Sidonius Appolinaris- 5th century letters

[Caballo]

Just finished reading these 5th century AD letters from a Gallo-Roman aristocrat, Sidonius Apollonaris- available here for free in an old translation. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefat ... 1book1.htm

He loves his books, and sitting discussing plays with his sons-he is clearly an intellectual, deeply steeped in Classical literature. He still has his bath house, his library and lake side villa, which he describes in detail. On one excursion, he gets his slaves to even create a temporary steam room by heating stones till they are red hot, dropping them in a pit by a stream, pouring water over them and creating a temporary cover with branches, with goatskins over the stones . He composes poems, and the church choir chants the Psalms and the Rogations. But the roads are now dangerous- not all messages get through, and he can't visit his old friends. The Goths are coming closer- elsewhere, towns are laid waste, with churches left without their roofs, and animals prowling round the altars. The city defences and ramparts are crumbling; the emperor is rumoured to have no funds, and the regular army is not mentioned once. But local heroes still exist- in the letter below Ecdicius leads 18 cavalrymen charging through an army of thousands of Goths.................

Things are clearly getting tough- and then the centre betrays them, handing his area of Gaul over to the Goths.

Its really worth reading to get inside the mind of a cultured Roman, who is seeing everything he values crumbling under the barbarian assault. He witnesses a Goth wedding; describes Theodoric; and is kept up all night by two drunken Gothic women under his window. Some letters are less interesting; but as a free insight into the end of the Roman Empire, this is recommended. And I suspect that a 4th century Romano-British villa owner seeing the Saxons slowly eroding the enfeebled rule of Rome would have felt very similar....

To his brother-in-law Ecdicius
A. D. 474

[1] THERE never was a time when my people of Clermont needed you so much as now; their affection for you is a ruling passion for more than one reason. First, because a man's native soil may rightly claim the chief place in his affection; secondly, because you were not only your countrymen's joy at birth, but the desire of their hearts while yet unborn. Perhaps of no other man in this age can the same be said; but the proof of the statement is that as your mother's time advanced, the citizens with one accord fell to checking every day as it went by.

[2] I will not dwell on those common things which yet so deeply stir a man's heart, as that here was the grass on which as an infant you crawled, or that here were the first fields you trod, the first rivers you swam, the first woods through which you broke your way in the chase. I will not remind you that here you first played ball and cast the dice, here you first knew sport with hawk and hound, with horse and bow. I will forget that your schooldays brought us a veritable confluence of learners and the learned from all quarters, and that if our nobles were imbued with the love of eloquence and poetry, if they resolved to forsake the barbarous Celtic dialect, it was to your personality that they owed all.

[3] Nothing so kindled their universal regard for you as this, that you first made Romans of them and never allowed them to relapse again. And how should the vision of you ever fade from any patriot's memory as we saw you in your glory upon that famous day, when a crowd of both sexes and every rank and age lined our half-ruined walls to watch you cross the space between us and the enemy? At midday, and right across the middle of the plain, you brought your little company of eighteen safe through some thousands of the Goths, a feat which posterity will surely deem incredible.

[4] At the sight of you, nay, at the very rumour of your name, those seasoned troops were smitten with stupefaction; their captains were so amazed that they never stopped to note how great their own numbers were and yours how small. They drew off their whole force to the brow of a steep hill; they had been besiegers before, but when you appeared they dared not even deploy for action. You cut down some of their bravest, whom gallantry alone had led to defend the rear. You never lost a man in that sharp engagement, and found yourself sole master of an absolutely exposed plain with no more soldiers to back you than you often have guests at your own table.

[5] Imagination may better conceive than words describe the procession that streamed out to you as you made your leisurely way towards the city, the greetings, the shouts of applause, the tears of heartfelt joy. One saw you receiving in the press a veritable ovation on this glad return; the courts of your spacious house were crammed with people. Some kissed away the dust of battle from your person, some took from the horses the bridles slimed with foam and blood, some inverted and ranged the sweat-drenched saddles; others undid the flexible cheek-pieces of the helmet you longed to remove, others set about unlacing your greaves. One saw folk counting the notches in swords blunted by much slaughter, or measuring with trembling fingers the holes made in cuirasses by cut or thrust.

[6] Crowds danced with joy and hung upon your comrades; but naturally the full brunt of popular delight was borne by you. You were among unarmed men at last; but not all your arms would have availed to extricate you from them. There you stood, with a fine grace suffering the silliest congratulations; half torn to pieces by people madly rushing to salute you, but so loyally responsive to this popular devotion that those who took the greatest liberties seemed surest of your most generous acknowledgements.

[7] And finally I shall say nothing of the service you performed in raising what was practically a public force from your private resources, and with little help from our magnates. I shall not tell of the chastisement you inflicted on the barbaric raiders, and the curb imposed upon an audacity which had begun to exceed all bounds; or of those surprise attacks which annihilated whole squadrons with the loss of only two or three men on your side. Such disasters did you inflict upon the enemy by these unexpected onsets, that they resorted to a most unworthy device to conceal their heavy losses. They decapitated all whom they could not bury in the short night-hours, and let the headless lie, forgetting in their desire to avoid the identification of their dead, that a trunk would betray their ruin just as well as a whole body.

[8] When, with morning light, they saw their miserable artifice revealed in all its savagery, they turned at last to open obsequies; but their precipitation disguised the ruse no better than the ruse itself had concealed the slaughter. They did not even raise a temporary mound of earth over the remains; the dead were neither washed, shrouded, nor interred; but the imperfect rites they received befitted the manner of their death. Bodies were brought in from everywhere, piled on dripping wains; and since you never paused a moment in following up the rout, they had to be taken into houses which were then hurriedly set alight, till the fragments of blazing roofs, falling in upon them, formed their funeral pyres.

[9] But I run on beyond my proper limits; my aim in writing was not to reconstruct the whole story of your achievements, but to remind you of a few among them, to convince you how eagerly your friends here long to see you again; there is only one remedy, at once quick and efficacious, for such fevered expectancy as theirs, and that is your prompt return. If, then, the entreaties of our people can persuade you, sound the retreat and start homeward at once. The intimacy of kings is dangerous; I court it no more; the most distinguished of mankind have well compared it to a flame, which illuminates things at a short distance but consumes them if they come within its range. Farewell.

[Jona Lendering]

Its really worth reading to get inside the mind of a cultured Roman, who is seeing everything he values crumbling under the barbarian assault.

Yes, I agree. I have fond memories of the man. I still hope to one day visit his city, Clermont-Ferrand.

[elagababbalus]

Interesting read. In one of his letters he says

Armed nobles stand about the royal seat; the mass of guards in their garb of skins are admitted that they may |4 be within call, but kept at the threshold for quiet's sake; only a murmur of them comes in from their post at the doors, between the curtain and the outer barrier.1 And now the foreign envoys are introduced. The king hears them out, and says little; if a thing needs more discussion he puts it off, but accelerates matters ripe for dispatch. The second hour arrives; he rises from the throne to inspect his treasure-chamber or stable.

I thought that late antiquity barbarians, especially aristocratic ones would dress similar to the romans to downplay their difference to make the transition to barbarian rule more palatable. Is reference to guards dressed in skins done as a rhetorical device or is it realistic?

[Jona Lendering]

Is reference to guards dressed in skins done as a rhetorical device or is it realistic?

Both, probably. The men probably wore something made of leather, and Sidonius employed the traditional rhetoric description. Compare his younger contemporary Remigius, who called Clovis (born in Gallia Belgica and Latin-speaking, but the greatgrandson of a "free" German) a "Sugambrian".

I would not even exclude that the leather dress was in fact identical to late Roman costume, but the same garment, considered normal and civilized when worn by a "true" Roman, could be seen as a symbol of barbarism when the man who wore it had ancestors who had once immigrated to the Empire.

[Robert Vermaat]

Things are clearly getting tough- and then the centre betrays them, handing his area of Gaul over to the Goths.

Not quite.

First of all, Sidonius was not ‘just’ an landed gentleman, fond of writing poems and telling tales about the past. He was also at one time the Praetorian Prefect of Rome.

And even though he describes the encroaching Goths, remember that this was at the time not seen as foreign powers taking over Roman soil. The Goths were of course not Romans, but they functioned within the Roman state. And what was long seen as a barbarian king conquering Roman territory, was at the time seen as a Roman general extending his sphere of influence. Just like Roman emperors had been doing for centuries, with the same result for any civilian caught between the lines.

A Gothic army besieging a city in Gaul was (to those living at that time) not very different from a Roman pretender besieging a city in Gaul. I doubt that many saw the difference.