ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER III.
THE LETTERS AND
POEMS OF APOLLINARIS SIDONIUS.
EIGHT Emperors,
and a space of twenty-one years, 455-476. separate the capture of Rome by
Gaiseric from the familiar date of the fall of the Empire of the West. It is
worthwhile to do more than enumerate the mere names of these shadowy Emperors,
of whom only one, Majorian, has anything of the dignity of manhood, and who
might all, with that one exception, share the title of the last of them,
Augustulus, The Little Emperor. Is not Avitus as Severus, and Glycerius as
Nepos? May we not take for granted all this history of monotonous feebleness,
these sham elections and involuntary abdications, this burlesque of the awful
tragedy of the earlier Caesars, and planting ourselves at once in the year 476,
learn amid what accompaniments the twelve centuries of Roman dominion expired?
Such is
naturally one's first thought, but it may well be modified on further
reflection. If physiologists have found the study of the humblest forms of life
useful, as illustrating the connection between the animal and vegetable worlds,
and if some of them have descended into the lowest zones of organic existence
in the hope of bringing up from thence some further light on the great problem
of Life itself, it may well be, in like manner, that from the study of these,
the lowest types of an Emperor which Rome has to set before us, we may learn
something as to that inextinguishable idea of the Caesar which not all the
storms of the Middle Ages were able utterly to destroy. We shall observe how,
even in his deepest degradation, there was something which marked off the Roman
Imperator from the Barbarian King. Above all, we shall see how reluctantly even
the world of the Northern Invaders parted from the idea of Caesarian rule; how
willingly they would have kept the pageant Augustus in his place, if he had been
simply able to sit upright in his world-too-wide throne; how, notwithstanding
all the rude blows of Goth, and Hun, and Vandal, the Roman Empire rather died
of internal decline than was slain by the sword of an enemy.
Unfortunately
the materials out of which we have to reconstruct the history of this quarter
of a century are singularly meagre and unsatisfactory. Had the genius of a
Tacitus, or even the clear, calm intellect of a Sallust, thrown its light over
this troublous time, much more had it been possible for a De Tocqueville to
have analyzed the causes, and a Carlyle to have painted the scenes of this
revolution, we might have learned from it many a lesson, useful even in our own
day to those who labor to preserve an aged empire from falling. But what can we
do when the only really trustworthy authorities for the events of the time are
the Annalists, that is to say, some six or seven men, who having the whole
history of the world from Belus and Nimrod downwards to relate, can spare only
a line or two, at the outside a paragraph of moderate length, for the
occurrences of the most eventful years in their own lives. The history of
modern Europe, if told by Annalists of this type, would run into some such mold
as this —
‘A.D. 1851. The
Queen reigning in England, and Louis Bonaparte being President of the French
Republic, there was opened in a certain park near to London, a great
market-place for all the wares of the world. That was the Palace of Crystal.
The Queen of England gave birth to a son, who was named Arthur. Bishops, in
obedience to the see of the Holy Peter, had been sent to England. Whom the
adherents of the other Church, which is called the Protestant Church, being
unwilling to receive, passed a law for-bidding any man to say “God speed” unto
them, or to salute them by the names of their dioceses. That was called the
Ecclesiastical Titles Act. In Paris, the President of the Republic bade many
persons to be shot.
‘A.D. 1852. The
Republic of France was changed into an Empire, Louis Buonaparte being declared
Emperor. He was nephew of the Emperor Napoleon.
‘A.D. 1853. The
Emperor of Russia sent a proud man, named Menschikoff,
as an ambassador, to the Sultan of the Ottomans. There was much dissension
between the Emperors of Russia and France touching a certain silver star in the
sanctuary at Bethlehem.
‘A.D. 1854. It
was fought most bloodily between the nation of the Russians on the one side,
and those of France, England, and Turkey on the other, in the peninsula which
is called the Chersonesus Taurica.
‘A.D. 1855.
After much slaughter the August City (Sebastopolis)
in the Chersonesus Taurica was taken by the armies of France and England, whom
the island of Sardinia had also joined.
‘A.D. 1856.
Peace was made in Paris between the nations which were at war. That was called
the Peace of Paris. The treaty was signed by all the ambassadors, using a
feather which had been plucked from the wings of a certain eagle. Now the eagle
is the emblem of power in France and in Russia, but not in England, for in
England the lion is the National emblem. That feather had a silver handle
fastened to it, beautiful and costly, and it was given to the wife of the
Emperor Napoleon. She was a very beautiful woman, and was named Eugenia.'
No one who has
read the chronicles of Idatius, of Prosper, and of
Marcellinus will consider this an unfair specimen of their mode of writing
annals. After all, the most important events are there, and we are grateful
meanness to the patient scribes who have preserved even so much for us from the
sea of oblivion which was rising high around them, but from such scanty
chronicles as these it is impossible to deduce with certainty the true
proportions of those events or their exact relation to one another. We can
excuse the brevity of the Annalists, but it is much harder to excuse their
occasional prolixity. When we find one of the best of them (Marcellinus)
devoting only four lines to the capture of Rome by Alaric, and fifty-four to an
idle legend about the discovery at Emesa of the head
of John the Baptist, it is difficult not to grumble at the want of appreciation
of the relative importance of things which must have existed in the mind of the
writer, though he was no monkish recluse but a layman and a governor of a
Province.
It is perhaps
not surprising that in Italy itself there should have been this utter absence
of the instinct which leads men to record the events which are going on around
them for the benefit of posterity. When History was making itself at such
breathless speed and in such terrible fashion, the leisure, the inclination,
the presence of mind, necessary for writing History, might well be wanting. He
who would under happier auspices have filled up the interval between the bath
and the tennis court by reclining on the couch in the winter portico of his
villa, and there languidly dictating to his slave the true story of the
abdication of Avitus or the death of Anthemius, was himself now a slave keeping
sheep in the wilderness under the hot Numidian sun, or shrinking under the
blows of one of the rough soldiers of Gaiseric.
We find it much
more difficult to understand why the learned and leisurely Provincials of
Greece, whose country for more than a century (396-517) escaped the horrors of
hostile invasion, and who had the grandest literary traditions in the world to
inspire them, should have left the story of the downfall of Rome unwritten. But
so it was. Zosimus, seeing and foreseeing the inevitable decay, commenced the
lamentable history, but none of his compatriots (if we except the slight
references of Procopius) seems to have had the spirit or the inclination to
finish it.
The fact seems
to be that at this time all that was left of literary instinct and
historiographic power in the world had concentrated itself on theological, we
cannot call it religious, controversy. And what tons of worthless material the
ecclesiastical historians and controversialists of the time have left us!
Blind, most of them, to the meaning of the mighty drama which was being enacted
on the stage of the world, without faith enough in a living God to believe that
he could evolve a fairer and better order out of all the chaos round them,
anticipating perhaps, the best among them, the speedy return of Christ and the
end of the world, they have left us scarcely a hint as to the inner history of
the vast revolution which settled the Teuton in the lands of the Latin ; while
they force upon us details, endless and wearisome, as to the squabbles of
self-seeking monks and prelates over the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon.
They describe to us bow with stealthy step Timothy the Weasel crept into the
Patriarchate of Alexandria; his brawls, his banishments, and his death.
They are
anxious to inform us that Peter the Stammerer succeeded Timothy the Weasel in
the Egyptian see, and that Peter the Fuller, his contemporary at Antioch,
obtained his episcopate by bloodshed, and signalized it by adding four words to
a hymn. Who really cares now for the vulgar bickerings which the ecclesiastical historians relate to us with such exasperating
minuteness? The Weasels, the Fullers, and the Stammerers, are all deep in
mummy-dust. To the non-Christian the subject of their controversies is
imaginary; to the Christian the pretensions of these men of violence and blood
to settle anything concerning the nature of the spotless Son of Man are a
blasphemy.
To sum up then;
from the Annalists we get some grains of fine gold, from the Literati of Greece
we get nothing, from the Ecclesiastical Historians we get chiefly rubbish,
concerning the history of these eventful years. One man alone, he whose name
stands at the head of this chapter, gives us that more detailed information
concerning the thoughts, characters, persons of the actors in the great drama
which can make the dry bones of the chronologers live. This is Caius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, man of letters, Imperial
functionary, country-gentleman and bishop, who, notwithstanding much manifest
weakness of character, and a sort of epigrammatic dullness of style, is still
the most interesting literary figure of the fifth century.
Sidonius was
born at Lyons about the year 430. His father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather had each held the high office of
Praetorian Prefect in Gaul. Upon the whole they had been faithful to the line
of Theodosius, though one of them, the grandfather, had derived his office from
the usurper Constantine. Such high honors, enjoyed for three generations
without any serious reverses, would alone have carried the family of
Apollinaris high among the noble houses of Gaul at a time when the hierarchy of
office, reaching from the Emperor to the Notary, was incomparably the most
important factor in the social system of the provinces. But besides this
official position, the wealth, the culture, and the respectable, if not heroic,
character of most of the near ancestors of Sidonius placed him at the outset of
life on a vantage-ground, from which, whatever he had of literary ability could
soon make itself recognized. A man thus situated, born near the centre of the national affairs, and surrounded from his
cradle with influential and hereditary friends, knows nothing of that
difficulty of ‘emerging' which is so forcibly described in the well-known lines
of a Roman poet.
Sidonius
received at Lyons as good an education probably as a young Roman noble of the
fifth century could have met with anywhere in the Empire. It was an education
however in words rather than things. Men had ceased to believe in the Olympian
gods; so the schoolmasters taught their scholars the name of every Nymph and
every Muse. All earnest thought about the nature of the world and the mind of
man ran in Christian channels; so they taught elaborately the speculations of
every Greek philosopher from Thales to Chrysippus.
The sword of the barbarian was carrying everything before it in the world of
politics; so they went on teaching all the arts of rhetoric by which brilliant
orators had won honors for themselves or exile for their adversaries from the
sovereign multitude in the cities of free Greece. But though it is easy for us
to see how little the teaching of these schools can have done in helping the
student to face any of the real difficulties of his after-life, we must, on the
other hand, do justice to the vast amount of intellectual activity which still
remained in the Empire and which this teaching both denoted and fostered.
Sometimes we think of the hundred years between Theodosius and Theodoric as
wholly filled with rapine and bloodshed. Sometimes we carry back into the fifth
century the thick darkness which hung over the intellectual life of Merovingian
France or Lombard Italy. In both these estimates we are mistaken. A careful
perusal of the three volumes of the Letters and Poems of Sidonius reveals to us
the fact that in Gaul at any rate the air still teemed with intellectual life,
that authors were still writing, amanuenses transcribing, friends complimenting
or criticizing, and all the cares and pleasures of literature filling the minds
of large classes of men just as though no Empires were sinking and no strange
nationalities were suddenly rising around them. We need not believe, upon the
authority of the highly-wrought panegyrics of Sidonius, that he had a score of
friends all more eloquent than Cicero, more subtle than Plato, and diviner
poets than Homer or Virgil; but the interesting fact for us is that such
forgotten philosophers and poets did exist in that age, and that their works
produced in lavish abundance, seem to have had no lack of eager students.
The impulse
towards rhetoric, which was conspicuous in every part of the career of
Sidonius, may very likely have been communicated by an oratorical display which
he witnessed, in early adolescence, at Arles the Roman capita] of Gaul. There,
at the commencement of the year 449, the general Asturius was to assume the office of Consul. A crowd of Roman dignitaries assembled to
witness the ceremony. In the centre, on a curule
chair, sat Apollinaris, Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, and by his side stood his
son, the young Sidonius. As one after another of the great persons of the
State, consulares, praesides,
masters of horse, and masters of foot, tribunes, bishops, notaries, advanced to
kiss the purple robe of the representative of the Emperor, each one doubtless
spared a less formal salutation for the bright, highly-cultured lad who was
watching the scene with eager interest, and with a mind keenly conscious, as it
ever was, of the great difference between those who have rank and position and
those who have them not. The new Consul was proclaimed, the slave, who was
always forthcoming on these occasions, received the buffet from his hand which
bestowed freedom, the largesse (sportula) and the
ivory tablets, upon which the names of the two new magistrates had been
inscribed, were distributed to the people. Then stood forth Flavius Nicetius, and in brilliant, well-chosen words, pronounced
the customary panegyric on the virtues and capacities of Consul Asturius. The pompous periods, the applause which followed,
the compliments paid and received by the smooth-tongued orator, produced a
profound impression on the boyish imagination of Sidonius, and we may perhaps
conjecture that he secretly resolved that he too would one day be a Prefect
like his father, an orator like Nicetius, and a
Consul like Asturius. The first two of his
aspirations were realized.
‘The rest the
gods dispersed in empty air'.
Sidonius was
probably about twenty-one years of age when the blast of Attila's invasion
swept over Belgic Gaul. Sheltered behind the walls of Lyons he felt, in all
likelihood, not even the outskirts of the storm. But he may have conversed with
Lupus, Anianus, and others of the chief actors in the defence of Gaul, and no doubt his imagination was powerfully impressed by all that he
saw and heard of that ‘horde of many-nationed spoilers’ who, according to the lines which have been already quoted from him,
hewed down the trees of the Thuringer Wald to bridge with their rafts the bosom
of the Rhine. There was even a possibility that Sidonius might have been the
historian of that eventful campaign. His friend Prosper, successor of Anianus
in the see of Orleans, urged him to undertake the task. He began to write,
apparently in prose, and occupied himself with the origin of the barbarians who
composed the host of Attila. But his genius was all for epigram or pompous
panegyric. Plain historical narrative wearied him, and moreover the duties of
his episcopate (for the work was commenced in the later period of his life)
seemed to call him to other occupations. Even the fragment which he wrote has
perished, and we regret its loss, for though he was not well-fitted by nature
or education to be the historian of such a war, he would assuredly have
preserved for us some interesting details with reference to that year of
terror.
About the time
of the Hunnish invasion, or soon after, Sidonius married. His wife, Papianilla,
was the daughter of the most powerful citizen of Auvergne, of that Avitus whom
we have already met at the court of Theodoric, cementing the alliance between
the Romans and the Visigoths against Attila, and whom we are shortly to meet
again in a more exalted station. Sidonius was related by descent to the family
of Avitus, and this new tie linked him very closely to the mountainous land of
the Arverni (the modern Auvergne) with which henceforward his life became more
nearly associated than with his own foggy city of Lyons. His marriage also
brought him more decisively forward on the broad stage of Imperial politics,
and during the years which intervene between 455 and 469 we shall have
frequently to rely on his letters and poems for our sole information as to the
events which occurred at the court of the Western Emperors.
In the year 469
he finally retired from public life and from the court of the Caesars, and took
up his abode at the charming villa of Avitacum in
Auvergne, part of his wife's dowry, a place of which he has given us, evidently
in imitation of the younger Pliny, a description which, though prolix and too
much laboured, is not devoid of interest. In this
description, notwithstanding one or two minor discrepancies, which may be
easily accounted for by the changes in the configuration of land and water
wrought during the course of fourteen centuries, we can still recognize the
characteristic features of the shores of the Lac d'Aydat.
This little lake, which is about twelve miles to the south-west of
Clermont-Ferrand, lies near the junction of the two great volcanic ranges of
the Monts Dome and the Monts Dore. From two summits of the former range (the
Puy de la Vache and the Puy de Lassolas) descended,
in that far distant age when the volcanoes of Auvergne were still glowing
against the midnight sky, a great stream of molten lava, which has left a
wilderness of rock five miles long and in some places a mile wide, sprawling
over the once fruitful valley, This stony cataract, with its significant Celtic
name, La Cheyre, though ugly and desolate itself, has
been the cause of beauty to the landscape, for the little stream of Pontava coming down from some other mountains on the west,
and finding its course impeded by this barrier of lava, has formed the lovely
little lake of Aydat, at the south-western corner of
which (if this identification be correct) once stood the villa of Sidonius.
There is, of course, no trace of that stately dwelling now. A few humble
cottages cluster round the little Romanesque Church, which dates from the
twelfth century, and has three round buttress-towers on each side, built
apparently only for strength not for ornament. Inside the church, high up on
the north wall of the chancel, is a long flat stone coffer built into the wall,
and bearing on its front the words
HIC ST [SUNT]
DVO INOCENTES ET S. SIDONIYS.
There is a
mystery about ‘the two Innocents,' nor is it probable that this is the actual
burying-place of the poet-bishop, but it may very probably contain some relic
of the saint, to whom in fact the church appears to be dedicated. There is a
deep well in an adjoining house said to be of Roman excavation, and a few
strokes of the pickaxe in the soil of the little village street bring to light
pieces of undoubtedly Roman cement, an evidence probably of a once existing
pavement.
But leaving
these faint archaeological traces of a past which almost eludes our research,
it is pleasant to climb the most easterly of the two hills between which Aydat nestles, and there with the unchanged, or but
slightly changed, face of Nature before us, to read the description of his
villa given by the Gallo-Roman nobleman. He writes to his friend Domitius, and
says:—
‘We are now at Avitacum : that is the name of this property, which having
come to me in right of my wife, is even sweeter than a paternal inheritance. A
mountain on the west, steep though not rocky, sends forth lower hills, as if
from a double focus, which are about four acres apart. But while the ground
broadens out sufficiently to afford a fitting vestibule for the house, the
sides of the hills hold straight on their course through the valley up to the
margin of the villa, which has two fronts, one to the north and the other to
the south'. Sidonius then goes on to describe with much detail the bath-house,
the fish-pond, the women's apartment (triclinium matronale),
the pillared portico overlooking the lake, the winter-parlour (hiemale triclinium), the little dining-room (coenatiuncula), and the summer-parlour (diversorium aestivum), looking towards the north.
‘This room,' he says, ‘lets in the daylight, but not the sun, a narrow closet
being interposed' (apparently between it and the south face) ‘where the drowsy
grooms of the chamber sit nodding, though they may not lie down to sleep. How
pleasant it is here to let the chirp of the cicalas beat upon one's ear at
noon, the croak of the frogs in the twilight, the swans and geese calling upon
their mates at night, the cocks crowing in the small hours of the morning, the
crows with their augural voice, three times repeated, saluting the ruddy face
of rising Aurora, and at daybreak Philomela trilling among the fruit-trees, or Progne (the swallow) twittering upon the palings. To this
concert you may join the pastoral Muse, goddess of the seven-holed reed, for
oftentimes in their nightly rivalry of song the sleepless Tityri of our mountains make their notes heard in the meadows above the tinkling bells
of their flocks. And yet, believe me, all this strife of varied sounds only
plunges one into the deeper slumber.
‘Below us lies
the lake, winding down towards the east, and sometimes when the winds ruffle
it, it moistens the stones of the villa, whose foundations are laid in its
sandy shores. Its right bank is abrupt, winding and wooded, its left open,
grassy, and level. By nautical measurement it is seventeen furlongs in length.
A stream enters it which has foamed over the rugged rocks that seek to bar its
passage, but which has a short period of tranquility before it mingles with the
lake. Its exit is through hidden subterranean channels, which afford a passage
to the water, but not to the fish, and these latter, forced back into the
lake's slothful tranquility, grow fat in their prison, and daily swell out a
greater extent of pink flesh under their gleaming bellies. Sometimes from the
villa we see the fisherman launching forth into the deep, spreading out his
nets with their corks floating on the water, or arranging his hook-armed cords
at certain well-marked intervals, in order that the greedy trout in their nightly prowlings through the waters may fall into the snares
which are laid for their cannibal tastes. For surely it is a fitting stratagem
that fish should be tempted by fish to rush upon their own destruction.
Sometimes, when the winds have fallen, the surface of the fickle deep is cloven
by a whole fleet of pleasure-boats. In the middle of the lake is a little
island, where, upon a natural heap of stones, rises a goal often worn by the
blades of the rowers' oars in their nautical contests. For this is the point
round which they must steer when they would imitate the Sicilian boat-races of
our Trojan ancestors, and many a comic shipwreck takes place here as one boat
dashes into another.'
Such, greatly
abbreviated and freely translated (for it is hardly possible to translate
Sidonius literally), is the description, the not unpleasing description, of the
home of a great Gaulish noble under the Empire.
After a year or
two of seclusion Sidonius re-entered public life in a new capacity. He was
elected Bishop of the chief city of the Arverni (now called Clermont-Ferrand),
and he continued in the same see for the remaining eighteen years of his life.
This election seems to have been a voluntary tribute of respect on the part of
his fellow-citizens to an unstained private character, and to the memory of an
official career which, if not signalized by any brilliant services to the
State, had at least not been abused to sordid and ignoble ends. His position in
the literature of the age was both a recommendation and a stumbling-block. It
was an honor for a rural diocese in the mountains to have as its president a
man who had recited amid the applause of the multitude the panegyrics of three
Emperors, whose statue in brass stood between the Greek and the Latin Libraries
in the Forum of Trajan, whose letters were humbly prayed for and treasured up
as invaluable literary possessions by all the rhetoricians and philosophers of
Gaul. Yet, on the other hand, his very panegyrics were crammed full of the
conceits of Pagan mythology; his Epithalamia, though morally pure, turned,
according to the fashion in such compositions, on the voluptuous splendors of
the dwelling of Venus, on the charms of the bride, surpassing those of all the
heroines of classical antiquity, and on the success of Cupid in piercing with
his arrows the bridegroom's heart. This was not exactly the kind of composition
which it was considered safe or decorous for a Christian Bishop to indulge in,
so soon after the great struggle between the new and the old faiths, and while
the religion of the Olympian gods, though prostrate and wounded to the death,
still, by a few convulsive spasms, showed signs of a vitality not yet wholly
extinct. Sidonius felt the incongruity as strongly as any one, and as, unlike
the Cardinal de Retz, he was determined to bring his private life into
conformity with the sacred character which he had assumed, he broke off
abruptly and finally from the service of the Muses. He could not indeed bring
himself to suppress poems which were in his view so charming as his Panegyrics
and Epithalamia, but he wrote no more verses of this description. Invocations
to the Holy Spirit take the place of invocations to Apollo, and the names of
the Martyrs meet us instead of those of the Argonauts. The result is not a
happy one, and to a taste formed by the Christian hymnology of subsequent ages,
the later poems of Sidonius are rather less attractive than his earlier ones.
Sidonius
appears to have made an excellent Bishop, according to the notions of his day,
which scarcely expected every prelate to rise to the saintliness of a Polycarp,
but would not have tolerated his sinking to the infamy of a Borgia. He applied
himself with earnestness to the study of the Scriptures, in which he had
probably not been well instructed as a child. He steered through the
theological controversies of a difficult time with an unimpeached reputation
for orthodoxy.
His experience
as a Roman official helped him to govern his diocese with the right
apportionment of firmness and suavity. His unfailing good-nature joined to a
certain ingredient in his character, which can only be described as fussiness,
made him the willing counsellor and confidant of his people even in their
business difficulties, in the law-suit, and the family quarrel. Above all, his
hearty sympathies with the Romanized population of Gaul, and his antipathies,
national and religious, to their Arian and barbarian conquerors, made him
willing to risk life and fortune, and even his dearly-loved social position, on
behalf of the liberties of Auvergne. During the years while the struggle
between the Arverni and the Visigoths was going on, the courtier and the
rhetorician were lost in the patriot, and his life rose into real grandeur. At
the close of the struggle (475) Sidonius had to feel the full weight of the
displeasure of the Visigothic king, Euric, who was now undisputed master of
Auvergne. He was banished from his diocese, and kept, probably for about a
year, in captivity in the fortress of Livia, not far from Carcassonne. His
confinement was not of the most rigorous description; he was allowed to employ
himself, if he wished, in literary labor, and his quarters for the night seem
to have been appointed him in a private dwelling-house. But his days were
occupied with harassing duties, and both study and sleep were driven away from
his evening hours by the clamors of two Gothic hags, whose window looked upon
the court-yard of his lodging, and whose life was passed in one perpetual round
of scolding, intoxication and gluttony. The fastidious Roman noble, forced into
hourly companionship with these scenes of barbarian vulgarity, passed his
nights in sighing for the seclusion of his mountainous Auvergne, for the baths,
the lake, and the fish-ponds, the airy summer apartment, and the chorus of
rural voices of his own beloved Avitacum.
At length, by
the mediation of his friend Leo, a Roman, a lover of literature, and the chief
minister at the court of Euric, he was restored to his home and diocese; and
the remaining years of his life were passed in comparative tranquility, but
probably with an impaired fortune, and certainly with an ever-present pang of
humiliation at the enforced subjection of his high- spirited Arverni to the
degrading yoke of the barbarians. He had probably not reached his sixtieth and
death, year when (about 489) he was carried off by a fever. He died with
Christian calmness and hope. When he felt his end approaching he desired his
attendants to carry him to the church where he had been wont to officiate, and
lay him before the altar. A multitude of men, women, and children crowded into
the church after his bearers, and filled it with their passionate lamentations.
‘Why art thou deserting us,' they cried, ‘0 good shepherd? Who will take care
of us, thy orphans, when thou art gone? Who will feed us with the salt of the true
wisdom? Who will guide us into the fear of the Lord as thou hast done.' He
gently rebuked their want of faith, and said, ‘Fear not, my people. My brother Aprunculus still lives, and he will be your Bishop'. Then
with a prayer to his Creator he yielded up his life. His dying words were
verified by the election of Aprunculus (a fugitive
for the sake of the Catholic faith from the wrath of the Burgundian king) to
fill the vacant see.
The end of
Sidonius was in harmony with the dignified thoughtfulness which had marked his
whole episcopal life. He played his part as a Christian Bishop well; and yet,
without imputing to him any shade of conscious insincerity or hypocrisy, it is
difficult when reading his letters and pre-eminently his letters to his brother
Bishops, to resist the conviction that he was, in a certain sense, playing a
part throughout; that he was essentially an author or a courtier, and only
accidentally a divine. That strong bias of the mind towards the Invisible which
impelled St. Augustine, through all his immoralities, through all his years of
Manichaeism, to ponder continually on the relation of his soul to the God of
the Universe; that keen intellectual interest in the Scriptures which drew St.
Jerome into Palestine, and supported him through all the heroic toil of his
translations and his commentaries; these are qualities which it would be absurd
to mention in connection with the character of Sidonius. But though his taste
probably preferred the mythology of Greece, his reason accepted the doctrines
of Christianity. The career of secular office was closed to him by the hard
circumstances of those stormy times. The Church offered him a safe and
honorable retreat from war and revolution. The voices of his fellow-citizens
called him to a post of dignity in that Church; and he therefore accepted the
retreat and the dignity, and made his life harmonize fairly well with his new
vocation. If some sprays of the poet's laurel were still seen under the mitre of the bishop, if his thoughts were sometimes running
on Helicon and Parnassus when he was celebrating the Divine mysteries in the
basilica of Arvemi, at least he kept his secret well,
and made his actions congruous to his character as a shepherd of the Christian
flock.
He was by the
general voice of his people recognized as a saint after his death, and the
Church of Clermont still, upon the 21st of August, the day of his death,
celebrates the festival of Saint Sidonius. The only reason for any hesitation
about canonizing him would appear to be that he had never claimed any power of
working miracles, that he was not, as a biographer says, ‘one of those great
thaumaturgic pontiffs whose glory was made common property, and whose virtues
were immortalized by the generous instincts of Gaul'; but the entire absence of
all pretentions of this kind will not be accounted a demerit by the present
age.
In his attitude
towards men of other faiths than his own, he showed a tolerance of spirit more
like the eighteenth century than the fifth. He could not but deplore and
condemn the fury of the Arian persecutors, but he speaks with some kindliness
of the Jews :
‘Gozolas is the bearer of these letters of mine, a Jew by
nation, and a man for whose person I should feel a cordial regard if he did not
belong to a sect which I despise'.
And again :
‘This letter
commends a Jew to your notice. Not that I am pleased with the error in which
that nation is involved, and which leads them to perdition, but because it
becomes us not to call any one of them sure of damnation while he yet lives,
for there is still a hope that he may turn and be forgiven'.
This is the
language of an orthodox Catholic, but certainly not of a man who is by nature a
persecutor.
Of the literary
style of Sidonius it is difficult to speak with fairness. His obscurity, his
long and uncouth words, often clumsily coined from the Greek, his
constantly-recurring epigrams, which, when examined, generally turn out to have
as much point in them as the clever things which a man utters in his dreams,
his preposterous and monotonous adulation of his correspondents, evidently
dictated by the desire to receive their adulation in return, his frigid
conceits, his childish display of classical learning, which after all was
neither deep nor thorough,—all these qualities make much study of the works of
this author emphatically a weariness to the flesh. But it is doubtful how far
he is to be blamed individually, and how far his age is responsible for the
faults of his style. Latin poetry had fallen during the fourth century into the
hands of elegant triflers, of the composers of triple and quintuple acrostics,
and the manufacturers of vapid centoes. Claudian had
snatched the Latian lyre out of the hands of these
feeble poetasters, and made it give forth some manlier harmonies; but even
Claudian, with his courtier like exaggerations, and his creaking mythological
machinery, was not a very safe guide to follow. Suffice it to say, without
attempting further to apportion the blame of a most miserable style between the
author and his age, that in his poems, Sidonius bears the same relation to
Claudian that Claudian bears to Virgil, and that in his letters he is as far
from attaining the purity of style of the younger Pliny as the latter is from
rivalling the easy grace of Cicero. It remains to reproduce from the pages of
Sidonius some of his most striking pictures of social life among the Romans and
Barbarians.
1. Roman Life. The Church Festival, and the Game
at Tennis.
‘Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Eriphius.
You wish me to
send you the verses which I made to please that most respectable man your
father-in-law. I will do so; but as, in order to understand this trifle, you
wish to know the scene and the cause of its composition, you must not complain
if the preface is more long- winded than the work itself.
We had
assembled at the Sepulchre of St. Justus [at Lyons];
there was a procession before dawn, to celebrate the yearly festival of the
saint, and a great multitude had assembled, larger than the basilica could
hold, though it was surrounded with spacious arcades. When the office of Vigils
was ended (chanted by monks and clergy in alternate choruses) we parted from
one another, but did not go far, that we might be in readiness for Tierce, when
the priests should return to celebrate it. The crowd in the church, the many
lights, and the closeness of the weather (for it was summer, though just
passing into autumn) had made us feel as if we were being stewed, and we longed
for the fresh air. So when the various ranks of citizens dispersed, we who
belonged to the first families of Lyons, decided to make our rendezvous at the
tomb of Syagrius, which was scarce a bowshot from the
church. Here some reclined under the shade of a trellis-work covered with the
leaves and clusters of a vine; others, of whom I was one, sat on the green
sward, which was fragrant with flowers. The conversation was full of light fun
and banter; and what was best of all, there was no talk about great people or
the incidence of taxation, not a word to compromise anybody, not a person whom
anybody else thought of compromising. Any one who could tell a good story, and
adorn it with proper sentiments, was listened to most eagerly. But really there
was such general merriment that it was not easy to hear any story distinctly to
the end. At length we got tired of idleness, and discussed what we should do.
The young men voted for tennis, the elder ones for the tables [backgammon]. I
was prime champion of the ball, of which, as you know, I am as fond as of my
books. On the other side, my brother Domnicius, a man
full of wit and courtesy, shook the counters about in the tables, and thus, as
with a sound of a trumpet, summoned his party to the dice-box. I played for a
long time with a troop of students till my limbs, which had grown numb, were
made supple again by the healthful exercise. Then the illustrious Philimatius, as Virgil says,
‘He too
adventuring to the task
That matches
younger years,’
boldly joined
the group of tennis-players. He had once played the game well, but that was
when his years were fewer. Poor man! he was often forced from the place where
he was stationed, by the mid-current of eager players; then, when he had to
keep the middle of the ground, he could neither ward off nor dodge the
quickly-flying ball. Moreover he often met with a catastrophe and fell flat on
the ground, from which he raised himself slowly and laboriously. So that the
upshot of the matter was that he was the first to retire from the rush of the
game, which he did with deep sighs and a fearful stitch in his side. Very soon
I left off too, out of kindness to him, that he might not be mortified at so
soon showing signs of distress. So, when we were seated again, the sweat
running down his face obliged him to ask for a basin of water. It was brought
him, and with it a thick cloth which, cleaned from yesterday's dirt, happened
to be hanging on a pulley behind the door of the porter's lodge. While he was
slowly drying his cheeks he said, “How I should like you to dictate four lines
of poetry on the cloth which does me this service.”
“It shall be
done,” said I.
“But so as to
bring in my name in the metre?'
“What you ask
for is possible.”
“Dictate them,
then.”
To which I
answered, smiling,
“You know the Muses will not
like it if there are any bystanders when I commune with their holy band.”
He said, very
politely, but with that jocosely passionate manner of his, “Take care, Mr. Sollius, that you don't much more exasperate Apollo if you
ask for secret interviews with his young ladies.”
Imagine the
applause which greeted this sally, as sudden as it was happily conceived. Then,
without more delay, I called to my side his amanuensis, who was standing near
with his tablets in hand, and dictated the following epigram :
‘Oh Towel! in
the early morn, when the bath has made him glow,
Or when with
heated brow he comes at noontide from the chase,
Into thy
thirsty reservoirs let the big sweat-drops flow,
When Philimatius shall wipe on thee his handsome face.’
Scarcely had
our friend Epiphanius read over what had been written, when word was brought us
that the time was come for the bishop to leave his private apartment, and we
all rose up. Pray pardon the verses which you asked for. Farewell.'
2. The Country-house
‘Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Donidius.
You ask me why,
though I set out for Nimes some time ago, I have not yet returned home. I will
tell you the agreeable cause of my delay, since I know that the things which
please me please you too.
The fact is
that I have been spending some days in a very pleasant country with two most delightful
men, my hereditary friend Tonantius Ferreolus, and my
cousin Apollinaris. Their estates adjoin one another and their houses are not
far apart, a long walk but a short ride. The hills which rise behind are
covered with vineyards and oliveyards. The view from
each house is equally charming; the one looks upon woods, and the other over a
wide expanse of plain. So much for the dwellings; now for the hospitality shown
to us there.
‘As soon as
they found out that I was on my return journey, they stationed skillful scouts
to watch not only the high-road but every little track and sheep-walk into
which I could possibly turn aside, that I might not by any chance escape from
their friendly snares. When I had fallen into their hands, not very reluctantly
I must confess, they at once administered to me a solemn oath not to entertain
one thought of continuing my journey till seven days were over. Then, every
morning a friendly strife arose between my hosts whose kitchen should first
have the honors of preparing my repast, a strife which I could not adjust by a
precisely equal alternation of my visits, although I was bound to one house by
friendship and to the other by relationship, because Ferreolus, as a man who
had held the office of Prefect, derived from his age and dignity a claim beyond
that of mere friendship to take precedence in entertaining me. So we were
hurried from pleasure to pleasure. Scarce had we entered the vestibule of either
house when lo! on one side the pairs of tennis-players stood up to oppose one
another in the ring; on the other, amid the shouts of the dicers, was heard the
frequent rattle of the boxes and the boards. Here too were books in plenty; you
might fancy you were looking at the breast-high boo-shelves of the grammarians,
or the wedge-shaped cases of the Athenaeum, or the well- filled cupboards of
the book-sellers. I observed however that if one found a manuscript beside the
chair of one of the ladies of the house, it was sure to be on a religious
subject, while those which lay by the seats of the fathers of the family were
full of the loftiest strains of Latin eloquence. In making this distinction, I
do not forget that there are some writings of equal literary excellence in both
branches, that Augustine may be paired off against Varro, and Prudentius
against Horace. Among these books Origen, ‘the Adamantine,' translated into
Latin by Turranius Rufinus, was frequently perused by
readers holding our faith. I cannot understand why some of our Arch-divines
should stigmatize him as a dangerous and heterodox author.
While we were
engaged, according to our various inclinations, in studies of this nature,
punctually as the water-clock marked 5 [11 a.m.], there would come into the
room a messenger from the chief cook to warn us that the time for refreshment
had arrived. At dinner we made a full and rapid meal, after the manner of
senators, whose custom it is to set forth a large banquet with few dishes,
though variety is produced by sometimes cooking the meat dry and sometimes with
gravy. While we were drinking we had merry stories told, which at once amused
and instructed us. To be brief, the style of the repast was decorous, handsome,
and abundant.
Then rising
from table, if we were at Voroangus (the estate of
Apollinaris) we walked back to the inn where was our baggage, and there took
our siesta); if at Prusianum (the name of the other
property) we had to turn Tonantius and his
brothers—nobles as they were, and our equals in age—out of their couches, as we
could not easily carry our sleeping-apparatus about with us.
When we had
shaken off our noontide torpor, we rode on horseback for a little while to
sharpen our appetites for supper. Both of my hosts had baths in their houses,
but neither of them happened to be in working order. However, when my
attendants and the crowd of their fellow-revellers,
whose brains were too often under the influence of the hospitable wine-cup, had
made a short pause in their potations, they would hurriedly dig a trench near
to the fountain or the river. Into this they tossed a heap of burnt stones, and
over it they would weave a hemisphere of hazel-twigs. Upon this framework were
stretched sheets of coarse Cilician canvas, which at once shut out the light,
and beat back the steam rising from the hot flints sprinkled with water. Here
we often passed hours in pleasant and witty talk, while our limbs, wrapped in
the fizzing steam, gave forth a wholesome sweat. When we had spent as long as
we chose in this rude sudatorium, we plunged into the heated waters to wash
away the perspiration; and, having so worked off all tendency to indigestion,
we then braced our bodies with the cold waters of the well, the fountain, or
the river. For I should have mentioned that midway between the two houses flows
the river Vuardo, red with its tawny gravel, except
when the melting snow makes pale its waters, gliding tranquilly over its pebbly
bed, and well- stocked with delicate fish.
I would also
describe the luxurious suppers which we used to sit down to, if my talkative
vein, which knows no check from modesty, were not summarily stopped by the end
of my paper. And yet it would be pleasant to tell over again their delights if
I did not blush to carry my scrawl over to the back of the sheet. But now, as
we are really in act to depart, and as you, with Christ's help, are going to be
good enough to pay us an immediate visit, it will be easier to talk over our
friends' suppers when you and I are taking our own; only let the end of this
week of feasting restore to me as soon as possible my vanished appetite, since
no refinements of cookery can so effectually soothe an overcharged stomach as
the remedy of abstinence. Farewell.'
3. The new Basilica.
The Bishop Patiens, an earnest and liberal-handed man, raised in his
city of Lyons a magnificent church, which was dedicated to the popular Gallic
saint, Justus. Sidonius and two other poets, the most eminent of their age and
nation, were requested to write three inscriptions which were to be engraven on tablets at the west end of the building. The
church itself, after witnessing some interesting passages of mediaeval history,
was destroyed in the religious wars of the sixteenth century; and these lines
written by Sidonius, and by him transcribed at the request of a youthful
admirer, alone remain to testify of its departed glories. The chief reason for
quoting them is the proof which they afford that the use of mosaics on the
walls and of golden decorations on the ceiling was not confined, as we may have
been inclined to suppose, to those places where Byzantine taste was
predominant. Many touches in the following description would suit some of the
still surviving churches of Ravenna. The Atrium or oblong porch in front of the
church, the triple doorway from the Atrium into the nave, and from the outside
of the building into the Atrium, the ‘forest of columns' within, and the slabs
of marble in the windows, are all also characteristic of the ecclesiastical architecture
of Constantine and his successors.
Sidonius uses
the metre called hendecasyllabic to which he was very
partial, and which has been employed in the following translation:
‘Stranger! come
and admire this temple's beauty,
Know, 'twas
reared by the zeal of Bishop Patient.
Here put up the
request that earns an answer:
Here shall all
of thy heart's desires be granted.
See how shines
from afar the lofty building
Which,
square-set, nor to left nor right deflected,
Looks straight
on to the equinoctial sunrise.
Inly gleams
there a light: the golden ceiling
Glows so fair
that the sunbeams love to wander
Slowly over the
sun-like burnished metal.
Marbles varied
in hue, with slabs resplendent,
Line the vault
and the floor, and frame the windows.
And, in glass
on the walls, the green of spring-tide
Bounds the blue
of the lake with winding margent.
Here a portico,
three-arched, fronts the gazer,
Reared on
pillars from Aquitanian quarries.
There its
counterpart stands, an inner portal,
At the Atrium's
end, three-arched and stately;
While within,
and around the floor of worship
Rise the stems
of a slender marble forest.
Fair it rises,
between the Road and River;
Here it echoes
the horseman's clanging footfall
And the shout
of the slave who guides the chariot.
There, the
chorus of bending, hauling bargemen,
As they pace by
the turgid Arar's waters
Send to heaven
the joyful Alleluia !
Sing thus !
Wayfarers sing by land or water,
Sing at sight
of the house which all may enter,
Where all learn
of the road that leads to safety.'
4. The family setting out for the country
Evodius had asked
Sidonius to furnish him with twelve verses to be engraved on the inside of a
large shell-shaped silver basin which he was about to present to Ragnahild the
Visigothic queen. Sidonius replies as follows :—
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Evodius.
‘ When the
messenger brought me your letter, informing me that you were about soon to
visit Toulouse at the command of the king, we too were leaving the town for a
place in the country some way off. From early morning I had been detained by
one cause or another, and the arrival of your letter only just gave me an
excuse to shake off the crowd of attendants and try to satisfy your request
while I was either walking or riding. At the very break of day my family had
gone forward, meaning to pitch the tent when they had accomplished eighteen
miles of the journey. The spot which they would then reach was one which many
reasons combined to make desirable for the purpose of a halt; a cool spring in
a shady grove, a level lawn with plenty of grass, a river just before our eyes
well stocked with fish, and a favorite haunt of water-birds; and besides all
this, close to the river's bank stood the new house of an old friend, so
immensely kind that neither by accepting nor by refusing can you ever get to
the end of his civilities.
Hither then my
people had gone before me and here I stopped for your sake, that I might send
your slave back by the shortest way from the chief town in the district. By
this time it was four hours and more after sunrise; already the sun which was
now high in the heavens had sucked up the night-dews with his increasing rays;
we were growing hot and thirsty, and in the deep serenity of the day a cloud of
dust raised by our horses' feet was our only protection against the heat.
Then the length
of the road stretching out before us over the green and sea-like plain made us
groan when we thought how long it would be before we should get our dinner. All
these things, my dear Sir, I have mentioned to you that you may understand how adverse
the circumstances of my body, my mind, and my time were to the fulfillment of
your commission.'
Sidonius then
gives the verses, twelve in number, which were to be engraved in twelve
grooves, reaching from the centre to the
circumference of Queen Ragnahild's silver basin. The heat and the remoteness of
the prospect of dinner must have been unfavorable to his courtship of the Muse,
for the verses are vapid, and there is scarcely a thought in them which would
survive translation.
5.. The Fortune-hunter.
In the early
days of the Episcopate of Sidonius a certain Amantius asked him for letters of
introduction to Marseilles. With his usual good-nature Sidonius gave him a
letter to Graecus, Bishop of that city, describing
him as a poor but honest man, who transacted what we should call a
commission-business in the purchase of cargoes arriving at the seaports of
Gaul. He had been lately appointed a Reader in the Church—a post which was not
incompatible with his transactions in business—and this gave him an additional
claim on the good offices of the two Bishops. The letter concluded with the
expression of a hope that Amantius might meet with splendid success as a
merchant, and might not regret exchanging the cold springs of Auvergne for the
fountain of wealth flowing at Marseilles.
Not long after,
Sidonius discovered that he had been imposed upon by a swindler, that the
modest young man who desired an introduction to Marseilles was in fact too well
known at Marseilles already, and that the honest broker was an impudent and
mendacious fortune-hunter. Having occasion to write again to Graecus, who had asked him for ‘one of his long and amusing
letters,' he thought that he could not do better than send him the history of
Amantius, though the Bishop of Marseilles must have been already in good part
acquainted with it, and the Bishop of Arverni must have been conscious that the
part which he had played did not reflect great credit on his shrewdness. After
a complimentary preface, the letter proceeds thus :
‘His native
country is Auvergne; his parents are persons in a somewhat humble position in
life, but free and unencumbered with debt; their duties have been in connection
with the service of the Church rather than of the State. The father is a man of
extreme frugality, more intent on saving up money for his children than on
pleasing them. This lad accordingly left his home and came to your city with a
very slender equipment in all respects. Notwithstanding this hindrance to his
ambitious projects he made a fairly successful start among you. Saint
Eustachius, your predecessor, welcomed him with deeds and words of kindness,
and put him in the way of quickly obtaining comfortable quarters. He at once
began to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of his neighbors, and his
civilities were well received. He adapted himself with great tact to their
different ages, showing deference to the old, making himself useful to his
coevals, and always exhibiting a modesty and sobriety in his moral conduct
which are as praiseworthy as they are rare in young men. At length, by
well-timed and frequent calls, he became known to and familiar with the leading
personages of your city, and finally even with the Count himself. Thus the
assiduous court which he paid to greatness was rewarded with ever-increasing
success; worthy men vied in helping him with their advice and good wishes; he
received presents from the wealthy, favors of one kind or another from all, and
thus his fortune and his hopes advanced “by leaps and bounds.”
‘It happened by
chance that near the inn where he was lodging there dwelt a lady of some
fortune and high character, whose daughter had passed the years of childhood,
yet had scarcely reached the marriageable age. He showed himself very kind to
this girl, and made, as her youth allowed him to do, trifling presents to her
of toys and trash that would divert a girl, and thus, at a very trifling
expense, obtained a firm hold on her affections. Years passed on; she became
old enough to be a bride. To make a long story short, you have on the one side
a young man, alone, poorly off, a stranger, a son who had skulked away from
home not only without the consent, but even without the knowledge of his
father; on the other, a girl not inferior to him in birth, and superior to him
in fortune; and this fellow, through the introduction of the Bishop because he
was a Reader, by favor of the Count because he had danced attendance in his
hall, without any investigation as to his circumstances by the mother-in-law
because his person was not displeasing to her daughter, woos and wins and
marries that young lady. The marriage articles are signed, and in them some
beggarly little plot of ground which he happened to possess near our borough is
set forth with truly comic pomposity.
When the solemn
swindle was accomplished, the poor beloved one carried off his wealthy spouse,
after diligently hunting up all the possessions of his late father-in-law, and
converting them into money, besides adding to them a handsome gratuity drawn
from the easy generosity of his credulous mother-in-law, and then, unrivalled
humbug that he was, he beat a retreat to his own native place.
‘Some time
after he had gone, the girl's mother discovered the fraud, and had to mourn
over the dwindling proportions of the estates comprised in her daughter's
settlement, at the very time when she should have been rejoicing over the
augmented number of her grandchildren. She wanted to institute a suit for
recovery of her money, on the ground that he had fraudulently overstated his
property; and it was in fact in order to soothe her wrath that our new
Hippolytus set forth Marseilles, when he first brought you my letter of
introduction.
‘Now, then, you
have the whole story of this excellent young man, a story, I think, worthy of
the Milesian Fables or an Attic comedy. It remains for you to show yourself a
worthy successor of Bishop Eustachius by discharging the duties of patronage to
the dear youth whom he took under his protection. You asked me for a lengthy
letter, and therefore if it is rather wordy than eloquent you must not take it
amiss. Condescend to keep me in your remembrance, my lord Pope.'
What was the
issue of the quarrel between the amatory Amantius and his mother-in-law we are
not informed, but as he acted twice after this as letter-carrier between
Sidonius and Graecus, we may conjecture that the
affair of the settlement took some time to arrange.
6.. The Master murdered by his Slaves.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Lupus.
I have just
heard of the murder of the orator Lampridius, whose
death, even if it had been in the course of nature, would have filled me with
sorrow on account of our ancient friendship. Long ago he used, by way of joke,
to call me Phoebus, and I gave him the name of the Odrysian bard [Orpheus]. Once, when I was going to visit him at Bordeaux, I sent forward
to him with lurid fires. However false and deceptive the predictions of these
mathematicians as a rule may be, in the case of our friend they were strictly
correct both as to the time and manner of his death. For having been held down
in his own house, and strangled by his own slaves, he died by the same death as Lentulus, Jugurtha, Sejanus, and even Scipio of Numantia. The least melancholy part of the business is that
the parricidal deed was discovered as soon as morning dawned. For no one could
be so dull as not to see the signs of foul play on first inspection of the
corpse. The livid skin, the starting eyes, the yet lingering traces of anger
and pain in the face told their own tale. The earth too was wet with his blood,
because after the deed was done the villains had laid him face downwards on the
pavement to make it seem as if he had died of hemorrhage. The chief agent in
the crime was taken, tortured, and confessed his guilt. Would that I could say
that our friend was altogether undeserving of his fate. But he who thus pries
into forbidden mysteries, deviates from the safe rule of the Catholic faith,
and while he is using unlawful arts must not complain if he is answered by some
great calamity.'
7.. The Oppressive Governor.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Pannychius.
If you have not
already heard that Seronatus is returning from Toulouse,
let this letter inform you of the fact. Already Evanthius is on his way to Clausetia, and is forcing people to
clear away the rubbish from the works that have been let out on contract, and
to remove the fallen leaves from his path. Poor man! if there is an uneven
surface anywhere, he himself, with trembling hand, brings earth to fill up the
trenches, going before the beast whom he is escorting from the valley of Tarmis, like the little mussels who pioneer the mighty body
of the whale through the shallow places and rocky channels of the sea.
‘Seronatus, however, as quick to wrath as he is unwieldy in
bulk, like a dragon just rolled forth from his cave, comes towards us from the
district of Gabala, whose inhabitants he leaves half dead with fright. This
population, scattered into the country from their towns, he is now exhausting
with unheard-of imposts; now entangling them in the winding meshes of false
accusations, and scarcely permitting the laborers at length to return home,
when they have paid him a year's tribute in advance. The sure and certain sign
of his approaching advent is the gangs of unhappy prisoners who are dragged in
chains to meet him. Their anguish is his joy, their hunger is his food, and he
seems to think it an especially fine thing to degrade before he punishes them,
making the men grow their hair long, and the women cut theirs. If any here and
there meet with a chance pardon, it will be due to a bribe, or to his flattered
vanity, but never to compassion.
‘But to set
forth all the proceedings of such a beast would exhaust the rhetoric of a
Cicero and the poetry of a Virgil. Therefore, since it is said that this pest
is approaching us, (whose ravages may God guard us from!) do you forestall the
disease by the counsels of prudence; compromise your lawsuits if you have any;
get security for your arrears of tribute; do not let the wicked man have any
opportunity of hurting the good, or of laying them under an obligation. In
fine, do you wish to hear what I think of Seronatus?
Others fear his fines and his punishments : to me the so-called benefits of the
robber seem even more to be dreaded.'
We do not know
what was the subsequent history of this oppressive governor, nor how long the
crushed provincials had to endure his yoke. In another letter Sidonius speaks
of him as ‘the Catiline of our age, fawning on the barbarians, trampling on the
Romans, joking in Church, preaching at the banquet, passing sentence in bed,
sleeping on the judgment-seat; every day crowding the woods with fugitives, the
villas with barbarians, the altars with criminals, the prisons with clergymen;
insulting prefects, and conniving at the frauds of revenue-officers, treading
under foot the laws of Theodosius, and exalting those of Theodoric' [the
Visigoth], ‘every day bringing forth old accusations and new exactions.' And he
states in conclusion that if Anthemius, the then reigning Emperor, affords them
no assistance against the tyranny of Seronatus, ‘the
nobility of Auvergne have resolved to sacrifice either their country or their
hair,' that is, to retire either into exile or into monasteries.
8. The Country Magnate.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Industrius.
‘I have just
been visiting the Eight Honorable Vectius, and have studied his actions at my
leisure, and from close quarters. I think the result of my investigations is
worth recording. In the first place I will mention what I consider the highest
praise of all; the house and its master both exist in an atmosphere of
unsullied purity. His slaves are useful; his rural laborers well- mannered,
courteous, friendly, obedient, and contented with their patron. His table is as
ready to welcome the guest as the retainer; his civility is great, and yet
greater his sobriety.
‘Another and
less important matter is that he of whom I speak is inferior to none in the
arts of breaking horses, training dogs, and managing falcons. There is the
utmost neatness in his raiment, elegance in his girdles, and splendor in his
accoutrements. His walk is dignified, his disposition serious : the former well
maintains his private dignity, the latter is set upon preserving public faith.
He is equally removed from spoiling indulgence and from bloody punishments, and
there is a certain austerity in his character, which is stern without being
gloomy. Moreover he is a diligent reader of the sacred volumes, with which he
often refreshes his mind while in the act of taking food for the body. He
frequently peruses the Psalms, and yet more frequently chants them, and thus,
in a novel fashion, acts the monk, not under the habit of a recluse, but under
the uniform of a general. He abstains from game, though he consents to hunt,
and thus, with a delicate and unobtrusive religiousness, he uses the processes
of the chase but denies himself it produce.
‘One only
daughter was left to him on her mother's death as the solace of his
widowerhood, and her he cherishes with the tenderness of a grandfather, the
assiduity of a mother, and the kindness of a father. As to his relations
towards his household, when he is giving orders he “forbeareth threatening;” when he receives their advice he does not spurn it from him as
valueless; when he discovers a fault he is not too persistent in tracing it;
and thus he rules the state and condition of those who are subject to him, more
as a judge than as a master; you would think that he rather administered his
house as a trust than owned it as an absolute possession.
‘When I
perceived all this industry and moderation in such a man, I thought it would be
for the common good that the knowledge of it should be thoroughly and widely
spread abroad. To follow such a life, and not merely to don a particular
[monastic] habit, whereby the present age is often grievously imposed upon,
would be a useful incitement for all the men of our profession [the clerical].
For—let me say it without offending my own order—when a private individual
shows such excellent qualities as these, I admire a priest-like layman more
than a priest himself. Farewell.'
9. The Juvenile Sexagenarian.
[This letter is
addressed to the subject of the preceding one.]
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Vectius.
‘Lately, at the
request of the Hon. Germanicus, I inspected the church of Cantilla.
He himself is
certainly one of the most noteworthy men of the district, for although he has
already put sixty years behind him, every day, in dress and manners, he
becomes, I will not say more like a young man, but actually more boyish. His
robe is closely girt around him, his buskin tight-laced, his hair is cut so as
to make it look like a wheel, his beard is cropped close to the chin by pincers
which pierce to the bottom of each fold of his skin. Moreover, by the blessing
of Providence, his limbs are still strongly knit, his sight is perfect, he has
a firm and rapid gait, in his gums there is an untouched array of milk-white
teeth. With no weakness in his stomach, no tendency to inflammation in his
veins, no perturbation of his heart, no distress in breathing, no stiffness in
his loins, no congestion of his liver, no flabbiness in his hand, no bending of
his spine, but endowed with all the health of youth, he claims nothing that
belongs to age but reverence.
In
consideration of all these peculiar benefits which he has received from God, I
beg you, as his friend and neighbor, and one whose example justly exerts a
great influence over him, to persuade him not to trust too much in these
uncertain possessions, nor to cherish an overweening confidence in his own
immunity from disease ; but rather to make a decided profession of religion,
and so become strong in the might of renewed innocence. Let him thus, while old
in years, be new in merit; and since there is scarcely any one who is devoid of
hidden faults, let him openly show his penitence and give satisfaction for
those wrong things which he has committed in secret. For a man in his position,
the father of a priest and the son of a bishop, unless he lead a holy life
himself, is like a briar, rough, prickly and unlovely in the midst of roses,
from which it has sprung, and which it has itself produced.'
10. Teachers and Pupils, Masters and Slaves
‘Sidonius
wishes health to his friends Simplicius and Apollinaris.
‘Good God! how
do the emotions of our minds resemble a sea strewn with shipwrecks, the
tempests which sweep over them being the evil tidings which messengers
sometimes bring to us. A little while ago I was, together with your son,
Simplicius, revelling in the delicate wit of the Hecyra of Terence. I sat beside the young student
forgetting my clerical profession in the delight which the human nature of the
play afforded me. In order that I might help him to follow the flow of the
comic verses more easily, I kept before me a story with a similar plot, the Epitrepontes of Menander. We read at the same pace, we
praised our authors, we laughed over their jokes, and, according to our
respective tastes, he was captivated by the reading, and I by his intelligence.
Suddenly there
stood by my side a slave of my household, pulling a very long face. “What is
the matter?” said I. “I have just seen,” said he, “at the gate the reader
Constans, returning from my lords Simplicius and Apollinaris; he says that he
delivered your letters to them, but has lost the replies which were entrusted
to his care.” When I heard this the calm, bright sky of my gladness was
overspread with a cloud of sorrow, and so much was my bile stirred by the
untoward intelligence thus brought me, that for many days I inexorably forbade
that most stupid Mercury to venture into my presence. For I should have been
vexed if he had lost any ordinary letters entrusted to him by anybody, but how
much more, yours, which, so long as my mind retains its vigor, will always be
deemed least common and most desirable.
However, after
my anger had gradually abated with the lapse of time, I enquired of him whether
he had brought me any verbal message from you. Trembling and prostrate before
me, stammering and half-blind with the consciousness of his offence, he
answered that all those thoughts of yours, by which I had hoped to be charmed
and instructed, were committed to those unlucky letters which had disappeared
on the way.
‘Go back
therefore, dear friends, to your tablets, unfold your parchments and write over
again what you wrote before. For I cannot bear with equanimity this unlucky
failure of my hopes unless I know that you are assured that your written speech
has never reached me. Fare you well.'
11. Husbands and Wives, Parents and Children
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his wife Papianilla.
‘The quaestor
Licinianus, who has just arrived from Ravenna, as soon as he had crossed the
Alps and touched the soil of Gaul, sent letters forward to announce his
arrival, stating that he was the bearer of an imperial ordinance, bestowing the
honor of the Patriciate on your brother and mine Ecdicius, whose titles will
rejoice you as much as mine. This honors comes very early if you consider his
age, though very late if you look to his merits. For he has long ago paid the
price for his new dignity, not with gold but with steel, and though a private
individual, has enriched the treasury, not with money, but with trophies of
war.
‘This debt,
however, under which your brother, by his noble labors, laid the Emperor
Anthemius, has now been honorably discharged by his successor Julius Nepos, a
man whose character, no less than the success of his arms, entitles us to hail
him as Supreme Augustus. The promptitude of the act makes it all the more
praiseworthy, for one Emperor has at once done what the other a hundred times
promised to do. Henceforward, therefore, our best men may with joyful certainty
spend their strength in the service of the Commonwealth, knowing that even if
the Emperor dies, the Imperial Dignity will faithfully perform every promise by
which their devotion has been quickened.
‘Meanwhile you,
if I rightly read your affectionate heart, will derive, even in these gloomy
times, great solace from these tidings, and will not be diverted from sharing
in our common joy even by the terrors of the siege which is going on so near
you. For I know right well that not even my honors, which you legally share,
will bring you so much gladness as this intelligence; since though you are a
good wife you are also the best of sisters. Wherefore I have made haste to
inform you in this congratulatory letter, of the augmented dignity which,
through the favor of Christ our God, has been bestowed upon your line, and thus
I have at the same time satisfied your anxiety and your brother’s modesty, to
which, and not to any want of affection on his part, you must attribute his
silence respecting this promotion.
‘For myself,
great as is my rejoicing at the added honors of your family for which you have
hitherto sighed impatiently, I rejoice even more at the harmony which reigns
between Ecdicius and me. And I pray that this harmony may continue as the
heritage of our children, for whom I put up this prayer in common, that even as
we two have, by God's favor, added the Patrician dignity to the Praefectorial rank which we inherited from our fathers, so
they may yet further enhance it by the office of Consul.
‘Roscia, our
common charge, salutes you. Favored above most other grand-children, she is
fondled in the kindest embraces of her grandmother and aunts, while at the same
time she is being strictly trained, and thereby her tender age is not rendered
infirm while her mind is healthily informed. Farewell.'
12. Debtor and Creditor. The Courtier turned
devout.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Turnus.
‘Well indeed
with your name, and with your present business, harmonizes that passage of the
Mantuan poet—
‘Turnus I what
never god would dare
To promise to
his suppliant's prayer,
Lo, here, the
lapse of time has brought
E'en to your
hands, unasked, unsought.'
Long ago, if
you remember, your [late] father Turpio, a man of
tribunician rank, obtained a loan of money from an officer of the palace named
Maximus. He deposited no security either in plate or in mortgage on land; but
as appears by the written instrument prepared at the time, he covenanted to pay
twelve per cent, to the lender, by which interest, as the loan has lasted for
ten years, the debt is more than doubled. But your father fell sick, and was at
the point of death : in his feeble state of health the law came down upon him
harshly to compel him to refund the debt: he could not bear the annoyance
caused by the Collectors, and therefore, as I was about to travel to Toulouse,
he, being now past hope of recovery, wrote asking me to obtain from the creditor,
at least, some moderate delay. I gladly acceded to his request, as Maximus was
not only an acquaintance of mine, but bound to me by old ties of hospitality. I
therefore willingly went out of my way to my friend's villa, though it was
situated several miles from the highroad. As soon as I arrived he himself came
to meet me. When I had known him in times past he was erect in his bearing,
quick in his gait, with cheery voice and open countenance. Now how greatly was
he changed from his old self! His dress, his step, his bashfulness, his color,
his speech, all had a religious cast: besides, his hair was short, his beard
flowing: the furniture of his room consisted of three-legged stools, curtains
of goat's hair canvas hung before his doors : his couch had no feathers, his
table no ornament; even his hospitality, though kind, was frugal, and there was
pulse rather than meat upon his board. Certainly, if any delicacies were
admitted, they were not by way of indulgence to himself, but to his guests.
When he rose
from table I privily enquired of his attendants what manner of life was this
that he was leading, a monk's, a clergyman's, or a penitent's. They said that
he was filling the office of priest which had been lately laid upon him by the
goodwill of his fellow-citizens, notwithstanding his protests.
‘When day
returned, while our slaves and followers were occupied in catching our beasts
of burden, I asked for an opportunity for a secret conversation without host.
He afforded it: I gave him an unexpected embrace, and congratulated him on his
new dignity: then with my congratulations I blended entreaties. I set forth the
petition of my friend Turpio, I urged his necessitous
condition, I deplored the extremities to which he was reduced, extremities
which seemed all the harder to his sorrowing friends because the chain of usury
was tightening, while the hold of the body upon the soul was loosening. Then I
begged him to remember his new profession and our old friendship, to moderate,
at least, by a short respite the barbarous insistence of the bailiffs barking
round the sick man's bed; if he died, to give his heirs one year in which to
indulge their grief without molestation; but if, as I hoped, Turpio should recover his former health, to allow him to
restore his exhausted energies by a period of repose.
‘I was still
pleading, when suddenly the kind-hearted man burst into a flood of tears,
caused not by the delay in recovering his debt, but by the peril of his debtor.
Then suppressing his sobs, “God forbid,” said he, “that I as a clergyman should
claim that from a sick man which I should scarcely have insisted upon as a
soldier from a man in robust health. For his children's sake too, who are also
objects of my pity, if anything should happen to our friend, I will not ask
anything more from them than the character of my sacred calling allows. Write
then to allay their anxiety, and that your letters may obtain the more credit,
add a letter from me in which I will engage that whatever be the result of this
illness (which we will still hope may turn out favorably for our brother) I
will grant a year's delay for the payment of the money, and will forego all
that moiety which has accrued by right of interest, being satisfied with the
simple repayment of the principal.”
‘Hereupon I
poured out my chief thanks to God, but great thanks also to my host who showed
such care for his own conscience and good name: and I assured my friend that
whatsoever he relinquished to you he was sending on before him into heaven, and
that by refraining from selling up your father's farms, he was buying for
himself a kingdom above.
‘Now, for what
remains, do you bestir yourself to repay forthwith the principal at least of
the loan, and thus take the best means of expressing the gratitude of those
who, linked to you by the tie of brotherhood, haply by reason of their tender
years, scarcely yet understand what a boon has been granted them. Do not begin
to say, “I have joint-heirs in the estate : the division is not yet
accomplished : all the world knows that I have been more shabbily treated than
they : my brother and sister are still under age: she has not yet a husband,
nor he a curator, nor is a surety found for the acts and defaults of that
curator”. All these pretexts are alleged to all creditors, and to unreasonable
creditors they are not alleged amiss. But when you have to deal with a person
of this kind who foregoes the half when he might press for the whole, if you practise any of these delays you give him a right to
re-demand as an injured man the concessions which he made as a good-natured
one. Farewell.'
From these
glimpses of the social life of the Roman Provincials in the middle of the fifth
century, we turn to consider what light of a similar kind the correspondence of
Sidonius throws on the internal history of the Barbarians with whom he was
brought in contact. His first description is kindly and appreciative : so much
so, that it has been conjectured that it was meant to be shown to the gratified
subject of the portrait. In his other character-sketches of the Barbarians, as
we shall find, the shallow contempt of the heir of civilization for the
untutored children of Nature is more distinctly visible.
13. Barbarian Life. The Visigothic King.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to [his brother-in-law] Agricola.
‘You have many
times asked me to write to you a letter describing the bodily appearance and
manner of life of Theodoric, king of the Goths, whose love for our civilization
is justly reported by common fame. I willingly accede to your request, so far
as the limits of my paper will allow, and I praise the noble and delicate
anxiety for information which you have thus exhibited.
‘ Theodoric is
“a noticeable man,” one who would at once attract attention even from those who
casually beheld him, so richly have the will of God and the plan of nature
endowed his person with gifts corresponding to his completed prosperity. His
character is such that not even the detraction which waits on kings can lessen
the praises bestowed upon it. If you enquire as to his bodily shape, he has a
well-knit frame, shorter than the very tallest, but rising above men of middle
stature. His head is round and domelike, his curling hair retreats a little
from the forehead towards the top. He is not bull-necked. A shaggy arch of
eyebrows crowns his eyes; but if he droops his eye-lids the lashes seem to fall
well-nigh to the middle of his cheeks. The lobes of his ears, after the fashion
of his nation, are covered by wisps of over-lying hair.
His nose is
most beautifully curved; his lips are thin, and are not enlarged when the
angles of his mouth are dilated: if by chance they open and show a regular, but
rather prominent set of teeth, they at once remind you of the color of milk. He
cuts every day the hairs which grow at the bottom of his nostrils. At his
temples, which are somewhat hollowed out, begins a shaggy beard, which in the
lower part of his face is plucked out by the roots by the assiduous care of his
barber. His chin, his throat, his neck, all fleshy without obesity, are covered
with a milk-white skin, which when more closely inspected, is covered with a
youthful glow. For it is modesty, not anger, which so often brings this color
into his face.
‘His shoulders
are well-turned, his arms powerful, his fore-arms hard, his hands widespread:
he is a well set-up man, with chest prominent and stomach drawn in. You can
trace on the surface of his back the points where the ribs terminate in the
deeply recessed spine. His sides are swollen out with prominent muscles.
Strength reigns in his well-girded loins. His thigh is hard as horn : the leg
joints have a very masculine appearance: his knee, which shows but few
wrinkles, is especially comely. The legs rest upon full round calves, and two
feet of very moderate size support these mighty limbs.
‘ You will ask,
perhaps, what is the manner of his daily life in public. It is this. Before
dawn he attends the celebration of divine service by his [Arian] priests,
attended by a very small retinue. He shows great assiduity in this practice,
though if you are admitted to his confidence you may perceive that it is with
him rather a matter of habit than of religious feeling. The rest of the morning
is devoted to the care of the administration of his kingdom. Armed nobles stand
round his chair : the crowd of skin-clothed guards are admitted to the palace
in order to ensure their being on duty; they are kept aloof from the royal
presence that their noise may not disturb him, and so their growling talk goes
on before the doors, shut out as they are by the curtain, though shut in by the
railings.
Within the
enclosure are admitted the ambassadors of foreign powers : he hears them at
great length, he answers in few words. In negotiation his tendency is to delay,
in action to promptitude.
‘It is now the
second hour after sunrise: he rises from his throne and spends his leisure in
inspecting his treasury or his stables. If a hunting day is announced, he rides
forth, not carrying his bow by his side—that would be beneath his kingly
dignity—but if in the chase, or on the road, you point out to him beast or bird
within shooting distance, his hand is at once stretched out behind him and the
slave puts into it the bow with its string floating in the air, for he deems it
a womanish thing to have your bow strung for you by another, and a childish
thing to carry it in a case.
When he has
received it, sometimes he bends the two ends towards one another in his hand,
sometimes he lets the unknotted end drop to his heel, and then with quickly
moving finger tightens the loose knot of the wandering string. Then he takes
the arrows, fits them in, sends them forth, first desiring you to tell him what
mark you wish him to aim at. You choose what he has to hit, and he hits it. If
there is a mistake made by either party, it is more often the sight of the
chooser than the aim of the archer that is at fault.
If you are
asked to join him in the banquet, which, however, on non-festal days, is like
the entertainment of a private person, you will not see there the panting
servants laying on the groaning table- a tasteless heap of discolored silver.
The weight then is to be found in the conversation rather than in the plate,
since all the guests, if they talk of anything at all, talk of serious matters.
The tapestry and curtains are sometimes of purple [cloth], sometimes of cotton.
The meats on the table please you, not by their high price, but by the skill
with which they are cooked, the silver by its brightness, not by its weight.
The cups and goblets are so seldom replenished that you are more likely to
complain of thirst than to be accused of drunkenness. In short, you may see
there Greek elegance, Gallic abundance, Italian quickness, the pomp of a public
personage, the assiduity of a private citizen, the discipline of a king's
household. Of the luxury which is displayed on high-days and holidays I need
not give you any account, because it cannot be unknown even to the most unknown
persons. Let me return to my task.
‘The noontide
slumber, when the meal is ended, is never long, and is frequently omitted
altogether. Often at this time he takes a fancy to play at backgammon: then he
collects the counters quickly, views them anxiously, decides on his moves
skillfully, makes them promptly, talks to the counters jocularly, waits his
turn patiently. At a good throw he says nothing, at a bad one he laughs ;
neither good nor bad makes him lose his temper or his philosophical equanimity.
He does not like a speculative game either on the part of his adversary or
himself, dislikes a lucky chance offered to himself, and will not reckon on its
being offered to his opponent. You get your men out of his table without
unnecessary trouble, he gets his out of yours without collusion. You would
fancy that even in moving his counters he was planning a campaign. His sole
anxiety is to conquer.
‘When a game is
on hand, he drops for a little time the severity of royal etiquette, and
invites his companions in play, to free and social intercourse. To tell you
what I think, he fears to be feared. At the end he is delighted to see the
vexation of a conquered rival, and takes credit to himself for having really
won the game, when his opponent's ill-temper shows that he has not yielded out
of courtesy. And here notice a strange thing : often that very complacency of
his, arising from such a trifling cause, ensures the successful carriage of
serious business. Then petitions, which have well-nigh been shipwrecked by the
injudiciousness of those who favored them, suddenly find a harbor of safety. In
this way, I myself, when I have had somewhat to ask of him, have been fortunate
enough to be beaten, and have seen my table ruined with a light heart, because
I knew that my cause would triumph.
‘About the
ninth hour [3 o'clock] comes back again all that weary turmoil of kingship. The
suitors return, the guards return whose business it is to remove them.
Everywhere you hear the hum of claimants, and this is protracted till
nightfall, and only ceases when it is cut short by the royal supper. Then the
petitioners, following their various patrons, are dispersed throughout the
palace, where they keep watch till bedtime arrives. At the supper sometimes,
though rarely, comic actors are introduced who utter their satiric
pleasantries: in such fashion, however, that none of the guests shall be
wounded by their biting tongues. At these repasts no hydraulic organs blow, no
band of vocalists under the guidance of a singing-master intone together their
premeditated harmony. No harpist, no flute-player, no choir-master, no female
player on the tambourine or the cithara, makes melody. The king is charmed only
by those instruments under whose influence virtue soothes the soul as much as
sweet sounds soothe the ear. When he rises from table the royal treasury
receives its sentinels for the night, and armed men stand at all the entrances
to the palace, by whom the hours of his first sleep will be watched over.
‘But what has
all this to do with my promise, which was to tell you a little about the king,
not a great deal about his manner of reigning? I really must bid my pen to
stop, for you did not ask to be made acquainted with anything more than the
personal appearance and favorite pursuits of Theodoric: and I sat down to write
a letter, not a history. Farewell.'
14. Syagrius and his
Germanic neighbors.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to his friend Syagrius.
‘ As you are
grandson of a Consul, and that on the paternal side, as you are sprung (which
is more to our present purpose) from a poetic stock, descended from men who
would have earned statues by their poems if they had not earned them by their
services to the state, all which is shown by those verses of your ancestors
which the present generation studies with unimpaired interest,—as these are
your antecedents, I cannot describe my astonishment at the ease with which you
have mastered the German tongue. I remember that in your boyhood you were well
trained in liberal studies, and I am informed that you often declaimed before a
professional orator with force and eloquence. But since this is the case, pray
tell me whence your soul has suddenly imbibed the oratory of an alien race, so
that you who had the phraseology of Virgil flogged into you at school, you who
sweated over the long and stately sentences of Cicero, now swoop down upon us
like a young falcon from the German language as though that were your old eyrie.
‘You cannot
imagine how I and all your other friends laugh when we hear that even the
barbarian is afraid to talk his own language before you lest he should make a
slip in his grammar. When you are interpreting their letters, the old men of
Germany, bent with age, stand in open-mouthed wonder, and in their transactions
with one another they voluntarily choose you for arbitrator and judge. A new
Solon when you have to discuss the laws of the Burgundians, a new Amphion when
you have to evoke music from their three-stringed lyre, you are loved and
courted, you please, you decree, you are obeyed. And though the barbarians are
equally stiff and lumpish in body and mind, yet in you they learn and love the
speech of their fathers, the disposition of a Roman.
‘It only now
remains for you, oh most brilliant of wits, to bestow any spare time which may
still be yours on reading [Latin], and so to retain that elegance of style
which you now possess. Thus while you preserve your Latin that we may not laugh
at you, you will practise your German that you may be
able to laugh at us. Farewell.'
15. Roman Intriguers at the Burgundian Court.
A young kinsman
of Sidonius, also named Apollinaris, had been brought into some danger through
the calumnies of informers who represented to the Burgundian prince Chilperic
that he was secretly plotting for the surrender of Vaison,
a border fortress, to ‘the new Emperor,' Julius Nepos.
Sidonius writes
concerning these informers to Thaumastus, the brother
of the calumniated man, with sympathetic indignation.
‘These are the
men, as you have often heard me say, under whose villanies our country groans, longing for the more merciful barbarians. These are the men
before whom even the great tremble. These are they whose peculiar province it
appears to be to bring calumnious accusations, to carry off men from their
homes, to frighten them with threats, to pillage their substance. These are the
men who in idleness boast of their business, in peace of their plunder, in war
of their clever escapes, in their cups of victories. These are they who
procrastinate your lawsuit if you engage them, who get it postponed if you pass
them by, who are annoyed if you remind them of their engagement, and forget
it—after taking your fee—if you do not... These are the men who envy quiet
citizens their tranquility, soldiers their pay, post-masters their tariffs,
merchants their markets, ambassadors their functions, tax-farmers their tolls,
the provincials their farms, the burgesses their guild-dinners, the cashiers
their weights, the registrars their measures, the scribes their salaries, the
accountants their fees, the guards their largesse, the cities their repose, the
publicans their taxes, the clergy their reverence, the nobles
their birth,
their betters their precedence, their equals their equality, the officials
their power, the ex-officials their privileges, the learners their schools, the
teachers their stipends, the taught their knowledge.
‘These are the
men drunken with new wealth, who by the vulgar display of their possessions
show how little they are accustomed to ownership, the men who go in full armor
to a banquet, in white robes to a funeral, in hides to church, in black to a
wedding, in beaver-skin to the litany. No set of men suits them, no time seems
to hit their humour. In the market they are very
Scythians, in the bed-chamber they are vipers, at the banquet buffoons, in
confiscations harpies, in conversation statues, in argument brute-beasts, in
business snails, in enforcing a contract usurers. They are stone if you want
them to understand, fire if they have to judge, quick to wrath, slow to pardon,
panthers in their friendship, bears in their fun, foxes in their deceit, bulls
in their pride, Minotaurs in their rapacity.
‘Their firmest
hopes are founded on the uncertainties of the times; they love to fish in
troubled waters ; yet fearful both from natural cowardice and from an uneasy
conscience, while they are lions at court they are hares in the camp, and are
afraid of a truce lest they should be made to disgorge, of war lest they should
have to fight.'
The good
bishop's invective rolls on still through some sentences, which need not be
inflicted on the reader. Though well-nigh out of breath with following Sidonius’
headlong rhetoric, he may still have gathered from it the important fact that
the chief instruments of such oppression as was practised by the barbarian invaders upon the provincials were men who were themselves of
Roman origin.
16. The physique of the Burgundians.
While our poet
was residing at Lyons (apparently) he was asked by one of his friends, an
ex-consul named Catulinus, to compose an
epithalamium, perhaps for his daughter's marriage.
In a short,
humorous poem of apology Sidonius incidentally touches off some of the physical
characteristics of the Burgundians, by whom he was surrounded, and who, it is
important to observe, troubled him, not by their hostility, but by their too
hearty and demonstrative friendship.
‘Ah me! my
friend, why bid me, e'en if I had the power,
To write the
light Fescennine verse, fit for the nuptial bower?
Do you forget
that I am set among the long-haired hordes,
That daily I am
bound to bear the stream of German words,
That I must
hear, and then must praise with sorrowful grimace
(Disgust and
approbation both contending in my face),
Whate'er the gormandising sons of Burgundy may sing,
While they upon
their yellow hair the rancid butter fling?
Now let me tell
you what it is that makes my lyre be dumb:
It cannot sound
when all around barbarian lyres do hum.
The sight of
all those patrons tall (each one is seven foot high),
From my poor
Muse makes every thought of six-foot metres fly.
Oh! happy are
thine eyes, my friend: thine ears, how happy those!
And oh! thrice
happy I would call thine undisgusted nose.
'Tis not round
thee that every morn ten talkative machines
Exhale the
smell of onions, leeks, and all their vulgar greens.
There do not
seek thy house, as mine, before the dawn of day,
So many giants
and so tall, so fond of trencher-play
That scarce
Alcinous himself, that hospitable king,
Would find his
kitchen large enough for the desires they bring.
They do not,
those effusive souls, declare they look on thee
As father's friend or foster-sire—but, alas!
they do on me.
But stop, my
Muse! pull up! be still! or else some fool will say “Sidonius writes lampoons
again.”
Don't you
believe them, pray!'
The tenor of
these verses reminds us of an epigram of unknown authorship, but composed
probably in the fifth century.
‘Round me the
hails of the Goths, their skapjam and matjam and drinkam,
Harshly
resound: in such din who could fit verses indite?
Calliope, sweet
Muse, from the wine-wet embraces of Bacchus
Shrinks, lest
her wavering feet bear her no longer aright.'
17. The young Frankish chief and his retinue ‘
Sidonius wishes health to his friend Domnitius.
You are fond of
inspecting armour and armed men. What a pleasure it
would be for you could you see the royal youth Sigismer,
decked out like a suitor or a bridegroom, in all the bravery of his tribe,
visiting the palace of his father-in-law, his own horse gorgeously caparisoned,
other horses, laden with blazing gems, going before or following after him; and
then, with a touch of modesty which was especially suitable to his
circumstances, in the midst of his outriders and rearguard, he himself walked
on foot, in crimson robe with burnished golden ornaments and white silken
mantle, his ruddy cheeks, his golden hair, his milk-white skin repeating in his
person those three colors of his dress. Of all the petty kings and confederates
who accompanied him, the appearance was terrible even in their peaceful garb;
they had the lower part of the foot down to the heel bound about with boots of
bristly oxleather, while their knees and their
calves were without covering. Above, they had garments coming high up the neck,
tight-girdled, woven of various colors, scarcely approaching their bare legs;
their sleeves draped only the beginning of their arms, they had green cloaks
adorned with purple fringes; their swords, depending from their shoulders by
baldrics, pressed in to their sides the reindeer's skins, which were fastened
by a round clasp. As for that part of their adornments which was also a defence, their right hands held hooked lances and
battle-axes for throwing, their left sides were overshadowed by round shields
whose lustre, silvery at the outer circumference and
golden at the central boss, declared the wealth as well as the taste of the
wearers. All was so ordered that this wedding procession suggested the thought
of Mars not less emphatically than of Venus.
‘But why spend
so many words on the subject? All that was wanting to the show was your
presence. For when I remembered that you were not looking upon a sight which it
would have so delighted you to behold, I translated your feelings into my own,
and longed for you as impatiently as you would have longed for the spectacle.
Farewell.'
It is
interesting, but somewhat perplexing, to observe that some of the details of
the dress of these undoubtedly Teutonic warriors would fit equally well with
the Celtic Highlanders of Scotland.
18. The Saxon sea-rovers rovers.
At the end of a
long letter, written by Sidonius to his friend Nammatius,
after dull compliments and duller banter, we suddenly find flashed upon us this
life-like picture, by a contemporary hand, of the brothers and cousins of the
men, if not of the very men themselves who had fought at Aylesford under
Hengest and Horsa, or who were slowly winning the kingdom of the South Saxons.
‘Behold, when I
was on the point of concluding this epistle in which I have already chattered
on too long, a messenger suddenly arrived from Saintonge with whom I have spent
some hours in conversing about you and your doings, and who constantly affirms
that you have just sounded your trumpet on board the fleet, and that, combining
the duties of a sailor and a soldier, you are roaming along the winding shores
of the Ocean, looking out for the curved pinnaces of the Saxons. When you see
the rowers of that nation you may at once make up your mind that every one of
them is an arch-pirate; with such wonderful unanimity do all at once command,
obey, teach, and learn their one chosen business of brigandage. For this reason
I ought to warn you to be more than ever on your guard in this warfare. Your
enemy is the most truculent of all enemies. Unexpectedly he attacks, when
expected he escapes, he despises those who seek to block his path, he
overthrows those who are off their guard, he always succeeds in cutting off the
enemy whom he follows, while he never fails when he desires to effect his own
escape. Moreover, to these men a shipwreck is capital practice rather than an
object of terror.
The dangers of
the deep are to them, not casual acquaintances, but intimate friends. For since
a tempest throws the invaded off their guard, and prevents the invaders from
being descried from afar, they hail with joy the crash of waves on the rocks,
which gives them their best chance of escaping from other enemies than the
elements.
‘Then again,
before they raise the deep-biting anchor from the hostile soil, and set sail
from the Continent for their own country, their custom is to collect the crowd
of their prisoners together, by a mockery of equity to make them cast lots
which of them shall undergo the iniquitous sentence of death, and then at the
moment of departure to slay every tenth man so selected by crucifixion, a
practice which is the more lamentable because it arises from a superstitious
notion that they will thus ensure for themselves a safe return. Purifying
themselves as they consider by such sacrifices, polluting themselves as we deem
by such deeds of sacrilege, they think the foul murders which they thus commit
are acts of worship to their gods, and they glory in extorting cries of agony
instead of ransoms from these doomed victims.
‘Wherefore I am
on your behalf distraught with many fears and various forebodings; though on
the other hand I have immense incitements to hope, first, because you are
fighting under the banner of a victorious nation; secondly, because I hold that
the power of chance is limited over wise men, among whom you are rightly
reckoned; thirdly, because it is often when our friends at a distance are the
safest that our hearts are filled with the most sinister presentiments
regarding them...
‘I send you the
Libri Logistorici of Varro, and the Chronology of
Eusebius, a kind of literary file with which, if you have any leisure amidst
the cares of the camp, you may rub off some of the rust from your style after
you have wiped the blood from your armor. Farewell.'
19 The woman
wrongfully enslaved.
The following
account of the captivity and bondage of a poor woman of Auvergne incidentally
illustrates the troubled condition of Gaul, while it astonishes us by the legal
doctrine contained in it. Apparently the maxim with which our own courts are
familiar, that ‘a bona-fide purchaser of stolen property, without notice of the
theft, may justify his holding,' even applied to the most outrageous of all
thefts, that of liberty; and a woman wrongfully enslaved, but in the hands of a
bona-fide purchaser, could not claim her freedom,
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to “Pope” Lupus.
‘ After that
expression of homage which is endlessly due, though it be unceasingly paid, to
your incomparably eminent Apostleship, I take advantage of our old friendship
to set before you the new calamities of the humble bearers of this letter, who,
after having undertaken a long journey, and at this time of the year, into the
heart of Auvergne, have returned with no fruit of their labour.
A woman who was nearly related to them was by chance carried off by an inroad
of the Vargi—a name borne by some local banditti— and
was taken some years ago into your district and there sold. This they
ascertained on indubitable evidence, and followed tardily but surely the
indications which they had received. But in the meantime, before they arrived
upon the scene, she, having been sold in market overt, was living as a
household slave in the family of our friend the merchant. A certain Prudens
who, they say, is now living at Troyes, appeared to vouch for the contract of
her sale, which was effected by men unknown to me, and his subscription, as
that of a fit and proper witness, is now shown attached to the deed of sale.
You who are present on the spot will, from your exalted position, be easily
able to test each link in this chain of wrongful acts.
The affair is
all the more criminal because, as I am informed by the bearers of this letter,
one of the woman's fellow-travellers was actually
killed when she was carried off.
‘But since the
relations, who brood over this criminal affair, desire that your judgment
should apply the remedy, I think it will be befitting both to your office and
your character to devise some compromise whereby you may at the same time
assist the grief of one party and the peril of the other. By some wise and
well- considered sentence you may thus make the former less distressed, the
latter less guilty, and both more secure; lest otherwise, such is the disturbed
state of the times and the district, the affair go on to an end as fatal as was
its beginning. Condescend to remember me, my lord Pope.'
20.
The 'Levite' of Auvergne.
Auvergne.
Another
illustration of the sufferings of the poorer inhabitants from the storms of
barbarian conquest, is afforded by the following letter of intercession on
behalf of a man of ‘the Levitical order.' By this term Sidonius probably means
to indicate a person who, though married, and working for his livelihood,
filled (like Amantius the fortune-hunter) the office of Lector (reader) in the
church.
‘ Sidonius
wishes health to Pope Censorius [Bishop of Auxerre].
‘The bearer of
this letter is dignified by an office which raises him into the Levitical
order. He with his family in avoiding the whirlpool of Gothic depredation, was
swept, so to say, by the very weight of the stream of fugitives, into your
territory; and there, on the possessions of the church over which your holiness
presides, the hungry stranger threw into the half-ploughed sods his scanty
seeds, the produce of which he now begs that he may be allowed to reap without
deductions. If you should be inclined to grant him as a servant of the faith
this favor, namely, that he shall not be required to pay the quota which is due
to the glebe, the poor man, whose notions are as bounded as his fortune, will
think himself as well-off as if he was again tilling his native fields. If,
therefore, you can let him off the lawful and customary rent, payable out of
his very trifling harvest, he will return from your country as thankful as if
he had been splendidly entertained. If you will also by his hands bestow upon
me with your wonted courtesy a reply to this letter, I and my brethren living
here will receive that written page as if it had come straight down from
heaven. Condescend to remember me, my lord Pope.'
With this
notice of the poor expatriated ‘Levite' we finish our study of the social life
of the falling Empire as portrayed from the works of Apollinaris Sidonius. But
little effort is required to draw the necessary inferences from the condition
of the Gallo-Romans to that of the Italians. From the shores of Como or
Maggiore, as from the mountains of Auvergne, may many a needy tiller of the
soil have been swept away by the tide of flight from the conquering Visigoths.
Many a Neapolitan or Tarentine woman of Greek descent and Italian nationality
may have been carried away like the poor Gaulish woman by wild marauders
following in the track of the invading armies, sold as a slave, and not even
the place of her bondage discovered for years by her friends. The habits of the
Saxon freebooters may help us to understand the life of bold piratical
adventure led by the Vandals, though we must not attribute the harsher features
of heathen savagery to the Arian followers of Gaiseric. And in the pictures of
the court and retinue of Theodoric and Sigismer we
have probably some strokes which will be equally applicable to every Teuton
chief who led his men over the Alpine passes into Italy, from Alaric to Alboin.
It is
impossible not to think with regret of the wasted opportunities of Apollinaris
Sidonius. Here is a man who evidently hungered and thirsted for literary
distinction even more than for consular dignity or saintly canonization. Yet he
has achieved nothing beyond a fifth rate position as a ‘post-classical' author,
and with difficulty do a few historical enquirers, like Gibbon, Guizot,
Thierry, keep his name from being absolutely forgotten by the world. Had he
faced the new and strange nationalities which were swarming forth from Germany,
in the simple, enquiring, childlike attitude of the Father of History, he might
have been the Herodotus of Mediaeval and Modern Europe. From him we might have
learned the songs which were sung by the actual contemporaries of Attila and
Gundahar, and which formed the kernel of the Niebelungen-Lied;
from him we might have received a true and authentic picture of the laws and
customs of the Goths, the Franks, and the Burgundians, a picture which would
have in turn illustrated and been illustrated by the poetry of Tacitus'
Germania, and the prose of the Blackletter commentators on English Common Law.
He might have transmitted to us the full portraiture of the great Apostle of
the Germanic races, Ulfilas, the secret causes of his and their devotion to the
Arian form of Christianity, the Gothic equivalents of the mythological tales of
the Scandinavian Edda, the story of the old Runes and their relation to the Moeso-Gothic Alphabet. All these details and a hundred
more, full of interest to Science, to Art, to Literature, Sidonius might have
preserved for us, had his mind been as open as was that of Herodotus to the
manifold impressions made by picturesque and strange nationalities. But he
turned away with disgust from the seven-foot high barbarians, smelling of leeks
and onions, and by preference told over again for the hundredth time and worse
than any of his predecessors, the vapid and worn-out stories of Greek
mythology. Most truly has our own Wordsworth said,
‘We live by
Admiration, Hope, and Love,
And even as
these are well and wisely fixed
In dignity of
being we ascend.'
For want of the
first two qualities and others which spring up around them, Sidonius has missed
one of the grandest opportunities ever offered in literature.
