To his friend Herenius *
A. D. 467
[1] YOUR letter finds me at Rome. You are solicitous to know whether the affairs which have brought me so far go forward as we hoped, what route I took, and how I fared on it, what rivers celebrated in song I saw, what towns famed for their fair sites, what mountains reputed as the haunt of gods, what glorious battlefields; for it is your delight to check the descriptions you have read by the more accurate relation of the eye-witness. I am rejoiced that you inquire about my doings, because I know that your interest springs from the heart. Well then, though little accidents there were, I will begin, under kind Providence, with things of good event; it was the wont of our ancestors, as you know, to develop even a tale of mishap from fortunate beginnings. [2] As bearer of the imperial letter, I was able to avail myself of the public post on leaving our beloved Lyons + ; my path lay amid the homes of kinsmen and acquaintances; and I lost less time from scarcity of horses than from multiplicity of friends, so closely did every one cling about me, shouting each against the other best wishes |10 for a happy journey and safe return. In this way I drew near the Alps, which I ascended easily and without delay; formidable precipices rose on either side, but the snow was hollowed into a track, and the way thus smoothed before me. [3] Such rivers, too, as could not be crossed in boats, had convenient fords or traversable bridges with covered arches, built by the art of old time from the foundations to the stoned road above. On the Ticino I boarded the packet known as the cursoria, which soon bore me to the Po; be sure I laughed over those convivial songs of ours about Phaethon's sisters and their unnatural tears of amber gum. [4] I passed the mouth of many a tributary from Ligurian or Euganean heights, sedgy Lambro, blue Adda, swift Adige, slow Mincio, borne upon their very eddies as I looked; their margins and high banks were clothed with groves of oak and maple. Everywhere sweetly resounded the harmony of birds, whose loose-piled nests swayed on the hollow canes, or amid the pointed rushes and smooth reed-grass luxuriantly flourishing in the moisture of this wet riverain soil. [5] The way led past Cremona, over whose proximity the Mantuan Tityrus so deeply sighed. We just touched at Brescello to take on Aemilian boatmen in place of our Venetian rowers, and, bearing to the right, soon reached Ravenna, where one would find it hard to say whether Caesar's road, passing between the two, separates or unites the old town and the new port. The Po divides above the city, part flowing through, part round the place. It is diverted from its main bed by the State dykes, and is thence led in diminished volume through derivative channels, the two |11 halves so disposed that one encompasses and moats the walls, the other penetrates them and brings them trade ---- [6] an admirable arrangement for commerce in general, and that of provisions in particular. But the drawback is that, with water all about us, we could not quench our thirst; there was neither pure-flowing aqueduct nor filterable cistern, nor trickling source, nor unclouded well. On the one side, the salt tides assail the gates; on the other, the movement of vessels stirs the filthy sediment in the canals, or the sluggish flow is fouled by the bargemen's poles, piercing the bottom slime. [7] From Ravenna we came to the Rubicon, which borrows its name from the red colour of its gravels, and formed the frontier between the old Italians and the Cisalpine Gauls, when the two peoples divided the Adriatic towns. Thence I journeyed to Rimini and Fano, the first famed for its association with Caesar's rebellion, the second tainted by the fate of Hasdrubal; for hard by flows Metaurus, more durably renowned through the fortune of a single day than if it had never ceased to run red to this hour, and roll down the dead on blood-stained waters to the Dalmatian Sea. [8] After this I just traversed the other towns of the Flaminian Way----in at one gate, out at the other----leaving the Picenians on the left and the Umbrians on the right; and here my exhausted system succumbed either to Calabrian Atabulus or to air of the insalubrious Tuscan region, charged with poisonous exhalations, and blowing now hot, now cold. Fever and thirst ravaged the very marrow of my being; in vain I promised to their avidity draughts from pleasant fountain or hidden well, yes, and from every stream present or |12 to come, water of Velino clear as glass, of Clitunno ice-cold, cerulean of Teverone, sulphureous of Nera, pellucid of Farfa, muddy of Tiber; I was mad to drink, but prudence stayed the craving. [9] Meanwhile, Rome herself spread wide before my view, but I felt like draining down her aqueducts, or even the water of her naval spectacles. Before I reached the city limits I fell prostrate at the triumphal threshold of the Apostles, and in a flash I felt the languor vanish from my enfeebled limbs. After which proof of celestial protection, I alighted at the inn of which I have engaged a part, and there I am trying to get a little rest, writing as I lie upon my couch. [10] As yet I have not presented myself at the bustling gates of Emperor or Court official. For my arrival coincided with the marriage of the patrician Ricimer, to whom the hand of the Emperor's daughter was being accorded in the hope of securer times for the State. Not individuals alone, but whole classes and parties are given up to rejoicing; you have the best of it on your side of the Alps. While I was writing these lines, scarce a theatre, provision-market, praetorium, forum, temple, or gymnasium but echoed to the passage of the cry Thalassio! and even at this hour the schools are closed, no business is doing, the Courts are voiceless, missions are postponed; there is a truce to intrigue, and all the serious business of life seems merged in the buffooneries of the stage. [11] Though the bride has been given away, though the bridegroom has put off his wreath, the consular his palm-broidered robe, the brideswoman her wedding gown, the distinguished senator his toga, and the plain man his cloak, yet the noise of the great gathering has |13 not died away in the palace chambers, because the bride still delays to start for her husband's house. When this merrymaking has run out its course, you shall hear what remains to tell of my proceedings, if indeed these crowded hours of idleness to which the whole State seems now surrendered are ever to end, even when the festivities are over. Farewell.
* Paraphrased by Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, ii. 454; For the occasion of Sidonius' visit to Rome, see Introduction, p. xxvii.
+ Rhodanusiae nostrae.
VI.
To his friend Eutropius*
A. D. 467
[1] I HAVE long wished to write, but feel the impulse more than ever now, when by the Christ's preventing grace, I am actually on the way to Rome. My sole motive, or at least my chief one, is to drag you from the slough of your domestic ease by an appeal to you to enter the imperial service. . . .
[2] Moreover, by the goodness of God, your age, your health of body and mind concur to fit you for the task; you have horses, arms, wardrobe, establishment, slaves in plenty; the one thing lacking, unless I greatly err, is the courage to begin. In your own home you are energetic enough; it is only at the idea of exile from it that a dull despondency intimidates you. How can it fairly be described as exile, for one with blood of senators in his veins and with the effigies of ancestors in the trabea daily forced upon his sight, to visit Rome once in his prime----Rome the abode of law, the |14 training-school of letters, the fount of honours, the head of the world, the motherland of freedom, the city unique upon earth, where none but the barbarian and the slave is foreign?
[3] Shame on you now if you bury yourself among cow-keeping rustics, or grunting swineherds, as if it were the height of your felicity to feel the plough-handle tremble above the cleft furrow, or, bowed over your scythe, to spoil the meadow of its flowery wealth, or hoe the luxuriant vines with a face bent earthwards. Have done! awake! sleek ease has unstrung the sinews of your mind; raise it to higher things. Is it a less duty in a man of your descent to cultivate himself than his estate? [4] In fine, what you are pleased to call a young man's exercise is really a relaxation only fit for broken soldiers, when their feeble hands exchange rusty sword for belated mattock. Suppose you achieve your end; suppose that vineyard upon vineyard foams with purple juice, while piled granaries collapse under endless mounds of grain; suppose plump neatherds drive the crowding cows with their swollen udders into the reeking yards to milk: what then? What use will it be to have enlarged your patrimony by sordid gains like these, to have lived recluse not only among such things, but, O deeper shame! for such things' sake? You will have only yourself to thank if one day you stand, you a nobleman born, obscure in your white hairs behind your juniors seated in debate, if you smart under the speech of some poor man risen to honour by office, and with anguish see yourself distanced by those in whom it would once have been presumption to follow in our train. [5] But why say more? 'Take my appeal |15 as it is meant, and you shall find me at your side ready to anticipate and share your every effort. But if you let yourself be caught in the insidious nets of pleasure; if you choose to yoke yourself, as the saying is, with the tenets of Epicurus, who frankly sacrifices virtue, and defines the chief good as physical delight, then, be our posterity my witness, I wash my hands of the disgrace. Farewell.
* Partly translated by Chaix; p. 264. For the effect of the letter on Eutropius, see III. vi.
VII.
To his friend Vincentius
A. D. 468
[1] THE case of Arvandus distresses me, nor do I conceal my distress, for it is our emperor's crowning praise that a condemned prisoner may have friends who need not hide their friendship. I was more intimate with this man than it was safe to be with one so light and so unstable, witness the odium lately kindled against me on his account, the flame of which has scorched me for this lapse from prudence. [2] But since I had given my friendship, honour bound me fast, though he on his side has no steadfastness at all; I say this because it is the truth and not to strike him when he is down. For he despised friendly advice and made himself throughout the sport of fortune; the marvel to me is, not that he fell at last, but that he ever stood so long. How often he would boast of weathering adversity, when we, with a less superficial sense of things, deplored the sure disaster of his rashness, unable to call happy any man who only sometimes and |16 not always deserves the name. [3] But now for your question as to his government; I will tell you in few words, and with all the loyalty due to a friend however far brought low. During his first term as prefect his rule was very popular; the second was disastrous. Crushed by debt, and living in dread of creditors, he was jealous of the nobles from among whom his successor must needs be chosen. He would make fun of all his visitors, profess astonishment at advice, and spurn good offices; if people called on him too rarely, he showed suspicion; if too regularly, contempt. At last the general hate encompassed him like a rampart; before he was well divested of his authority, he was invested with guards, and a prisoner bound for Rome. Hardly had he set foot in the city when he was all exultation over his fair passage along the stormy Tuscan coast, as if convinced that the very elements were somehow at his bidding. [4] At the Capitol, the Count of the Imperial Largess, his friend Flavius Asellus, acted as his host and jailer, showing him deference for his prefectship, which seemed, as it were, yet warm, so newly was it stripped from him. Meanwhile, the three envoys from Gaul arrived upon his heels with the provincial decrees empowering them to impeach in the public name. They were Tonantius Ferreolus, the ex-prefect, and grandson, on the mother's side, of the Consul Afranius Syagrius, Thaumastus, and Petronius, all men practised in affairs and eloquent, all conspicuous ornaments of our country. [5] They brought, with other matters entrusted to them by the province, an intercepted letter, which Arvandus' secretary, now also under arrest, declared to have been |17 dictated by his master. It was evidently addressed to the King of the Goths,* whom it dissuaded from concluding peace with 'the Greek Emperor', + urging that instead he should attack the Bretons north of the Loire, and asserting that the law of nations called for a division of Gaul between Visigoth and Burgundian. There was more in the same mad vein, calculated to inflame a choleric king, or shame a quiet one into action. Of course the lawyers found here a flagrant case of treason. [6] These tactics did not escape the excellent Auxanius and myself; in whatever way we might have incurred the impeached man's friendship, we both felt that to evade the consequences at this crisis of his fate would be to brand us as traitors, barbarians, and poltroons. We at once exposed to the unsuspecting victim the whole scheme which a prosecution, no less astute than alert and ardent, intended to keep dark until the trial; their scheme was to noose in some unguarded reply an adversary rash enough to repudiate the advice of all his friends and rely wholly on his own unaided wits. We told him what to us and to more secret friends seemed the one safe course; we begged him not to give the slightest point away which they might try to extract from him on pretence of its insignificance; their dissimulation would be ruinous to him if it drew incautious admissions in answer to their questions. [7] When he grasped our point, he was beside himself; he suddenly broke out into abuse, and cried: 'Begone, you and your nonsensical fears, degenerate sons of prefectorian fathers; leave this part of the affair to |18 me; it is beyond an intelligence like yours. Arvandus trusts in a clear conscience; the employment of advocates to defend him on the charge of bribery shall be his one concession.' We came away in low spirits, disturbed less by the insult to ourselves than by a real concern; what right has the doctor to take offence when a man past cure gives way to passion? [8] Meanwhile, our defendant goes off to parade the Capitol square, and in white raiment too; he finds sustenance in the sly greetings which he receives; he listens with a gratified air as the bubbles of flattery burst about him. He casts curious eyes on the gems and silks and precious fabrics of the dealers, inspects, picks up, unrolls, beats down the prices as if he were a likely purchaser, moaning and groaning the whole time over the laws, the age, the senate, the emperor, and all because they would not right him then and there without investigation. [9] A few days passed, and, as I learned afterwards (I had left Rome in the interim), there was a full house in the senate-hall. Arvandus proceeded thither freshly groomed and barbered, while the accusers waited the decemvirs' summons unkempt and in half-mourning, snatching from him thus the defendant's usual right, and securing the advantage of suggestion which the suppliant garb confers. The parties were admitted and, as the custom is, took up positions opposite each other. Before the proceedings began, all of prefectorian rank were allowed to sit; instantly Arvandus, with that unhappy impudence of his, rushed forward and forced himself almost into the very bosoms of the judges, while the ex-prefect* gained subsequent credit |19 and respect by placing himself quietly and modestly amidst his colleagues at the lowest end of the benches, to show that his quality of envoy was his first thought, and not his rank as senator. [10] While this was going on, absent members of the house came in; the parties stood up and the envoys set forth their charge. They first produced their mandate from the province, then the already-mentioned letter; this was being read sentence by sentence, when Arvandus admitted the authorship without even waiting to be asked. The envoys rejoined, rather cruelly, that the fact of his dictation was obvious. And when the madman, blind to the depth of his fall, dealt himself a deadly blow by repeating the avowal not once, but twice, the accusers raised a shout, and the judges cried as one man that he stood convicted of treason out of his own mouth. Scores of legal precedents were on record to achieve his ruin. [11] Only at this point, and then not at once, is the wretched man said to have turned white in tardy repentance of his loquacity, recognizing all too late that it is possible to be convicted of high treason for other offences than aspiring to the purple. He was stripped on the spot of all the privileges pertaining to his prefecture, an office which by re-election he had held five years, and consigned to the common jail as one not now first degraded to plebeian rank, but restored to it as his own. Eye-witnesses report, as the most pathetic feature of all, that as a result of his intrusion upon his judges in all that bravery and smartness while his accusers dressed in black, his pitiable plight won him no pity when he was led off to prison a little later. How, indeed, could any one be much moved at his |20 fate, seeing him haled to the quarries or hard labour still all trimmed and pomaded like a fop? [12] Judgement was deferred a bare fortnight. He was then condemned to death, and flung into the island of the Serpent of Epidaurus. There, an object of compassion even to his enemies, his elegance gone, spewed, as it were, by Fortune out of the land of the living, he now drags out by benefit of Tiberius' law his respite of thirty days after sentence, shuddering through the long hours at the thought of hook and Gemonian stairs, and the noose of the brutal executioner. [13] We, of course, whether in Rome or out of it, are doing all we can; we make daily vows, we redouble prayers and supplications that the imperial clemency may suspend the stroke of the drawn sword, and rather visit a man already half dead with confiscation of property, and exile. But whether Arvandus has only to expect the worst, or must actually undergo it, he is surely the most miserable soul alive if, branded with such marks of shame, he has any other desire than to die. Farewell.
* Euric.
+ Anthemius.
* Tonantius Ferreolus.
VIII.
To his friend Candidianus*
A. D. 468
[1] You congratulate me on my prolonged stay at Rome, though I note the touch of irony, and your wit at my expense. You say you are glad your old friend has at last seen the sun, since on the Saône his chances of |21 a good look at it are few and far between. You abuse my misty Lyons, and deplore the days so cloaked by morning fog that the full heat of noon can scarcely unveil them. [2] Now does this nonsense fitly come from a native of that oven of a town Cesena? You have shown your real opinion of your charming and convenient natal soil by leaving it. The midges of Po may pierce your ears; the city frogs may croak and swarm on every side, but you know very well that you are better off in exile at Ravenna than at home. In that marsh of yours the laws of everything are always the wrong way about; the waters stand and the walls fall, the towers float and the ships stick fast, the sick man walks and the doctor lies abed, the baths are chill and the houses blaze, the dead swim and the quick are dry, the powers are asleep and the thieves wide awake, the clergy live by usury and the Syrian chants the Psalms, business men turn soldiers and soldiers business men, old fellows play ball and young fellows hazard, eunuchs take to arms and rough allies to letters. [3] And that is the kind of city you choose to settle in, a place that may boast a territory but little solid ground. Be kinder, therefore, to Transalpines who never provoked you; their climate wins too cheap a triumph if it shines only by comparison with such as yours. Farewell.
* Partly translated by Hodgkin, i. 860, and by Chaix, i. 273. Cf. Letter V.
IX.