherefore cease henceforth to decline our judgements, which threaten nothing biting, nothing reproachful. Otherwise, if you delay to make our sterility fruitful with eloquent colloquies, we shall lie in wait for the markets of pilferers, and the cunning hand of housebreakers shall, of its own accord, plunder your writing-cases, we conniving and abetting; and you will then begin in vain to be moved, despoiled by theft, if now, when asked, you are not moved by duty. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.8.1. Although we did not expect, yet did desire, your letters, the old courier delivered them—found fit, to whom the duty may rightly be entrusted again, since he delivered the first so well. Therefore, gifted with a second address, or rather a blessing, I too in turn pay back another "Hail," combining compliances equalled in number, not in merits.

9.8.2. And since, my Lord Bishop, we now live with minds joined but regions disjoined, and are forbidden by the situation of our separated dwelling to enjoy the mutual sight of one another, pray that, by a longed-for and religious departure, the anguishes and burden of the present life discharged, when the holy day of judgement shines forth with the resurrection, we may be joined to your throngs, to serve them—even under the occasion of a Gibeonite servitude; because, according to the heavenly promises, which pledged that the sons of God should be gathered from the nations, if pardon console us who are guilty, while glory awaits you who are blessed, we shall be divided, though by the difference of our deeds, yet not by the distance of our places. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.9.1. You have complained, most sacred man, that we both keep silence too long; I recognize the zeal of your part herein, but I do not recognize the guilt of ours. For, long ago bidden to chatter, I did not keep silence, with letters running on ahead—which, however, to be perused, when they had come to Riez, you, who were then at Apt, most aptly were absent for. And that was greatly votive and most longed-for by me, that the enjoined letter should neither be denied as written to friendship nor be subjected, when read, to censure.

9.9.2. Let us pass these things over. You bid a copious page be sent again; to obey, the wishes are at hand for one hastening, the causes are absent; for a salutation, unless the matter actively brings some business, is succinct; and he who extends it with unnecessary words, turned aside from the rule of the Sallustian track, strays—Sallust, who blames Catiline for having had eloquence enough, wisdom too little. Whence, "Hail" said, we straightway say "Farewell." Pray for us.

9.9.3. But it is well, it is well, that, as I was about now and now to fold up my little paper, a matter chanced to occur, in the upbraiding of which, if either my joy or my anger should restrain itself longer, I shall judge myself worthy of the affront received. You have come, master, into my hands (nor do I only exult, but truly I insult), you have come—and indeed such as for a long time now our desires awaited. I doubt indeed whether even unwilling, but certainly like one unwilling, since by your providing—or, if you altogether deny this, your acquiescing—I have been unsaluted by your books, and these, what is much more injurious, when they passed by the Arvernian territory, grazing not only my walls but even my flanks.

9.9.4. Or did you fear that we would envy your sayings? But by God's indulgence we are addicted to no vice less; to whom, if it lay subject from my part as to others, despair of attaining would even so take away the rivalry of contending. Or did you dread my eyebrow, as of a difficult and rigid applauder? And what neck of skill is there so great in anyone, or what dropsy, that it should not pursue your lukewarm things too with the most fervent praises?

9.9.5. Or did you take care to have me disdained and neglected for this reason—that you despised my youth? Which I little believe. Or that I am unlearned? Which I bear the more—yet so that one who knows not how to speak does know how to hear; for even those who have been present at the circus games do not refuse to pass judgement on the chariots. Or did we by any chance fall out, so that we were thought likely to disparage those little books which you had published? But, God presiding, that our friendships are slight, not even an enemy can feign.

9.9.6. To what end these things? you ask. Behold, now I lay it open—both what I rejoice to have tracked out, and at what I am angry that you concealed. I have read your volumes, which the bishop and monk Riochatus, twice a pilgrim of this world, carries back for you to your Britons—he being now, for the present, fortunate rather, who does not grow old, and who, not about to fail the living, will after his burial become, through the very things he wrote, a survivor of himself. So this same venerable man, while he tarried at our town, until the storm of the stirred-up nations should rage itself out—whose huge whirlwind had then bristled up on this side and that—so unfolded the rest of your gifts that he most urbanely covered over the more excellent things he carried, dissembling, by your flowers, the lighting up of my thorns.

9.9.7. But after two months or more, when likewise some of the travellers had betrayed that he had quickly set out from us, secretly carrying treasures of mystic wealth in closed wrappers, I, having pursued him as he departed with swift horses, which could easily outstrip the spaces of the previous day's journey, leapt with a kiss upon the throat of the seized brigand—with human jest, with the gesture of a beast, as when a tigress, robbed, leaps over with flying foot to shake off any of her whelps from the neck of the Parthian ravisher.

9.9.8. Why many words? I embrace the knees of the captured guest, I halt the beasts of burden, I bind the reins, I loose the baggage, I find the sought volume, I bring it forth, I read it through, I excerpt the greatest chapters, breaking them off from the great. And the leaping nimbleness of the scribes granted a certain abridgement to one dictating in haste, who caught with signs what they did not hold with letters. With what tears indeed we were wet, drenched mutually in turn by weeping, then when we were separated from an embrace often repeated, it is long to have told, nor does it matter; for what suffices for a triumphal joy, I returned home laden with spoils of charity and possessed of a spiritual prize.

9.9.9. You ask now what I judge of my spoils; I would not yet betray it, that you might hang the longer in expectation; for I should avenge myself more, if I kept silent what I felt. But now neither do you yourself pride yourself in vain, inasmuch as you understand that there is in you a power of pleading so to compass, that for your reader, whether reluctant or willing, the force of pleasure strikes out the necessity of heralding. Accordingly, receive what we, even having suffered injury, judge concerning your writings.

9.9.10. We read a work most laborious, manifold, keen, sublime, digested by headings, heaped up with examples, bipartite under the scheme of a dialogue, quadripartite under the theme of the causes. You had written very many things ardently, more pompously; these things simply, not rustically; those wittily, not craftily; weighty matters maturely, profound ones carefully, doubtful ones steadfastly, argumentative ones in the manner of disputation, some severely, some blandly, all morally, choicely, powerfully, most eloquently.

9.9.11. And so, following you through so many kinds of narration over the whole broadest field of your composition, I easily perceived nothing in the eloquence of others, nothing in their talents, equally polished. That I feel these things true you sufficiently approve, since not even when offended do I judge otherwise. In fine, the oration of an absent man, as far as we suppose, can grow no more, unless perchance the author, speaking face to face, add somewhat to these things—voice, hand, motion, modesty, the artist . . .

9.9.12. So, endowed with these gifts of mind and of letters, you have yoked to yourself, my Lord Bishop, a wife fair—but one marrying with Deuteronomy attesting; whom you, still a young man, having descried among the hostile bands, and there, in the battle-line of the opposing party, fallen in love with, repulsed by no resisting warriors, with the conquering arm of desire you carried off—Philosophy, namely, who, violently rescued from the number of the sacrilegious arts, her hair of superfluous religion shaved, and her eyebrow of secular knowledge cut off, and the wrinkles of her most ancient garments lopped away (that is, the windings of grim dialectic which veil false morals and unlawful things), now cleansed, has joined her limbs to yours in a mystic embrace.

9.9.13. She, from your earliest years long your handmaid, she your inseparable companion at your side, whether exercising you in the urban wrestling-schools or wont to mortify you in the hidden solitudes, she, the consort of the Athenaeum, she of the monastery, with you renounces the worldly, with you proclaims the heavenly disciplines. Whoever shall provoke you, joined in this marriage, will feel that the Academy of Plato serves in the church of Christ, and that you philosophize more nobly:

9.9.14. first, that you assert the ineffable Wisdom of God the Father, with the eternity of the Holy Spirit; then, besides, that you neither feed your hair nor glory in the cloak or club as in sophistic insignia, nor affect pride from the distinction of dress, pomp in elegance, ostentation in squalor; nor do you greatly emulate this—that through the Areopagite gymnasia or the prytanea there be painted, with bent neck Speusippus, Aratus with bowed, Zeno with contracted brow, Epicurus with distended skin, Diogenes with flowing beard, Socrates with falling locks, Aristotle with arm thrust out, Xenocrates with leg drawn up, Heraclitus with weeping eyes shut, Democritus with laughter and open lips, Chrysippus with fingers constricted on account of the marks of numbers, Euclid with them spread out on account of the spaces of measures, Cleanthes with them gnawed on account of both.

9.9.15. Nay rather, whoever shall have contended will find the Stoics, Cynics, Peripatetics, those heresiarchs, shaken by their own arms, by their own engines too. For their followers, if they shall have resisted the Christian dogma and meaning, soon, you being their master, bound by their own home-bred entanglements, will headlong be netted in their own snares, the hooked syllogisms of your proposition catching the voluble tongue of the prevaricators; while you rather knot the slippery questions with categorical coils, in the manner of keen physicians, who, when reason compels, trust for a remedy against poisons even from the serpent itself.

9.9.16. But this, in these times, is under the contemplation only of your conscience or the power of your doctrine; for who would follow your footsteps with an equal step, to whom alone it is given to speak better than you have learned, to live better than you speak? Wherefore deservedly all good men, and that above all others in your age, will celebrate you as most blessed, whose life has so doubly grown illustrious by your sayings and your deeds, that—since indeed the right hand has now numbered your years—proclaimed by your own age, to be longed for by another, praiseworthy by either deed, you may depart, about to leave yourself to strangers, your own things to those nearest. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.10.1. He has delivered to you my letters whom it would have been fitting to offer me yours; for our brother Caelestius, lately returned to you from Béziers, drew out of me a certain bond of cession concerning the status of our Iniuriosus. Which indeed I wrote, broken no less by your modesty than by your wish; for it was fitting that we, of our own accord, should run to meet your bashfulness as it were with certain feet of compliance.

9.10.2. Wherefore, I too willing, possess the thing granted, but liberally (for, as I suspect, you yourself sought nothing more of this kind of solace); whom by these letters, no less commendatory than restitutory, I now, already appeased, introduce; yet so that he attend you, obey you, follow you, and so that, if he remain with you, he be judged the servant of neither of us; if perchance he depart, he be sought as a fugitive by both. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.11.1. On account of a little book which you thought sent not to you more than through you, I have received a letter of yours written not to me more than against me. To the reproaches I reply for the equity of the cause, not for the equality of eloquence—although who or how great am I now, that I should presume to plead, you charging an innocent man? Wherefore I at once, in the very beginning, supplicate that this fault, however small it is, be forgiven me, confessing the error of diffidence only, not of pride.

9.11.2. For though the rigour of your censure, in letters as in character, is on both sides to be trembled at by me, I confess nonetheless that, in the unbarring of the very volume and work, that charity which you allege was to me more of a burden; nor do I conjecture this beside what is just, since this force is naturally inborn in the minds of mortals, that, if anything be done amiss, friends indulge it the less, the more they love.

9.11.3. I had written a book, as you pronounce, full and laden with a varied congeries of causes, times, and persons: I should have seemed to do a most impudent thing, if all of it had pleased me so much that I trusted none of it would displease you. Here too, whatever the outcome of the judgement should be, I saw that the account of piety would by no means stand whole on my side, if at least the volume had not been previously brought to you, even if it should not seem offered—under this moderation, of course, that, if perchance I should please, you might not be judged to have been passed over by arrogance; if otherwise, not to have been sought out by importunity.

9.11.4. Nor indeed did I believe I should deprecate, with much labour, the corrupted causes of blushing. Likewise I had known that you knew this—that authors, in publishing their works, are befitted by modesty rather than by boldness, and that the boldness of a reciter wrings points from grim censors more slowly than his trepidation does. Otherwise, if there is anyone who, with the prerogative of confidence, publishes abroad the work of a theme before unheard, he begins to owe public expectation more in return, though he has paid much. Besides, whatever you shall have decreed concerning the tenor of this reply, I have preferred to confess the deed simply rather than to deny it craftily.

9.11.5. Another would have said: "I preferred no one to you, I gave no special letters to anyone; he whom you suspected was preferred departed content with the form of a single letter, and that indeed bringing nothing about the present matter: you, complaining that you were passed over, wearied with three most loquacious pages, are stirred rather to nausea, while you frequently linger over the empty words of an insipid reading. Add that even in this, which perhaps you did not note, the account of your reverence and merits was kept—that, just as you among the chairs of the other bishops, so your heading is first in the book. His name sounds scarcely once only, and on a page assigned to himself; yours, besides those allotted to you, frequently lights up others'."

9.11.6. Join to these that, if anything there pleases even casually, you read it through by my counsel, he at some time by your benefit—he who, pressed in vain by envy of my little gift, has not yet, as I suspect, come to the faculty of reading, when you yourself have long ago come to the abundance of transcribing. I say this, as though he were not going to deem the membranes autograph, if at least he should receive even a copy of what you had earlier run through; for in the things which you have handled, neither rarity of punctuation nor frequency of barbarisms will be blamed. Indeed, in the end, openly the very property seems transmitted even to you, to whom the use has been transmitted without the prescription of a fixed time, and who can use the aforesaid little book so long that your memory shall enclose it no more than your little cabinet.

9.11.7. These things, and more than these, perhaps someone would say; but I pass over all, and prefer to pray for pardon rather than to deprecate guilt, if this is believed to be such. The negligence too of the present letters I now neither excuse: first, because, even if I wish, I can write little more elegantly; next, because, the work of the little book finished, my mind, about at last to keep holiday, now disdains to polish what it dissembles to make public.

9.11.8. But yet, since I yield to you sufficiently—and that deservedly (for what is like?)—in all things, since in another kind of virtues you, now for fifty years, have, as often as you have made the attempt, been preferred not only to bishops of your own age but even to the ancient ones, I wish you to know that, although you should shake the stars with your complaints and implore the ashes and embers of our forefathers in testimony of wounded charity, I will not draw back my foot from your conflict, if there is to be a contest about mutual love; because, as in other things, so it is most foul of all to be surpassed in affection—which sure profession, willy-nilly, is repaid to those reproaches of yours (which surpass, indeed, all the honeys of blandishments) not beyond what is just.

9.11.9. Behold, you have a letter almost as garrulous as you were demanding; although they are all, if any anywhere are, most loquacious. For into the audacity of discoursing whom would you not yourself compel? You who—of all men of letters (for of myself I am silent), though they affect to be hidden, so draw forth their talents, as the sun's ray is wont to draw water hidden in the bowels of the earth through the absorbing atoms. By the sting of which light not only the subtle sand or the diggable earth is penetrated, but, if by the pressure of a rocky mountain the vein of hidden springs be concealed, the nature of heavenly secrets, more violent, opens the arcanum of the liquid element. So, holy man, if you have perceived any of the studious to be either quiet or modest, or lurking in the obscure recess of an unknown fame, these the clarity of your eloquence, by an artful conversation, while it compels, also makes public.

9.11.10. But whither a little more than is the custom? Let us return to the cause, upon whose superfluous babbling, since I obey, I pray that you, appeased, impart to me, confessing my errors, the elements of pardon by your indulgence—although, by whatever holy joy and communion is yours, you would rejoice the more copiously, if the defence of my fault rather than satisfaction were borne to you written. Deign to be mindful of me, my Lord Bishop.

9.12.1. A page set out from you came into our hands, which draws much resemblance to the Spanish salt cut in the Tarraconensian ridges. For, to one perusing it, it is bright and salty, nor yet on this very account less honeyed—but speech sweet, and keen in its propositions: for so it delights by its eloquence what it troubles by its command, since, measuring too little what order I follow, it asks of us now new poems. First, from the very outset of my religious profession, I renounced this exercise chiefly, because, of course, it could be accommodated to lightness, if the levity of verses had occupied me, whom the gravity of actions had begun to regard.

9.12.2. Then, besides, it is agreed that every work, if it rest in a long interval, is recovered with difficulty. For who would not know that the greatest grace comes to all craftsmen or arts by use, and that, when accustomed pursuits are not frequented, arms in bodies, talents in arts grow black with rust? Whence too is that—that the bow, when seized late or seldom, rebels the more against the hand, the ox against the yoke, the horse against the bridle. Besides, the modesty that is the companion of our sloth inclines my opinion to this—that I am as much ashamed to compose a new poem, after I have run through three Olympiads in silence, as I am loth.

9.12.3. Here likewise it is a sin that even things difficult to do be denied to you, whose affection it the less befits to be cheated, the more steadfastly it fears no rebuff. We shall therefore hold to a certain middle course; and as I shall now compose no new epigrams, so I shall send you letters, if any shall be lying stuffed with verse—namely, before the necessity of my present office—asking that you be not so far a prevaricator of justice as to suppose that I shall never refrain from writing of this kind. For I should be no less increased by your suffrage, if perchance you should deign to deem me now modest rather than witty. Farewell.

9.13.1. Your opinion of my verses is indeed, I confess, so applaudable of old, so favourable, that you think me to be compared with all the most choice of poets, certainly to be preferred to very many. I would believe you, did you not, as much as you are wise, so also much love me. Hence it is that your charity can lie about my praises, and cannot deceive.

9.13.2. Besides this, you ask that I send you some Asclepiads, formed on the Horatian anvil, on which you may exercise yourself by reciting them over your drink. I obey what is enjoined, although, if ever, now most of all I am pressed and occupied by the prosaic kind of speaking. In short, you will prove that, among us, the studies of metres for the most part grow cold; for it is not easy to do well one and the same thing both, and seldom. Long ago we played at smooth hendecasyllables, the thumb worn down upon the reeds, which you might sing more nimbly for choriambics, the foot shaken out; but you wish that our track henceforth run along the causeway of the Calabrian path, where Flaccus turned his lyric horses to the Pindaric melody with quill-mighty reins, while the string is struck in Glyconic metre, and also in Alcaic or Pherecratean joined to Lesbian or anapaestic, blooming through the eclogues of varied song with the many-coloured violets of words. That, grant pardon, is hard for the ancient bards to fashion, hard for me too, that a mouth sounding diverse epigrams should in no way stumble, because of frequent letters, which a masculine diction forbids to grow wanton in song and luxuriant measures. That scarcely Leo, king of the Castalian choir, scarcely Lampridius, who follows him, could do, declaiming under the weight of a twin style before his Bordeaux disciples. Does this befit me and you? Spare your jests, I pray; I beg, let care preserve to the end the modesty promised to the orator's work, than which nothing is worse, if it should be at once rigid in its first parts, soft in its last.

9.13.3. Nay rather, as often as you shall be cheered by the feast of a more sumptuous table, give yourself to religious narratives, which I more approve; let frequent conversation serve to bring these forth, anxious hearing to learn them again. Certainly, if to these most wholesome diversions, as one still young, you are too tepidly bent, borrow at least from the Platonist of Madaura the formulas of convivial questions, and, that you may be rendered more instructed, solve these set before you, propose these to be solved, and exercise yourself in these studies even while you are at leisure.

9.13.4. But since mention of banquets has once fallen in, and you so diligently demand of me a poem composed for another cause and person, that you can no longer have me as a hesitator over publishing it, receive willingly what, in the times of Augustus Majorian—when at the request of a certain comrade we had come together to dinner—I poured out, suddenly, upon a book of Peter, the master of letters, suddenly brought forth, my fellow-companions too, while the king of the feast wove delays about the ordering of the fish-sauce, composing equal verses—Domnulus, Severianus, and Lampridius (I have said this boastfully; nay, better ones); whom the emperor, summoned from all the cities into one city, the inviter into one dinner, had by chance drawn together.

9.13.5. The only delay was while we apportion the kinds of metres by lot. For it pleased us, for the charity of the company, that, although the same matter of writing existed for all, yet the epigrams of each should not be brought forth in one kind, lest any of us, who had spoken more meagrely than the rest, should be bitten first by modesty, afterward by envy; for it is more quickly recognized, in any reciter, whether he sings in the metre in which the rest sing, and writes too with the same talent. But you will then more opportunely praise the things appended, when you have wholly indulged in leisure. For it is not just that you begin, as a censor, to discuss with severity what a friend could not dictate at leisure. Come, youth assembled, the place, the hour, the table, the cause bid that you exalt to the stars, with your studies, this volume, which you learn both by ear and by mouth. Peter is to be read by you, an author sufficiently instructed in either discipline. Let us therefore celebrate, brothers, the holy festival of letters. Let a genial furnishing pass the falling day with feast, cups, and dances. Bring the ruddy embroidery on fine linen and the ruddy purples, which the Meliboean wave dyes, the cauldron re-boiling them, that with unmixed colour it may enrich the thirsty fleece; let the foreign furniture give the woven mountain-ranges of Ctesiphon and Niphates and the swift beasts on the spreading cloth, whose fury the well-feigned wound sharpens with scarlet, and, as from a piercing dart, bloodless gore comes forth; where, grim and bent back through art, his face turned upward, the Parthian goes by horse and returns by spear, fleeing and routing the images of beasts. Let the table bear linens fairer than snow, and be covered with laurels and ivy and green vine-shoots; let capacious baskets bring cytisus, crocus, asters, cassia, privet, marigolds, and let them paint the side-board and the couches with fragrant garlands. Let a hand anointed with the juice of balsam tame the bristling hair, and let the smoke, rich with the Arabs' harvest, seek the high roofs; and likewise, as night comes on, let a numerous lamp be raised upon the high parts of the vault, amid the gleaming panels; and the lanterns, knowing not oil and gluey fats, with swelling belly pour forth the balsam-juice. Let the bearers, bending their heads under the embossed metal, bear on laden shoulders the prouder feasts. Let bowls, cups, basins ally Falernian with nard, and let the sewn rose crown the tripods and the goblets. It is pleasant to go among the garlands fanning the alabaster vases; it is pleasant too, with wandering whirl, to give broken limbs to the dance, or to feign the trembling Bacchantes with foot, dress, and voice. Let twin-harboured Corinth send back its harp-girls, learned in stage and palaestra, to the warm workshops, whose singing fingers, the tongue sounding alike, weary, in the place of a plectrum, the living strings by their stroke. Give too the piped bronzes, dear to the naked Satyrs; give the hoarse flute-players, through whose throats of the palate, to be blown again with rattling cheeks, the pipe's breath groans; give things sung under the comic sock, give things spoken under the tragic buskin, give whatever the advocates, give whatever the poets too clamour in varied action: Peter surpasses both these and those. We hold the work brought forth, which, weaving with art the double metre, ran the rough way and the labyrinthine paths; but, labouring in all things and approved by all, he snatches the palm hence and thence, and is borne through learned mouths. Far from here let us drive both Hippocrene and the Aganippic founts and tuneful Apollo with the attendant Muses, and Minerva, as though the patroness of singing; remove things feigned in speech: one God bestows these things. The power of the diadem stood amazed at the man speaking, the toga, the soldier, the equestrian order, and the people of Romulus; and still the forums, temples, fields, and camps revolve their "Bravo," above these the Po gives a roar for its foster-child, and the love of the Ligurian cities. A like favour echoes through the cities of the Rhône, and the fierceness of the Iberians will imitate the Gauls. Nor, delaying on this axle, will it swiftly make for the fields, but be borne off by the east wind and the north and the south and the west winds.

9.13.6. Behold, while I ask what you sing, I myself have sung. For such trifles, gnawed by mice in the lowest depth of my writing-case, I bring forth into the light after about twenty years—such as Ulysses, absent for an equal time, could have found when he returned home. Accordingly I ask that you willingly forgive the present sportive things; but this I enjoin neither bashfully nor impudently, that what I myself pronounced concerning the whole book of my friend, this you, as though solicited by the necessity of the example, may feel concerning mine. Farewell.

9.14.1. I am doubly tormented, that each of us is held by his bed; for nothing is harder than when friends, though present, are divided by the common share of a sickness; since, if it happen that they do not even lie in one chamber, there are no words, no solaces, no exchange in turn of mutual entreaty: so to each there is a huge grief, and that more on account of the other; for you can little, though yourself sick, fear for yourself when one you love is in peril.

9.14.2. But God, most loving son, has shaken out for me, fearing for you, a most violent scruple, because you begin to recover your former strength. For you are said now to wish to rise, and—what I more desire—now to be able; you at least consult me in such a way, and, with an almost premature solicitude, you now exercise me, as though wholly vigorous, with the little questions of letters, desiring more to hear, though still sick, Socrates disputing about morals than Hippocrates about bodies; wholly worthy that Rome should cherish you with applauding arms, and at whose reciting the wedge-shaped benches of the resounding Athenaeum should be shaken.

9.14.3. Which without doubt you would attain, if the condition of peace and place permitted that you be there educated, mingled in the company of the senatorial youth. Of which glory and fame alike I judge you capable from the quality of your oration, in which, as you most becomingly recited it lately—the things, indeed, which you had written extempore—the benevolent admired, the proud marvelled, the skilled lingered. But lest we impudently press your modesty of our own accord with excessive praises, we write the heraldings of you more justly concerning you than to you. Let us rather bring in this, whence is the cause of our discourse.

9.14.4. So you ask, through your post-boy, which verses I call recurrent, that I may quickly explain, but under an example. These, of course, are recurrent which, the metre standing and the letters not moved from their place, are read back from the end to the top just as from the beginning to the end. So is that ancient one: "Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor." And that: "sole medere pede, ede perede melos."

9.14.5. Likewise those are held for recurrent which, the law of the feet kept, even if not through single letters, yet through single words, are folded back—as is one distich of mine (such as indeed I think I have read many of many men's), which I played about a little stream, which, fed by the sudden falling of storms, and having overpassed the public causeway with a rough flood, had inundated the fields beneath the road; though about soon to lay aside its insane abundance, since indeed, swollen with the appendages of the rains, no weights of an upper perennial vein were inflating it.

9.14.6. So there (for I had come as a traveller), while I seek the bank rather than the ford, having jested with such an epigram, I went over the back of the turbulent torrent with at least these feet: "Praecipiti modo quod decurrit tramite flumen / tempore consumptum iam cito deficiet." This, if you run it back, is read thus: "Deficiet cito iam consumptum tempore flumen / tramite decurrit quod modo praecipiti." There you have verses, whose plan you may marvel at syllable by syllable; for the rest, the pomp which they do not have they will not teach. I suspect I have sufficiently shown what you thought ought to be inquired.

9.14.7. You yourself do something like, if you restore things set before you and, on the other side, unfold by repeating what you expound; for there hangs over you the votive return of a most celebrated theme—namely, the praise to be delivered, which you meditate, of Julius Caesar—a matter so grand that, if any of the students should be the most copious, he ought in it to guard against nothing more than saying anything too little. For if the things which are written about the titles of the unconquered dictator in the Paduan volumes be omitted, who, by speaking, would equal the works of Suetonius, who the history of Juventius Martialis, or who, lastly, the journal of Balbus?

9.14.8. But these things we reserve for your tablets. It is rather our office to set the benches for the hearers, to prepare the ears for the roars about to thunder, and, while you tell the virtues of others, for us to tell yours. Nor would you fear that I shall summon any Catonian judges, who cover now their envy, now their ignorance, under the veil of an assumed severity. Although pardon is owed to the unskilled; for the rest, whoever is so bad that he understands things well written and yet does not praise them—him the good understand and yet do not praise.

9.14.9. Accordingly I absolve your cares from this fear: all will hear with favour, all with warmth, and we shall enjoy together the joys which your face will refresh. For very many will praise your eloquence, very many your talent, all your modesty; for it will be borne to no less praise that a young man—or, what is fairer, almost still a boy—brings back from the wrestling-school of a public examination the suffrages of his character as much as of his letters. Farewell.

9.15.1. You prove (nor do I deprecate it) that I have done wrong; I have done wrong, since I have not yet joined to my work any letter under your name. But yet you write that what I erred in will be pardonable, if I send something for you too to sing from the example—because, of course, I sent to my Tonantius letters in double metre, to be of use for a like cause; besides this you complain that my page, if it be loosed into sport, is frequented by hendecasyllables alone. On which matter, the trochaic garrulity suspended, you ask for some little senarii besides. I serve what is enjoined; only do you receive it placidly, whether you prefer to call this very thing an ode or an eclogue. For a metre long unfrequented is woven the more harshly. You bid, friend, that through our volumes the fierce iamb resound in more incited measures, as the trochee hitherto; and that the spondee add its slow pairs and fourfold times, that the wing-footed trimeter may have a little delay grafted in, and that swiftest foot resound, mingled in, well named of old from the Pyrrhic art, to be placed somewhere in the last position; and the anapaest, about to give a base to the verse besides, now in the first part, now in the last, though it itself be pronounced more absolutely, when the third following long cleaves to a twin and short syllable. Which a common poet scarce avails to temper, such as you yourself see Sollius to be; for me the quill goes astray, nor through the hollow mouth does the wandering tongue fittingly unfold the bent epos; but Leo would have prepared this more aptly, Leo, or one who has followed his tracks in Latin song, since first among the Attic is he, the survivor of his father, of the Consentii, who in faith, voice, metres, at the streams of Pegasus, is said to have sung an all-formed song, and as often as he set Greek words to verse, to have held the lofty stars, joined to Pindar, and, victor, gone over the two-peaked mountain, second to none among the Delphic caves. But if either of the bards should fit a Latin song to the poetic lyre, without the Doric, you, Flaccus, would draw forth the Venusine quills ineptly, and, the home-bred swan of Iapygian Aufidus, when Atax thunders with its own swans, would, conquered, groan with your white and tuneful neck. Nor are these the only skilled hearts, though to the skilled these be more skilled: Severianus the rhetor would have composed these more loftily, the African and crafty Domnulus more elegantly, and the scholar Peter, under rounder Muses, more keenly—nor would the epistolary style, everywhere, forbid the man to compose astounding things. This could always have done it more effectively, Proculus, sprung from the soil and race of Liguria, to sound on melodic strokes, polishing all his witty poems so that he might challenge Venetian Mantua in favour, and, himself too equal to Homeric glory, follow the wheels of Maro with matching art. But I, justly despicable in heart and mouth, what should I chatter among these at your asking, proving the impudence of loquacity and the wishes of a mind destitute of letters? But what shall I deny, not terrified by shame? Love knows not to fear: thence I obeyed.

9.15.2. Forgive one returning to disused things, and one who, for having fulfilled what you had bidden, awaits nothing more than the indulgence of my rarity. For the rest, if you bid me like things hereafter, that I may be made more compliant, you will so take care, in turn for a poem, either to dictate what I may sing or to dance what I may laugh at. Farewell.

9.16.1. If you recall, my lord son, you had enjoined this upon me, that this ninth little book, dedicated particularly to you, should be joined to the other eight which I wrote to Constantius—a man of singular talent, of saving counsel, certainly in public discussions excelling the other eloquent men, whether he decree diverse or like things, by the gifts of a more excellent eloquence. The pledge is fulfilled, not indeed exactly, but at least promptly.

9.16.2. For when, the dioceses being traversed by chance, I came home, if any draft lying carelessly about was contained in rotten and mouldering little papers, a hasty translator, I copied it out swiftly and forcibly, retarded by nothing in the winter season, but that I should at once complete what was bidden, although the unfreezable page hindered the copyist by its frost, and the drop, harder than the pen, which you would have judged, to the impelling fingers, not to flow but to break; even so, however, I took care to discharge my duty before the Favonius should wed, with its warm blast and its natal rains, our twelfth month, which you call the month of Numa.

9.16.3. It remains that, with you as arbiter, we be not required to render back things altogether most discrepant—maturity and speed. For as often as any book is bidden to be written quickly, the author looks for honour not so much from his merit as from his compliance. For the rest, since you pronounce that the iambics I lately sent to Gelasius, a man kind enough, pleased you, through these I will gift you too with the home-bred children of the town of Mytilene. Now through the alternating sea of speaking my skiff has driven its bold course, nor has it feared, in the twofold flood, to turn the helm. It has loosed the yard-arms, gathered the high sails, the hand sets down the little oar, and, the benches joined to the shore, with a leap it seeks the sand to be kissed. Though the muttering chorus of the envious betray with canine snarl their rage, it says nothing openly, indeed, and fears the public votes. They beat the stern, shake the keel, fan the rounded gunwales of the sides; about the mast fly the hisses of a sinister tongue. But we, the prow set straight by attendant art, fearing in nothing the swelling storms, stand in harbour, having gained the leaf of a twofold crown, Which the people of Quirinus granted me, or which the purple-bearing senate bestowed, which the consort order of the skilled in judgements gave, When Nerva Trajan saw a perpetual statue set up with my titles, fixed among the authors of either library; And which afterward—seen, as it were, near—after twice five years' time I received, taking up the honour which alone once governs at once the rights of fathers and of people. Besides the heroic, I have woven many jests on many patches; the elegiac I have frequently rolled out, set under six feet, with double colon. Now wont to ride through eleven syllables, I have played the swift, and in the Sapphic metre often sung, in the quick iamb rarely. Nor can I recall how much once I wrote in the first heat of youth; whence would that the greater part could be silenced and hidden! For, the goal of old age nearer, the more we are joined to our last years, the more it shames us now to recall if our age has played anything light. Shuddering at which, I have transferred every kind of care to the cultivation of letters, lest, being guilty by a too wanton song, I be guilty by my act; And lest I rot, dissolved by pleasant sayings, if I join figure and trappings to my pages, lest the reputation of a poet stain the rigour of a cleric. In short, to any epigram hereafter I shall not be borne prone, and by tender metre or grave I shall be compelled hence to bring forth no song quickly: Unless perchance I tell the inquisitions of the persecutors, and the martyrs who, deserving heaven, have purchased, by the price of death, the rewards of life. Of whom let a hymn first chant for me that one who held the chair of Toulouse, hurled down from the highest step of the Capitol; Whom, denying Jupiter and Minerva and confessing the good things of Christ's cross, the raging mob bound to the flank of an unyoked bull, That, the ox driven down a steep, it might scatter his torn corpse in its course, the crags stained with the warm pulp of his loosened brain. After Saturninus I would have the quills sing those whom I have proved my remaining patrons, who through anxious labours helped me in my hardships, Each of whom now pious words cannot, by name, contain in verse; yet whom the strings cannot sound, our hearts shall sound.

9.16.4. Let us return at the end to the oratorical style, about to finish the present matter in the order once proposed, lest, if we close a prose work with musical epilogues, according to the rules of Flaccus—where the wine-jar began to be fashioned—a pitcher should rather seem to have come out. Farewell.