ON ST. SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS BISHOP
AT CLERMONT IN GAUL,
About the year CDLXXXVIII.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.
Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop at Clermont in Gaul (St.)
BY G. C.
§ I. The ancient cultus of this holy Prelate, his eulogies, and an abridgment of his Acts.
In this holy and most learned Prelate an ancient city of Gaul glories, which Baudrand in volume 1 of his Geography, page 101, describes in these words: This holy Bishop of the Arverni, Arvernae, a city of Gaul in Aquitaine, in Pliny; Arverni in Caesar; Arverna in Gregory of Tours; Arvernum in Sidonius Apollinaris; now Clermont, an episcopal city of Gaul under the archbishop of Bourges, and the head of Auvergne, set upon a hill, whence its name was given it. It grew out of the ruins of the city of Gergovia in its neighborhood, and is distant two leagues from the river Allier toward the west, as twenty-five from Lyons, thirteen from Saint-Flour toward the north, and fifteen toward Moulins. From it the surrounding peoples were called Alverni, now l'Auvergne. A fuller description of this city and region may be seen in Hadrian de Valois, Notitia Galliarum, page 45, and in the latest editors of Gallia Christiana, volume 2, column 222.
[2] Even though St. Sidonius seems to have departed to the heavenly ones on the XXI day of August, whom various Martyrologies commemorate, as is gathered from his epitaph and from the Breviary of Clermont, yet the present Roman Martyrology celebrates his yearly memory on the XXIII day of the same month with this brief announcement: At Clermont, of St. Sidonius the bishop, conspicuous for learning and sanctity. It must be that this day of veneration was already customary from immemorial time: for in most of the ancient copies of the Hieronymian Martyrology in Florentinius the same holy Prelate is announced on the XXIII day of August. We, following the Roman Martyrology after our manner, shall illustrate his deeds on this day, and do not think there is need that we should here more fully confirm the most well-known sanctity of that renowned Man from our supplements to Usuard or from other more recent Martyrologists, since what has already been said abundantly suffices to prove his immemorial cultus. Moreover this public fame of sanctity will receive strength from the eulogies with which men illustrious for learning or for virtue have adorned the erudition and piety of the Saint, and of which we shall here bring forward some.
[3] First of all Mamertus Claudianus, priest of Vienne, shows by Mamertus Claudianus, how much he valued the judgment of St. Sidonius, when, before his lucubration which he had sent him to be examined, in the Cologne Library of the Fathers, volume 5, part 1, page 949, he thus addresses him: Thou, a cautious arbiter of keeping silence and a weighty one of speaking, didst command me to publish the little books which I composed on the state of the soul. It was right that I should either yield to the skill of a most learned and most loving man, or trust his friendship. But, as thou thyself excellently knowest, many, and with thee men very great, laid this same business upon me — which I should not rashly have undertaken, had I not judged it more dangerous to despise it than more laborious to do it… Truly, whether that little work, brought forth without an author's name and everywhere challenged, having been led forth in its whole array into the line of battle and having closed with us hand to hand, has conquered or yielded, do thou, chief of the eloquent, deliver sentence. These things Claudianus wrote to St. Sidonius, not yet initiated in sacred orders, whom nevertheless he chooses as the censor of his lucubration, and whose erudition he adorns on this occasion with other eulogies, which may be read in Jean Savaron before the Works of St. Sidonius published at Paris in the year 1609.
[4] a contemporary writer, Since St. Sidonius had not answered Mamertus Claudianus, the latter friendlily expostulates with him, now a bishop, and at the same time thus praises his beneficent spirit and his other virtues: That thy writings are often shared with others, who neither court them as I do, and perhaps deserve them no more, I do not think is committed with impunity against the laws of friendship. This too I shall even now sorrowfully leave unsaid, that those little books which thou dost not refuse to have ennobled by thy name, thou hast never honored with any answer. But perhaps thou hast no free time to spend, small though it be, upon a very great friendship. In what occupation, at last, wilt thou ever anywhere be entangled which does not turn back to the advantage of others? When by prayer thou appeasest God, thou reconcilest Him not only to friends but to strangers also. When thou searchest out the mysteries of the heavenly Scriptures, the more studiously thou steepest thyself in them, the more copiously thou pourest doctrine into the rest. When thou lavishest thy wealth upon the uses of the needy, thou providest indeed chiefly for thyself, but for others also. Therefore there is nothing — assuredly nothing — so barren among all thy actions that it bears rich fruit for thee alone and not for many others with thee. No occasion therefore of any hindrance can be pretended, even falsely, why I, thy special and intimate friend, should reap nothing from my special friend, from whom very many strangers also take much. But, as I judge, after the fashion of the Gospel giver, what thou givest not to a hungry friend, thou wilt give to a shameless knocker. Further, if even now thou shalt harden thyself as usual, I will do what thou wilt repent of: since, if thou sinnest further by keeping silence, I shall straightway avenge myself by writing. For it is beyond doubt that thou art as much to be punished by my writing as I am punished by thy silence. Farewell.
[5] to whom he humbly replies, The Saint humbly answers this friendly expostulation — which is read among the letters of Sidonius in our Sirmond, book 4, epistle 2 — in the third epistle in the same place; and, the manifold learning of Claudianus being praised at length, at the end he alleges his own slenderness as an excuse for his long silence, in these words: While under pretext of the profession forced upon me (here he means the episcopal dignity laid upon him against his will) I am by degrees seeking a new manner of writing, and by leaps unlearning the old, I have nothing more of a good orator than that I have begun to be more of a bad poet. Wherefore I pray thee grant me pardon of this fault, that, remembering me somewhat, I more rarely mingle my dry little vein with thy river. Thy trumpet the whole world, so far as it extends, will rightly venerate, which it is agreed has sounded with a doubled felicity, since it finds neither rival nor equal, when long ago it ranged through the ears and mouths of the peoples, I too carrying it about. But for us it is great boldness if we chatter even among municipal and chair-bound orators or forensic pettifoggers; who even when they plead (saving the peace of their betters), a more numerous crowd, give their leisure to most unlettered letters. For thee, to whom it is pleasing to vary thy speech whether free or bound, and to thunder in both kinds, few, whom the just one has loved, will imitate. Farewell.
[6] Although our Saint thought so humbly of himself, and he is praised by Gennadius of Marseilles. yet the learned censors of books passed a far different judgment upon his lucubrations; among whom Gennadius, priest of Marseilles, in the work On Illustrious Men, chapter 92, thus commends him: Sidonius, bishop of the Arverni, wrote various and pleasing volumes, and of sound doctrine. A man indeed thoroughly steeped both in divine and in human things, and keen in genius, he wrote to divers persons a notable work composed in divers meters or in prose
volume, in which he showed what he could do in letters. But being strong in Christian vigor even amid the hardness of barbarian ferocity which at that time oppressed the Gauls, he is held a Catholic father and a notable doctor. He flourished at that season in which Leo and Zeno ruled the Romans. We here pass over the other praisers of St. Sidonius, whom Jean Savaron prefixed to the aforesaid edition of his Works, and of whom it will be needful to allege some below in the course of this historical Commentary.
[7] Meanwhile we shall transcribe the elegant abridgment of his Acts which our Sirmond prefixed to the Works of that holy Prelate, in this manner: Sirmond narrates the chief deeds of St. Sidonius, both in the secular It is established that Sidonius was born of a most noble family among the Gauls, his father and grandfather being prefects of the praetorium of the Gauls. Concerning his native place, although others think differently, he himself more than once and in no obscure words signifies that he was of Lyons. But the frequent mention of the Arverni in his books, among whom he obtained first a wife, the daughter of the emperor Avitus, and then an episcopal chair, has given some a handle for suspecting that he was of Clermont. Born therefore at Lyons, and having used the best masters of the liberal arts with whom Gaul was then still filled — among whom he mentions Hoënius in poetry, Eusebius in philosophy — he attained by nature and by study such praise in all things that he was held the most skilled and most eloquent of the learned men of his age (as the eulogies of Mamertus Claudianus concerning him show). Illustrious above all for the fame of his poetry, he was held in esteem not only among his equals and friends, but even among the princes themselves. Of which the former is declared by epigrams and poems of every kind, which at the request of friends he wrote most obligingly on various subjects; the latter by the three panegyrics in which he publicly praised Avitus his father-in-law, and the Augusti Majorian and Anthemius, and bore from each the fruit of their goodwill: for at Rome under Avitus he earned a statue among the poets in the library of Trajan's forum; and by Majorian, when he gave Circensian games at Arles, he was admitted at his solemn banquet among the men of honor, and by a singular example was vindicated from the odium of a satire of which he was accused. By Anthemius at last, after the office of Count and the other dignities with which he had previously been adorned, being made prefect of the City and a patrician, he rendered his family, which he had received from his forefathers as prefectorial, a patrician one.
[8] and in the ecclesiastical state, Nor long after, Eparchius, bishop of the Arverni, being dead, he was substituted in his place, though reluctant and not yet a cleric. Which charge, undertaken with the greatest modesty, he administered with equal sanctity and vigilance in the most turbulent times and amid the greatest difficulties, both private and public: for first, the Arverni being besieged by the Goths, he bore the hardships of a long and most fierce assault. Then, the town being brought into the power of the enemy by the treaty of Nepos Augustus, he was banished by them under the show of an embassy, and was compelled for some time to live in exile. Then at last, being restored to his own people, when, intent upon the care of his office, he omitted no part of a most excellent shepherd among the barbarians, and with singular kindness toward all and especial munificence toward the needy provoked no one himself, he nevertheless, as is the way, stirred up against himself the hatreds of rivals; namely of two priests, who, having stripped him with the greatest contumely of all power in his own church, cast him into the greatest straits of all things. But the divine vengeance did not suffer that calamity to be lasting. Being therefore restored to his whole estate, and yet not long surviving thereafter, Aprunculus being designated his successor not without a divine foreknowledge, he flew away to the rewards of heaven on the XII Kalends of September; which day was thenceforth dedicated among the Arverni to his anniversary memory, and was inscribed upon his tomb.
[9] and from his writings compendiously declares his keen He left children, born of his wife Papianilla before his episcopate: his son Apollinaris, and his daughters Roscia and Severiana. But of the monuments of his genius, although he wrote very many others, he wished these alone which survive to be made public: in which indeed, whether bound in meter or free and loosed, whether he narrates or persuades, whether he praises or blames, and whatever subject he handles, there is equal felicity and copiousness in all, and such variety both of words and of sentences that a wonderful force of genius in him and a certain abundance of learning at once shines out: whereby, I suppose, it came to pass that even by the learned men of his age, such as Ruricius of Limoges, he was judged somewhat obscure and to need an interpreter.
[10] and ready genius, Nor indeed did he show how great he was only in those things which he attentively meditated and elaborated, but in extempore and sudden writings also; of which he had so ready a faculty that he poured forth on the spot not merely a few unmeditated verses — such as was the distich by which he deprecated the calumny of the satire before Majorian, and the other, reciprocal, in which he sported upon a torrent, or the quatrain which he composed in favor of Philemotius — but sometimes wove with equal swiftness whole works in either kind of speech: for of this sort was the address at Bourges, which he dictated in a few hours, and the Anacreontic poem which, bringing it forth suddenly at Bordeaux in the book of Peter, master of the epistles, he contended with the excellent poets of that age, Domnulus, Severianus, and Lampridius. But never did it shine forth more clearly what he could do in this kind than when, the little book from which he had been accustomed to recite having been withdrawn from him during the sacred rites, as is found in Gregory of Tours, he nevertheless unfolded aptly and brilliantly the whole series of what was to be said.
[11] For the rest, though Sidonius was in every part such and so great, he compendiously declares, and though his writings were wonderfully approved by all, he alone seemed to think modestly of himself, and to satisfy himself but little in any respect. And so he both suppressed many things, as has been said, and, having begun certain works, such as the war of Attila, cast them aside out of weariness of the work. Moreover, when Leo, the counselor of king Euric, urged him to write the history of his own time, he declined, saying that the design of writing history by no means befitted a cleric. And nearly all these things, and many more besides, concerning Sidonius may be learned from the Works of Sidonius themselves. But among the Arverni, as we have already noted, the memory of that illustrious Prelate is honored on a fixed day and with the rite of the Saints, and his sacred bones are religiously preserved in the Genesian basilica, whither they record that they were translated long ago from the old chapel of St. Saturninus, in which he had first been laid. In the following paragraphs we shall more distinctly explain this synopsis of the Acts, which has now been generally set forth to the reader, out of the writings of St. Sidonius themselves, and shall endeavor to illustrate it with chronological and historical notes.
§ II. The illustrious lineage of the Saint, his native place, the time of his birth, his manifold name, his literary studies, and the exercises of his youth.
The Saint was born of a noble lineage St. Gregory of Tours testifies that St. Sidonius was sprung from a noble stock, when in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 21, he narrates the death of Eparchius, prelate of Clermont, and thus writes concerning his successor: Upon whose departure, Sidonius, from being prefect, is substituted, a man according to the dignity of the world most noble, and of the first senators of the Gauls, so that he took to himself in marriage the daughter of the emperor Avitus. Our Saint himself declares this ancestral nobility of his family, when in book 1 he thus begins the third epistle inscribed to Philimatius: Go now, and, having questioned me under the laws of canvassing, remove me from the senate, because I devote myself with sleepless cares to the attaining of a hereditary dignity — I, whose father, father-in-law, grandfather, and great-grandfather shone in urban and praetorian prefectures, in palatine and military masterships. Further, that brightness of lineage might be proved from various epistles of the same Saint, which to adduce more laboriously for this purpose we have thought superfluous, since the Heavenly ones, being now adorned with perpetual nobility, make very little of race and ancestors and of what they did not do themselves.
[13] Nay more, St. Sidonius, while still living, reckoned among the chief ornaments of his family the conversion of his grandfather to the Christian faith, and of a Christian grandfather, as he signifies in book 3, epistle 12, in the metrical epitaph which he ordered to be carved upon his tomb in this manner:
A late song, after uncles and after father, I, a grandson not unworthy of my grandsire, have dedicated; Lest haply in some after time a traveler, Not knowing the reverence due to him here buried, Should tread the earth that bears no mound. Here lies the prefect Apollinaris, After the praetorian rule of the Gauls, Received into the bosom of a grateful fatherland; Most wise, and most serviceable, A tiller of the field, of arms, and of the forum; And, by an example perilous to others, Free beneath the tyrants who bore rule. But this is proved his greatest dignity, That, cleansing his brow with the cross and his limbs at the font, First of the number of his fathers He renounced sacrilegious rites. This is the first honor, this the proud virtue: To go before in hope those whom thou joinest in honor, And those kinsmen who here are equal in titles, Yonder to surpass in merits.
Sirmond in his notes on this epistle, page 40, gathers from the circumstances of this epitaph that St. Sidonius was of Lyons by birth, on which matter we shall now discourse somewhat.
[14] not of Clermont, as Savaron will have it, Jean Savaron of Clermont, in the Life of St. Sidonius which he prefixed to his writings published in the year 1609, has this near the end concerning the native place of the holy Prelate: It is no wonder if the people of Lyons would have so illustrious and famous a Man and so holy a Prelate to be theirs, if the people of Bordeaux claim him back, if the people of Narbonne maintain that he is theirs; but Clermont rightly and truly claims him for herself, since Sidonius sets himself forth as of Clermont: all these cities indeed he inhabited, but at Clermont he dwelt at his family hearth: these cities were an adopted, but Clermont his true fatherland. This so holy contention is decided by the tomb of his ancestors, situated in the fields adjoining Clermont; besides that the authority of all the ancients supports it, who affirm that he was of Clermont. So indeed that writer of Clermont pronounces, more confidently than truly. But the sweet love of his fatherland seems here so to have carried Savaron away that he drew out of the writings of St. Sidonius an opinion contrary to the rest of clear-sighted men, who from the same testimonies conclude that the Saint's fatherland must be assigned to Lyons, as we shall now show.
[15] but at Lyons in Gaul, St. Sidonius himself often indicates his fatherland, and chiefly in book 1, epistle 5, which he sent from the city of Rome to Heronius of Lyons, by whom he had been asked to describe his Roman journey, and to whom among other things he thus answers: When I had gone forth from the walls of our Rhodanusia, the public post was of use to me, being summoned as I was by the sacred letters, and that through the dwellings of comrades and kinsmen; where indeed delay was caused to the traveler not by the fewness of the post-horses, but by the multitude of friends, who, clasping me in a close embrace, prayed with contending vows for a happy going and returning. Thus we drew near to the ridges of the Alps, etc. Our Jacques Sirmond, born in Auvergne, and therefore by no means suspect of party zeal, when he denies St. Sidonius to his own countrymen of Clermont, in the notes upon this epistle at the words our Rhodanusia skillfully observed the following: Of Lyons, the fatherland common to both (namely to Heronius and to our Saint). As Rhodanusia in Sidonius, so Araria sometimes in others, because it is placed at the confluence of both rivers. Other cities also situated on the Rhone he called Rhodanitides in his Anacreontic poem. But Irenaeus called the very region and tract about the Rhone Ῥοδανουσίαν, Rhodanusia.
[16] as on account of the testimony of the Saint himself, The Saint still more distinctly designates his fatherland when in book 1, epistle 8, he addresses Candidianus
of Cesena, who had reproached him with the discomforts of his native soil, he wittily rallies him in these words: Thou congratulatest me on my staying at Rome; yet this as it were pleasantly, and with the salt of raillery mixed in. For thou sayest that thou rejoicest that at last I, thy friend, see the sun, which surely I, a drinker of the Saône, have rarely beheld: for thou reproachest me with the mists of my people of Lyons, and complainest that the day, blocked for us by morning fog, is scarcely unbarred by the noonday heat. And dost thou babble these things at me, thou home-born slave of Cesena, a furnace rather than a town? Concerning the pleasantness or the convenience of thy native soil thou hast thyself indicated what thou thinkest, in that thou departest from it. By this manner of speaking St. Sidonius so clearly signifies that the city of Lyons, which is situated at the rivers Saône and Rhone, was his fatherland, that this phrase seems not to need further explanation.
[17] Moreover, in book 4, epistle 25, near the beginning, St. Patiens, expressed in various epistles, who before the year of Christ 470 had ascended the chair of Lyons, is by St. Sidonius himself, writing to Domnulus, called our father in Christ, and likewise pontiff; and that epistle ends with these words: Patiens also did, a man equal to praises however great, what it well befitted that person to do who is the head of our city through the priesthood, and of your province through the city. Hence Sirmond in his notes upon this epistle, page 54, observes the following: OF OUR CITY, of Lyons, whose head Patiens is, because he is bishop; but through the city, because Lyons is the metropolis of the province, he is likewise head of the whole province of Lugdunensis Prima. Further, Lyons is the city and fatherland of Sidonius; its bishop, when he wrote these things, was Patiens, whom therefore at the beginning of the epistle he calls his father in Christ. The Acts of this St. Patiens will occur to be illustrated in our Work on the XI day of September.
[18] On account of these and other testimonies of St. Sidonius himself, which for brevity's sake we pass over, we think it more probable with Sirmond. the praised Sirmond in his notes on Poem 17, page 152, thus candidly sets forth his opinion concerning this controversy: Concerning the fatherland of Sidonius I am compelled to differ from the most learned Savaron, who makes him of Clermont; since it were a scruple to think otherwise than Sidonius himself signifies, who everywhere testifies that he is of Lyons, as in book 1, epistles V and VIII; book IV, epistle XXV; Poems V and XIII. That the tomb of his grandfather Apollinaris was not among the Arverni, as it seemed to him, but in the territory of Lyons, we have already shown from the third epistle of the third book. Then at last, on the following page, from all that he had noted here and there on this matter, he thus concludes: Wherefore let it stand that Sidonius was by birth of Lyons, by marriage and by his chair of Clermont. Nor let our Arverni be indignant that not the whole of him is granted them, who have obtained the better part of him; since such was the dignity and splendor of Sidonius that it was fitting that not one fatherland alone should be made illustrious by it. Now let us draw out from the ancient monuments some things concerning the time of his birth.
[19] With most of the more recent historians we judge that St. Sidonius was born at Lyons of illustrious parents about the year 430, The Saint was born on the 5th day of November on the V day of November. Concerning the day it is established from Poem 20 in Sirmond, page 387, where our Saint invites Ecdicius to celebrate the yearly memory of his birthday in this distich:
Our birthday warns us that the Nones of November are at hand; I do not ask, but bid, that thou come to meet it.
Hence it is plain that St. Sidonius was born on the Nones of November. But we cannot pass so certain a judgment upon the year of his birth, which nevertheless we in some sort conjecture from the sixth epistle of the eighth book, in which St. Sidonius among other things thus writes to Nammatius: I heard him as a youth, and still lately out of boyhood, when my father, prefect of the praetorium, presided over the tribunals of Gaul; under whose magistracy, namely, the consul Asterius, robed in the trabea, had opened the doors of his own votive year. From this consulate of Asterius we shall now endeavor to draw out approximately the birthday of St. Sidonius.
[20] In Hadrian Reland, in nearly all the consular Fasti at the year from the founding of the City 1201, about the year of Christ 430, that is, of the Incarnation 449, Asterius is announced as consul with Protogenes. This consulate our Bolland, in the general Preface to the Acts of the Saints before volume one of January, pages XLIV and XLV, confirms from an ancient monument. Therefore in the consulate of Asterius, or in the year of Christ 449, our Saint was a youth, and still lately out of boyhood, when his father was prefect of the Gauls. But Censorinus in his book On the Birthday, chapter 14, asserts that males were by Varro called boys down to the fifteenth year. So too Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, book 10, chapter 28, reports that by Servius Tullius, king of the Roman people, those were reckoned boys who were less than seventeen years old. Hence we probably judge that those were called youths who counted or had completed the seventeenth year of their age. This opinion of ours is not a little confirmed from Jordanes, bishop of Ravenna, who flourished about the middle of the sixth century, and who in his work On Gothic Affairs, chapter 55, writes thus: Theoderic, now touching the years of youth, boyhood being completed, entering upon his eighteenth year, having taken to himself his father's retainers, associated with himself out of the people lovers and clients. If therefore we assign seventeen or eighteen years of age to St. Sidonius at that time, who at the beginning of the consulate of Asterius, or in the year of Christ 449, was a youth still lately out of boyhood, reckoning backwards we shall come to the year of Christ 430 or 431, about which he was most probably brought forth into the light.
[21] he had several names, The Boy, being born, received several names after the manner of the ancient nobility; concerning which custom Sirmond in the preface to his notes discourses at length. The Saint himself expresses three of his names in Poem 9, the apologetic one to Felix, to which he prefixes this heading in a hendecasyllabic verse:
To Felix, his lord and pious brother, Sollius Apollinaris, his own Sidonius, Speaks this bountiful greeting.
These three names also are read thus in the title of the epistle which our Saint prefixed to Poem 22 in hexameters: Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius to Pontius Leontius, greeting. Mamertus Claudianus, the name Apollinaris being omitted and another substituted, dedicates the books On the State of the Soul mentioned above, in Savaron and Sirmond in the preliminaries to their edition, to the prefectorial, patrician, most learned and excellent man, Caius Sollius Sidonius. Nay more, to these four names a fifth is added, as Savaron testifies, who from a Cluny manuscript before the lucubrations of this Saint alleges the epitaph of Caius Sollius Apollinaris Modestus Sidonius. Whence Sirmond in his notes, page 6, thus admonishes the reader: Certain codices add also the name MODESTUS in this manner: Of Caius Sollius Apollinaris Modestus Sidonius. Nor was it unusual in that age for one man to have five appellations. For the rest, of this forename there is nowhere any mention in Sidonius, unless perhaps he seems to allude to it when, writing to Oresius, he signifies that he prefers to be thought modest rather than witty, book IX, epistle XII. But the name of Sidonius is set in the last place, as being the true and proper one. Wherefore those who in inverted order call him Sidonius Apollinaris, following Angelo Poliziano and certain others, who nearly a hundred years ago first so called him, act contrary to the custom of Sidonius's own age. For the rest, St. Gregory of Tours, and St. Sidonius himself, often use the name Sollius only.
[22] The Saint, while still a boy or a youth, gave his labor to divers studies of letters, as is easily gathered from the first epistle of the fourth book, and as a youth he gave his labor to various sciences, which he wrote to Probus, once his fellow-pupil, and in which, besides kinship, he alleges a second title for the cultivating of friendship in these words: A second bond of minds came to us from the likeness of our studies, because we feel, blame, and praise the same things in letters, and equally does any given piece of writing please or displease us both. Although I claim too much for myself, in comparing my judgment with thine. For what young man or old knows not that thou wast my own particular master, when thou seemedst to be a master common to all? And that whatever lofty thing the epic poet, whatever charming thing the comic, whatever songful thing the lyric, whatever ripe thing the orator, whatever true thing the historian, whatever figured thing the satirist, whatever plausible thing the panegyrist, whatever serious thing the sophist, whatever wanton thing the epigrammatist, whatever lucid thing the commentator, whatever obscure thing the jurisconsult has manifoldly composed, that thou hast in every fashion delivered to each — save to him who failed his own genius and himself? Good God! how did our fathers glory herein, when they saw that, by the help of Christ, thou couldst teach and I could learn, and that thou not only didst what thou couldst, but wast willing to do what thou didst, and that therefore thou wast pronounced no less good than skilled? And truly within the household of Eusebius a certain mint of such disciplines had received thee; formed upon whose philosophic anvil, thou didst now lay open to us the various principles of things and of words, with the approval even of him who had taught thee. Now, as Plato, a disciple already almost superior under Socrates, so didst thou already under our Eusebius, an artist dialectician amid the Aristotelian categories, speak in the Attic manner; while he was still by turns seething down our mobile, tender, raw little age with chastening severity, and now seasoning it with the wholesomeness of his precepts. It seems also that St. Sidonius at that time learned geometry, music, astrology, and like sciences, which in the epistle prefixed to Poem 14 he calls the consequent members of philosophy. Nor was he unskilled in the Greek tongue, as appears from book 4, epistle 12, and book 8, epistle 3, and as Sirmond observes in his notes, page 82.
[23] Yet most of all in his youthful age was he affected toward the study of poetry, and especially to poetry, as he himself testifies in book 5, epistle 21, book 8, epistle 4, and book 9, epistle 16. That he had a great name in this art among others is clear from the judgment of Tonantius, which nevertheless the Saint modestly refuses in the thirteenth epistle of the ninth book, which he thus begins: There is indeed, I confess, an opinion of thine concerning my verses, long since so applauding, so favorable, that thou thinkest I should be compared with the choicest of the poets, and certainly preferred to very many. I should believe thee, if, as thou art very wise, so also thou didst not love me very much. Hence it is that thy charity can lie concerning my praises, and yet cannot deceive. So also in book 5, epistle 17, he rejects the praises with which Eriphius had extolled his poetic art, with this answer: Thou art, Eriphius, ever thine own self to me; and never do hunting, city, or field so call thee away that thou art not held in passing by the delight of letters; and it comes about by that zeal that thou dost not even disdain my works, which, as thou writest, smell of the muses to thee. Which opinion, however, is largely proved to lack truth; although it also appears to come either from jest, if thou art merry, or from love, if thou art serious. For the rest, it leaps far from the just measure, when thou assignest to me things which could scarcely be fitly applied to Virgil or to Homer. Let us leave these things, and let us discourse of that whence our business is. But this Poet was endowed with so great a facility of genius that he sometimes poured forth unforeseen extempore verses, which in book 1, epistle 11, in book 4
epistle 8, in book 5, epistle 17, and in book 9, epistle 13, may be read. Hence St. Gregory of Tours in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 22, writes thus of him: But St. Sidonius was of so great eloquence that for the most part he would compose most brilliantly and on a sudden whatever he wished, with no delay standing in the way.
[24] which studies, however, he interrupted with other exercises. But at that age he often interrupted the continual study of letters with merry conversation or with some other exercise of the body, as is plain from book 4, epistle 4, where he writes thus to Simplicius and Apollinaris concerning Faustinus: This man is my brother in the equality of our birth, my friend in the likeness of our minds; often have I mingled serious things with him, often jests also; and when we were young men some while back, in ball, in dice, in leaping, running, hunting, swimming, our contention was always holy to us both, because charity remained. Moreover in book 5, epistle 17, he records another relaxation of the mind, and signifies that he was addicted to the game of ball, in this narration: Part of us had sat down beneath the shade of a full-grown vine, which, the stocks being raised aloft and hanging trellis-wise, the vine-leaf drawn over had woven; part upon the green turf, but fragrant with flowers. The talk was sweet, jesting, bantering… Presently, being demanded with acclamations divided into two parties, as our age was, a ball is brought forth for these, a gaming-board for those. Of the ball I was the first standard-bearer, which, as thou knowest, is held by me no less a companion than a book. Finally, when in book 2, epistle 2, he invites Domitius to his estate, he again makes mention of the game of ball among its other delights in these words: Two great lime-trees, with their foliage interwoven, their trunks apart, make one shade from no single root; in whose shadiness, when my Ecdicius honors me, we give ourselves to the ball: but this only so far until the image of the trees, drawn in more closely, is confined within the space of the branches, and there, the ball-play being finished, makes a gaming-place for the weary. Now we proceed to the other deeds of our Saint.
§ III. The Saint's marriage, children, and the dignities which he obtained from the Roman emperors.
Of the noble wife whom Sidonius married, The Saint, being now ripe for marriage, took a wife by name Papianilla, who was the daughter of Avitus, afterwards emperor, and the sister of Ecdicius and Agricola, noble men; to whom afterwards, in book 5, epistle 16, he wrote in this manner: Licinianus the quaestor, coming from Ravenna, as soon as, the Alps being crossed, he touched the soil of Gaul, sent a letter before his coming, in which he indicates that he is the bearer of codicils, at whose coming there accrues to thy brother Ecdicius also, in whose titles thou rejoicest as much as in mine, the patrician honor; most swiftly, if thou considerest his age; if his merits, most slowly… Meanwhile thou, if I rightly gather thy affection, on learning these things takest great solace amid the greatest adversities; nor does the terror of the neighboring siege drive thy mind from the path of our common joys: for I know well that thou wast not so gladdened even by my honor, in which by law thou sharest; because, though thou art a good wife, thou art also the best of sisters. Wherefore, Christ God being propitious, I have hastily inscribed with congratulatory letters the enlarged titles of thy stock, at once relieving thy anxiety and thy brother's modesty, who would say nothing of his own dignity — whom, if perchance thou didst not know to be bashful, thou wouldst not on that account judge undutiful. But I enjoy not so much your insignia, which thou hast hitherto awaited the more impatiently the more freely (although these too greatly), as your concord; which I wish equal hereafter for our children and for his, demanding with vows in common that, as we, having obtained both our families as prefectorial, have by divine favor rendered them patrician also, so they may make consular that patrician rank which they receive. Since mention is here made of the children whom St. Sidonius had begotten of Papianilla before his episcopate, we shall now enumerate them also from his writings.
[26] First of all he had a son by name Apollinaris, whom his careful Father endeavored to imbue with the best morals, his son Apollinaris as he signifies in book 5, epistle 11, where, after the virtues of a certain Potentinus have been enumerated, he thus finishes the epistle: If my Apollinaris follows all these examples of living from these his years of youth, I rejoice; certainly I admonish him to follow them; in whose teaching and instructing, if only by the help of Christ what is arranged succeed, I greatly rejoice that I shall borrow the greatest pattern of life from thy morals. Farewell. Moreover, in book 3, epistle 13, he writes to Apollinaris himself, and praises him for his flight from a pernicious fellowship in these words: I singularly approve, rejoice, and marvel that from a love of chastity thou fleest the company of the unchaste; especially of those to whom nothing is weighed, nothing is holy, in seeking after and chattering of foulnesses; and who, because with shameless words they defile the reverence of public ears, seem to themselves to be hugely witty. Finally, in book 4, epistle 12, he shows a father's solicitude that this son of his should profit in the study of the humaner letters, and elsewhere he often makes mention of him.
[27] Of his daughter Severiana he makes mention in book 2, epistle 12, and two daughters, in which, being invited by Agricola his wife's brother to a fishing, he excuses himself on account of that daughter's sickness in this manner: Thou hast indeed sent a boat, swift, solid, capable of holding a couch, and already with fish in it. Then besides, a steersman far skilled, and rowers too, strong and nimble, who indeed fly past the back of the opposing stream with the same swiftness with which it flows down. But thou wilt pardon me that I decline to come as thy companion when thou invitest me to the fishing: for far stronger nets of sorrow hold me, our household lying sick; which are to be grieved over by friends and even by strangers. Whence I think that thou too, if thou art rightly moved by a brother's affection, at the very moment of time in which thou shalt take up this page, wilt rather be thinking of returning. Severiana, our common care, first disquieted by the assault of a lingering cough, is now also wearied with fevers, and those growing heavier through the nights; on account of which she desires to go out to the suburb. In fine, when we were receiving thy letter, we were already preparing to go forth to our little villa. Wherefore, whether thou comest or delayest, aid our prayers with thy own, that to her who desires the air of the country the very quickening may healthfully avail. Certainly I, and thy sister, hanging between hope and fear, believe that her weariness would be increased if we should stand in the way of the pleasure of the sick girl. Therefore from the heat and the torpor of the city we withdraw both ourselves and our whole house alike, Christ going before; and at the same time we avoid the counsels of the physicians, of those who sit by and those who disagree, who, being little learned and diligent enough, most officiously kill many sick men. Truly to our company Justus will be admitted by the right of friendship (this is perhaps that itinerant physician whose epitaph Sirmond exhibits in his notes, page 35), whom, if it were lawful to jest amid sad things, I should easily convict of being trained rather in the art of Chiron than in that of Machaon: wherefore Christ must the more diligently be asked and besought that the heavenly power may heal that sickness for which our care finds no cure. Farewell.
[28] or perhaps three In the aforesaid sixteenth epistle of the fifth book he records another daughter, in whose name he thus salutes his wife at the end: Roscia greets thee, our common care, who in the most indulgent bosom of her grandmother and aunts — which rarely befalls other people's grandchildren — is brought up even with severity; by which, however, her tender age is not weakened, but her disposition is formed. St. Gregory of Tours, in the History of the Franks, book 3, chapter 2, seems to add to these a third daughter of St. Sidonius, who is there called by him Alchima and the sister of Apollinaris. Since nevertheless our Saint nowhere makes mention of that Alchima, we suspect not altogether rashly that she is the same with Severiana or Roscia, who perhaps afterwards bore a double name, as was customary at that time among noble women. But whoever that Alchima was, after the death of St. Sidonius she conspired with the wife of Apollinaris, and in an unworthy manner raised her brother to the chair of Clermont, as we shall presently see.
[29] (among these children the son afterwards did not answer his holy Father's care) Hence it also follows that Apollinaris afterwards little answered his father's care and holy training, since Gregory of Tours in the place just cited narrates the following concerning this unworthy usurper of the see of Clermont: But they, hearing these things, send Apollinaris to the king; who, departing and offering many gifts, succeeded to the episcopate, and abusing it for four months, departed from this world. The holy historian in the Lives of the Fathers, chapter 4, repeats the same, save that he affirms that Apollinaris sat in that chair only three months. After that testimony of St. Gregory of Tours we exceedingly wonder that this Apollinaris is found among the Saints in the Gallican Martyrology of Saussay, page 1234, in Ferrari in the general Catalogue on the XXVI day of September, and on the same day in the Additions of Ado and in our supplements to Usuard; or that he is called a saint by the Sainte-Marthe brothers. But this error the latest editors of Gallia Christiana, volume 2, column 235, prudently corrected, and from the narration of St. Gregory of Tours rightly admonish thus: This end of Apollinaris, the son of Sidonius, is truly to be lamented, whom his most pious Father had trained with so great zeal in good morals. We therefore judge that this Apollinaris is altogether to be erased from the sacred calendars.
[30] he received before his episcopate. On occasion of the children of St. Sidonius certain corrupters of ecclesiastical discipline might laboriously be refuted, who impudently feign that the holy Prelate begot a son or daughters of his wife Papianilla during the time of his episcopate. But our Sirmond in his notes, page 61, convicts those triflers of calumny, from the prescript of the canons and the perpetual custom of the ancient Church, in which those who from the married state were called to the priesthood, being separated from the bed of their wives, thenceforth dwelt with them no otherwise than with sisters. After he had demonstrated this by various and certain examples, which we here omit for brevity's sake, he thus proceeds in the same place: That therefore which Sidonius remembered to have been sanctioned by law and by custom, and attested by the deed of his own predecessor — how could he either be ignorant of it or contemn it with impunity? And yet there are those who trust that a deception can here be practiced from the mention of Papianilla; and because in book IV, epistle XII, Sidonius the bishop read Terence and Menander with his son Apollinaris, thence they contend that the son, already a youth, already initiated in the authors of the Greek and Latin tongues, was received from his Father when already a bishop; whereas the thing itself teaches that all the epistles of the Constantian collection — that is, of the first seven books — which he dictated as bishop, he dictated at almost the very beginning of his pontificate. But what are you to do with men who, though they say nothing true, yet wish to be believed with closed eyes? Let us now pass to the honors which Sidonius obtained, and of which he everywhere signifies in his writings that he was at that time desirous.
[31] When Avitus in the month of July of the year 455 had been declared emperor in Gaul, He delivered a Panegyric before the emperor Avitus, Sidonius followed him as he set out for Rome, and at the beginning of the year 456 recited a panegyric poem in his praise before the senate and people of Rome. This panegyric was received with so great applause that on account of it a bronze statue was erected to Sidonius at Rome, as he himself indicates in book 9, epistle 16, and in Poem 8.
But when Avitus, before the end of the same year 456, was compelled to abandon the empire, Sidonius seems to have taken arms in his defense against his rival Majorian. But being forced to yield to this successor of Avitus, he fled to the clemency of the victor, by whom Sidonius was so kindly received that he was afterwards most intimate with him, and at the end of the year 458 publicly praised him at Lyons in a panegyric poem, from whose preface in Sirmond, page 308, we gather that that praiser had before borne arms against the emperor Majorian, since he there prefixes these verses in distichs:
For thee too, Flaccus, who hadst followed the ranks of Brutus and Cassius, He was the author of thy song who was also the author of thy pardon. So to me, of late falling under a contrary war, Thou, victor, didst bid me be of tranquil mind. Let therefore the tongue of the poet whom thou hast saved serve thee, And let thy praise be the price of my life.
[32] We do not know with sufficient certainty what office Sidonius administered under the emperor Majorian. and to Majorian his successor, Nevertheless from the sixth epistle of the eighth book we gather that he discharged some military charge, because he there writes to his friend Nammatius in this manner: Caius Caesar the dictator, than whom, they say, no man administered military affairs more like a leader, the studies of dictating and of much reading claimed for their own by turns… Which has likewise befallen me also, if it be lawful to compare small things with great, according to my own small measure, though in a manner most unlike… Flavius Nicetius, a man most illustrious by birth, respectable by privilege, distinguished by merit, and, in prudence and skill alike, the greatest of the men of our fatherland, extols, as far as I have learned, the volumes of the present little work with immense praise; declaring moreover that I have surpassed very many of the young men, and not a few of the old, in the various kinds of dictating and of soldiering (being indeed still green in age). For my part, so far as it can be done apart from boastfulness, I rejoice in the authority of a most excellent man, if he is sure; in his love, if he is mistaken. Yet who, being challenged now to the deeds of our forefathers, will not be most inert; who also to their words, will not be most speechless? Here from the comparison and from the word soldiering we conjecture that Sidonius was endowed with some military dignity, although we know not of what kind it was. At least from book 1, epistle 11, it is established that Sidonius under this emperor had the dignity of Count, since there Majorian himself addresses him by that title, as we shall see on another occasion.
[33] After Majorian had been slain in the year 461, and Severus had succeeded him, our Saint seems to have remained in Gaul: for about this time he wrote some epistles and poems after whose death he seems to have remained in Gaul, which indicate his abode in Gaul. Perhaps in that interval of time he from time to time visited his Gallic friends, or, being for the most part occupied with studies, dwelt on his suburban estate near Clermont, to which in book 2, epistle 2, he invites Domitius, and describes the place to him among other things thus: Truly, if it please thee, hear what is the situation of the land to which thou art called. We are at Avitacum; this is the name of the estate, which, because it came by my wife (namely, he had received it on his wife's part), is sweeter to me than my father's. Then he graphically paints the pleasantness of the estate, and in Poem 18 praises its baths in these verses:
If thou deignest, whoever thou art, to visit our Avitacum, Let it not displease thee, if what thou hast pleases thee. Roofs rise up rivaling the Baian dome, And a peak shines with a summit equal to the buskin. More than the streams of Gaurus the chattering water murmurs, Falling from the brow of the neighboring hill. Rich Campania would not have her Lucrine pool, If she beheld the waters of our lake. That shore is adorned with purple sea-urchins; In our fishes, guest, thou seest both. If thou wilt, and sharest our joys with a peaceful heart, Whoever thou art that comest, thou makest here a Baiae in thy mind.
[34] until Anthemius obtained the empire, In the year of Christ 467 St. Sidonius returned to Rome, when Anthemius had been raised to the summit of the Roman empire, and pronounced a panegyric poem in honor of the same emperor, who at the beginning of the year 468 was entering upon his second consulate. This he did by the counsel of Basilius, formerly consul, who had shown him this way for the obtaining of dignities. The desired issue answered the expectation of both, when Sidonius in the same year of Christ 468 obtained the prefecture of the city of Rome. All these things he himself, in book 1, epistle 9, familiarly announces to his friend Heronius in these words: While through this most ample man (namely Basilius, of whom he had treated above) we were working at somewhat concerning the petitions of the embassy of Clermont, behold the Kalends of January, which awaited the name of the Augustus, soon to be consul, to be repeated in the calendars. Then my patron said: Come, my Sollius, although thou art pressed by the burden of the office undertaken, I would have thee bring forth in homage to the new consul thine old muse, singing something votive even upon hasty strings. I will furnish approach by getting thee admitted, and comfort for thee as thou art about to recite, and support for thee as thou recitest. If thou believest one who has tried it, many serious things will be advanced for thee by this play. I obeyed his precepts: he did not withdraw his favor from what he had enjoined; and being an unconquered advocate of the devotion he had imposed, he wrought with my consul that he should make me prefect of his own senate.
[35] under whom he administered the prefecture at Rome. Then quite merrily he commits the censure of his poem to his friend, and continues the epistle in this manner: But thou, unless I mistake, hating the prolixity of a letter, wilt now, I know, dwell more delightfully upon re-reading the verses of the little work itself: and on this account the talkative paper carries the poem itself in what follows, which may discourse to thee for a few days in my stead, until I come. And if to it also the marks of thy examination be given, it will be as pleasing to me as if, while I harangued in the assembly or among the rostra, at my Bravo there were stirred up the applause not only of the broad stripe but of the tribesmen too. Truly I warn thee, and give notice beforehand, that thou by no means match these sweepings of mine with the hexameters of thy Clio: for my poems, deservedly compared with yours, will be likened not to the trappings of heroic verse but to the dirges of epitaph-makers. Nevertheless rejoice that this very panegyric received, if not the judgment, at least the outcome of a good work. Wherefore, if however austere things are to be made pleasant by jests, I will conclude my page with a boastful — that is, a Thrasonian — end, being an imitator of the Plautine Pyrgopolynices. Since therefore I have come, by the help of Christ, to the prefecture by occasion of my pen, do thou forthwith bid, by the power of a girded man, all the acclamations of every praise being gathered from every side, that my eloquence be borne to the stars, if I please; if I displease, my good fortune. I seem to myself to see thee laugh, because thou perceivest our boasting with the most ferocious soldier of comedy. Farewell.
[36] The emperor Anthemius also adorned Sidonius with the patrician dignity, and he obtained the patrician dignity. as is clear from his epistle given to his wife Papianilla, which we exhibited above, and in which he asserts that he rendered patrician his family, which he had received from his forefathers as prefectorial. That honor is confirmed from the testimony of Mamertus Claudianus, who inscribed his work On the State of the Soul to the prefectorial, patrician, most learned and excellent man, Caius Sollius Sidonius. But Sirmond in his notes, page 62, admonishes from Cassiodorus that the patriciate was a dignity midway between the prefecture and the consulate, so that it surpasses the prefecture and yields to the consulate. But all those honors sought with so great ambition would have profited Sidonius little toward preserving his immortal memory, had he not afterwards made illustrious this vain splendor of his family by true sanctity. Wherefore we omit in this place the various things which he did while still a layman, that we may be able below to dwell the longer upon the reporting of his episcopal virtues. Yet first we shall draw out more distinctly from his writings his excellent disposition, with which he was endowed even before his episcopate, and shall represent it in the following paragraph.
§ IV. The Saint's disposition, drawn chiefly from his writings, and the improbable opinion concerning his monastic life.
Sidonius betrays his disposition in his epistles, Even though the generous disposition of St. Sidonius may in some sort be known from the fragments of some epistles already reported, yet he himself in book 7, epistle 14, more openly discloses the various inclinations of his mind to his friend Philagrius, whose imitator he professes himself in these words: Although thou pleasest all good men, no one has wished more to behold thee inwardly than he who outwardly strives to imitate thee. Truly, in what manner I may become a follower of thy studies shall be laid open in the ensuing part of the page. Thou lovest, as I have learned, the quiet: I love even the idle. Thou avoidest barbarians, because they are thought bad: I, even if they be good. Thou appliest diligence to reading: I too suffer sloth to hurt me little in that. Thou fillest up the character of a religious man; I, at least the image of one. Thou seekest not others' goods: I count it even for gain if I lose not mine own. Thou art delighted with the company of the learned: I call any crowd, however great, that is without skill in letters, the greatest solitude.
[38] Thou art said to be most cheerful: I too determine that all tears perish which anyone has shed, save as often as he supplicates God. from which we gather Thou art reported to be most kindly: no guest has shuddered at our little table as at the cave of Polyphemus. The greatest clemency toward thy servants is attributed to thee: nor am I tormented if mine are not tormented as often as they sin. Dost thou think one should fast on alternate days? It irks me not to follow; it shames me not to go before to dinner. For the rest, if it be granted by the gift of Christ that you be seen by me, may I so rejoice as one from whom the lesser things concerning thee also have not been withdrawn. But what things in thee are greater I already well know. On account of which it may the more easily happen that, even if at some time, being placed before thee, I shall behold thy face, some fresh gladness concerning thee, rather than a fresh opinion, will accrue to me. Farewell in Christ. From this and from many other epistles we gather that Sidonius was easy and courteous among his friends and intimates.
[39] that he sometimes used sharpness of style, But the more kindly he was toward the good, the more vehement was he against the bad, as is made manifest from the first epistle of the second book, where he thus bitterly complains to Ecdicius concerning Seronatus, the oppressor of Auvergne: That Catiline of our age has himself lately returned from Toulouse, that here he might mix in full the blood and fortunes of wretched men, which he had there in part pledged. Know that in him day by day the spirit of a long-dissembled fury is being laid open. Openly he envies, abjectly he feigns, slavishly he is proud. He proclaims as a lord, exacts as a tyrant, condemns as a judge, calumniates as a barbarian; all day long armed by fear, fasting by avarice, terrible by greed, cruel by vanity, he ceases not at the same time to punish thefts and to commit them. Openly, and with laughers called together, he belches out among citizens his fights, among barbarians his letters; letters which, not sufficiently initiated even in the first characters, he publicly dictates out of boastfulness and corrects out of shamelessness. Everything that he covets he as it were buys, and neither gives the price, despising it, nor takes the deeds, despairing of them. In the council he commands, in counsel he is silent, in church he jests, at a banquet he preaches, in his chamber he condemns, at an inquiry he dozes. Daily he fills the woods with fugitives, the farms with guests, the altars with the accused, the prisons with clerics. Exulting over the Goths and insulting the Romans, mocking the prefects and playing into the hands of the accountants, trampling the Theodosian laws and setting forth the Theodorician ones, he hunts out old faults and new tributes. No less sharply in book 5, epistle 13, does he inveigh against this tyrant, and in the seventh epistle of the seventh book he narrates that he was slain by the Arverni and paid the deserved penalties of his violence.
[40] which he calls liberty of mind, The Saint calls this sharpness of his style, which sometimes occurs in his writings, an ingenuous liberty of speech, in book 7, epistle 18, where he writes thus to Constantius after other things: I commend therefore the various motions of my heart to thy judgment, not at all unaware that the mind lies open in a book as the countenance in a mirror. For I have dictated some things by way of exhortation, very many by way of praise, some by way of persuasion, a few in mourning, and not a few in jest. And if anywhere thou hast read me as somewhat too vehement against certain persons, I would have thee know that, the right hand of Christ helping, I shall never endure a servitude of mind, holding it most certain that concerning such manners of men the censure is twofold: for as the timid call me rash, so the steadfast call me free; among which things I myself decide that his character lies low enough whose opinion must lie hidden. Nay more, Sidonius pursued the wicked with so great hatred that he would not receive benefits from them, as in book 5, epistle 13, he freely pronounces to Pannychius in this closing sentence: In sum, thou wouldst know what I think concerning Seronatus. The rest fear to be afflicted with loss by the man above written; to me even a robber's benefits are suspect. Farewell.
[41] and which Peter of Cluny praises in him. Perhaps someone will condemn this sharper liberty of writing or of speaking as rashness or arrogance. But the venerable Peter, abbot of Cluny, seems not to have disapproved that free candor of mind in this very writer, when in André Duchesne's Cluniac Library, columns 839 and 840, he thus alleges our Saint with a eulogy: Thence the good and learned man Sidonius, bishop of Clermont, mocking the vices of certain persons with biting reproof, among the other things wherewith he inveighs against them says: They go forth in white to funerals, in black to weddings; showing that they were so far confounded in manners and in act that they interchanged, in perverted order, the funeral array with the nuptial, and the nuptial with the funeral. Then the same venerable abbot, in his poem against calumniators in the same place, column 1342, adorns our Author with the title of saint, and cites him in these verses:
Now, ornament of Clermont, whom thou adornest with so many virtues, Come to us, Sidonius, called holy: And, recounting the praises which thou hast rendered to the Saints, Strike the faithless hearts after thy wonted manner, Which dare to grunt that praises must be denied us, When the merit of virtue demands them.
[42] Although Sidonius was harsh in reproving adversaries, Further, he was ready yet in praising friends he was ready and kindly. But what sort of friends he chose, he signifies in book 5, epistle 11, writing to Potentinus in this manner: We love thee much, and indeed the affection of this love is neither erring nor accidental. For I judged that I should become the more bound to thee as a comrade: for it is my custom that I first choose, and afterwards love. What things, thou sayest, in me have pleased thee and won thy approval? I will say it willingly and briefly; the one of these gratitude compels, the other the paper. I revere in thy actions that thou doest many things imitable by every good man. Thou tillest as one most skillful, thou buildest as one most orderly, thou huntest as one most effective, thou feedest as one most exact, thou jestest as one most witty, thou judgest as one most equitable, thou persuadest as one most sincere, thou art moved to anger as one most slow, thou art appeased as one most swift, thou lovest in return as one most faithful. At the end of this epistle he wishes that his son Apollinaris may imitate those examples of living, as we reported above on another occasion.
[43] If love finds equals, or makes equals, as the common saying is, to praise the characters of his friends, we can also gather the character of St. Sidonius from the character of Menstruanus, which in the sixth epistle of the second book, given to Pegasius, he praises in this manner: It is proverbially famous that delay is often better, as we too have now found by experience. Menstruanus, thy friend, having been observed here for a long time, has deserved to be reckoned among the persons dear and bound to us also: seasonable, elegant, modest, sober, frugal, religious, and endowed with such gifts of character that, as often as he is taken into the friendships of any good man, he obtains no more benefit himself than he confers. These things I have written to thee, not as to one ignorant, but that I might satisfy my own judgment. Wherefore there is a threefold cause of rejoicing: the first thine, to whom it falls thus either to train or to choose friends; the second the Arverni's, whom I affirm to have been pleased in him by that which I doubt not thou hast approved; the third his, of whom all good men have judged all good things. Farewell.
[44] But how constant Sidonius was in cultivating friendship, constant in friendship, even at the peril or the loss of his own reputation, is plain from the misfortune of Arvandus, prefect of the Gauls, who, being brought to Rome in the year 469, was accused of peculation and of the crime of treason. The unhappy fall of this prefect Sidonius, in book 1, epistle 7, begins thus to narrate to his friend Vincentius: The fall of Arvandus grieves me, nor do I dissemble that it grieves me. For this crowning point too is added to the praises of the emperor, that it is lawful openly to love even those condemned to death. I was a friend to the man beyond what the easiness and changeableness of his character allowed. This is attested by the odium lately kindled against me on his account, whose flame scorched me as being a little too incautious. But that I stood firm in friendship, I owed to myself. Then, after a diffuse narration of this suit, at the end of the epistle he sets forth how he strives to preserve the life of him whose innocence he could not defend. In truth Sidonius afterwards brought it about with the emperor that the capital punishment to which Arvandus had been condemned was commuted into exile, as we learn from the Ecclesiastical Annals of the most eminent Baronius at the year of Christ 468, number 10.
[45] he envied no one, So great sometimes is the rivalry for glory among men of letters that it degenerates into base envy, and even learned men cannot bear equals or superiors in knowledge, and would alone be wise. But our most erudite Saint was accustomed to favor and not to envy the studious, as Ruricius, his contemporary, in book 1, epistle 8, in Henry Canisius, volume 5 of the Ancient Reading, page 468, pronounced concerning him. This testimony of Ruricius agrees wonderfully with the tenth epistle of the second book, which Sidonius wrote to Hesperius, and to which he gave this beginning: I love in thee that thou lovest letters, and everywhere I strive to honor with the most abundant praises the generosity of so great diligence, whereby thou commendest to us not only thine own beginnings but our studies also: for when we see the wits of the younger men growing up in that discipline for whose sake we too withdrew our hand from the rod, we obtain the most copious fruit of our labor. Moreover, in book 9, epistle 9, the Saint, now bishop of the Arverni, sincerely testifies that he was never addicted to any vice less than to envy.
[46] he willingly shared his own works with others, Hence he willingly communicated his little works to others, as is proved by the example of the praised Ruricius, who in the epistle assigned a little above deprecates the fault which he thought he had committed in having secretly transcribed some lucubration of Sidonius. To him our Saint in book 4, epistle 16, thus kindly answers: I have received through Paterninus your page, which has the more of honey or of salt is uncertain. For the rest, it displays such copiousness of eloquence, it smells of such flowers, that it well appears that you profit not only by open but also by stealthy reading. Although even this theft which thou deprecatest, of a little book copied out, ought to be regarded not so much with pardon as with glory. For what canst thou do without virtue, who commit not even thy very sins without praise? But I willingly hear of whatever fraud has been laid upon me, as upon one absent, and embrace it as a chief gift, who have in some sort borne a loss without loss: for what has been added to thy use has not been taken from our property; nor have you come to the increase of your knowledge through the detriment of another's. Nay rather, thou thyself wilt henceforth by right not lack rich praise, who with a fiery genius hast becomingly imitated the nature of fire, from which, if thou wouldst take anything away, the whole remains that is transferred. Wherefore cease now to tremble, and to believe of a friend's character somewhat otherwise than rightly: for in this deed the wound of the fault pollutes us the more, if the stroke of envy smite. Farewell.
[47] he shrank from all obscenity, But how greatly Sidonius, while still a layman, shrank from obscenity, the second epistle of the second book teaches, by which he invites Domitius, a grave man, to his estate of Avitacum, and in the midst of an accurate description of that villa records these things: Here no base story stands exposed through the naked beauty of painted bodies, which, as it adorns the art, so it disfigures the artist. Absent are actors ridiculous in dress and in countenance, counterfeiting with many-colored pigments the furniture of Philistio. Absent are wrestlers, slippery and twisting in fisticuffs and grapplings, whose bouts, even when living men wrestle, the chaste rod of the gymnasiarchs at once breaks up if they are entangled too indecently. Wherefore also, in book 3, epistle 13, he praises his son Apollinaris for avoiding the immodest talk of certain persons, as we saw above on another occasion; and after he has there graphically painted a certain wanton parasite of his fatherland, at the end of the epistle he thus admonishes his son: Therefore thou wilt act according to my wish if thou associate not with the fellowship of such men even at a first meeting, especially of those to whose prostituted and theatrical talk modesty sets no reins, no bars: for those whose unbridled tongue, boasting without the brightness of honor, is polluted with the dregs of chattering wantonness, have also a most befouled conscience. Finally it more easily befalls that someone speaking serious things should live obscenely, than that one can be shown who is at once base in words and upright in morals. Farewell.
[48] Finally Sidonius in the lay state gave various tokens of Christian piety, and the tombs of the Saints among which, against the saint-fighting heretics of our time, the veneration of the Saints deserves to be observed, to whose patronage he fled by the Catholic rite. This we learn chiefly from book 5, epistle 17, where he writes thus to Eriphius after other things: We had come together at the tomb of St. Justus (he was bishop of Lyons, and is honored on the second day of September); but infirmity was a hindrance to thee, so that thou wast not then present. There had been a procession before dawn, an anniversary solemnity, an immense people of both sexes, whom the most capacious basilica could not hold, nor the crypt, however girt with wide-spreading porticoes. The observance of the vigils being finished, which the monks and the psalm-singing clerics had celebrated together with alternating sweetness, we withdrew each our several ways; yet not far, since we were to be at hand at the third hour, when the divine service was to be performed with the priests.
[49] But when in the year 467 he was setting out for Rome to the emperor Anthemius, he piously venerated by the Catholic rite; and had been seized by a fever on the journey, he suppliantly had recourse to the threshold of the Apostles, and experienced their intercession, as he himself narrates in book 1, epistle 5, in these words: Amid these things Rome too lay open to my sight; whose forms, and even naumachiae, I seemed about to drink in. Where, before I touched even the pomerium, having cast myself down at the triumphal threshold of the Apostles, I straightway felt that all languor had been driven from my ill-strong limbs. After these experiences of heavenly patronage, being received in a part of a hired lodging, and even now writing these things as I lie, a very little to rest
I bestow upon rest. From all that has been reported thus far the good disposition of Sidonius appears, which nevertheless he greatly perfected and increased with excellent virtues in his episcopate, of which we shall treat straightway, when we shall first have briefly set forth a certain new opinion concerning his monastic life.
[50] Our Saint nowhere in his writings indicates that he ever lived in the island of Lérins, but with no probable argument is he said much less that he ever there embraced the monastic life, although he often praises the institute of the monks of Lérins. Nevertheless Juan Bautista de Lezana, in the Annals of the Carmelites at the year of Christ 471, number 4, that is, volume 3, page 206, confidently asserts that St. Sidonius passed from the monastery of Lérins to the chair of Clermont. Any learned man sees well enough what Lezana intends by this assertion, since before, in the same Annals at the year 432, number 9, that is, page 152 of the volume just cited, he pronounced the following concerning Vincent of Lérins, a monk: That this Vincent and the other men of Lérins were emulators of the ancient Elian monks before they had imbibed the Benedictine rule of living, many of the things which we write here and there through this Work persuade.
[51] to have led a monastic life before his episcopate. But Joseph Antelmy, a Canon of Fréjus in Gaul, in his Diatribe on the Church of Riez and the Monastery of Lérins, chapter 5, opposes to these many assertions of Lezana this negative argument: What the institute of the men of Lérins was, he says, or under what rule of the ancient fathers those most blessed men professed the monastic life who were first admitted into that congregation, has hitherto been most difficult to attain, since no contemporary or nearly contemporary writer committed anything concerning it to posterity; and those who, living far from that time, have opened their opinion upon this matter, have either been so deceived, or, what I think more probable, have so wished to deceive others, that to have adduced their opinions is to have confuted them. To this purpose that writer alleges many things in the same place. But leaving such odious questions here undecided, we desire only to be taught whether it can be proved from ancient and trustworthy authors that St. Sidonius led a monastic life in the island of Lérins before his episcopate, to the tracing of whose epoch we now proceed.
§ V. The beginning of the episcopate, the reply to the congratulatory epistle of St. Lupus of Troyes, the Saint's humility and his sickness.
When the Saint had been compelled to ascend the chair of Clermont The most eminent Baronius, in the Ecclesiastical Annals at the year of Christ 472, number 13 and following, concerning the time in which St. Sidonius began to sit in the chair of Clermont, after his secular honors have been enumerated, thus reasons: Thus much as to his secular dignities; but as concerns his sacred office, the certain time of his episcopate seems able to be understood even from his own writings, as it were through a thin chink obliquely in a doorway. There is extant indeed his epistle written to St. Lupus, bishop of Troyes (this we shall exhibit below), given when Sidonius himself was made bishop, in which he implores the prayers of that most holy man, that he might bear with unhurt conscience the burden of the rule which he had then undertaken… But when that epistle was written, so that likewise the promotion of Sidonius may be ascertained, this must be investigated, if in any way it be permitted to attain what we desire. It must therefore be considered that the same man says that at the time in which he was writing that letter, Lupus had already spent forty-five years in the episcopal see… Since therefore Sidonius was then made bishop of Clermont, when St. Lupus had already spent nine lustres in his see, it must now be searched out what was the time of the see of St. Lupus of Troyes, that from it may likewise be made known the year in which Sidonius was advanced to the episcopate.
[53] about the end of the year 471, The deeds of St. Lupus are extant, though in a brief compendium, yet handed down anciently in writing with all credit by a man of his own time; from which it may be understood in what year chiefly he was made bishop: for when it says that St. Lupus himself was joined as a colleague to St. Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, in the legation undertaken into Britain against the Pelagians, when the same Lupus was already in his second year in the episcopate, from this it must necessarily be gathered that he was made bishop of Troyes in the year of the Lord four hundred and twenty-seven, since it is already established, from what was said in the preceding fifth volume of the Annals on the authority of St. Prosper, that the holy Bishops undertook that legation in the year of the Redeemer four hundred and twenty-nine. Add therefore nine lustres completed after the year four hundred and twenty-seven, in which we have said St. Lupus was made bishop, and you will assuredly come to the present year of the Lord four hundred and seventy-two. Since therefore it is established that in the year in which St. Lupus himself had already passed nine lustres in the episcopate Sidonius was made bishop of Clermont, it must assuredly be said that he was made bishop in this very year of the Lord four hundred and seventy-two, when he was about forty years old. Sirmond, Noris, and the latest editors of Gallia Christiana embrace this chronology of the most eminent Baronius.
[54] Tillemont, however, in volume 16 of the Ecclesiastical Monuments, page 750, prefers to place the beginning of Sidonius's episcopate at the end of the year 471, or the beginning of the year 472 for the reason that this epoch seems better to agree with the history. It does not please us to dispute more laboriously about so small a discrepancy of time, since Tillemont's chronology can easily be reconciled with the opinion of our Bosch, who in volume VII of July, page 63, began the episcopate of St. Lupus at the end of the year 426, and there established his opinion with certain arguments. Therefore begin the episcopate of St. Sidonius about the end of the year 471 or the beginning of the year 472, as you will. But beware of following in the determining of this year our Bucher, who in book 18 of Belgium Romanum, chapter 6, number 4, wrongly affixed the beginning of that episcopate to the end of the year 469 or the beginning of 470, and moreover erred in assigning the year of St. Sidonius's death, as we shall afterwards see. Nor does the opinion of Pagi please us, who in the Criticism of the Ecclesiastical Annals of Baronius at the year 472, number 5, defers the beginning of Sidonius's chair to the year 473 on account of certain slight reasons, which our Bosch in the preliminary Commentary to the Acts of St. Lupus, at the page just cited, refutes, and which he further noted as refuted by Tillemont. Leaving therefore these chronological trifles, we proceed to the investigating of the chief virtues of our holy Prelate.
[55] Therefore from the reasoning of the most eminent Baronius and from the opinion everywhere received it is probable enough he had been compelled to ascend, that St. Sidonius was elected bishop of the Arverni in the year 471 or 472, who without doubt demanded this Man for the governing of their church on account of his excellent gifts of genius and eloquence. But we know not the particular circumstances of this election, which neither the holy Prelate himself, unless we are mistaken, nor other writers left to posterity. From his writings we know only this, that the burden was laid upon him almost against his will and while he resisted: for in book 5, epistle 3, he writes that the weight of so great a profession was forced upon me, most unworthy, so that the wretched man was compelled to teach before he learned. Nay more, in the address at Bourges, which is reported in book 7, epistle 9, he publicly expressed the same feeling of his mind before the people in these words: But now a far different condition awaits my mediocrity, upon whom, walking through sighing gulfs and the wallowing-places of shameful deeds, the weight of this profession has been forced; and before I render to any of the good the obedience of a learner, I am compelled to owe to the rest the duty of a teacher. Often elsewhere he repeats like things, and out of a deep lowliness of mind pronounces himself most unworthy of the episcopate.
[56] St. Lupus, bishop of Troyes, But otherwise did the illustrious prelates of Gaul think concerning him, among whom St. Lupus of Troyes congratulates St. Sidonius on his new episcopal dignity, and at the same time paternally admonishes him concerning the due administration of the office undertaken. This epistle of St. Lupus, which is most honorable to our Saint, in d'Achery's Spicilegium, volume 5, page 579 and following, runs thus: Lupus to the lord pope Sidonius. I give thanks to the Lord our God Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, who has called thee, dearest brother, in this general staggering and pressure of His most beloved spouse the church, to its support and consolation, unto the priesthood, that thou mayest be a lamp in Israel; and that, as thou hast discharged the ambitious honors of worldly service with the highest praise, so thou mayest, Christ Himself helping, run alertly through the laborious duties and humble ministries of the heavenly service, and not, thy hand being set to the plough, turn thine eyes backward after the manner of sluggish husbandmen.
[57] in a congratulatory epistle Thou hast lately attained the summits of the emperor through most glorious alliances; thou hast exercised, with honor and amid clamorous applause, the ornaments of the consular robe and splendid prefectures, and whatever the restless train of desires can imagine for itself as more blessed in this world. The order is changed, and thou hast reached a summit in the house of the Lord, which is to be handled not in the overflowing brightness of worldly pride, but in the utmost lowliness of mind and in the humble abasement of a heart laid low. Thou who once strovest to surpass the ornaments of thy birth by added honors, and didst not believe it enough for a man to be equal to the rest and not to go beyond his equals, hast come into that state in which, though superior, thou oughtest to reckon thyself superior to none; being set beneath the least of thy subjects, thou shalt be the more honored the more the humility of Christ shall gird thee, and thou shalt kiss the soles of those upon whose heads thou once didst disdain to set thy feet. This labor assuredly now lies upon thee, that thou be the servant of all, who didst seem the lord of all, and that thou bend to others, who didst tread upon the rest; not because thou wast proud, but because by the majesty — not to say the vanity — of thy past dignities thou hadst to go before the rest as far as now thou hast to withdraw behind the rest.
[58] strongly and sweetly admonishes him of his office. Do therefore now transfer to divine things that genius which availed so much for human. Let thy peoples gather from thy mouth the thorns from the head of the Crucified, who from thy words used to gather the roses of worldly pomp; and let them take from the speech of a priest the words of heavenly discipline, who took from the speech of a ruler the rule of civil discipline. I indeed, who loved thee so much when thou wast following the dryness of the world, with what measure thinkest thou I now love thee following the richness of heaven? Already I am being poured out, and my dissolution is at hand; yet I shall not think that I am dissolved, who, though loosed, live in thee, and leave thee in the church. I rejoice to be unclothed, after thou hast put on the church, and the church has put thee on. Hail, old in friendship, but new in brotherhood. The last title suppresses the ancient ones; there is nothing that today I would remember of past love, since the present dignity makes charity both firmer and more tenacious. Oh, if God would that I might embrace thee! But in spirit I accomplish what I cannot in body, and, Christ being present, I venerate and kiss no longer a prefect of the commonwealth, but a prefect of the church, who is to me a son in age, a brother in dignity, and a father in merits. Pray for me,
that, being consummated in the Lord, I may consummate the work which He enjoined, and in Him may at last fulfill the times that remain — I who (woe is me) have fulfilled so many and so great things with those which I ought not; but with the Lord there is mercy. Be mindful of me.
[59] To this congratulation and paternal admonition St. Sidonius, in book 6, epistle 1, thus humbly answers: To this St. Sidonius replied, Blessed be the Holy Spirit and the Father of almighty God, that thou, father of fathers and bishop of bishops, and a second James of thine age, from a certain watchtower of charity, and that not of the lower Jerusalem, lookest over all the members of the Church of our God; worthy to console all the weak, and deservedly to be consulted by all. And what now shall I, earth rotten and foul with guilt, answer worthy of this condescension? Suffering both the want of thy saving discourse and the fear of it, I am led by the remembrance of a punishable life to cry out to thee what that colleague of thine said to the Lord: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." But if this fear be not tempered by affection, I fear that I may be left after the example of the Gerasenes, and that thou depart from my borders. Nay rather — what is more profitable for me — I will bind thee by the condition set forth by my fellow-leper, so as to say to thee: "If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean." By which saying he no more betrayed what he asked of Christ than he published what he believed.
[60] Is it then that, since thou art beyond doubt the first of all pontiffs in the whole world, so far as it extends, and gave thanks since men are subject to thy prerogative, since even the throng of the college trembles at thy censure, since in comparison with your gravity even the hearts of the aged grow childish; since, after the sweated watches of the warfare of Lérins and nine lustres already run through in an apostolic see, the spiritual camps venerate thee as a most renowned chief centurion of both orders of the Saints — thou nevertheless, withdrawing thyself a little from the company of the spearmen and standard-bearers, dost not despise thy lowest camp-servants and sutlers, and to the outermost of the baggage-draggers, who through their own folly still sit by the burdens of the flesh, carriest round the standards of the cross so long borne, and stretchest out the hand of thy tongue to those wounded in conscience? Thou knowest, as it appears, veteran commander, how to gather up those wounded from the opposing line, and, a most skilled trumpeter, to sound the retreat from sins to Christ; and after the example of the Shepherd of the Gospel thou rejoicest no more if the sound remain than if the desperate do not remain so.
[61] Thee therefore, rule of manners, thee, pillar of virtues, thee in a modest epistle, — if it be lawful for the guilty to flatter — true sweetness, because holy, it has not irked to handle with the fingers of exhortation the sores of a most despicable worm. It was no avarice in thee to feed with counsels a soul fasting through frailty, and out of the storehouse of thy deepest love to pour out for us a measure of the humility we must follow. But pray that I may some day come to my senses, and perceive how greatly the mass of the burden imposed weighs down my neck. By the continuance of crimes I, wretched man, have come to such necessity that I am now compelled to pray for the sin of the people, for whom a people of innocent men could scarcely obtain a hearing if it should supplicate: for who, being sick, may well impart a cure? Who, having a fever, may with a burning touch distinguish a healthy pulse? Who would rightly praise a deserter's knowledge of the art of war? Who, being full of food, would fitly censure an abstainer? Most unworthy of mortals, I must needs say what I decline to do; and, damnable by my own words, since I command what I do not fulfill, I am daily compelled to pronounce the same sentence against myself.
[62] in which his humility chiefly shines, But if thou, between me and Him with whom thou art crucified, Jesus Christ our Lord, shalt stand as intercessor for the people of my crimes, a Moses rather younger than less, we shall not further go down alive into hell; nor, being inflamed by the incitements of carnal vices, shall we longer kindle strange fire upon the altar of the Lord. For although the balance of glory looks not upon us, as being guilty, yet we shall rejoice enough and more than enough if by thy prayer we may be able to lift up the breast of our inward man — if not whole unto reward, at least scarred unto pardon. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord pope. An explanation of this epistle of reply, which is here and there obscure and somewhat hyperbolical, the curious reader will find in the notes of Savaron and of our Sirmond. Further, from it there is sufficiently plain the great modesty of St. Sidonius, to speak with Baronius, who thought of himself only in the humblest way, although his endowments were very many, on which he might have been lifted up.
[63] which he knew how to distinguish from pusillanimity, Certain unskilled persons are wont wrongly to confound humility with pusillanimity, whom, as unjust judges of things, St. Sidonius himself in book 7, epistle 9, in the address at Bourges, reproves in these words: Who would not be exasperated when he sees the sincerity of virtues befouled by the imputation of vices? If we choose a humble man, he is called abject; if we bring forward an upright one, he is judged to be proud; if one less trained, he is thought fit for mockery because of his unskillfulness; if one somewhat learned, he is cried down as puffed up because of his knowledge; if a severe man, he is shuddered at as cruel; if an indulgent one, he is blamed for laxity; if a simple one, he is despised as dull; if a keen one, he is shunned as crafty; if a diligent one, he is judged superstitious; if a relaxed one, he is judged negligent; if a shrewd one, greedy; if a quiet one, he is pronounced slothful. If we put forward an abstemious man, he is taken for a miser; if one who feeds others by his dining, he is charged with gluttony; if one who fasts while feeding others, he is accused of vanity. Liberty they condemn as wickedness; modesty they disdain as boorishness; the rigid they hold not dear because of their austerity; the gentle with them grow cheap through familiarity.
[64] and joined with the fear of the divine judgment, Since our Saint there treats of the choosing of a worthy prelate for the people of Bourges, and so accurately distinguishes virtues from vices, he doubtless knew how in the episcopal charge to join a deep lowliness of mind with pastoral vigilance and magnanimity: for the Angelic Doctor in the Summa Theologica, 2-2, question 161, article 1, ad tertium, teaches that humility restrains the appetite lest it tend to great things beyond right reason; but magnanimity impels the mind to great things according to right reason. Whence it is plain that magnanimity is not opposed to humility; but they agree in this, that each is according to right reason. Yet St. Sidonius seems so deeply to have engraved upon his mind the aforesaid teaching of Lupus, bishop of Troyes, that he set in humility the chief foundation of the other virtues. Hence, an excellent despiser of himself and at the same time an undaunted defender of his flock, he everywhere reckons himself most vile. Hence also in various epistles which he wrote after taking up the episcopate he frankly and without any disguise confesses that he dreads the severe judgments of God, and fears for his own salvation on account of the office laid upon him, of which he acknowledges himself most unworthy.
[65] Perhaps from that dread or anxious solicitude he contracted the sickness from which perhaps he contracted a sickness. with which he labored at the beginning of his pastoral administration, as he himself in book 5, epistle 3, seems to hint in these words: Meanwhile, if you at least are well, it is well. But I, weighed down by the mass of an unhappy conscience, lately by the force of fevers came to the utmost bound of health; as one upon whom, most unworthy, the weight of so great a profession has been forced: who, wretched man, being compelled to teach before learning, and presuming to preach good before doing it, like a barren tree, since I have no works for fruit, scatter words for leaves. For the rest, pray that it may be worth the labor that we have returned almost from the seat of hell; lest, if we remain in our past crimes, our living begin to pertain rather to the death of the soul. Our Saint in book 7, epistle 6, in book 9, epistles 3 and 8, and often in other letters expressed like feelings of a lowly mind, which perhaps below on another occasion will be reported.
§ VI. After taking up the episcopate, the great change of manners, and the various virtues of the Saint.
The episcopal charge being undertaken, After St. Sidonius had been compelled to accept the episcopate of the city of Clermont, he probably imitated his friend by name Maximus, who likewise at the demand of the people had passed from the lay to the episcopal dignity, and whose outward change he himself, an eyewitness, in book 4, epistle 24, thus paints in living colors: With Maximus I had old rights not only of acquaintance but of hospitality. Therefore I gladly turned aside from my journey to my friend, although his villa was not a few miles distant from the public highway. When I came, he himself met me, whom I had formerly known as upright in body, nimble in gait, free in voice, generous in face — much unlike his former self in his walk. The man's dress, gait, modesty, color, speech were religious; then his hair short, his beard long, three-legged stools, curtains of Cilician cloth hung at the doors, a bed having nothing of down, a table nothing of purple; his very courtesy so kindly that it was frugal, and not so abounding in meats as in pulse. Certainly, if there was anything richer among the dishes, he indulged not himself but his guests therein. When we rose, I secretly asked those who stood by what kind of life he had seized upon out of the three orders; whether he was living as a monk, or a cleric, or a penitent. They said that he was discharging a priesthood lately forced upon him, with which the love of his fellow-citizens had by their faction bound him, refusing it. If anything in this fragment of the epistle occurs too obscurely, Savaron and Sirmond may be consulted in their notes. Hence meanwhile we understand the modesty and frugality of that Maximus, now a prelate, whom St. Sidonius doubtless emulated, as may in some sort be drawn from the fourteenth epistle of the seventh book, part of which we transcribed above at the beginning of the fourth paragraph.
[67] But whatever was the bodily appearance of our Saint after taking up the episcopate, he renounced the poetic art, it concerns us nothing or little. Certainly that his mind was then wholly changed we know even from this, that at that time he renounced the poetic art, in which before he greatly delighted. This change the Saint himself indicates in book 8, epistle 4, when he writes thus to a poet living in the country, after other things: While thou bendest no less to the pen than to the ploughshare, it is hard to discern whether the master's field or his genius has been the better tilled. Here therefore (so far as I remember) thou hast wrought out by lamplight swift iambics, keen elegiacs, and rounded hendecasyllables, and other poems redolent of the flowers of the muses and of thyme, to be sung now by the men of Narbonne, now by those of Béziers — a doubtful question whether more swiftly or more beautifully — being about to enlarge thy favor among thy contemporaries and thy fame among posterity. Certainly so it seemed to me, as often as thy verses were brought from the anvil of meditation as though still hot — to me, who, though I write not well, judge well. But, as must be confessed, an earlier age justly gave its leisure to such studies, or, what is truer, was occupied with them. Now it is time that serious things be read, serious things be written, and that we think rather of perpetual life than of perpetual memory, and remember exceedingly that after death it is not our little works but our works that must be weighed.
[68] as from various of his epistles, Still more clearly, in book 9, epistle 12, he expresses his purpose of having left poetry, where he answers thus to Oresius, who asked for certain poems: There has come into our hands a page proceeding from thee, which bears much likeness to Spanish salt cut in the ridges of Tarragona: for to him who examines it it is clear and yet also deceptive, nor for that very reason any the less honeyed. The speech is sweet and keen in its propositions; so
it delights by its eloquence as much as it disturbs by its bidding: since he, little measuring what order of life I follow, now asks new songs of me. First, from the very beginning of my religious profession I renounced this exercise chiefly, because forsooth it might be made to serve levity, if the lightness of verses should occupy me whom the gravity of actions had begun to regard.
Then, having brought forward another excuse, St. Sidonius concludes the same epistle thus: We shall therefore hold to something midway; and just as I shall now dictate no fresh epigrams, so I will send thee such letters as may lie at hand stuffed with verse — namely, from before the necessity of my present office; asking that thou be not so far a transgressor of justice as to suppose that I shall never refrain from writing of this sort. For I shall be no less increased by thy favor if perchance thou deign to reckon me henceforth modest rather than witty.
[69] and is established by a certain poem, Finally our holy Prelate afterwards repented that in his youth he had composed profane or jesting verses. Whence he firmly resolves that henceforth nothing was to be sung by him but the glorious triumphs of the Saints, if ever he should write anything in bound style. These feelings of his mind he expressed in a Sapphic poem, which is inserted in book 9, epistle 16, and whose latter part, bearing upon the present matter, runs thus:
Besides heroics, I wove many jests in many rags; often I rolled elegiacs subjoined to six feet with a twofold clause.
Now, wont to ride upon eleven syllables, I sported swiftly; and in the Sapphic meter I sang frequently, in the hurried iambus rarely.
Nor can I recall how much I once wrote in the first heat of youth: whence would that the greater part might be silenced and hidden:
For with the goal of old age nearer, whatever we are joined to in our last years, it shames us the more, if the age sported anything light, now to remember.
Shuddering at which, I have transferred every kind of care to the cultivation of letters, lest, being guilty by too wanton a song, I be guilty in deed.
And lest I rot, dissolved by pleasant sayings, I will so join the figure of art and its trappings that the fame of a poet may not stain the rigor of a cleric.
Finally, to any epigram hereafter I shall not be borne inclined, and in tender meter or in grave, I shall from now be compelled to bring forth no song swiftly.
Unless perhaps I tell the inquisitions of the persecutors, and how the martyrs, deserving heaven, purchased at the price of death the rewards of life.
Of whom let a hymn first chant for me him who held the see of Toulouse, cast down headlong from the highest step of the Capitol.
Whom, a denier of Jove and Minerva, and confessing the goods of the cross of Christ, a raging populace bound to the side of an unyoked bull;
that, the ox being goaded, his course might scatter the mangled corpse down the precipice, the rocks stained with the warm pulp of the loosened brain.
After Saturninus I would have the quills sing those whom I have proved to be the rest of my patrons, who helped me, anxious, through hard labors.
Each of whom by name pious words have not now strength to contain in verse; yet those whom the strings cannot sound, hearts shall sound.
From these verses, maturely weighed, we gather that our holy Bishop bade farewell to profane poetry, and thenceforth bestowed his labor upon writing familiar letters from time to time. Nay more, in these very epistles he changed a witty and too studied style into a more common and serious one, lest anything should misbecome a bishop, as the Saint himself indicates in book 4, epistles 3 and 10.
[70] Mamertus Claudianus, in the epistle which we gave in §1, and exercised the virtues proper to a bishop. among the other virtues of St. Sidonius praises his mercy toward the poor, of which St. Gregory of Tours also, in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 22, relates the following: But since he was of magnificent sanctity, and, as we have said, the first among the senators, he very often, without his wife's knowledge, carried off silver vessels from the house and bestowed them on the poor. When she learned this, she was scandalized at him; yet nevertheless, the price having been given to the needy, she restored the pieces to the house. We conjecture that he was also liberal and munificent toward the churches from book 8, epistle 4, at the end of which he thus exhorts his friend Consentius: Let the tongue keep watch for heavenly praises, the soul for judgments, the right hand for offerings; but chiefly the right hand for offerings, because whatever thou scatterest to the churches thou gatherest for thyself: to the practice of which virtue this above all will be able to kindle thee, that, set among riches of whatever kind (which are falsely called goods by the foolish), if we do anything, it is ours; if we have anything, it is another's. Who would easily persuade himself that the churches were not adorned with sacred offerings by this holy and munificent Prelate, to the distributing of which he so strongly and piously stirred up Consentius? For the rest, the praised Gregory of Tours implicitly assigns many virtues to St. Sidonius, when in the place just cited, and in another to be alleged hereafter, he affirms that he was of magnificent sanctity, and that he led a holy life in this world: for a magnificent or eminent sanctity is not wont to be acquired without very many virtues.
[71] Yet his ruling virtue, so to speak, was humility, which he reckoned so proper to bishops Although out of humility he judged, that in book 4, epistle 14, to Polemius he wrote the following: In the men of our order, even if something still stinks of negligence, yet nothing now swells with pride. From the same fount of humility flowed the excuse which in book 4, epistle 17, the Saint offered to Count Arbogastes, who asked for a certain interpretation of Holy Scripture, in this manner: As to thy wishing that I, an unworthy interpreter, should prattle something about the spiritual pages, these things are more justly to be asked of priests near at hand in place, advanced in age, illustrious in faith, well known in works, ready of speech, tenacious of memory, in short better endowed with every gift of lofty merits. For, to leave aside the bishop of your own city, a most consummate man and blessed alike in the consciousness and in the fame of all the virtues, far more opportunely will the renowned fathers and chief hierophants of the Gauls be questioned by thee on whatever matters — Lupus, not set far enough off, and Auspicius, not a little near; whose abundant learning thy consultation does not suffice to winnow. Accordingly, pardon me — kindly indeed, but also justly — that in this part of thy requests I have not obeyed: because if it is fitting that you flee inexperience, it becomes me also to avoid boastfulness.
[72] that he was unfit for conducting affairs, So too St. Sidonius in book 9, epistle 2, most modestly refused to undertake a spiritual lucubration which Euphronius, prelate of Autun, desired to be made by him, and among other excuses humbly offers this: What of the fact that it would also be arrogantly and unbecomingly done, if I should take up the weight of the enjoined business — a new cleric, an old sinner, of light knowledge and heavy conscience? Nor did our Saint hold this humble opinion of himself only at the beginning of his episcopate, but he disclosed the same likewise after some years of episcopal administration in the sixth epistle of the seventh book, writing thus to Bishop Basilius: My iniquity is so great that scarcely even the efficacy of thy supplication can heal it from the assiduity of its lapses… Nor am I so unmindful of myself as not to recall that I am he whom a conscience yet to be washed with long weeping weighs down. Besides, in book 9, epistles 3 and 8, and often elsewhere, he discloses such tokens of humility.
[73] nevertheless amid various factions he persuaded the people of Bourges Even though St. Sidonius professed himself an unworthy sinner and useless for all things, yet most of the bishops of Gaul bore a far different judgment concerning him, and without doubt those prelates had well perceived his exceptional endowments who committed to him the difficult business of choosing a prelate for Bourges, which in a city divided by factions he brought to a happy issue when he chose St. Simplicius, as might be more fully related from his own letters. But let us rather hear the most eminent Baronius, who in the Ecclesiastical Annals, at the year 472, number 19, among the eulogies of St. Sidonius briefly relates that election in these words: Further, he is known to have been, though younger, of such esteem among the elder holy bishops, that when a contention had arisen in choosing the metropolitan bishop of the church of Bourges, to him alone was the free arbitration of choosing whom he would deferred by the priests of the province, by the clergy and the people; when he himself declared how greatly he prevailed in judgment for the discerning of men, choosing St. Simplicius, whom all received with the highest joy. There are extant on these matters letters given by the same Sidonius to divers bishops, and likewise the very address then delivered by him, by which, if thou read it, thou wilt marvel how great was his eloquence in speaking.
[74] Then Baronius reports a fragment of this elegant address, the election of a bishop by a single address, which is subjoined to book 7, epistle 9, and can be read entire, since our Saint was compelled to send it to Perpetuus, bishop of Tours, as is signified in the aforesaid prefatory epistle in these words: Thou enjoinest that I direct to thee the oration which I seem to have delivered to the people at Bourges in the church; to which neither rhetorical partition, nor oratorical threats, nor grammatical figures supplied a fitting comeliness and discipline: for it did not there please me, as is the custom with those who declaim exactly, to fit in either historical weights, or poetic figures, or the sparks of controversial clauses. For while the seditions of parties, their zeals and variances, hurried me in different directions, the wrong done supplied me matter for dictating in the measure that preoccupation took away my time: for so great was the throng of competitors that two benches could not have received the most numerous candidates for a single chair. All were pleasing to themselves, all displeasing to all.
[75] For neither should we have had strength to take any counsel in common, from which his authority and genius are gathered. unless the people, softened, and making a sacrifice of its own judgment, had rather submitted itself to the priestly judgment — a few of the presbyters indeed muttering in corners, but openly not even murmuring; because most of them feared their own order no less than the rest. Therefore, while in public each man guards against all, it came about that all heard without disdain what they would thereafter eagerly seek. And so take the page joined to the volumes below, which, dictated in two watches of a single summer night, Christ being witness, I greatly fear lest thou believe the reading itself, which proves this of itself, more than me. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord pope. Hence you see above all the ready genius of our Saint, who in two watches of a single summer night — that is, in the space of four or five hours — composed so effective an address. Thence, moreover, it is clear that from the teaching of Christ the simplicity of the dove is joined with the prudence of the serpent without difficulty, and that those greatly err who reckon humble men unfit for conducting affairs prudently and bravely. But this popular error will be refuted freely and abundantly from some of the following paragraphs.
§ VII. The fatherly solicitude of the holy Prelate for his flock, and his obliging charity toward his neighbor.
To this Prelate, diligently instructing his people Our holy Bishop visited his diocese at a set time, as is drawn out from book 9, epistle 16, and then without doubt instructed the people with salutary admonitions or addresses. Although those instructions were perhaps never committed to writing, or at least have not come down to us, yet their matter can be gathered from Ruricius, who afterwards to the see
of Limoges was raised, such as we may learn: for he, an ear-witness, begins thus the eighth epistle of the first book, which he inscribes to his own peculiar lord in Christ, his lord and patron Sidonius the bishop, in Canisius, volume 5 of the Ancient Reading, page 467: I recall that I have often heard, when you preached, that we can in no wise be cleansed from our iniquities unless we have confessed our crimes, our conscience pricking us. For who could, I will not say obtain, but even seek indulgence, unless he joined to his lamentation the confession of his error? Thus St. Sidonius rather often gave addresses on rightly receiving the remission of sins, or on the Sacrament of penance.
[77] Ruricius, afterwards bishop of Limoges, The praised Ruricius made so much of the effective instruction of this holy Prelate that he desired to become his disciple, and therefore in the volume just cited, page 468, gave to him the following epistle: So has the recent preaching and the ancient love of your piety allured me, that I dare rather often to do injury to your ears with my ineptitudes, while I desire to reach, so far as is granted to a barren little wit, your discipline: which, though it be a great and difficult thing to attain, is yet a fair and lofty thing to follow. For of the highest things not only the attainment but the very imitation is delightful; because scarcely ever does anyone wholly lack a portion of that thing to which he has striven to climb and to come.
[78] bestows great praises, I desire therefore, my lord, I desire, I say, to be refreshed with thy foods, to be given drink from thy fount, to be filled with thy banquets, to be fattened with thy feasts; which, if anyone, while you distribute them, shall not have tasted with the tip of the mouth, but, a guest craving them with all the inward parts of his soul, shall have swallowed them, and afterwards hidden the same in the inmost of his breast to be ruminated, he will begin with continual eructations to break forth into the praise of the almighty Lord; stuffed in heart, fasting in mouth, while full he hungers, and satisfied yet hungering, to be more fully satisfied in the regeneration. Nor can that food be lacking whose pasture is in the Word. Obtain by your patronage that I may deserve to be a sharer of these delights; and come as helpers to me striving beyond the measure of my strength, and at once let me not be found a stranger to the sheepfold entrusted to you. Pray, and carry back the straying sheep from the pastures of the world to the Lord's folds; because I trust that by your intercessions he may be made a lamb who has deserved to be your disciple. From this allegorical epistle we understand that the instructions of St. Sidonius were such as to stir up his own people not only to the keeping of the commandments, but also to the embracing of a greater perfection of life.
[79] which St. Sidonius by an ingenious reply Further, Ruricius in the sixteenth epistle of the same book (this is read in Canisius, volume 5, page 473) extols St. Sidonius with great praises, which the most modest Bishop in book 8, epistle 10, strives to elude by this ingenious reply: That letters are to thee alike a use and a delight I greatly rejoice; for how great a flame of thoughts or wave of words accompanies your style I would more freely assert, did not thou, while thou strivest not a little to praise me, forbid thyself to be praised at all. And although in thy epistle charity keeps its sweetness, nature its fluency, skill its discipline; yet in the choice of matter alone thou hast sinned; although that very thing may be commended in the intention which thou seemest to have erred in by judgment. Thou appliest huge titles of praise to my character. But if thou hadst made any account of my shame, it had been fitting for thee to think on that saying of Symmachus: As true praise adorns, so false praise chastises. Yet in this place, if I measure thy mind aright, beyond the affection which thou showest to be very great, thou hast done this also by art: for it is the custom of eloquent men to prove the capacity of their wits by the difficulties of their subjects, and there to fix the skilled pen, as it were a plowshare of a fertile breast, where the argument of a barren matter, like the dry clod of a meager sod, goes hungry.
[80] The world teems with like examples. The physician is known in desperate cases, the pilot in a storm: tries to avoid. preceding perils exalt the fame of all these, which indeed lies hid unless it find where it may be tested. So too the great orator, if he undertake a narrow business, then more applaudably displays an ample genius. Marcus Tullius in his other pleadings conquered others; in the defense of Aulus Cluentius he conquered himself. Marcus Fronto, while he stood out in the rest of his orations, in the Pelops preferred himself to himself. Caius Plinius carried home more glory from the platform of the Hundred Men on behalf of Attia Viriola than when he spoke a panegyric comparable to the incomparable prince Marcus Ulpius. So thou also hast done, who, while thou wishest to exercise thy knowledge, hast not feared that my conscience would be a hindrance to thee. Rather heal my languors by supplicating; and do not, through the snare of an ill-flattering eloquence, weigh down with the burden of false glory the frailty of a soul still sick. Truly, since thy life is fairer than thy fair speech, thou indulgest me more if for my sake thou wilt rather pray than plead. Farewell. Now we shall report some works of mercy or of fraternal charity which St. Sidonius exercised, and which he judged to pertain to his episcopal solicitude.
[81] It was the custom in those times that prelates should intercede for their subjects with kings or other leading men, The charity of the holy Prelate and even commend their temporal affairs to them, as is sufficiently clear from the aforementioned address at Bourges, in which our Saint thus speaks to the citizens, and at once brings in those who answer: If I shall have named any one of the monks — though he be one to be compared with the Pauls, the Antonys, the Hilarions, the Macarii, and though the prerogative of a pursued anchoritic life accompany him — at once the murmur of ignoble dwarfs complaining beats upon my ears, clamored about with unruly tumult: "This man who is named," they say, "fulfills the office not of a bishop but rather of an abbot; and he can intercede for souls with the heavenly judge rather than for bodies with the earthly one." Then nevertheless, toward the end of the address, he commends St. Simplicius, whom he had designated bishop for them, among his other endowments also on that side, in these words: If the necessity of undertaking an embassy has pressed, not once has he stood for this city before skin-clad kings or before purple-robed princes.
[82] And so the holy Prelate thought this burden laid upon him together with the episcopate, toward country folk, and in every necessity acknowledged himself a debtor to all. Wherefore he did not fear to appeal to bishops or other princes, so as to avert or repair even a temporal loss of his subjects. This becomes manifest from book 3, epistle 9, in which he commends to Riothamus, king of the Britons, a poor countryman of his diocese, from whom British soldiers had snatched away his slaves, in this manner: The custom of my discourse is kept; for we mingle complaint with greeting, not at all aiming at this, that my pen be obliging in its salutations and harsh in its pages; but because those things always happen concerning which it is certain that a man of my place or order is set at odds if he speak, and sins if he be silent. But we ourselves also regard the burden of your modesty, whose bashfulness has always been such that you would blush for the faults of others. The bearer of these letters, humble, obscure, and despicable even to the point of the loss due to a harmless indolence, laments that his slaves have been carried off, the Britons secretly enticing them. It is uncertain to me whether the plea be well founded; but if, between the parties set face to face, you impartially unbind the charges, I judge that this toilworn man can prove what he alleges; if indeed, among men shrewd, armed, tumultuous, defiant in strength, in number, in fellowship, he can be heard on the footing of equity and goodness — alone, unarmed, abject, a rustic, a stranger, poor. Farewell. Because of the beginning of this epistle we suspect that St. Sidonius had written again before to the same king on this matter.
[83] widows, This Saint, patron of the afflicted, moreover commends to Bishop Pragmatius a pious widow of his diocese, against whom a suit had been brought by Agrippinus, a crafty presbyter, and in book 6, epistle 2, praises her thus: The venerable matron Eutropia, so far as concerns us, is of singular example (who, with thrift and kindness contending in her, feeds the poor no less by her fastings than by her food, and, ever watchful in the worship of Christ, alone compels sins to sleep within her); to the sorrows of her bereavement the necessity of a lawsuit being added, she hastens to seek, as the remedy of a double evil, the perfection of your consolation. Then, having set forth the causes of the litigation, he exhorts Pragmatius to settle the suit in whatever way: For holy Eutropia, he says toward the end of the same epistle, if you give any credit to my surety, counts it a victory if she does not go to law even after her losses. This St. Eutropia is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology on the fifteenth day of September, although Saussay in his Gallican Martyrology placed her on the twenty-sixth day of the same month. Further, that litigious Agrippinus is perhaps one of those two presbyters who persecuted St. Sidonius, as we shall relate hereafter from St. Gregory of Tours.
[84] the afflicted, We do not doubt that St. Sidonius consoled with great affection of compassion his subjects afflicted with adversities, since he rendered that office of charity to the bishop of Marseilles, whom in book 9, epistle 4, he raises up by the hope of a heavenly reward and thus exhorts to patience by the example of Christ: That you lately endured many anguishes through the necessity of certain brethren has come by a tearful report to those who weep. But thou, flower of priests, gem of pontiffs, strong in knowledge, stronger in conscience, despise the threats and waves of worldly storms; for thou thyself hast often taught that one comes to the promised banquets of the patriarchs, or to the nectar of heavenly cups, through the chalices of earthly bitternesses. Willing or unwilling, whoever obtains the kingdom of the despised Mediator follows His example. However many bowls of anxieties the affliction of the present life may proffer us, we bear little, if we remember what He drank at the gibbet who invites us to heaven. But how great was the gentleness of this our holy Prelate toward penitent sinners will appear from the following example.
[85] sinners A certain man of the diocese of Troyes, by name Gallus, had deserted his wife and fled to the city of Clermont. This being known, St. Lupus the bishop sent letters to St. Sidonius in which he strongly and sweetly set forth the offense of this wanderer, that he might bring him back to right living. When St. Sidonius had read those letters aloud to Gallus, he at once repented of the deed and promised his return. Whence our gentle Prelate in book 6, epistle 9, answers St. Lupus of Troyes in this manner: Gallus, now an honorable man, because when bidden he did not delay to return to his wife, brings back the compliance of my letters and the effect of yours. When the page which you had sent was unsealed to him, straightway, pricked in heart, he groaned, and judged the epistle to have been directed not to me but as a sentence against himself. And so at once he pledged, prepared, and seized upon the journey to his own country. Him, on account of this very swiftness of repentance, we took care to address not reprovingly but rather consolingly; because a hastened correction borders upon innocence.
[86] Yet our Saint sometimes mingled severity with mildness, penitents as is established from the twenty-third epistle of the fourth book, in which he thus intercedes with his father on behalf of a certain runaway youth: Thy son, nay rather our common son, (he was doubtless a spiritual son of the holy Prelate, since he was dwelling in the diocese of Clermont) has run to me; who, having left thee, grieves that he has done wrong, overwhelmed by the shame of repenting his desertion. Therefore, having heard the tenor of his fault, I rebuked him as he lurked, with words
bitter, with threatening countenance, and with my voice indeed, but in thy stead; crying that he was worthy of disinheritance, of the cross, of the sack, and of the other punishments of parricides. At these things he blushed in confusion, in no way deprecating his error by any shameless excuse: but when I pressed him, convicted on every count, he joined to his shame the companions of tears, so flowing and pouring forth abundantly that they gave assurance of a correction to follow. I ask therefore that thou be merciful to one severe against himself; and, following the Lord, do not hold him damnable by thy judgment when he confesses himself guilty; whom, if thou unmoved shouldst bid to undergo unheard-of kinds of penalties, he cannot be tortured more with grief through thee than through himself.
[87] Free his despair from fear, free my confidence; was extended so far and wide, and by the necessity of paternal affection, if I interpret rightly, absolve thyself also, who art consumed with hidden grief as the son is consumed with public. To whom it is plain that I have done very much wrong, if thou too shalt have done even a little; which certainly, as I hope, thou wilt not do, unless thou art hard, harder than crags, or persistest, more rigid than unsplittable adamants. Therefore, if of thy character and of thy friendships I justly presume better things, be favorable and pardon one excused; whom, being reconciled, I steadfastly promise will be faithful hereafter; and by whose swift release from fault I am bound by a benefit, greatly demanding that thou not only pardon, but that thou do it at once, and that thou receive him on his return not only into thy house but also into thy heart. Great God! how glad a day will dawn for thee, what tidings for me, what spirit for him, when, fallen at his father's feet, from that wounded mouth, that terrible mouth, expecting reproach, he shall have received a kiss. Farewell. We have set out this epistle entire, so that the learned reader might see not only the Prelate's pious solicitude for peace, but also this reconciler's ingenious diligence.
[88] Finally, that we may put an end to this paragraph, so far and wide extended was the obliging charity of this holy man that it did not exclude even the Jews themselves, that it embraced even the perfidious Jews, as we are taught from the eleventh epistle of the sixth book, where he commends to Bishop Eleutherius a certain stubborn Jew in these words: The present paper commends a Jew; not that the error pleases me, through which they perish, entangled in it; but because it becomes none of us to pronounce any of them damnable to the full while he lives: for he is still in the hope of absolution to whom the power of being converted remains. But what the sequence of his business is, he himself will more rightly disclose by present narration face to face: for it goes much against prudence to stretch out with manifold discourse the neatness due to an epistolary form. Certainly, since according to either earthly business or earthly judgments men of this sort are wont to have honorable cases, thou also, though thou assail his perfidy, canst defend the person of this toilworn man. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord pope.
[89] Probably that diligent hunter of souls hoped that to this Jew there would perhaps come the same happiness which befell another of that nation, and would help any men whatsoever who, forsaking Jewish superstition, embraced the true faith of Christ. To him he gave letters of commendation to Bishop Nonnechius, in which, after exceptional praises of Nonnechius, the following is read of that neophyte in book 8, epistle 13: I commend Promotus, the bearer of these letters, known indeed to us before, but lately made our fellow-tribesman by your prayers; who, though he is a Jew by race, has nevertheless chosen rather to be reckoned an Israelite by faith than by blood; and, aspiring to the citizenship of that heavenly city, and disdaining the letter that kills for the spirit that gives life, on the one hand contemplating the rewards set before the just, on the other foreseeing that, unless he made his flight from circumcision to Christ, he would suffer through eternal ages punishments coeternal [], he preferred that Jerusalem rather than Hierosolyma be reckoned his fatherland. These things being known, let the spiritual Sara receive in maternal arms this now truer son of Abraham as he comes: for he ceased then to belong to Hagar the handmaid, when he exchanged the servitude of legal observance for the liberty of grace.*
[90] in their affairs. For the rest, what was his reason for coming hither the same man will be able to explain more profitably by a present recital. But by us he is held most dear for the reasons I have written above; which I signify because he commends each man most effectively who has laid open the plain grounds of a just commendation. Here for brevity's sake we halt in enumerating the good offices which St. Sidonius freely rendered to his own subjects, or, being asked by some bishops, undertook for the sake of others: for anyone who will not think it burdensome to run over his epistles with a light eye will easily find various affairs of this sort in them. Assuredly, on account of that ready will to serve all, it seems that our obliging Bishop could have used the words of the Apostle Paul, who in the first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 9, writes thus: Whereas I was free as to all, I made myself the servant of all, that I might gain the more. And I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews… I became weak to the weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all. Now in the following paragraph we shall see how piously and bravely that solicitous Shepherd labored, lest the Arian Goths should invade and tear apart his flock.
Annotations* That is, equally eternal.
§ VIII. The Saint's pious and magnanimous zeal for the Catholic faith, and his harsh exile.
When the Goths attempted to occupy Auvergne, When the Goths, whom St. Sidonius knew to be infected with the Arian heresy, attempted to occupy Auvergne, this solicitous Shepherd of the orthodox flock moved every stone to avert that yoke of heretics from the necks of his people. Hence in book 3, epistle 3, he invites his brother-in-law Ecdicius, who not long before had routed the Goths, to defend Auvergne with arms. But because the Saint trusted little in human aid, he had recourse to divine help, and introduced into his diocese the custom of Rogations after the example of Mamertus, prelate of Vienne, to whom in book 7, epistle 1, he writes thus: There is a rumor that the Goths have moved their camp onto Roman soil. To this irruption we wretched Arverni are always the door: for hence we furnish peculiar fuel to the hatreds of our enemies, because, in that they have not yet bounded their territories from the Ocean to the Rhône by the channel of the Loire, under the help of Christ they suffer their sole delay only from our barrier. But the spaces and stretch of the surrounding regions the troublesome pressure of that menacing kingdom has long since devoured. Yet for our spirit, so rash and so perilous, we do not trust that either the scorched face of our walls, or the rotten hurdle of our stakes, or the battlements worn by the breasts of watchmen will bring aid; but we are soothed by the help of the Rogations introduced by your authorship alone, in the beginning and establishing of which the people of Auvergne, if not with equal effect, at least with no unequal affection, has begun to be initiated, and on this account does not yet turn its back on the terrors poured round about.
[92] The holy Prelate in book 5, epistle 14, sets forth what those Rogations were, The Saint tried to turn away this calamity from his diocese by prayers, while he calls back a certain friend dwelling in the mountains of Auvergne into the city of Clermont to celebrate them, in these words: Whatever it be to which thou hast leisure, whether idleness or business, thou wilt nevertheless, unless we are mistaken, be called back into the city by the consideration of the Rogations; the solemnity of which Mamertus, father and pontiff, first discovered, established, and introduced for us by a most reverend example and a most useful experiment. Formerly indeed there were (be it said saving the peace of the faith) wandering, lukewarm, and infrequent, and, so to speak, yawning supplications, which were often blunted by the interposing obstacles of luncheons, being chiefly meant to deprecate either rains or fair weather; to which (that I say nothing more) it was not fitting that potter and gardener alike should come together. But in those which the aforesaid chief priest both brought forth and conferred, there is fasting, there is prayer, there is psalmody, there is weeping. To these feasts of humbled necks, and to the sighing companies of prostrate citizens, I summon thee: and, if I measure thy spiritual mind aright, thou wilt come the more quickly because thou art called not to banquets but to tears.
[93] Meanwhile St. Sidonius humbly imputed that calamity of the times to his own sins, which he humbly imputed to his own sins. writing to Felix, a man of patrician dignity, in book 3, epistle 4, in these words: Gozalas, a Jew by nation, a client of thy eminence, whose person would be dear to me also if his sect were not contemptible, carries my letters, which I have written in great anxiety: for the arms of the nations poured round about us terrify our town, as though it were a kind of barrier of their frontier. Thus, being the pitiable prey of rival peoples set in the midst, suspect to the Burgundians, next neighbors to the Goths, we lack neither the anger of the assailants nor the ill-will of the defenders. But of this elsewhere. Meanwhile, if things at least are right with you, it is well: for we are not of such a heart that, though we ourselves are smitten with open penalties for the hidden things of our crimes, we should not wish things to go prosperously somewhere. For it is certain that he is no less the captive of vices than of enemies who has not kept good wishes even amid evil times. Farewell. Also in the eleventh epistle of the seventh book, shut in among the half-burned narrows of a frail wall, as he writes there to a certain bishop, he acknowledges and kisses the avenging hand of God.
[94] However much the Goths had besieged the city of Clermont in vain, [But when he hears that peace is being negotiated between the Goths and the Romans,] yet by their frequent incursions into Roman dominion they so far succeeded that about the end of the year 474 the emperor Nepos resolved to make terms with those troublesome enemies, and therefore sent Licinianus, who was to conciliate peace between the Romans and the Goths under certain conditions. This news being heard, St. Sidonius at once in book 3, epistle 7, writes to the patrician Felix, after other matters, in this manner: Hasten to indicate whether, God going before, the quaestor Licinianus has opened any door of security to our mutual trepidation. For he is a person, as they report, of great expectation, greater in his arrival, lofty in report, loftier in inspection, and remarkable for all the gifts of fortune and of nature. Then, after setting forth the other endowments of this envoy, which the Saint had received by rumor, he thus ends his epistle: Send word swiftly, if what is said squares with the truth, that those may for a while breathe from their sleepless post whom neither a snowy day nor a moonless and stormy night persuades to sound the retreat from their watches on the walls; because, even if the barbarian withdraw into winter quarters, hearts rather postpone than abandon a dread once rooted.
[95] he soon writes to Bishop Basilius, But when our Saint had afterwards learned by more certain report that that treaty between the Romans and the Goths was in truth already being negotiated, and that some prelates of Gaul had been appointed arbiters of this peace, out of his affection toward the Catholic faith he thought that one of them, by name Basilius, perhaps the bishop of Aix, should be appealed to by his letters. And so in book 7, epistle 6, after a friendly winning of goodwill and a humble confession of his own faults, he writes the following to this prelate: Since the public safety overtops the shame of a private guilt, I shall not fear, even though a sinister interpreter carp at the zeal of the faith in me, to betray the cause of truth under the odium of vanity. That Euric, king of the Goths, either guards or advances the boundary of his kingdom by the law of arms, the ancient treaty being broken and dissolved, it is neither for us sinners here to accuse, nor for you
holy men here permitted to discuss. Nay rather, if thou shouldst inquire, it is a matter of the ordering of things that here the rich man be veiled in purple and fine linen, and here Lazarus be stricken with ulcers and poverty. It is a matter of the ordering of things that, while we dwell in this allegorical Egypt, Pharaoh should walk with a diadem and the Israelite with a basket. It is a matter of the ordering of things that, while we are boiled down in the furnace of this figurative Babylon, we should with Jeremiah bewail the spiritual Jerusalem with sighing wailings, and that Assur, thundering with royal pride, should trample upon the holy things of the Saints.
[96] who had been appointed among the arbiters of peace, Having looked upon these alternations of present and future blessednesses, I bear the common misfortunes more patiently. First, because, when I look into what I deserve, whatever adversities have come will be reckoned lighter. Then, because I know for certain that it is the greatest remedy of the inner man if in this threshing-floor of the world the outer man be threshed with the various scourges of sufferings. But — what must be confessed — I dread that the aforesaid king of the Goths, though he be terrible for the merits of his strength, will lie in wait not so much for the Roman walls as for the Christian laws. So much, they say, so much does the mention of the Catholic name sour his mouth and his breast, that thou wouldst be in doubt whether he holds the primacy more of his nation or of his sect. Besides this, powerful in arms, keen in spirit, brisk in years, he suffers this error alone, that he thinks the success of his treaties and counsels is granted him for his lawful religion, which he rather attains through earthly good fortune.
[97] and warns him that in entering upon this treaty Wherefore learn quickly the hidden sickness of the Catholic state, that you may hasten to apply an open medicine. Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Comminges, Auch, and by now a far greater number of cities, their chief priests having been cut off by death, and no bishops thereafter substituted in the offices of the dead (through whom assuredly the ministries of the lesser orders were supplied), have drawn a broad boundary of spiritual ruin; which it is fairly agreed advances day by day with the failing of dying fathers, so that it could bend not only any heretics of the present, but even the heresiarchs of former times: so does a sad despair of a severed faith weigh upon peoples bereaved by the departure of their pontiffs. There is no care in the desolate dioceses and parishes. Thou mayest see in the churches either the rotten falling of roofs, or, the hinges of the doors torn away, the entrances of the basilicas blocked by the bushes of bristling briars. Thou mayest see (alas the grief!) the very herds not only lying in the half-open vestibules, but even grazing down the grassy sides of the greening altars.
[98] But now the solitude is not only through the rural parishes; he should have the greatest care for the Catholic faith, the very assemblies of the city churches besides grow thin: for what solace remains to the faithful when not only clerical discipline but even its memory perishes? Indeed, when any cleric dies, if by a succeeding benediction he does not receive an heir to his dignity, in that church the priesthood dies, not the priest. And so what hope wouldst thou pronounce to remain, where the end of a man makes the end of religion? Look more deeply into the losses of the spiritual members. Assuredly you will understand that, however many bishops are snatched away, the faith of so many peoples will be endangered for you. I say nothing of your colleagues Crocus and Simplicius, whom, thrust out from the sees delivered to them, the like penalty of an unlike exile tortures: for one of them grieves that he does not see whither he may return; the other grieves that he sees whither he does not return. Thou art found midmost among the most sacred pontiffs Leontius, Faustus, and Graecus in city, in order, in charity. Through you the mischiefs of treaties run; through you the pacts and conditions of both kingdoms are carried. Act so far that this friendship, this concord of princes, may be such that, episcopal ordination being permitted, we may hold by faith the peoples of the Gauls whom the frontier of the Gothic lot shall have enclosed, even if we do not hold them by treaty. From this epistle anyone understands how great a care our Saint bore for the Catholic faith in general, and how greatly he grieved over the ruin of the same begun in Gaul.
[99] But his grief grew very much when rumor at last reported and to the bishop of Marseilles, that Auvergne was to be handed over to the Goths by the compact: for then St. Sidonius, writing to the bishop of Marseilles, who had a vote in conciliating the peace, and with whom he had formerly been wont to jest by letters, thus bitterly complains in book 7, epistle 7, of that hard condition of the treaty: Behold, again our trifle-bearer Amantius seeks his own Marseilles, … through whom I would prattle many things jestingly, if one and the same mind were equally able to practice glad things and to endure sad ones. For such is now the state of this our unhappy corner; whose condition, as report confirms, was better under war than under peace. Our servitude has been made the price of another's security. The servitude (alas the grief!) of the Arverni; who, if ancient things were unrolled, once dared to call themselves brothers to Latium, and to reckon their peoples of Ilian blood.
[100] If recent things be recalled, these are they who by their own strength delayed the arms of the public enemies; also an arbiter of that treaty, to which people the Goth was often no terror while they were shut within their walls, since in turn he himself became a terror to the besiegers set within their camp. These are they who sewed together for themselves both leaders and soldiers against the battle-line of their neighbors; yet of the outcome of their struggles, if anything prosperous fell out, prosperity consoled you; if anything contrary, adversity broke them. They, for the love of the commonwealth, did not fear to hand over to the laws Seronatus, who was serving up the provinces to the barbarians — whom, once convicted, the commonwealth scarcely presumed to put to death. Was it this that want, fire, sword, pestilence, swords fat with slaughter and warriors lean with fastings deserved? Yet for the expectation of this glorious peace we have drawn into food grasses torn from the crevices of the walls; often infected through ignorance by poisonous herbs, which, green with undistinguished leaves and juices, a hand as pale as hunger often gathered. For these so many and so great proofs of devotion, ours (so far as I hear) has been the loss.
[101] he opens the bitter feeling of his grief, Be ashamed, we pray you, of this treaty, neither useful nor becoming. Through you embassies pass. To you first, although the prince be absent, not only are things transacted disclosed, but even things to be transacted are entrusted. Let the harshness of truth, we beseech, be pardonable in your ears, from whose reproach grief takes away the odium. You take little counsel for the common good, and when you come together into council, it is not so much your care to heal the public perils as to be zealous for private fortunes; by doing which often and long you have now begun to be not the first of your fellow-provincials but the last. But how long will these illusions be able to last? For our elders will not longer glory in this name, who are beginning to have no juniors. Wherefore, by counsel at least, whereby you are able, cut off the state of so shameful a concord. It is still a delight, if it must be, to be besieged, still to fight, still to hunger.
[102] if Auvergne be handed over to the Arian Goths; But if we, who could not be won by force, are handed over, it is certain that you cowards have found what to urge upon the barbarian. But why do we loosen the reins to excessive grief? Nay rather, pardon the afflicted, and impute nothing to mourners: for another region handed over hopes for servitude, but Auvergne for punishment. Certainly, if you have not strength to heal our extremities, at least accomplish this by diligent prayer, that the blood of those may live whose liberty is to die. Prepare land for exiles, ransom for those to be taken, provision for those about to wander. If our wall is opened to enemies, let not yours be shut to guests. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord pope. From these two epistles it is plain that the profound humility of our holy Prelate was joined with a fervent zeal for the Catholic faith and with a generous magnanimity.
[103] but Auvergne fell to the Goths in the year 475, But those admonitions of St. Sidonius availed nothing: for in the year 475 the Romans were compelled to yield Auvergne to the Goths, as Jordanes testifies in the History of the Deeds of the Getae, chapter 45. It is easy to understand how greatly that change of empire afflicted our Saint, who loathed even good barbarians, as we learned above at the beginning of the fourth paragraph from his epistle to Philagrius, and who was now compelled to be subject to Arian, and therefore to the worst, barbarians. Had not love of his flock and its need held back this holy Shepherd, he would doubtless have followed his brother-in-law Ecdicius, who chose rather to desert his fatherland than to live under the dominion of the Goths. And so the holy Prelate resolved to keep diligent watch over his flock among the neighboring wolves, and, humbled under the mighty hand of God, conformed his own will to the divine good pleasure.
[104] and the Prelate was at once sent into exile, But Euric, king of the Goths, having occupied the city of Clermont, held a man of so great authority and nobility (for he was joined by consanguinity or affinity with the chief families of the Romans) as suspect of partisan zeal, and therefore judged that he must be banished. Perhaps too his pastoral vigilance and his immense zeal for the Catholic faith had come to Euric's ears and displeased the Arian heretic. And so he ordered St. Sidonius to be carried off to the fortress of Livia, which was situated between Carcassonne and Narbonne. Perhaps St. Avitus wished to indicate in general the discomforts of this exile, when in Epistle 45 to the illustrious man Apollinaris he writes among other things thus: Since, if you have learned from your father Archadius that a man serving in the world is less endangered among arms than among revilings, I too take no small example from my Sidonius, whom I do not dare to call father, of how much a cleric can endure.
[105] But let us hear our Saint himself, who sets forth to Leo, quaestor of King Euric, some discomforts of his exile, whose discomforts he sets forth to Leo, the king's minister, when in book 8, epistle 3, he thus excuses to him the long delay of a certain lucubration enjoined upon him: The life of Apollonius the Pythagorean — not as the elder Nicomachus copied it out from Philostratus, but as Tascius Victorianus did from Nicomachus's draft — I have sent, because thou hadst bidden it: which, while I hasten to obey, a hurried and headlong and clumsy transcription has quickly cast forth into a hasty copy. And do not count it a fault in me that thou believest the thing was longer in the working: for while the delay of the walls of Livia held me shut in (of which discomfort I owe the end, after the help of Christ, to thee), my mind, sick with cares, had not strength to run through even by leaps the things to be handed over, distracted now by nocturnal sighs, now by daily duties. Besides, even when the twilight hour had called me back, worn out from the watches, to my lodging, scarcely was a very little rest granted to my closed eyes: for at once there was the din which two certain Gothic old women, neighbors to the rain-court of my chamber, kept up — than whom nothing will ever be more quarrelsome, more bibulous, more vomiting. Truly, as soon as on my return there was some leisure, I offered this unpolished and half-raw and, as they say, new-wine book, mindful more of thy desire than of my duty.
[106] Among the learned there is controversy whether St. Sidonius made this Life of Apollonius the Pythagorean Latin out of the Greek idiom, [who had asked of him that he transcribe there the Life of Apollonius, or translate it into Latin.] or whether he merely transcribed and emended it. Our Sirmond in his notes, page 81, thinks that it was only an emended transcription of this Life, although it is there called a translatio, and proves from various letters of the same Saint that the word translatio is taken for a simple copying out. Yet others contend that this was a Latin interpretation of that Greek Life, and confirm their opinion
from the difficulty which St. Sidonius indicates in the completing of that work. But whatever that little work was, we understand from the reported fragment of this epistle that the holy Bishop, detained in the fortress of Livia, could not satisfy Leo's desire because of sleepless nights and two drunken and quarrelsome Gothic women, who by their frequent uproars hindered him from his work. From the same we also learn that Leo, minister of King Euric, obtained liberty for the holy Prelate by his patronage, and that he returned from exile into the city of Clermont. For the rest, we shall relate in the following paragraph the chief things he did or wrote after this return.
§ IX. The remaining deeds of the Saint after his return from exile up to the year of Christ 483.
Although the Saint, returned from exile, When the holy Bishop had returned to his diocese, he governed it diligently and undauntedly in the midst of the Arian Goths, as Gennadius of Marseilles, whom we cited in the first paragraph of this historical Commentary, hints in these words: Strong in Christian vigor, even amid the hardness of barbarian ferocity which at that time had oppressed the Gauls, he is held a Catholic father and a distinguished teacher. We draw a proof of this episcopal vigor from book 4, epistle 15, in which St. Sidonius praises Elaphius, a pious man, because he had built a new church at that time when others scarcely dared to restore collapsing temples. Here most probably is designated the time when Auvergne and the neighboring regions obeyed Euric, king of the Goths, who was most addicted to his Arian sect, as was related above, and of whom St. Gregory of Tours in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 25, writes the following: In his time also Euric, king of the Goths, going beyond the Spanish frontier, brought a grievous persecution upon the Christians in the Gauls. He mutilated everywhere those who did not consent to his perversity, he subjected clerics to prisons; some priests he gave over to exile, others he butchered with the sword. For he had even ordered the very entrances of the sacred temples to be blocked with thorns, namely that the rarity of entering might bring about the forgetting of the faith.
[108] undauntedly promoted the worship of the Catholic faith, Nevertheless at this perilous time St. Sidonius fearlessly set out to Rodez to consecrate that new church, and in the epistle just cited, the fifteenth of the fourth book, he answers Elaphius, who was inviting him to this solemnity, in this manner: Prepare a manifold feast and most capacious couches. By many roads, by many crowds, men come to thee. So has it been settled by the company of the good: since indeed the time of the future dedication has become known to all. For you write that the baptistery which you were long building can now be consecrated. To which festivities your vow, our ministry, our duty summons many, the cause of the faith summons all. For it is a thing of great example that at this time new roofs of churches should be built by you, when scarcely another would dare to patch old ones. For what remains, we wish that, as you render your vows to our God through fruitful years, so you may cherish vows still to be rendered; and that not only by a hidden religion but by a manifest conversion; and that, the state of the times being softened, Christ may indulge my desire as much as that of the people of Rodez, so that you who already offer altars for them may be able also to offer sacrifices for them.
[109] and discharged his office, For the rest, although the very end of autumn is already shortening the day, and the leaves falling through the whole grove echo with a rustling crash about the anxious ears of travelers; and the stronghold to which thou invitest me, girt as it is with Alpine crags, is with more difficulty climbed under the nearness of winter; yet we, God going before, coming along the rugged flanks of thy mountains, will fear neither the crags below nor the snows above, although the deep steepness of the ridges must often be retraced by a spiral track broken along the causeway. We do not know whether the desire of St. Sidonius was fulfilled, who wished that Elaphius might sometime become prelate of the church of Rodez. But we do know that Ruricius, prelate of Limoges, wrote the seventh epistle of the second book to a certain Elafius, whom he calls brother, and whose virtues he praises, as may be seen in Canisius, volume 5 of the Ancient Reading, page 481 and the following. For the rest, in the reported epistle of St. Sidonius there shines the magnanimous zeal of that bishop, whereby he despised any discomforts and perils in order to restore and advance the oppressed worship of the Catholic religion.
[110] Undauntedly, yet cautiously and prudently, he discharged his office, yet he cautiously tried to win over the king of the Goths himself, lest, namely, he should provoke the Arian king against the Catholics. Nay more, he was eager to gain for himself the goodwill of Euric's ministers or friends, and of Euric himself, that he might so much the more securely provide for his flock: for although from the beginning of his episcopate he had renounced poetry, yet to Lampridius, the poet of Bordeaux, who had asked some poem of him and whom he knew to be dear to Euric, he sent, after various excuses, certain little verses about that king's great power, that in this way, even unwillingly, he might catch at his favor. But when the Saint himself had labored in vain for two months to conclude a certain business at Euric's court, and in all that time had been able to see that prince only once, he kindly imputes this delay to the king's royal occupations, when in book 8, epistle 9, in the poem sent to Lampridius, he sings thus among other things:
Us, set here and seen but once, the monthly moon now beholds twice: nor has the lord himself much leisure, while a subdued world seeks his answers.
Then he recounts the various nations which Euric had subjected to his rule. Without doubt he desired that Lampridius should show or recite that poem to Euric.
[111] More willingly, as I suppose, he composed a metrical epitaph in honor of St. Abraham the abbot, and endeavored to win over his ministers, in order to oblige Count Victorius, to whom King Euric had committed the governing of Auvergne, as he indicates in book 7, epistle 17, writing to Volusianus in these words: Thou biddest me, lord brother, by the law of friendship, which it is a sin to injure, to lay my long idle fingers upon the anvils of the old workshop, and to inscribe a sepulchral dirge in mournful verses for holy Abraham, now dead. I shall quickly comply with what is enjoined, both drawn by thy authority and, chiefly, anticipated by the devotion of that most eminent man Count Victorius; whom by secular law my patron, by ecclesiastical law my son, I honor as a client and love as a father: who sufficiently showed what care, and of what kind, burned in him toward the servants of Christ, when, bending over the couch of the bishop as he lay dying, bowed no less in dignity than in limbs, and made one color with grief above that face pale with approaching death, he showed by his tears as witnesses what he wished for the man.
[112] And because he himself snatched to himself the greatest parts of the burying of the corpse, that he might so much the more freely govern his diocese, imparting the whole apparatus of overflowing expense which befitted a priest to be buried, we at least contribute the words that remain to the funeral service, meaning to write with the impression of the graving pen nothing else than the testimony of mutual love. For the rest, the man's character, deeds, and virtues will be most unworthily weighed by the meanness of my words. To these he subjoins some little verses in distichs, which we gave on the fifteenth day of June in the Acts of that holy Abraham. Further, that Count or Duke Victorius either at that time feigned an outward piety, or was afterwards much changed, since St. Gregory of Tours in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 20, writes the following about him: But Euric, king of the Goths, set Duke Victorius over seven cities in the fourteenth year of his reign… And he was at Clermont nine years. Upon the senator Eucherius he rolled calumnies, and, having put him in prison, ordered him to be dragged out by night, and, bound beside an ancient wall, he ordered that very wall to be dashed down upon him. But he himself, since he was exceedingly wanton in the love of women, and feared to be killed by the Arverni, fled to Rome, and there, attempting to practice a like wantonness, was overwhelmed with stones.
[113] in which he had a care also for monastic discipline. Further, how great was the solicitude of our holy Prelate for monastic discipline is plain from the end of the same epistle, where he thus commends to the aforementioned Volusianus the monastery of St. Cyricus, in which St. Abraham had died: Behold, as thou hadst enjoined, we have paid the rites that remain to him who is buried. But if in turn it becomes brethren, friends, and fellow-soldiers to obey the commands of charity, do thou also in thy turn, I beseech, undertake to console his disciples with those institutes in which thou excellest, and hasten to shape the wavering rule of the destitute Brethren according to the statutes of the fathers of Lérins or of Grigny: if any be rebels against that discipline, chastise them thyself; if any be followers, thyself praise them. Set over them indeed there seems to be holy Auxanius, who — a man, as thou knowest, somewhat more than is just both infirm in body and bashful in disposition, and therefore readier to obey than to command — requires that thou be asked, that he may approach the mastership of the monastery under thy own mastership; and that, if any of the younger despise him as unskilled or faint-hearted, he may through thee alone perceive that neither is despised with impunity. Why say more? Wilt thou learn in few words what I wish? I beg that brother Auxanius be abbot over the congregation, but thou over the abbot as well.
[114] The Saint two little works, Willingly too would he have written up, to the glory of St. Anianus, the war of Attila, which Prosper, bishop of Orléans, had requested. But St. Sidonius, hindered by other occupations, or deterred by the mass of the work, abandoned the lucubration he had begun, and in book 8, epistle 15, excuses himself to him in these words: While thou desirest that holy Anianus, a most great and consummate pontiff, equal to Lupus and not unequal to Germanus, be celebrated with the highest praises, and desirest that the character, merits, and virtues of so great a man be fixed in the breasts of the faithful — to whom this too is given for glory, not without justice, that he departed with thee for successor — thou hadst exacted of me that I promise thee I would make known by my pen to posterity the war of Attila: in which, namely, were contained the siege of the city of Orléans, its assault, its breaking in but not its plundering, and that famous prophecy of the priest heard from heaven. I had begun to write; but when the bundle of the work taken up had been examined, it wearied me to have begun. On this account I entrusted to no ears what I had first condemned with myself as censor. It will be granted, as I hope, to thy prayer and to the merits of that highest bishop, that on some occasion, and indeed a speedy one, we may serve his praise. If the holy Bishop shortly afterwards celebrated the praises of St. Anianus, as he here promises, that little work has perished or still lies hidden, since it is not found among the other lucubrations of St. Sidonius.
[115] which were demanded of him, The above-mentioned Leo, minister of King Euric, had asked our Bishop to commit a history (perhaps of his own time, or of King Euric) to writing and leave it to posterity. But the Saint, seeing that he could not accomplish this without danger of offense or of flattery, in book 4, epistle 22, dexterously turns that burden onto Leo's own shoulders, and modestly excuses himself on account of his clerical profession of life in this manner: The magnificent man Hesperius, gem of friends and of letters, when he lately returned from the city of Toulouse, said that thou didst enjoin that, the books of my epistles being now finished, I should turn my care to the pen of history. With the highest reverence, and with the highest affection, I embrace such and so great a judgment: for thou pronouncest him fit for greater works whom thou thinkest ought to abandon middling ones. But — what must be confessed — I more easily dare to look up to a judgment of this kind than to take up the counsel. The thing is indeed worthy for thee to command; but no less worthy
for thee to do. For in antiquity also, when Caius Cornelius had urged the like upon Caius Secundus, he himself afterwards seized upon what he had enjoined. And by that example thou now better undertakest it; because I rise up to Pliny as a disciple, and thou by right surpassest Cornelius in the ancient manner of narrating; who, if he came to life again in our age, and beheld thee, of what quality and how great thou art held in letters, would now more truly be Tacitus i.e., silent.
[116] And so thou rightly takest up the mass of the theme sent, for whom, besides singular eloquence, he refused to write, there is great opportunity of vast knowledge: for daily, through the counsels of a most powerful king, solicitous for the whole world, thou learnest alike his affairs and his rights, his treaties and his wars, places, distances, deserts. Whence who would more justly gird himself to these things than he who, it is certain, has learned the movements of nations, the varieties of embassies, the deeds of leaders, the pacts of rulers, in short all the secrets of public affairs; and who, placed on a preeminent summit, has no need either to suppress the truth or to patch together a lie. But our condition is far unlike, to whom a new sojourn is a grief, and old reading of no use; then religion is our profession, humility our desire, mediocrity our obscurity: nor is so much placed for us in present things as hope in future ones. Lastly, languor is a hindrance; and by now, though late, on account of this very thing, sloth is coeval with my heart. Certainly by now no praise for studies is my care, not even a posthumous one.
[117] Chiefly it is settled that we should seek little glory from history; and various excuses being brought forward, because by men of the clerical office our own affairs are told rashly, others' boastfully, past things unfruitfully, present things half-fully, false things shamefully, true things perilously: for it is such a theme or work that, if thou make mention of good men, small favor is procured; if of notable men, the greatest offense. So does that satiric color and odor at once mingle itself with the diction. Accordingly historical writing seems to shrink far from our order, whose beginning is ill-will, whose continuation is toil, whose end is hatred. But these things come about if anything is dictated with clerics as authors, who, fixed by the snaky molars of barkers, if we publish anything simply, are called mad; if anything exactly, presumptuous. But if thou thyself, to whom it is given to be able by the leaps of glory to trample down or outrun the necks of censurers, wouldst willingly draw the province of that matter as thy lot, none would write more loftily than thou, none more in the ancient manner, even if it pleased thee to speak of recent things; since, having been filled before with abundance of words, and now of things, thou hast left no cause why one should cut with venomous bite: and therefore hereafter it will be profit to consult thee, pleasure to hear thee, authority to read thee.
[118] The holy Prelate at this time sent other letters to divers friends, finally in the year 483 he publishes the ninth book of epistles, in all of which his genius, courtesy, and humility shine forth. Now he seems to have published the ninth and last book of his epistles in the year of Christ 483, when he had passed twelve years in the episcopate, as we conjecture from the twelfth epistle of the same ninth book, in which Oresius the Spaniard, asking for a certain poem, suffers a refusal, and among other causes of refusal St. Sidonius offers him this: Then besides it is agreed that every work, if it rests through a long interval, is with difficulty resumed. For who would not know that to all craftsmen or arts the greatest ornament comes by practice; and that, when accustomed studies are not frequented, the arms in bodies and the wits in the arts grow sluggish? Whence comes also that saying, that a bow more rebels against the hand, an ox against the yoke, a horse against the bridle, when it is taken up late or seldom. Moreover, shame, the companion of my sloth, inclines my judgment to this, that, after I have run through three Olympiads in silence, it shames me as much as it irks me to compose a new poem.
[119] and then he seems to have put an end to his writings. For the rest, the holy Bishop seems by the sixteenth or last epistle of the ninth book to have put an end to all his writings: for we find no lucubration of his afterwards. To this last epistle he inserted a Sapphic poem, part of which we transcribed above in § VI, and in which he renews his purpose of composing no more poems, unless these should perhaps be required for celebrating the praises of Saints or Martyrs. Among these Saints or Martyrs, whom he might perhaps sometime praise in verse, he assigns the first place to St. Saturninus, martyr of Toulouse, whom he followed with great veneration, and in whose church he was buried, as we shall see below. Thus far we have gathered the chief deeds of St. Sidonius from his writings. But since after three Olympiads passed in the episcopate, that is, after the year of Christ 483, nothing is found written by him, we cannot know from his own testimony what he did in the remaining years of his life. Yet from elsewhere we know that this holy man was afflicted before his death with persecutions, which we shall now relate in the following paragraph.
§ X. The Saint's afflictions, prophecy, death, burial, epitaph, and relics.
The holy Prelate, amid persecutions, Even though St. Sidonius was most friendly with many illustrious men, and strove to win them all to himself by his compliance, yet after the wonted manner of the Saints he had certain envious men and enemies, as is clear from St. Gregory of Tours, who in the History of the Franks, book 2, chapter 22, relates the following: But holy Sidonius was of such eloquence that very often he would compose extempore, most brilliantly, whatever he wished, with no delay standing in the way. Now it happened one day that, being invited, he came to the festival of the basilica of the monastery of which we made mention above; and, the little book by which he was accustomed to perform the most sacred solemnities having been wickedly taken from him, he thus, prepared from the moment, unfolded the whole work of the festival, so that he was marveled at by all, nor was it thought by those standing there that a man had spoken, but an angel; which in the preface of the book which we compiled concerning the Masses composed by him we have more fully declared. Hence we easily gather that that book was carried off by a certain rival, that the holy Prelate might hesitate perplexed in the divine office, or be affected with shame, which nevertheless God wonderfully turned aside.
[121] But more open was the persecution which two wicked presbyters stirred up against the holy man, which two presbyters had stirred up against him, and concerning whom the praised St. Gregory in the following chapter of the book just cited hands down these things: And when he had been made over to the Lord's office, and was leading a holy life in the world, two presbyters rose up against him, and, all power over the goods of the church being taken from him, leaving him a narrow and scanty living, they reduced him to the utmost contumely. But the divine clemency willed not to endure his injury unavenged for any long space of time: for one of these most worthless men, unworthy to be called presbyters, when before nightfall he had threatened that he wished to drag him out of the church, hearing that the bell had been rung for Matins, boiling with gall against the Saint of God, rose up, thinking in his wicked heart to accomplish what he had plotted the day before.
[112] But having entered his privy, while he strove to purge his belly, he breathed out his spirit: for a servant was waiting outside with a candle for his master to come forth. And now the light had come, and his accomplice, that is, the other presbyter, sends a messenger saying: "Come, do not delay, that we may together carry out what we agreed upon yesterday." But when the lifeless man delayed to give an answer, the servant, lifting the curtain of the door, found his master dead upon the little seat of the privy. Whence it is beyond doubt that this man was guilty of no lesser crime than that Arius, whose inward parts were likewise laid down in a privy, cast out through the lower parts: because neither can this be taken as being without heresy, that in the church the priest of God should not be obeyed, to whom the sheep have been committed to be fed; and that a man should thrust himself into a power to which nothing has been committed him either by God or by men.
[123] Thereafter the blessed Priest, one enemy nonetheless still remaining, is restored to his authority. endowed with the spirit of prophecy, dies; Now it came to pass after these things that, a fever coming on, he began to sicken; and he asks his people to carry him into the church. And when he had been brought thither, there gathered to him a multitude of men and women, and at the same time also of children, lamenting and saying: "Why dost thou forsake us, good Shepherd, or to whom dost thou leave us as orphans? Will there be life for us after thy passing? Will there be hereafter one who will so season us with the salt of wisdom, or reprove us unto the fear of the Lord's name by the reasoning of such prudence?" When the people said these and like things with great weeping, at last the Priest, the Holy Spirit flowing into him, answered: "Fear not, O peoples; behold, my brother Aprunculus lives, and he shall be your priest." And they, not understanding, thought he was speaking something in ecstasy.
[124] When he had departed, that worthless presbyter, the other of the two whose chair one of these wishing to occupy, who had remained, straightway, gaping with greed, seizes beforehand all the property of the church, as though he were already bishop, saying: "At last God has looked upon me, knowing that I am juster than Sidonius, and has bestowed this power upon me." And when he was borne proudly through the whole city, when the Lord's day came which was at hand after the passing of the holy man, having prepared a banquet, he ordered all the citizens to be invited into the house of the church; and, the elders being scorned, he reclines first upon the couch. To him, when the cupbearer had offered a cup, the man said: "My lord, I have seen a dream, which, if thou permit, I will declare. I was seeing this Lord's night, and behold, there was a great house, and in the house a throne was set, on which one sat as judge, more preeminent in power than all, to whom there stood by many of the priests in white garments, and also mingled throngs of peoples, exceedingly innumerable.
[125] But while I trembling contemplated these things, I behold from afar blessed Sidonius standing among them, is punished by a sudden death, and earnestly contending with that presbyter most dear to thee, who a few years ago departed from this world: and when he was overcome, the king orders him to be thrust back into the lowest straits of the prison; and, that man having been removed, he says he will rise again against thee, saying that thou hadst been a partner in that crime for which the former man had been condemned. But when the judge began anxiously to inquire whom he should send to thee, I began to hide myself among the rest, and stood behind, considering with myself lest perchance I, who am known to the man, be sent. While I turned these things silently with myself, all being removed, I remained alone in the open, and, being called by the judge, I approach nearer. Beholding whose power and splendor, I, made dull, began to totter for fear. And he said: "Fear not, boy; but go, say to that presbyter: Come to answer thy cause, because Sidonius has entreated that thou be summoned. But do thou make no delay in going, because under a great attestation that king charged me to speak these things to thee, saying: If thou keep silence, thou shalt die a most evil death." As he spoke these things, the terrified presbyter, the cup slipping from his hand, gave up his spirit; and, carried off dead from the couch, he was consigned to burial, about to possess hell with his accomplice.
[126] and St. Aprunculus succeeded him, as St. Sidonius had foretold, Such a judgment upon contumacious clerics did the Lord display in this world, that one should obtain the death of Arius; the other, like Simon Magus, should be dashed down headlong from the lofty citadel of pride by the prayer of the holy Apostle: nor is it doubted that they alike possess Tartarus, who together wrought wickedly against their holy Bishop. Meanwhile, when now the terror of the Franks was resounding in these parts, and all desired with a longing love that they should reign, Aprunculus, bishop of the city of Langres, began to be held suspect among the Burgundians. And when the hatred grew from day to day, it was ordered that he be secretly struck with the sword. This report having been brought to him, being let down by night through the wall from the fortress of Dijon, he came to Clermont, and there, according to the word of the Lord which He had put in the mouth of holy Sidonius, he was given as the eleventh bishop. Now, concerning that narration of Gregory of Tours, certain things occur that must be observed.
[127] on the testimony of Gregory of Tours, whose narration is weighed. In the first place, this dreadful punishment of the two priests deserves great credence, of which thirty or forty years after the death of St. Sidonius there was still a fresh and public memory among the Arverni, where in all probability St. Gregory of Tours heard it, while he was being brought up there as a boy under his uncle St. Gallus, who was sitting in the see of Clermont before the year of Christ 529, as can be gathered from his Acts illustrated on the first day of July in our Work. Moreover, that history hints that those enemies claimed for themselves the goods of the church of Clermont, since they left only a narrow and scanty living to the holy Prelate — the Arians doubtless favoring them, whom perhaps these two wicked priests had corrupted with money. Thirdly, from that narration we understand that St. Sidonius was restored to his dignity after the divine vengeance upon the first persecutor, and lived still a few years. Fourthly, from the testimony of St. Gregory of Tours it is established that our holy Bishop was endowed with the spirit of prophecy, when, being near death, he foretold his successor. Finally, the close of this narration indicates that St. Sidonius passed to the heavenly ones when the terror of the Franks was already resounding in Gaul, and the inhabitants desired that they should reign. Now let us see whether from this note of time and the other circumstances we can draw out the year in which St. Sidonius departed from among the living.
[128] Our Aegidius Bucherius, in book 19 of his Roman Belgium, chapter 7, number 9, assigns the death of this holy Prelate to the year 482, Against our Bucherius, and there attempts to prove that epoch thus: At last in the year 482 Sidonius yielded to fate, on the twelfth of the Kalends of September, that is, the twenty-first of August; which day indeed thereafter was dedicated among the Arverni to his anniversary memory, and inscribed upon his tomb, although the Roman Martyrology reports it on the twenty-third of August, recording, I believe, the day of burial, or, if perchance, of some translation. Now Gregory of Tours, book 2, chapter 23, aptly notes that the Lord's day was at hand after the passing of the holy man, and accordingly that he died on a Sabbath, which the Dominical letter C teaches us fell on the twenty-first of August in that year 482. Savaro, our Sirmond, and those who follow them, defer it to the year 488; not observing that the letters of that bissextile year were twofold, C and B, of which the latter, B, not C, ran from the twentieth of February to August and the end of the year.
[129] But that reasoning of Bucherius seems to proceed upon a false hypothesis, who relies on a false hypothesis, as Pagi contends in his Critica at the year 484, number 27 and the following, where he adds this to his other arguments: From the cited place of the Turonensian it is wrongly inferred that the holy Bishop passed to heaven on a Sabbath day. The Turonensian relates that the two presbyters who had risen up against Sidonius while he lived perished by an evil end, and that, when, Sidonius being dead, one of them was borne proudly through the whole city, when the Lord's day came which was at hand after the passing of the holy man, he ordered, a banquet being prepared, that all the citizens be invited into the house of the church, because forsooth he believed he would succeed Sidonius; the cupbearer said that he had on that Lord's night seen a throne, and Sidonius standing before the judge. And while the cupbearer was relating these things, that presbyter perished by a sudden death, as Baronius relates at greater length from the Turonensian.
[130] But if Sidonius ceased to live in the year 487, and that on the twenty-first of August, as Pagi and others have observed, which in that year fell on the sixth feria, the Lord's day, which then coincided with the twenty-third of August, can rightly be called the Lord's day coming, which was at hand after the passing of the holy man. Wherefore, just as it does not follow from the Martyrologies and the cited epitaph that Sidonius flew to the heavenly ones on the twenty-first of August, so neither does it follow from the Turonensian that his day of death fell on a Sabbath. The year and day of Sidonius's death are therefore surrounded with no less darkness than before. But whether St. Sidonius died on the twenty-first or the twenty-third of August — about which we do not wish to wrangle in vain — we think with Pagi and others that it does not follow from the testimony of Gregory of Tours that that holy Prelate departed from this life on a Sabbath day: for that historian does not assert that this divine vengeance happened on the day following the death of the holy man, but on the Lord's day next after his death. Now this assertion is true even if St. Sidonius had died on the fifth or sixth feria.
[131] We are pleased with the opinion of those who place the death of St. Sidonius in the year of Christ 488 or 489. the death of St. Sidonius after the year 482 Certainly his life must be prolonged beyond the year 482, since the Saint himself in book 9, epistle 12, answers Oresius, who was asking for certain poems, that he had renounced poetry from the beginning of his episcopal office, and had now run through three Olympiads, that is, twelve years, in that kind of silence: for that writer, accustomed to figures and metaphors, doubtless took an Olympiad for the space of four years, so called from the games which were celebrated every four years in honor of Olympian Jove, as is commonly known. And so those three Olympiads run through, and reckoned from the end of the year of Christ 471 or the beginning of 472, lead us beyond the year 482. To these add that St. Sidonius, after the horrible punishment of the first presbyter, which happened after the year of Christ 482, lived still some years, as is drawn out from the above narration of St. Gregory of Tours.
[132] and before the year 490 we place it. Yet we cannot defer the death of our holy Bishop beyond the year 490, since Gennadius of Marseilles, cited above, and the epitaph to be given shortly below, testify that St. Sidonius died under the emperor Zeno, who in the month of April of the year 491 exchanged life for death. Moreover, some space of time must be left in the see of Clermont for his successor St. Aprunculus, who seems to have passed to the heavenly ones in the year 491, as the latest editors of Gallia Christiana, volume 2, column 235, affirm. All things therefore being maturely weighed, at the beginning of this historical Commentary we noted in the margin the death of St. Sidonius about the year of Christ 488, from probable conjecture. This chronology of ours, such as it is, is confirmed from the end of the above history of the two presbyters punished by God, where St. Gregory of Tours, treating of the death of St. Sidonius, asserts that at that time the arms of the Franks resounded in Gaul, and that these new guests stirred up in that people a desire of their dominion. Now Clovis in the fifth year of his reign, that is, of Christ 486, won a great victory over Syagrius, which and other following ones he, still a heathen, used so prudently that he venerated the Catholic bishops, and ordered the sacred vessel taken by his soldiers from the church of Reims to be restored to St. Remigius, as may be read in Gregory of Tours and in the historians of the Franks everywhere at hand. By this power of arms the young king terrified his enemies, and by his moderation of spirit so conciliated to himself the other inhabitants of Gaul that they desired his reign. Hence we think it more probable that the death of our Saint happened after these deeds, that is, after the year of Christ 486. Now we shall treat of his burial and his sacred relics.
[133] An epitaph was inscribed on his tomb, The body of St. Sidonius was buried in the church of St. Saturninus, where it still was about the year 950, as an anonymous writer of that time notes in Savaro's Origins of Clermont, page 357, in these words: In the church of holy Saturninus, the altar of holy Saturninus, where holy Amandinus and holy Sidonius rest. Upon this tomb was inscribed an epitaph or sepulchral poem, which Savaro and Sirmond set out before the Works of St. Sidonius thus:
Neighbor to the Saints and to the holy father, so lives Apollinaris by his merits, illustrious in titles, powerful in honor, a ruler of the soldiery and a judge of the forum. Quiet amid the swelling waves of the world, governing from time to time the motions of lawsuits, he gave laws to barbarian fury, and, when the kingdoms were at discord amid arms, he brought peace back by ample counsel. Amid these things nevertheless, philosophizing too, he wrote things to be held through perpetual ages, and after such gifts of graces, sitting in the chair of the highest pontiff, he poured back worldly acts upon his offspring [].* Whoever thou art who here with tears shalt entreat God, pour out thy prayers over the tomb on the right: known to none, and to be read by all the world, there let Sidonius be invoked for thee [].*
The twelfth of the Kalends of September, Zeno being emperor.
[134] Pagi, in the Critica on the Ecclesiastical Annals of the most eminent Baronius, at the year of Christ 484, number 27, thus discourses of the time when this epitaph or sepulchral eulogy was composed: which against the censure of Pagi The temporal note taken from the reign of Zeno shows that the epitaph was composed long after the death of Sidonius; for since the holy Prelate passed to God while the kings of the Visigoths were ruling Auvergne, if it had been engraved at the time of his death, the name not of the emperor of the East but of the king of the Visigoths would be read in it; since even in the very councils celebrated both in the Spains and in Septimania, while the Visigoths reigned, and in other public monuments, the names of those kings were written down.
[135] But that argumentation of Pagi would also prove that Gennadius of Marseilles wrote On Illustrious Men long after the death of St. Sidonius, appears to us ancient, since in his eulogy he reckons only the Roman emperors under whom our Saint flourished. Yet Gennadius seems to have drawn up this Catalogue On Illustrious Men when St. Sidonius was still alive, and the Visigoths had already occupied Auvergne and other provinces of Gaul. Further, we do not contend that the epitaph of this holy Bishop was written immediately after his death under Alaric, king of the Goths: for after twenty years that sepulchral inscription could freely be composed by some learned man to whom the heresy and the memory of the Goths were hateful, when Clovis had already slain Alaric in battle and driven the Goths out of Auvergne. Whatever be the determined age of this epitaph, we at least judge with Tillemont and other writers that it is thoroughly ancient.
[136] We do not know at what time the body of St. Sidonius was carried from the church of St. Saturninus to the church of St. Genesius
was translated, and his body was afterwards translated into another church, since John Savaro in the Life of that holy Prelate, prefixed to his Works, writes thus indeterminately of that translation: The corpse of holy Sidonius was brought into the church of holy Saturninus and buried at the right (which today is called the chapel of holy Amandinus), and afterwards was translated into the church of the holy Symphorianus and Genesius on the fifth of the Ides of July; whose ashes, wrapped in silks in a leaden chest, which is surrounded by a wooden case, are religiously kept at the right horn of the greater altar of the church of holy Genesius, bishop of Clermont. We reported like things in the first paragraph of this Commentary in the summary of the Acts from our Sirmond. For the rest, all the praisers of St. Sidonius affirm with unanimous consent that his sacred relics are preserved to this very day in the church of holy Genesius with greater piety than magnificence.
[137] Nevertheless John Tamayo de Salazar strives to persuade us but not into Lusitania, as some feign, that these relics of St. Sidonius were in great part translated into Galicia, when in his Spanish Martyrology he sets out the Acts of that holy Prelate on the twenty-third day of August, and toward the end of them thus confidently pronounces: The corpse having been brought into the church of holy Saturninus, the holy body was there buried, until afterwards a great part of the remains was translated to Spain at Braga, the metropolis of Galicia, as the celebrity of ancients and moderns persuades; where miracles are daily experienced by the inhabitants everywhere at the touch of the sacred relics. To prove this assertion of his he cites the pseudo-Julian, who in the Adversaria, number 187, treating of the bodies of Saints which he feigns to have seen in Lusitania, adds this to his other fables thus: Returning to Castile, I heard on the journey that there was a body of St. Apollinaris, and I learned that Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, had been a learned man, whose feast is kept on the twenty-third of August; a good part of whose body was brought thither. Tamayo in the same place, for the sake of confirmation, recites a poem from the manuscript codex of his own Aulus Halus, if one care to believe it, whom he has as a ready helper in every fiction. We shall seem to learned men to be idling if we laboriously refute those trifles.
[138] whom the Spaniard Nicolas Antonio Wherefore we shall give only a few things from the posthumous manuscripts of Nicolas Antonio, which his kinsman, already often praised in our Work, kindly communicated to us at Madrid in the year 1721, where that learned Spaniard explodes this fable in these words: Julian confounds St. Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont in Gaul, with a certain Apollinaris, martyr of the territory of Braga, of whom Don Rodrigo da Cunha treats in his History of Braga… As concerns Sidonius, Don John Tamayo, heaping fiction upon fiction, brought forward from the manuscript codex of Halus — his own Pandora of lies — a poem, the work assuredly of his own hands, whence he teaches that Castinus, bishop of Braga, passing through the Gauls to Rome, translated these remains of the Arvernian Sidonius into his own church; and in proof of this Roman-Gallic expedition of Castinus he praises a place of the same Julian from his Chronicle…
[139] rightly and deservedly explodes. Tamayo follows without hesitation Julian, the author of the fable, and, not without his own contribution, reckons the matter carried by the auxiliary poem of his Halus; and he believes this man different from another Apollinaris, a Calabrian martyr of the same diocese of Braga, of whom he treats on the fourth of December, a distich of the same Halus being likewise brought forward, who in the most difficult matters was never not at hand for him. But I do not believe that fig-wood Julian will lend his vote to this distinction, whose mind was nothing else at all than to pour into Apollinaris — a bishop little known to the people of Braga, and of, as it were, dead memory (for they have him painted with the pastoral infulae and believe him such) — the soul and life of Sidonius of Clermont, by the art he is wont to use: of the carrying off elsewhere of any part of whose relics from the church of Clermont, where he was buried, we shall nowhere and never hear, if you take Julian out of the way — which you may do without injury. These things we have gathered from the reasoning of Nicolas Antonio, who often elsewhere refutes very many fictions of his own countrymen, and on this matter declares his mind candidly enough. Wherefore we think nothing is to be added to his words, and without further delay we proceed to set forth another glory of our St. Sidonius.
AnnotationsOtherwise soboli or subdoli*.
Otherwise invocatur*.
§ XI. The Saint's posthumous glory from his writings, which partly survive, partly have perished, or still lie hidden.
Among the Saint's lucubrations which still survive, The Works of our Saint have come from the press in various places and times. But especially esteemed is the twofold Paris edition, each of which is illustrated with notes. John Savaro of Clermont saw to the making of the earlier of these in the year 1609, in which he adorns the text of St. Sidonius with copious observations. Yet the learned Benedictine monks in the History of Literary Gaul, which began to be published at Paris in the year 1733, volume 2, page 573, judge with other critics that in these observations there appears rather the vast erudition of Savaro than a clear explanation of obscure matters. Wherefore our Sirmond at Paris in the year 1652 gave another edition of the same writer, and elucidated it with other notes so useful that the praised critics judge that the annotations of both these interpreters must be read by him who would thoroughly understand the Saint's text, which is here and there obscure. These writings of St. Sidonius have in both places been published without the order of time, which nevertheless we shall now try in some fashion to keep in reviewing them.
[141] Although in these editions twenty-four poems follow the epistles, in the order of time yet in the order of time these long preceded them: for the Saint collected the epistles about the end of his episcopate; but before he was taken up to the see of Clermont, he published these poems together at the request of Felix, a patrician man and his friend, to whom in the ninth Poem, an apologetic one, he writes thus among other things:
Why dost thou bid the rash trifles of a friend, which the jesting of a tender youth scattered, be reduced to the form of a little book, and at once and suddenly a huge bundle of ill-will be kindled, and paper perish? I serve thy commands; but first I call to witness, reader, what rough places thou wilt suffer here.
Besides these twenty-four poems, among which some longer and others shorter occur, the holy Prelate inserted into his epistles some verses, of which we do not here treat, being content to assign summarily the chief ones which are contained in that collection of twenty-four poems.
[142] The first eight poems belong to three panegyrics, which our Saint recited before the emperors Avitus, twenty-four poems precede Majorian, and Anthemius, and which must be placed in that chronological order in which we have just enumerated those three emperors. The ninth is the apologetic poem to Felix, at whose request St. Sidonius collected some of his poems, as we said in the preceding number. Among the six following, the chief place is held by two epithalamia, one of which he sang for Ruricius, afterwards bishop of Limoges, and the other for Polemius, an illustrious man. The sixteenth is directed to Faustus, bishop of Riez, to whom the Saint gives thanks for his solicitous education of his youthful brother and for the hospitality once shown to himself. In this poem he abstains from naming the gods and from poetic fables, which elsewhere are frequent with him, because without doubt he knew that Faustus, a pious prelate, was by no means delighted with those trifles. Five others are shorter epigrams and of so little moment that they do not seem to need reviewing here one by one. In the twenty-second poem St. Sidonius describes at length the Burgus of Pontius Leontius, and in the twenty-third the city of Narbonne. Finally he concludes that collection of poems with an ingenious address to his own little book, which, as it is about to depart, he charges to greet his friends everywhere from the heart.
[143] Afterwards the Saint published a work in prose, nine books of epistles, which is divided into nine books, and which comprises one hundred and forty-seven epistles, not counting those which are mingled with the poems. St. Sidonius did not publish all these at once, but by degrees in the order which we shall now indicate. At the exhortation of Constantius, presbyter of Lyons, he published the first book of epistles separately from the others, as we gather from the first epistle of the same book, in which he answers Constantius thus: Long hast thou charged me, my greater lord, with the highest authority of persuading, such as thou art, most full of counsel in the things that come to be deliberated, that if any somewhat more polished letters have flowed forth on various occasions, according as the cause, the person, the time drew them out, I should enclose them all in one volume, the copies being revised and cleaned up… I have obeyed thee, and have committed these to thy examination, not to be reviewed (for that is too little) but, as they say, to be purged and filed, knowing that thou art an immoderate patron not only of studies but also of the studious. For which reason thou now drivest me, exceedingly hesitant, hereafter into this sea of fame. At the end of the same epistle he promises Constantius a greater collection of like lucubrations, if he shall learn that this first one has pleased.
[144] which he published by degrees, Without doubt this earlier collection pleased, and St. Sidonius stood by his promises: for to the first book he afterwards added six others, as can be drawn out from the last epistle of the seventh book, which he again sent to the same Constantius in these words: From thee was the beginning, with thee it shall end; for I have sent the work requested, the copies being hastily reread, which for this reason came into my hands but few, because, as I meditated nothing about the writing of this little book, they could not hitherto be found unguarded. Certainly these few, which indeed are also slight, I finished quickly; although a mind once stirred would not yet cease to itch for writing. From this epistle we understand that those later books were collected in a short time; and that they were six in number is plain from the beginning of the epistle, to which our Sirmond in his notes, page 80, for the sake of clearer explanation added these words: The first of all the epistles, by which he dedicated the work, was to Constantius; this likewise to the same. This therefore is the end of the Constantian edition, which comprised only seven books. The remaining two which follow were afterwards added separately, one by one. Hence it is clear that after a short interval of time those six following ones were added to the first book, and that to these seven books dedicated to Constantius there afterwards acceded separately the two remaining ones, of which last we shall now treat.
[145] in that sequence, Petronius, an illustrious man, had asked St. Sidonius that, after that edition of seven books which he had inscribed to Constantius, he should publish still other epistles. The Saint, meaning to satisfy the desire of this friend, answers him among other things in book 8, epistle 1, thus: Thou askest that the Arvernian cabinets be winnowed; for whom we were supposing it might suffice, if we had brought forth anything in the earlier publication. And so we shall comply with what is enjoined, meaning nevertheless to prolong the working of the pen so far that a sum of still a small number may stretch out, at the extreme end, the series of epistles begun namely from the beginning of the volume — being about to crown the work, now unrolled, with a kind of border, as it were, of its own margin. But greater care must be taken lest, on account of the late additions to a volume already published, we fall perhaps upon some censurers… But since thou exhortest, let us loose our sails to the whirlwinds again, and let us, who have crossed as it were seas, sail over this as it were pool. From this epistle we learn that the eighth
book was published at the request of Petronius, although it seems partly to belong to the praised Constantius, as we shall observe shortly below.
[146] which we here assign Finally, at the persuasion of Firminus, our Saint joined a ninth to the eight preceding books of epistles, as is plain from the first epistle of the ninth book, whose beginning is this: Thou requirest, lord son, that, the boundary of the earlier epistles being broken through, my pen should run forward into further things, not content to be shut in by the privilege of the aforesaid number. Thou addest also the reasons why this ninth book should accrue to the volumes of the eight preceding ones; because Caius Secundus, whose track thou pronouncest that we follow in this Work, limits his epistolary work by like headings. What thou biddest is not improbable, although this very thing which thou piously enjoinest is arduous, and not opportune for whatever little praise has once been won. First, because the joining of the present increase to a little work already published is late; then, because before any arbiters whatsoever, unless we are mistaken, it is most unbecoming that a single beginning of one matter should be found with threefold epilogues. Likewise I do not know how it can be pardonable that our garrulity does not endure to be restrained even after a declared end; unless perhaps because the measure that can be set to pages cannot be set to friendships. Then, certain conditions being set forth, he promises that he will satisfy his friend's desire.
[147] When that little work was already finished, in the last epistle of the ninth book he writes thus to the same Firminus: from the Saint's own writings, If thou rememberest, lord son, thou hadst enjoined this upon me, that this ninth little book, dictated particularly for thee, should be coupled with the other eight which I wrote to Constantius, a man of singular genius, of salutary counsel, certainly surpassing in public debates the other eloquent men — whether he decide differing or like things — by the gifts of a more excellent fluency. The promise has been fulfilled, not indeed exactly, but at least instantly: for when, my dioceses having by chance been traversed, I came home, whatever hasty draft lay carelessly contained in rotting and moldering papers, I, a hasty transcriber, hurriedly and compulsorily copied out, in no way delayed by the winter season from fulfilling thy commands at once: although the page, undryable by the frost, and a drop harder than the pen, hindered the copyist — a drop which thou wouldst have judged not to flow but to break under the pressing fingers. After other things he inserted into this last epistle the Sapphic poem which we mentioned before, and by which St. Sidonius seems to have wished to put the finishing flourish to all his lucubrations.
[148] But the beginning of this reported epistle might here detain attentive readers, in which we resolve an occurring difficulty. in which the holy Prelate hints that he had written eight books of epistles to Constantius. How, someone will say, do these things hang together, when it was shown before from St. Sidonius's own letters that this holy Writer dedicated the seven earlier books of epistles to Constantius and the eighth to Petronius? How then does the Saint at the beginning of this last epistle assert that he is adding a ninth little book to the other eight which he had written to Constantius? The solution of that difficulty seems to be sought from the sixteenth epistle of the eighth book, in which St. Sidonius writes thus again to the same Constantius: I had promised Petronius, an illustrious man, that I would dispatch the present little work in few epistles; whose ears I have not spared, while I spare thine: for I preferred that the labor of correction should regard him, and the honor of the edition thee, and that that volume should come into your hands at another's risk, by my compliance. Hence we understand how that eighth book, which was chiefly dedicated to Petronius, can also be said to be partly inscribed to Constantius. Let these things said suffice concerning the various lucubrations of our Saint which still survive, and now let us investigate those that are lost or hidden.
[149] In the first place, there is no longer found the parable or satire which our Saint had composed against a certain man who bore good days ill, as he himself in book 5, epistle 17, toward the end testifies in these words: But that other, which is greater, Certain little works of the Saint have perished, and which will be sent finished tomorrow, do you both review privately; and if it please, publish it and cherish it; if it displease, blot it out and pardon. We have already seen above in §9 that St. Sidonius promised to Prosper, bishop of Orléans, a certain lucubration on the praises of St. Anianus. If he composed it, as is very likely, it must have perished, or still lie hidden somewhere. This too must be said if our Saint put together hymns in honor of St. Saturninus and of the other Saints whom he had chosen as his peculiar patrons, as in book 9, epistle 16, in the oft-praised Sapphic poem, he seems to promise.
[150] or still lie hidden; At the beginning of the preceding paragraph we made mention of the Masses which St. Gregory of Tours testifies were composed by our Bishop. Perhaps St. Sidonius himself designates these lucubrations of his when in book 7, epistle 3, he writes thus to Bishop Megethius: Long and much have I deliberated, although my mind was stirred by affection and by the zeal of obeying, whether I should send, as thou enjoinest, the little contestations which I myself dictated. Not altogether rashly do we suspect that in this place by contestatiunculae those Masses are signified, since the most learned Mabillon in the Gallican Liturgy, book 1, chapter 3, number 17, holds out to us a certain light in this obscure matter in these few words: Contestatio, otherwise the immolation of the Mass, and, as among the Mozarabs, INLATIO, for us now the PREFACE, in which the faithful attest that they have their HEARTS ON HIGH. These little works of our Saint also (whether they were Masses or prefaces) we lack to this day. Certainly St. Sidonius wrote many other things which either were never published or have perished through the ill-will of time. Of this the Saint himself is witness, when at the end of the epistle just cited he thus addresses Megethius: Our custom has it for a rite that, even if it publish few things, it writes many; just as it is inborn in dogs that, even if they do not bark, yet they growl.
[151] but Cave wrongly numbers among them the satire against Paeonius, William Cave, a heterodox Englishman, errs in his Literary History of Ecclesiastical Writers, which was printed at Geneva in the year 1694, when there on page 259 he numbers among the lost Works of St. Sidonius the Satire against Paeonius, leader of the Marcellian conspiracy, which the Saint himself denies to be his. That error becomes manifest from the eleventh epistle of the first book, in which St. Sidonius answers his friend Montius after many years concerning this very satire, wrongly imputed to him, thus: Thou askest, most eloquent man, as thou art about to seek thy own Sequani, that a satire — I know not what — be sent to thee, if it has been written out by us. Which indeed I marvel that thou hast requested: for it is not holy that thou shouldst quickly think wrongly of a friend's character. To this theme, forsooth, I was going to devote myself, doing that kind of leisure and being of that age at which it would have been presumptuous for a young man in the service to have dictated it, and dangerous to have published it. For to whom, even when saluting him, did that Calabrian [] not say:*
If anyone shall have composed evil verses against another, there is a law * and a judgment?
But lest thou believe anything further of the like about thy comrade, what that was which breathed upon me the rumor and smoke of a sinister opinion, I will set forth a little at length, but from its origin.
[152] the Saint himself expressly denying, Then in the same place the Saint, the occasion of that suspicion having first been narrated at length, sets forth briefly enough and wittily how he publicly refuted that false accusation of Paeonius at a banquet before the emperor Majorian, in these words: The emperor, turning his neck toward me, said: "I hear, Count Sidonius, that thou writest satire." And I said: "I too hear this, lord prince." Then he, but laughing: "Spare us at least." But I said: "In that I refrain from unlawful things, I spare myself." After which he said: "And what shall we do with these who provoke thee?" And I: "Whoever that man is, lord emperor, let him accuse me publicly. If we are convicted, let us, being proved guilty, pay the due penalties; but if we quash the charges not improbably, I pray that by the indulgence of thy clemency, apart from any injury to the law, I may write what I will against my accuser."
[153] At this he, catching sight of Paeonius, began by a nod to consult him as he wavered, whether the condition pleased him. that he had ever written it, But when he, confounded, kept silence, and the prince took counsel for the blushing man, he said: "I grant thy requests, if thou ask this very thing on the spot in verses." "Be it so," I said; and, turning backward, as though I were asking water for my hands, and delaying only so long as the hurrying attendants run around the circle of the couch, I returned my elbow to the cushion. And the emperor: "Thou hadst promised that thou wouldst ask leave to write satire in extempore verses." And I:
Whoever blames me for writing satire, greatest prince, this I ask thee to decree: let him either approve it or fear it.
There followed an uproar — save that in saying so I am boastful — equal to the Camillan; which indeed not so much the dignity of the poem as the brevity of the time deserved. And the prince: "I call God and the public state to witness that hereafter I will never forbid thee to write what thou wilt; since indeed the charge fastened upon thee can in no way be proved." Finally he vividly depicts how Paeonius deprecated this sentence of the emperor, and asked pardon of Sidonius himself for his rash accusation, which the Saint at the end of the epistle calls a calumny. And so Cave, who rashly ascribed that same satire to our innocent Saint, seems worthy of no less a penalty than Paeonius.
[154] and Cave's slight accuracy in other matters is shown. Moreover we do not know what that book of causes means, which Cave in the same place reckons among the lost Works of our Saint. Did he perhaps wrongly extract this Work from the epitaph of St. Sidonius, in which is read governing from time to time the motions of lawsuits? Certainly that English bibliographer is little accurate in enumerating this Saint's little works: for when among his writings which still exist he had reckoned Poems, twenty-four, besides many others intermingled with the epistles, afterwards there are reported by him among the lost writings of the same Saint Two panegyrics; one to Majorian, the other to the emperor Anthemius. But those two panegyrics are read among the twenty-four Poems which Cave admits still to exist. We therefore desire to learn whence Cave dug up those two panegyrics as already lost. And these are the chief things which we have been able to gather concerning the deeds and writings of St. Sidonius, although it is indeed to be lamented that no contemporary author wrote particular and accurate Acts of so illustrious a man.
Annotations* This is Horace.