A Bishop of the Fifth Century

WHEN we read of Valentinian III. flying from Rome at the approach of Attila and his Huns, and then how the barbarians were turned back, and induced, this time, to spare the Eternal City, by the majestic front and solemn eloquence of Leo the Great, we know that these things mean the end of Imperial and the beginning of Papal Rome. But it is doubtful whether any contemporary Roman citizen fully realized their significance, and it is certain that one man, of no little distinction, — one of whom, through his writings, we know more, perhaps, than of any other then living, and whose history was destined singularly to illustrate the great vicissitudes of his age, — was occupied almost exclusively with his own private affairs.

In the year of Attila’s invasion, 452 A. D., Caius Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris married Papianilla, the only daughter of the future Emperor Avitus. The match was in all respects a suitable one. Both bride and groom belonged to the best of Gallo-Roman families ; and the ancestors of Sidonius Apollinaris, though now for three generations professing the Christian faith, were said to have been priests in an ancient temple of Apollo, of which, if we are to believe tradition, a relic still remains. There is a mask, somewhat resembling the Bocca della Verità in Rome, surmounting a ruined portal on the site of the Château de Polignac, destroyed in the Revolution ; and the archives of the Polignac family, which claims descent from the sainted Sidonius, and through him from the priests aforesaid, affirm this mask to have been the very vehicle of the oracles delivered in the ancestral temple.

Both the father and grandfather of Sidonius Apollinaris had been prefects of Gaul, and had fulfilled the duties of their office with honor; while on the maternal side he seems to have been distantly connected with his future father-in-law, Avitus. The latter had just rendered an important service to his Emperor, Valentinian III. ; for it was apparently by his arguments that Theodoric I., King of the Visigoths, was induced to join his troops to those of Ætius. the Roman general, and march to the relief of Orléans, besieged by Attila and his hordes. Had Theodoric not been on the Roman side, victory must inevitably have fallen to Attila, in the hardly contested battle of Châlons.

It was in the breathing-space afforded to Gaul by the defeat of Attila that the wedding took place between Sidonius and the daughter of Avitus ; but before we attempt to follow the fortunes of the young pair, a brief survey must be taken of the state of public affairs.

The Eastern Empire, under the rule of Marcian and Pulcheria, was in abler hands than usual. Its connection with the West had been weakened by the death, in 451, of Galla Placidia, whose tomb yet stands intact under its pictured dome at Ravenna; whose very mummified remains, arrayed in royal robes, could be discerned through a grating but little more than a century ago, and were only then sacrificed to a freak of childish mischief.

In giving to the world her son Valentinian III. and her daughter Honoria, Galla Placidia had done what she could toward fulfilling the augury of Romulus’s vultures, and putting an end to Rome after twelve centuries of greatness. There is no need to retrace here the careers of that brother and sister, each now about to close. Honoria’s name is never mentioned in history after Attila’s death, and Valentinian had but two years left to live.

The next Emperor of the West would enter upon a sadly contracted kingdom. Africa was in the hands of the Vandals, Spain given over to the Sueves ; all attempt to retain the British Islands under Roman rule had long before ceased. Gaul was now divided into many more than the three parts known to classical history. None of its Atlantic seaboard belonged to Rome, and two of the four races between whom this was shared, the Franks and Visigoths, were ever pushing eagerly forward — the Visigoths east and north, the Franks southwards from Belgium — into Central France. Moreover, the Burgundians had established a firm footing in Western Switzerland, from whose mountains they looked down enviously on the rich valley of the Rhone.

The fate surely impending over the Gallo-Romans was that of absorption into one or another of the barbarian kingdoms by which they were surrounded, but they seem themselves to have entertained no suspicion of any such destiny. Their insouciant disregard of the signs of the times has been aptly compared to that of the old French noblesse upon the selfsame soil, thirteen hundred years later.

Pagan Gaul had been a reflection of Rome. Every considerable city had its arx and forum, circus, temples, theatre, and amphitheatre. All aimed, in their public edifices and institutions, at copying as closely as possible the great Italian original. The rural districts, as always, had been slower to adopt new ideas. The worship of the Olympian divinities, even, was an exotic religion there, conformity to which, like the wearing of togas, the writing of hexameters, and the study of philosophy, was considered the correct thing, — a necessary part of the “high Roman fashion ” of respectable citizenship.

When Gaul received Christianity, it was at the hands of Oriental, not Occidental, missionaries ; and this probably accounts for one of the most curious features in the history of these years, namely, that while political Gaul, and above all Auvergne, remained intensely loyal to the Rome of the Emperors, Auvergne the bishopric acknowledged no allegiance to ecclesiastical Rome.

To return to the subject of this sketch. Sidonius Apollinaris was born in 431, at Lyons, where he probably passed the greater part of his youth, and where he received the education which was thought fitting for a young man of his position.

Here he made many lifelong friends, to one of whom, long afterwards, he sent a letter full of gay reminiscences of their schooldays together, in which this Probus who is addressed figures as an infant prodigy, coaching his fellow-pupils, and even correcting his teachers.

Sidonius completed his school course to the high satisfaction of a circle of admiring relatives, who held him, as indeed he held himself, a clever young man and a very promising writer. He had plenty of political ambition, and desire for a Roman reputation; and he regarded his own facility in the manufacture of hexameters and the composition of complimentary letters as means to that end, rather than as an adequate object in life.

He married, as has been said, the only daughter of the most prominent Auvergnat of that day, and settled down as a member of his father-in-law’s household, making himself generally agreeable, while he watchfully bided his time.

Of the villa where Avitus was then living, and which afterwards became his own, Sidonius Apollinaris has left a long and pompous description, professedly modeled on Pliny’s well-known accounts of his Laurentian and Tuscan residences, hut not by any means the most successful of his imitations. The less ambitious narrative of his visits to Ferreolus and Apollinaris is much more satisfactory, and gives a vivid notion of the ways of living among that generation of men.

“ You ask,” he writes to Donidius, “ why, though I set out from Nimes some time ago, I still try your patience by delaying my return home. I will explain the circumstances without loss of time,¹ for I know you are pleased with whatever pleases me. I have been passing my time most delightfully, in the pleasantest of places and with the most courteous of hosts, — Ferreolus and Apollinaris. Their estates adjoin,'² and their houses are not far apart. It would be a longish walk from one to the other, but a short ride. The hills that overlook both dwellings are planted with vines and olives. . . . One of the houses has a view over the open country, the other looks out upon forests, but the situations are equally charming. So much for the places, and now for the manner of life.

“ To begin, there was a friendly strife each morning between my entertainers as to whose kitchen - chimney should smoke for my first repast. Although nearly related to the one (Apollinaris), and only a distant connection of the other (Ferreolus), I could not very well divide my time equally between them, turn and turn about, because the age and dignity of Ferreolus over and above the deference due to a man who had held the office of prefect gave him the greater claim. However, I was hurried from pleasure to pleasure.” He goes on to describe how the tennis-court and the dice-boxes were ready for such as cared for that kind of amusement, and then follows a most interesting description of Ferreolus’s famous library : “ Here are books in abundance : breast-high cases, like those of the grammarians ; wedgeshaped ones, like those of an athenæum ; shelves laden like a bookseller’s. I observed that the manuscripts laid handy to the armchairs of the ladies consisted, for the most part, of œuvres de piété ; while those which adjoined the benches of the fathers of the family comprised the noblest specimens of Latin eloquence. There are works of equal literary merit in both lines, no doubt. Thus Augustine may be compared with Varro, and Prudentius with Horace.” It was in this library that Sidonius usually passed his mornings until eleven o’clock, when the summons came to lunch, or rather dinner. “ They dine quickly but plentifully, in senatorial fashion ; for it is their fad and fancy to have many kinds of food served on few dishes.” This meal was over by noon ; then came a short ride, and then a bath, taken, not in the elaborate bathing - rooms, though such were attached to each villa, but in simpler fashion. Temporary huts, erected along the river-side, and filled with steam by pouring water upon red-hot stones, made very effective sudaria, after the style of those described by Dostoïevsky, in the Siberian convict prisons. Here the company not unfrequently remained for hours, in grave or gay discussion ; and when they emerged, it was to take first a plunge into very hot water, and then a dip in the limpid river. After this, all felt themselves ready for the abundant evening meal.

We have no means of knowing whether the three years immediately following his marriage seemed to move quickly or slowly to Sidonius Apollinaris, for, save for the account of a visit which he paid to the court of the Visigoths, at Toulouse, he himself has left us no record of them, and it is doubtful whether even this narrative ought not to be referred to a later period.

In the great world, the history of these years is little more than a catalogue of murder. First, Valentinian connives at the taking-off of Ætius, — the skillful, if unprincipled, general whose lieutenant Avitus had often been. Early the next year, Valentinian himself was assassinated by the servant of one Maximus, a Roman senator, who seated himself on the vacant throne, and compelled the widow of his victim to take him as her second husband. Three months after his accession, — June, 455, — Maximus was, in his turn, stoned to death in the streets of Rome, and Genseric came over from Africa, at the summons of the outraged Empress. Leo’s venerable presence did not avail to overawe the Vandal, and the utmost Genseric would concede was to limit his occupation and sack of the city to a fortnight.

Fourteen days of systematic pillage ensued, and then the Vandal fleet set sail for Africa, bearing the Empress Eudoxia, her two daughters, and every portable object in the venerable city which had captivated the fancy of the barbarians. We are not altogether sorry to know that the treacherous Empress was ill treated by Genseric, and that one important bit of their booty escaped altogether out of the hands of the Vandals. The vessel bearing the plunder of the Capitol foundered and sank on its southward voyage. The golden candlesticks from the Temple at Jerusalem, on the contrary, performed the voyage in safety, and were found in Carthage by Belisarius, a century later.

So the midsummer of 455 saw Rome headless and desolate, and Avitus had a mind to assume the inviting purple. By the help of Theodoric II. he succeeded in being proclaimed Emperor at Ugernum, now the Beaucaire, with whose features both the lovers of Mirèio and the friends of Tartarin are abundantly familiar.

The price of the Gothic support appears to have been a free field for unlimited conquest in Spain; and while Theodoric set off upon a protracted Suevic campaign, the new-made Emperor and his escort, his young son-in-law prominent among them, departed for Rome. On his arrival there, Avitus accepted the now shadowy dignity of the consulship, and entered on the duties of his new office after gravely going through with all the traditional preliminaries. The breed of sacred hens was still kept up, and slain for the consular auguries, but the auspices, one would think, must have been very bad on this occasion.

Sidonius — poet laureate by virtue of his relation to the Emperor — delivered the official panegyric, which went off entirely to his own satisfaction and that of all his auditors. What a chance was now afforded him to show the still selfsufficient old Romans that those fellows from the provinces were not behind themselves in elegant culture! In the six hundred and three lines of which his panegyric is composed, Sidonius does all that could have been expected of a court poet. Jove summons the gods to Olympus, and Sidonius rattles off their names with a fluency which, however, can hardly have sufficed to hide from his critical hearers the damning faux pas which he committed in closing a hexameter with Cybele.

Not only gods, but half-gods, come at Jove’s bidding, and are faithfully catalogued. To them assembled appears Rome, in persona, recites a compendium of her history, and describes her present sorry state. On her Jove graciously bestows Avitus as ruler, and recounts his biography at length. Each deed demands its array of polysyllables, from the wolf Avitus killed as a boy to his reluctant acceptance of the Empire, which is described by his son-in-law as a coy acceding to the desires of beseeching Gaul.

The moment the Father of the Gods had ceased speaking, Olympus began to applaud, and the Senate did the same for Sidonius. They even broke their benches in his honor, and voted him a statue of brass in the portico of the Library of Trajan, which had been stripped of many of its choicest treasures, no doubt, by Genseric, in the preceding summer.

Avitus’s reign is an almost complete blank, and in the next year it came abruptly to an end. He had ceased to he acceptable to Ricimer, the Teuton commander-in-chief of the Roman forces; and Ricimer, surnamed the King-Maker, could do anything, it appears, that he desired, short of placing himself upon the throne of the Cæsars.

With his father-in-law’s death Sidonius’s prospects of advancement were for the time sadly blighted, and he returned to Gaul a very disaffected subject of the central government. How far his disloyalty led him we shall never know, but if he did not actually join the Visigothic faction, he was probably privy to the plot then on foot in Gaul, — to revolt from Rome altogether, and make of Central France either an independent kingdom, or one tributary to Theodoric II. And it is to this period that it seems best, upon the whole, to assign that account of a visit to the court of Toulouse of which mention has been made above, and which, though nominally addressed to Agricola (the eldest son of the late Emperor), was evidently written for the public eye, and reads very much like a campaign document.

The description of Theodoric’s person is too graphic and striking to be omitted : “ He is a man of perfectly proportioned figure, shorter than the tallest, but higher and more commanding than those of medium stature. The top of his head is round, and his curling hair recedes a little from the plane of his forehead. He is not at all bull-necked. His eyes are covered by a shaggy arch of eyebrow, and where his lashes droop they seem almost to graze the middle of his cheek. The lobes of his ears are veiled, after the fashion of his people, by waving locks of the hair that grows above them. His lips are finely cut, and do not appear to broaden when parted. His regular teeth, if by chance you obtain a glimpse of them, are almost as white as snow. His mustache is trimmed daily. A close beard begins at his slightly hollow temples, but is carefully plucked out from the lower part of the face by the assiduous care of his barber. The skin of his chin, throat, and rather slender but well-rounded neck is white as milk; but if he be looked at closely it becomes suffused with the rosy glow of youth, for he oftener flushes from modesty than from anger. His shoulders are well made, his arms powerful, the forearm hard, the hand broad. His chest is well expanded ; his abdomen recedes.”

There follows an equally minute account — unfortunately too long to quote — of Theodoric’s daily avocations ; and a very clean, just, manly, simple, and yet kingly life he seems to have lived. It should also be noted that the laudatory description which Sidonius has here given of Theodoric receives curious confirmation from a most unexpected quarter, — the polemical writings of Salvian; and we must conclude the rule of the Gothic kings to have been a more just and equitable one, upon the whole, than that of the Roman prefects. Moreover, under Theodoric, who, though nominally an Arian, was practically a free-thinker, Catholics were never persecuted ; and it is no wonder if the Gauls, and especially the family of Avitus, outraged by the murder of their countryman and kinsman, felt their allegiance to Rome wonderfully slackened.

Some steps toward revolt were certainly taken, but they proved abortive ; and in 458, Majorian, the first and the ablest of the Emperors whom Ricimer made, came to Lyons, and Sidonius, then quite in disgrace, at the age of twentyseven took the hint of a friend that it might be a politic thing for so ready a writer to compose a panegyric on the new ruler. A second panegyric was accordingly produced, and though we cannot fancy the composition of it to have been other than a bitter task, reviving, as it must have done, all the memories of that brief season of triumph at the capital and its tragical close, yet it must be confessed that no evidence of any such sentiment appears in the text. There is, perhaps, a covert allusion to the past in the fact that Majorian’s eulogy is carefully measured out to exactly the same length — six hundred and three lines — as that of Avitus, at which point it concludes with decided abruptness.

Majorian, however, was apparently quite satisfied. He not only relieved Sidonius from disgrace, but showed him distinguished favor. During the ensuing months, while the imperial court was at Arles, Sidonius was in frequent attendance, and proved himself an accomplished courtier. All his life through he remembered those days with peculiar complacency, and fully ten years later he describes with the greatest gusto a duel of words between himself and one Pæonius, which took place at Majorian’s table, and how he won the imperial host entirely to his side, and came off triumphant.

Everything now seemed to smile on Sidonius. The Emperor made much of him ; Petrus, Majorian’s secretary, being himself a clever writer, had a fellowfeeling, and a very kindly one, for the young poet; Magnus, the prætorian prefect, was interested in him as the schoolfellow of his own sons, Probus and Magnus Felix ; and he also found a former acquaintance in that famous Egidius who was shortly after appointed by Majorian magister militiæ, and went away to perform those feats of arms in the North by virtue of which he became the Comte Gilles of early French legend.

But Sidonius’s dreams of distinction under Majorian were as quickly and rudely dispelled as those had been which he cherished along with Avitus. In August, 461, Majorian was dethroned and put to death by the agency of Ricimer, who raised up to take his place one Severus, of whom little save his name is known. During the reign of this insignificant princeling, Sidonius lived quietly in the country, as he had done in the first years after his marriage. He made his home at Avitacum, an estate which was dearer to him, so he says, as the patrimony of his wife, than those even which came to him from his own father. Shut in among the hills lay the villa, where the valets dozed all day in the antechamber, and the flight of time was marked only by the varying sounds of the animal world: chirping of crickets at noon, croaking of frogs at dusk; at midnight, the cries of geese and swans, and the crowing of cocks; the hoarse caw of the rooks, when the first faint streaks of dawn appeared in the east; and as day broke, the song of the nightingale and the swallow.

A charming retreat, indeed, where he and his people lived in so great amity that he was afraid the friend to whom he sends his elaborate description might attribute this concord not so much to the blessing of God as to some fairy charm.

This villa of Avitacum was situated in the neighborhood of what is now Clermont-Ferrand, and was then that capital of the Arverni which the proverbial schoolboy knows to his cost as the seat of the valiant Vercingetorix, and which had given the great Cæsar a vast deal of trouble. Auvergne was now to show itself equally stubborn in its adherence to the Roman rule. They were a conservative race, those partially Romanized Gauls ; the pagan temples had still their handful of worshipers, and it was more than suspected that even Druid rites were annually practiced in certain remote and shady spots. Still, the vast majority of the population was of course Christianized, and the bishops of the Orthodox Catholic Church in Gaul were, as a rule, remarkably able men.

With certain of these higher ecclesiastics Sidonius became well acquainted, during his years of retirement, although his friendship with the saintly Lupus of Troyes was probably of an earlier date. Lupus had done for his own city what Leo had done for Rome, — he had averted the descent of Attila by the mere power of his personality. Raised to the bishopric in 427, he was already regarded as the patriarch of the Gallic Church, and he entertained an almost fatherly fondness for Sidonius.

So for four years, or until the age of thirty-four, the twice-disappointed courtier lived that life of a Roman provincial of which Salvian has left so vigorous, if sensational, a picture,— a life which in many of its fashions remained curiously pagan. Crowds attended the games which were still held in the arenas, and pieces were produced at the theatres of which the subjects were taken almost without exception from heathen mythology.

The complicated machinery of Roman government was also maintained after a sort, and the burden of it fell with crushing weight on that class whose well-being is most of all essential to the prosperity of a country, — the small proprietors. Taxes were so high as to be impossible of payment, and men were forced to become the serfs of some powerful lord, in order to find the means of subsistence for themselves and their families. But Sidonius and his cultivated circle appear to have taken this state of things quite as a matter of course. Not the least striking of his letters is that in which he recounts his successful intercession on behalf of a certain Turnus.

The father of this young man had borrowed a considerable sum of money at twelve per cent., and the debt was of so long standing that the original amount had doubled. The debtor was unable to pay, and, being apparently on his death-bed, he appealed to Sidonius to use his good offices with the creditor, one Maximus, for some abatement of the claim.

At considerable inconvenience to himself, Sidonius made a détour by the villa of Maximus, when en route for Toulouse, and it is to Turnus that he writes to tell of his success.

“ When I arrived,” he proceeds, “ Maximus himself came out to meet me. I had seen him in the old days, erect in body, brisk of pace, cheery of voice, and alert in expression, but his present appearance was very different. The man’s dress and walk, his complexion, speech, and downcast eye, all breathed religion. So did his closecropped hair, his flowing beard, his three-legged stools, his hair-cloth portières, his featherless bed, his table devoid of purple covering, his hospitality at once kind and frugal, more abundant in vegetables than in meats ; for if any particularly dainty plat was brought in, it was intended as an indulgence for his guests, not for himself.

“ When we rose from table, I took occasion privately to inquire of those present which of the three orders he had entered. Had he become monk, priest, or penitent ? They told me that he had just assumed the bishopric, which had been forced on his unwilling acceptance by his admiring fellow-citizens.”

Sidonius now obtains a private interview, falls on his old friend’s neck, congratulates him on his new honors, and then introduces his especial business. To continue in his own words : —

“ I presented the petition of your father ; I alleged his necessity ; I deplored his extremity, which would seem all the more grievous to his friends were he to be loosed from the body while still bound by debt. I begged him to be mindful both of his new profession and of his old acquaintance, and to appease by ever so slight a concession the barbarous insistence of the clamorous sheriffs. Should the sick man die, I entreated a year’s respite for his heirs ; should be recover, as I still hoped he might, a little indulgence for himself, that, weakened by illness, he might have a clear space for convalescence.”

Sidonius was yet pleading, when Maximus burst into tears, and, in a broken voice, yielded all, and more than all, which the advocate had hoped. He abated the interest of the debt, and granted a year’s delay in the payment of the principal; and the letter concludes quaintly with some rather plain advice to Turnus to lose no time in paying the original sum, and thanking Maximus for his great generosity,

“ For,” says Sidonius, with the involuntary and very naive cynicism which belonged peculiarly to himself, “ when a man like that holds a note, and remits the half where he might exact the whole, if there be any further delay, he feels himself justly offended, and exacts once more that which he had conceded through pious compassion.”

The picture of Maximus is not altogether an attractive one to modern eyes, but Sidonius was ever tolerant and easy in his judgments. Most of the things that people did seemed quite natural to him.

High and difficult moral standards did exist in a few select souls, and Sidonius recognized the fact and respected the individuals, but it was not to such that his sympathies went out most heartily. “ I ‘ll tell you a secret,” he wrote, years later, to the Bishop of Vaisons. “I look up to those extremely austere men, and, conscious of my own imbecility, I bear with meekness their severity toward myself ; but the fact is that such manners make me feel my inferiority more than they invite my confidence.”

Yet it should be said in his honor that, however little disposed to idealize his fellow-beings, he was absolutely stanch and loyal, never deserting a friend in misfortune, though laughing at himself, sometimes, for the softness and impolicy of his own behavior. Of this disposition he affords us a striking example in the year 457 ; but to make the circumstances clear, a few words must once more be given to the political situation.

In August, 465, the phantom Emperor Severus had ceased to be, and his death was followed by an interregnum of sixteen months. At the end of this time, Ricimer, having balanced the advantages to be derived from alliances with Constantinople and with Carthage, decided in favor of the former, and, with the aid and sanction of the Emperor Leo, raised to the purple Anthemius, in whose veins, as it chanced, ran the blood both of Eastern and Western Emperors. The arrangement seemed to promise fairly enough. It was Leo’s interest to support it, and Ricimer was thought to be hound by his betrothal to the daughter of the new ruler.

So Anthemius, then in command of the Hellespontic fleet, which had been ordered to watch the proceedings of Genseric, set out for Rome, and on April 12, 457, three miles from the city gates, he was met by a huzzaing multitude, who hailed him Emperor. The news of his elevation, when it reached Auvergne, found the dispositions of Sidonius and his party very unlike what they had been ten years before. Their then lukewarm loyalty to Rome had been rekindled into an ardent flame. Two events had helped to bring about this change. One was the rapid growth of the Burgundian power, which had by this time overrun all that portion of modern France which lies east of the Rhone, except the department of Var and that small tract of debatable land ceded by Piedmont in 1859, and now known as the Alpes Maritimes. Theodoric, the long-haired and clear-featured, had been murdered, and succeeded by his brother Euric, a no less able ruler, but in one important respect a very different man. All religions had been much alike to Theodoric, but Euric was a fiercely proselyting Arian, and there could he no question in the mind of any good Catholic of tamely handing over Auvergne to his tender mercies.

Meanwhile, no suspicion that they were not altogether free agents appears even yet to have dawned upon the Auvergnats. They thought it best to send an embassy to their new master in Rome, and they appointed Sidonius its chief: and verily a more willing envoy never undertook a mission.

Full particulars concerning his journey were sent back to his friend Heronius; and however interesting these may have been at the time, they are at least equally so to-day.

Sidonius begins by frankly congratulating himself on having made his trip at the public charge, and by the admirably managed government post. He crossed the Alps, descending by Lago Maggiore, where he embarked on the Ticino, following the course of that river down to its confluence with the Po, and afterward the latter as far as Ravenna, where he had probably expected to find the court.

The city made a profound and ineffaceable impression upon Sidonius, and it is strange indeed to compare his description with one’s own memories. “ I hardly know,” writes the Gaul, “ whether to say of the Via Cæsaris that it separates or connects the old city and the new port; ” and as we read of the broad and busy highway from a great capital to its principal mart, the vision arises of a lonesome, narrow rural road, leading between level rice-fields, miles away from the gray and shrunken town of Ravenna, to a majestic and solitary basilica.

Wonderfully imposing in its absolute isolation stands San Apollinare in Classe, and deserted of all save the bones that moulder in its immemorial sarcophagi, and the white-robed figures in fadeless mosaic that walk in radiant procession around its inner wall; and our sensitive Sidonius would have felt a pang of mingled pride and sorrow, could he have known that the very last relic of the rich and teeming port at which he marveled would have recalled, by its dedication to a local saint, his own halfpagan name.

That silent church is literally all that remains of Cæsarea or of Classis. The Adriatic has long since receded from the line where its billows broke before the curious eyes of the stranger from Auvergne, and on the tract of land thus lifted a mighty pine forest, beloved of many a poet, both before and since the days of Dante, has risen, and flourished, and decayed, until now, across the shadeless, flowery waste, only the faintest thread of blue can be discerned upon a distant horizon.

A sense of something funeste about the situation and prospects of Ravenna seems to have preyed even upon the mind of Sidonius. “You must think ill of your native town indeed,” he writes in his lively fashion to Candidianus, “if you find yourself happy in being exiled to Ravenna, where a loquacious troop of hopping frogs accompanies your steps through the town, while your ears are pierced by the mosquitoes of the Po. All the laws of nature are reversed in that quagmire: walls fall and waters rise ; towers rock and ships are stationary ; sick men walk abroad and doctors lie abed ; baths are cold and houses hot; the living are parched with thirst; while the dead go a-swimming; thieves are wide awake and authorities fast asleep ; the clergy practice usury, while Syrians sing the office; merchants fight and soldiers trade ; old men play at tennis and young men at dice; eunuchs bear arms and barbarians affect literature.”

The touch of malaria, which he very likely got at Ravenna, though he credits it to the “ pestilential Tuscan country,” may have helped to put Sidonius out of humor with the place. At all events, he suffered much from thirst and fever, while he proceeded Romeward by way of Rimini and Fano, noting the historic associations of these places with Julius Cæsar and with Hasdrubal. The act of paying his devotions at the basilica which then occupied the site of St. Peter’s sufficed, however, for his complete cure, and he established himself in lodgings where he might rest and recruit, until the commotion attendant upon Ricimer’s marriage should have subsided.

A few days later he takes up the thread of his narrative, not, as the reader of to-day fondly hopes, to tell of the aspect of Rome as he beheld it, but to describe how he had succeeded in obtaining the Emperor’s ear ; how, with the help of a friend, he had gone over a list of the senators, and satisfied himself that, “ with all due respect to the others, only two were really worth cultivating, — Avienus and Basilius. Now the former was the easier of access, but he had a large family connection, ready to snap up all the favors which came in his way, so the sage Sidonius decided, while keeping on friendly terms with him, to pay his more particular court to Basilius ; and the old senator soon procured for his new-found friend an opportunity of delivering a panegyric of Anthemius in the presence of the Emperor himself.

Once again, therefore, Sidonius was fain to trundle forth the dilapidated old Olympian machinery, and to grind out five or six hundred hexameters, which “ may or may not have been thought good work,” as he naively says, “ but at all events got the reward thereof ; ” for Anthemius appointed him prefect of Rome. “ By the aid of Christ and the use of my pen,” as he piously puts it, “ I am come to the prefecture;” and very happy he was made for the moment by this big piece of preferment.

Yet to condemn Sidonius as a mere office-seeker, on the strength of a letter like this, would he most unfair. There is another, dating from his very last days of worldly prosperity, which puts him before us in a different light.

“ I cannot disguise the fact,” he writes from Rome, “ that the fall of Arvandus preys heavily on my mind.” Now Arvandus had been prætorian prefect of Gaul, and had come to Rome to stand his trial for maladministration there. The province was represented by three prosecutors, Thaumastus, Petronius, and Ferreolus. We have already made the acquaintance of the last, as the possessor of the wonderful library. Thaumastus was cousin to Sidonius ; Petronius was his old friend. But Arvandus had been his friend as well, and though he was indubitably guilty, both of extortion and lèse-majesté, Sidonius could not find it in his heart to desert him.

When, however, in company with a fellow-noble, he waited on the accused with expressions of sympathy and offers of assistance, the unhappy man turned on them furiously, and with many abusive epithets ordered them out of his presence. They departed more sad than angry. “ For where,” says Sidonius, “ is the doctor who loses his temper every time an access of rage seizes upon a madman ? ”

He sorrowfully watched the case to its inevitable conclusion, by sentence of death against Arvandus ; and then, when the criminal had been relegated to the Isola Tiberina to await his execution, he once more came forward, and exerted all his influence to have the penalty at least commuted to one of exile. “ But in any case,” our good Sidonius adds gloomily, “ whether he suffer the extreme penalty of the law or only anticipate it, if, after all the insults and humiliations he has undergone, he can find death more terrible than life, he seems to me the most wretched of men.” What the fate of Arvandus really was we do not know.

Sidonius retained his office of prefect for one year only. He found its duties very onerous, particularly that of provisioning the city, with the assistance of the prœfectus annonœ ; and he was glad, at the end of a twelvemonth, to exchange his prefecture for the patriciate. Shortly afterward, perceiving on the political horizon the unmistakable signs of freshly gathering storm, he returned to Gaul, abandoning once again, and this time definitively, his hopes of political advancement.

He arrived to find Lyons the Burgundian capital, and very unpleasant to the traveled patrician was the barbarian crowd which jostled him in the streets of his native city, nor was he slow to express his disgust. To a request for an epithalamium he replies in rollicking hendecasyllabics, to the effect that he cannot write a six-foot measure with a seven-foot savage standing over him, after which he proceeds to a very unflattering description of the personal habits of the new-comers.³ A satirical skit of this kind may have obtained a succès d’estime among the outraged Lyonnais, but was not very likely to ingratiate its author with his new masters ; and indeed it must have been a sore trial to a man of refinement to have to share his private possessions (for such had been the strange terms of the surrender of the province) with some one of these unsavory intruders. Erelong, therefore, our friend shook the dust of Lyons from his feet, and returned to Auvergne, most probably to Avitacum, where he occupied himself with the congenial task, of editing a volume of his own poems. In so doing, he yielded, as he informs us (the old story !), to the entreaties of his friends, and especially of Magnus Felix. His selection consisted of twenty-four poems, of which eight, comprising about half the bulk of the volume, are made up of his three panegyrics, with their accompanying apologies and dedications. Of these he reverses the chronological order, placing that of Anthemius first, and that of Avitus last.

Then follows his apology to Magnus Felix for the quality of his verse ; wherein he takes about three hundred and fifty lines in which to enumerate the subjects he has not treated, and the authors he has not presumed to emulate (“ Quos multo minor ipse plus adoro ”) ; and he concludes with a sentiment which, though not precisely original, obtains our warmer assent, perhaps, for the dreariness of the waste which had preceded it: " The things a man knows are never so many as those of which he is ignorant.”

Many a time and oft we are tempted to wish that Sidonius had known less ! The greatest poets test our patience by their catalogues. Those of Sidonius are well-nigh unbearable.

For information, the longer poems, including the descriptions of Narbonne and Bourg-sur-Mer, may be consulted, but hardly for pleasure. Sidonius is a great deal better in his less ambitious efforts. Some of his epigrams are neatly turned, and the artificiality which is ingrain in the man’s style is much less annoying here than in his familiar letters. The quatrain which accompanied his gift of a brace of fish is not without grace in the original: —

A single specimen must also be given of his graver and sweeter manner; the rather because, in the basilica “ reared by the zeal of Bishop Patiens,” he has portrayed for ns a typical Christian church edifice of the fifth century, like many still existing at Ravenna, or like San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and one or two others at Rome. The lines may be thus rendered : —

THE BASILICA.

Of chanting choirs who hymn the Christ beloved.
Sing on, ye travelers of all climes and seas !
Here is the home ye seek, the way approvèd,
Whose end is peace.

The poetical gift of Sidonius, such as it was, appears exactly to have suited the taste of his generation, and compliments on his collection poured in from all quarters. But it was not as a poet any more than as a courtier that he was destined to be longest remembered.

Accustomed as we are to the spiritual retours and sudden acts of self-dedication which ever characterize an age of general upheaval and disaster, there seems at first sight something unusually abrupt about the transformation of Sidonius from a literary dilettante and glass of Roman fashion into the character in which we find him next. A little reflection will mitigate our surprise, and make the turn of events which raised him to the episcopate appear quite natural.

He was widely beloved for his many amiable qualities; he had shown great energy in resisting the encroachments of the Arian Euric ; his fellow-citizens of Auvergne, on the death of their bishop in 472, felt themselves to be in a peculiar and painful sense as “ sheep without a shepherd,” and their unanimous choice fell upon Sidonius to succeed him. His case was not unlike that of the sainted Ambrose in Milan, and there is no reason to doubt that the nolo episcopari which our friend so earnestly professed was quite as sincere as that of his great exemplar. Sidonius had seen much, both at Rome and Ravenna, of the deceitfulness of earthly glory. An unaffected patriotism helped him to overcome his personal scruples, and at the age of forty-one he was ordained, and inducted into what nearly corresponds with, the modern see of Clermont.

The step meant, for him, a radical change of life : the renunciation of a thousand darling indulgences, the assumption of heavy, and at the first uncongenial, duties. But his resolution once taken, he accepted its consequences manfully. Not the least of his sacrifices must have been the necessity of confining himself for the future to Christian literature and religious composition ; yet such was the rule which he evidently adopted, admitting only occasional exceptions. Once or twice he was persuaded to transcribe an old poem (and one sees that he was always flattered by the request), or even to compose a few lines, where, however, martyrs replace his old pagan favorites, and his tropes and puns and similes appear sadly constrained. He fasted so severely as to endanger his health, and his bounty was almost too lavish. Gregory of Tours quaintly chronicles how once he even sold his table-silver, and gave the proceeds to the poor, to the horror of his wife. “ Quod illa, cum cognosceret, scandalizabatur.”

Nor were the duties which he assumed of a purely religious character, for a Gallic bishop of that day was, by virtue of his office, a member of the town council, which managed the temporal affairs of his city.

Now, in 472, Euric was preparing a fierce campaign against Auvergne. He coveted the fruitful, pleasant province, all that was yet lacking to enable him to realize the old Visigothic dream of a kingdom bounded by the ocean, the Pyrenees, the Rhone, and the Loire; and the Auvergnats, cut off from all direct communication with Rome, from whose enfeebled arms little aid was in any case to be expected, had only their own forces on which to rely for resisting the Visigothic invasion.

Into this cause the new bishop flung himself with great fervor, impelled by every motive, both religious and political; for one had but to glance at the southern provinces in order to be enlightened as to the lot of Euric’s Catholic subjects. Bishops and lesser priests were put to death with cruel tortures, and their sees suffered to lie vacant.

“ All is neglect,” writes the Bishop of Clermont, “ in those deserted dioceses. You may see the very roofs of the churches crumbling and falling in, the doors torn from their hinges, the approaches to the basilicas choked with briers and thorns. The very flocks, alas, not only lie down in the open courts, but browse upon the verdant drapery of the grass-grown altars. Nor is it the rural parishes alone that are desolate. Even in the city churches, people assemble more and more rarely.”

But the soul of Sidonius was not daunted by these calamities. From this time onward he has no thought but for the good of his province and the good of his church. In one or two of the letters of this year we detect a slight tone of wistfulness; he hopes that his change of condition may not have lost him this or that old friend; but it is evident that his conduct will no more be influenced by any such private consideration. In his epistles he appears the same kindly, tolerant, humorous, extremely sensitive mortal as of old, changed in one respect only: now he lives no longer to himself, and we find in him a clear perception of duty and a single-mindedness in fulfilling it which are very touching. So simple and matter of fact, so entirely unstudied and unpretending, is his own story of these days as half to blind us to the rare disinterestedness of his conduct.

When the metropolitan see of Bourges became vacant by the death of Eulodius, and the bishops of Berry and Auvergne were summoned to choose a successor, Sidonius Apollinaris was one of the three who alone responded to the appeal, and the choice he made of Simplicius, a son of the late bishop, was in all respects admirable. He has left three letters on the subject: the first probably a circular one, addressed to all his fellow-bishops; a short note to Euphronius, who in connection with Patiens, Bishop of Lyons, the builder of the basilica, had pursued a very similar policy to his own in filling the see of Châlons ; and a third to the Bishop of Tours, inclosing the inaugural address which he delivered, and which gives a minute account of all the proceedings. This last, he assures his friend with pardonable pride, was composed “ in two watches of a summer night.”

Occupied by his new duties, he had not found time to acknowledge to Claudian Mamert his dedication of the De Statu Animæ, but when reminded by the author of his neglect he pulled himself together, and quite outdid himself in that mingling of puns and praises which was considered the crowning charm of his literary style : —

“ Here are words new because they are old, a style in comparison with which that of the ancients appears ridiculously antiquated; and what is better still, all this fine diction, equally cadenced and flowing, as amply illustrated as closely reasoned, seeming to suggest more than it says. By comparison with the holy Fathers, Claudian is Jerome for instruction, Lactantius for destruction, Augustine for construction. He exalts himself like Hilary, abases himself like John, reproves like Basil, consoles like Gregory, has the fullness of Orosius with the restraint of Rufinus, narrates like Eusebius, provokes like Paulianus, perseveres like Ambrose.”

On the merits of Claudian’s book we need not linger, nor tell how, in confuting the errors of Faustus, he fell into others of his own. It would lead us into the dreary maze of semi-pelagianism, a heresy more than usually unintelligible. Neither Saint-Simon nor SainteBeuve has succeeded in making quite clear to the average mind the story of Port Royal. Let us follow the example of Sidonius, and avoid the fifth-century phase of the endless antagonism between grace and free-will. It is more interesting to note that after Sidonius has finished his praises of De Statu Animæ, he has something cordial to say of a certain hymn of his friend’s composition which has been reasonably identified with the noble

which still holds its place in the Roman Catholic ritual.

With many of his fellow-bishops Sidonius carried on a brisk correspondence, after his elevation, and it is like him to have included in his own collection of letters three to Græcus, Bishop of Marseilles, of which Amantius was the bearer. The first is a graceful note of introduction and recommendation of the young Amantius, — an epistola formata, such as every cleric took with him on a journey, and which constituted a kind of passport to the bishops, who alone understood the cipher which such missives invariably contained. The bearer is described, in this instance, as a youth, poor, but of unspotted integrity, who has failed in business, and for whom Sidonius hopes that employment may be found at Marseilles. In the second he recounts with equal candor and animation what a dire mistake he had made about Amantius : how he had just discovered that the youth had begun life by running away from home ; how he had next succeeded in capturing an heiress, by judicious presents to herself and flatteries of her widowed mother ; and how this good lady, having discovered that she had a beggarly fortune-hunter for a son-in-law, was moving heaven and earth to get the marriage annulled.

Two years passed before Sidonius wrote again, and within this time events had moved rapidly. Anthemius and Ricimer were dead, and Glycerius and Olybrius had each sat for a little on the throne of the Cæsars, now occupied by Julius Nepos. In Gaul, Auvergne, desperately resisting, under the leadership of Ecdicius, the able and popular brother-in-law of Sidonius, had beaten back the Visigothic advance ; and during the brief truce — for peace it could hardly be called — which followed this victory, Sidonius went to Lyons, possibly to try and induce the Burgundian king to come to the aid of the Auvergnats. Here he learned that Ecdicius, for his very signal services, had been raised to the patriciate by Julius Nepos, and hastened to impart the tidings to Papianilla. This is the only letter to his wife which he seems to have thought it worth while to preserve; perhaps for the very reason that the rest are of too intimate a nature. “ A good wife, certainly, but the very best of sisters,” he calls her, when congratulating her on her brother’s advancement. On the whole, we must conclude that their relation, though pleasant, was not especially sympathetic. That he could appreciate the charms of a community of intellectual interests between man and wife we see from the letter to his friend Hesperius on the occasion of the latter’s marriage. He reminds him how Martia held the light (“ candelas et candelabra ”) for Hortensius to read by, and Terentia for Cicero, and Calpurnia for Pliny, and Pudentilla for Apuleius, and Rusticeana for Symmachus. He even mentions, further on, the joint compositions of Catullus and Lesbia, — but this was in his carnal days.

Returning from Lyons to Auvergne about the time of the new year (475), and finding Ecdicius away and the inhabitants torn by dissensions, Sidonius besought Constantius to come to his aid. This able priest — the same to whom are addressed the dedication and epilogue of the first seven books of letters, and the epilogue of the eighth — succeeded in restoring the citizens to something like unanimity, and they set about preparing for the siege with which they were threatened by Euric, for the opening of spring.

During the interval of suspense, Sidonius wrote to his old friend Magnus Felix, in the hope of obtaining further information about the fate in store for them, but Felix had no good news to give. Winter passed and spring came, and still their uncertainty continued. Sidonius now entreated Ecdicius, if he had ever loved Auvergne, to return thither without delay. “ You never were so needed as now,” he emphatically says : and, accompanied by a handful of Burgundian troops, Ecdicius accordingly came, while Euric and his great army were daily expected.

Suddenly an incredible rumor fills the air: Auvergne has been surrendered, — basely surrendered to the Yisigothic king. The report is only too soon confirmed, and presently come the names of the bishops appointed to draw up and determine the articles of the treaty. Græcus of Marseilles was first on the list, and now it was that Amantius carried to the Mediterranean the third letter of the Bishop of Clermont, — a fiery epistle, which shows its author at his manliest: —

“ Is this to be our reward for famine and fire, sword and pestilence, blades fattened on the blood of the slain, and warriors wasted by hunger ? Was it in the hope of this most noble peace that we fed on herbage torn from the crevices of the walls, poisoned over and over again in our ignorance by the unwholesome grasses, which, heedless of the character of leaf or stalk, we snatched with our bloodless fingers ? After testing our devotion thus often and severely, you will throw us over, as I hear! I pray that you may come to be ashamed of this treaty, — both useless and unseemly. You are the medium of negotiation. It devolves on you, in the absence of the Emperor, to settle certain points on your own responsibility, — not merely to ratify decisions already made. Pardon me if I tell unpleasant truths. I do it in sorrow rather than in spite. You take little heed of the public good, and in the sittings of this commission have seemed less anxious to avert public dangers than to advance private fortunes; and this, moreover, has been your regular practice for so long a time that you, who were once the first of us provincials, are in danger of becoming the last. How long is this sort of thing to go on ? What will become of the glory of our ancestors, if they are to have no descendants ? I beseech you, by all the means in your power, to break off this disgraceful negotiation. We have not shrunk, thus far, from siege, or battle, or famine ; nay, we have gloried in them ! But if we, whom force could not conquer, are to be given up, it will certainly be because you have made some infamous compact with the barbarians.

“ But why do I give way to this excessive grief ? Pardon the violence of my expressions. Other provinces, when they are surrendered, expect servitude ; Auvergne has to anticipate torture. If, indeed, you cannot help us in our extremity, pray, at least, that our stock may survive, though our liberties perish. Prepare a refuge for the exile, a ransom for the captive, a meal for the wanderer. If our gates are to be opened to the enemy, let not yours be closed against the guest.

“ Deign to remember me, Lord Pope.” The conventional ending is almost amusing. One would fancy that Græcus was in little danger of forgetting his caustic correspondent. He must, at least, have recalled him to mind when, a few years later, Marseilles, in its turn, was handed over to the Gothic king.

The letter of Sidonius had no practical result. Auvergne was definitely given up to Euric; and no demands were made, so far as we know, on the hospitality of Bishop Græcus. Many of the Auvergnats left their homes,— among others Ecdicius, who went to the Burgundian court, which he seems to have exchanged, a few years later, for the see of Vienne, — but Sidonius was not of the number who fled. He stayed with his flock ; and he and they seem alike to have received better treatment than they had expected. Victorius, Count of Auvergne, under Euric, exercised an abler, and at the same time kindlier, rule than that of the Roman governors to whom they had been subject of late. Sidonius was quit for two years’ imprisonment in the fortress of Livia, near Bordeaux ; disagreeable enough, according to his account, but doubtless mitigated, as well as abbreviated, by the good offices of his friend Leo, minister of Euric. There are hints, indeed, that the reality of imprisonment was concealed beneath the veil of a mission. Be this as it may, he was back in Auvergne before the close of 477, and had resumed, as nearly as possible, his former way of life.

The old duties awaited him, but not the old pleasures. He was oppressed by a sense of estrangement from the companions of his youth. The fact of living under a different government appeared to divide him from them, as he had never been divided before. He almost hesitates about writing, even to as early and fast a friend as Magnus Felix, and the ceremonious opening of his last letter is, in view of the circumstances, peculiarly pathetic : “It is a long while since I have written to you, my lord, and many years since you have written me. I could not venture on my old frequency of correspondence, when under the ban of exile and far away from the borders of my country.”

He had dwelt, in earlier and happier times, on the possibility of friendship between those who had never met. Let us at least hope that he proved in these declining days that love can outlast absence.

It distresses him to see the Latin tongue neglected and steadily declining, after the change of rulers ; and his warmest words of praise are for those who cling to the old cultured speech, and try to impart a knowledge of it to others.

There is no hint of any attempt having been made to throw off the Gothicyoke when once it had been accepted. Return to the Roman Empire was impossible, for the simple reason that the Empire of the West had ceased to be, and a barbarian king ruled even in Italy.

One does not wonder, in view of all the changes he had seen, that, though not yet fifty, Sidonius felt himself to be old. The requests of his friends that he would undertake this or that literary task were gently put aside, on the plea that his energy was exhausted, and he felt the time had come for him to devote the scanty leisure he could spare from his episcopal work to pious reading and thoughts of eternity. He did consent, however, to edit his letters, and put forth in rapid succession the first seven books.

Here, then, is perhaps the best place in which to say a few words of his literary style, which grates unpleasantly on our ears, no doubt, with its countless affectations, its pompous exaggerations, and wearisome and somewhat perfunctory jeux de mots. The utmost which can be said in its defense is, that such was the artificial fashion of his age, and that, after all, he is more readable than most of his correspondents. Here are two specimens from contemporary writers which will illustrate the prevailing manner. The first is from a congratulatory letter of Lupus of Troyes, on Sidonius’s appointment to the bishopric ; the second from Claudian Mamert.

“ As for me, who loved you so much when you were intent on the barrenness of this world, what, think you, is the measure of my love, now that you are intent on the fruitfulness of Heaven ? I am sinking, and my dissolution is at hand; but I shall not consider that I am wholly dissolved, for, held in solution, I shall live in you, and I leave you in the Church. I rejoice in putting off this body, since you have put on the ecclesiastical habit, and are put on the ecclesiastical rolls.”

Thus Lupus, and thus writes Claudian to Sapaudus, a rhetorician of Vienne, to whom one of Sidonius’s epistles is addressed : —

“ For I see that Romans not only neglect, but are ashamed of, the Roman speech; that grammar, like a barbarian woman, is knocked about by the foot and fist of barbarism and solecism ; that logic is feared as though she were an Amazon, her sword drawn ready for battle ; that rhetoric, like a grande dame, is unwelcome in narrow quarters ; that, in truth, music, geometry, and arithmetic are regarded with as much horror as if they were three furies ; and, finally, that even philosophy is considered as a beast of ill omen.”

Surely Sidonius himself does not quite so ruthlessly sacrifice sense to sound ! And though this style may not appeal to the present generation, who knows but it may precisely suit the taste of the next? Something very similar was quite the correct thing in France when Voiture wrote to the Abbess of Gères: —

“ Madame, j’étais déjà si fort à vous que je pensais que vous deviez croire qu’il n’était pas besoin que vous me gagnassiez par des presens, ni que vous fissiez dessein de me prendre comme un rat avec un chat. Néanmoins, j’avoue que votre liberalité n’a pas laissé de produire en moi quelque nouvelle affection, et s’il y avait encore quelque chose dans mon esprit qui ne fût pas à vous, le chat que vous m’avez envoyé a achevé de le prendre et vous l’a gagné entièrement. C’est, sans mentir, le plus beau et le plus agréable qui fût jamais. . . . J’y trouve seulement à dire qu’il est de très difficile garde, et que, pour un chat nourri en religion, il est fort mal disposé àa garder la clôture.”

To the seven books of letters first published was added, in 481, an eighth, and in 484 a ninth and last. About half of these epistles are dated after the return of Sidonius from Livia ; and one, long and very curious, contains a minute analysis of the character of a certain Lampridius, who had just been murdered by his slaves. The date and manner of the man’s death had been accurately foretold by “certain mathematicians of African cities,” and Sidonius suggests that his tragic end may have been Heaven’s punishment on Lampridius for having endeavored, by illicit means, to discover the duration of his life. One cannot, however, repress a doubt whether the extremely technical description which Sidonius gives of his friend’s horoscope could possibly have been written by one who had not himself dabbled in astrology.

The remaining letters of this period are for the most part answers to the demands of his friends, now for verses, now for the elucidation of some literary problem. Sidonius was always pleased by these requests, and gave them courteous attention. He appears to have kept on hand a stock of poems, dating from his secular days, upon which he drew freely, and once or twice he was persuaded to try a fresh bit of metrical composition. He sends some asclepiads to Tonantius Ferreolus, — who had by this time inherited his father’s library,—but he accompanies them by the sage reflection that “ it is not easy for a man to do anything both well and seldom.”

When Prosper, Bishop of Orleans, begged him to write an account of the siege of that city by Attila, and the sublime conduct of Anianus (St. Aignan), Sidonius made an attempt, but found himself unequal to the task. The note of apology which he sent on this occasion contains the only allusion, in all his later correspondence, to his own ecclesiastical position. Concerning his family he is equally silent; yet both as a bishop and a father he suffered many trials and humiliations.

Sidonius had but one son, Apollinaris, who must have been about twenty at the time of the cession of Auvergne to Euric. This youth formed a close alliance with Victorius, governor of that region under the Gothic king, — a man who, after a short period of seemingly righteous rule, took a turn for the worse, and began to abuse his position as shamefully as any Roman prefect had ever done. In 480, the Auvergnats rose against him. Victorius, in terror, fled to Odovacer, and Apollinaris the younger was the companion of his flight.

In Rome their conduct was such that they were soon arrested. Victorius was stoned to death, and Apollinaris dispatched to Milan under the guard of a couple of soldiers. He contrived, however, to escape, and return to Auvergne, where he becomes confused with another Apollinaris, and it is impossible to determine which of these two was the second successor of Sidonius in the see of Clermont.

The Church was the refuge of nearly all the great Gallo-Romans of that day. Felix, Ecdicius, Ruricius, one after another followed their old friend’s example, but not one of them has left us an account of his latest days.

The cathedral where Sidonius officiated was of great splendor, built by one Namatius : of a cruciform shape, adorned with precious marbles, and filled with the odor of sanctity, which in this case, we are told, resembled the fragrance of spices. Thither, feeling himself to be near his end, the bishop was brought by his own desire, and laid down before the altar, “ while a great multitude gathered about him, of men and women, weeping, and loudly saying, amid their tears, ‘Why do you desert us, O good shepherd, and to whom will you leave your orphans ? How can we live after your death ? Who, after you, can ever so fortify us with the pungency of his wisdom ? Who, by the example of his prudence, inspire us with the fear of the name of the Lord ? ’ These and like things said the people, with great lamentation. Then the bishop, filled by the Holy Ghost, answered, ‘ Fear nothing, O my people ! Lo, my brother Aprunculus lives, and he will be your bishop.’ They, not understanding, fancied that he spoke in delirium.”

He died on the 23d of August, and was buried in the church of St. Saturnin, situated in the suburbs of Clermont, to the south of the city. Hence his remains were translated, in the Middle Ages, to the basilica of St. Genès, destroyed, like so many other churches, in 1794 ; and with the rest of its treasures vanished the silver coffer containing the relics of Sidonius.

But though we look in vain for any trace of him at Clermont, there is another spot where we shall be more fortunate. From the less traveled of the two roads between Clermont-Ferrand and Mont Dore, about midway of its length, a narrow cart-track turns aside, and leads, after three miles, to a tiny village on the shores of a charming sheet of water.

There is a smiling landscape, a range of mountains on the horizon, vineyards and green pastures in the middle distance, and at your feet a limpid lake with a single island. L’Ile de SaintSidoine the peasants call it, and they show you his altar in their little church, and in the choir a tablet inscribed in archaic and half-obliterated characters :

HIC ST DVO INNOCENTES † ET S SIDONIVS.

As we slowly spell out this inscription, we become conscious of a wish, lying somewhere very near the heart, that the ashes of our Sidonius may not, after all, have been flung forth upon the wild winds of the Revolution, but rather, by some kind miracle, gathered here on the spot he loved so well.

For this is the site of Avitacum ; this is the lake which lapped the villa walls ; the ripples that break upon its further shore “are lucent green with the reflection of overhanging trees,” and “the bitterness of the gray-green willows is nourished by the sweet waters,” as of old. The landscape is unchanged, but a single bit of tenacious Roman masonry is all that remains of the once grand and spacious villa. That went long since, the way of Sidonius’s early dreams, his political ambitions, his fleeting social triumphs.

He witnessed the last throes of the Roman power, and the Burgundian and the Gothic which replaced it were soon to share its fate. They are French paysans who live at Avitacum to-day, and they never so much as heard of the perished villa, or its sometime imperial inhabitants. But St. Sidoine is their familiar friend, and we fancy that the thrice-chastened worldling is more than content with his immortality in their humble souls.

H. W. P. & L. D.