Born in Lyon around 430 CE to an aristocratic Gallo-Roman family, Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius was educated in Arles and was active in both politics and letters in Gaul and at Rome before becoming bishop of Clermont around 470. By the time of his death, sometime in the 480s, he had witnessed the final collapse of the western Roman empire and accommodated himself, not always easily, to the new Visigothic rulers of the Auvergne. Besides a substantial body of verse, Sidonius left us some 146 letters that he himself revised and organized into nine books, published in several stages. In this new volume, Joop van Waarden presents twenty of these letters, with at least one representing each book. Four of the letters include embedded poems, giving the reader a taste of Sidonius the poet as well.[1]
As van Waarden remarks, Sidonius “has certainly not been understudied in the past decades” (xiii), with van Waarden himself leading the charge.[2] Given this, the principal raison d’être for the present volume (in a series that still describes itself as “aimed primarily at undergraduate and graduate students”) would seem to be to make the letters more accessible to a wider readership. One could envision using this book, or parts of it, in a graduate course on ancient letters. Sidonius explicitly places himself within the earlier tradition of Latin epistolography, declaring in his opening programmatic missive that he has compiled a collection of revised texts in imitation of Symmachus’s rotunditas and Pliny the Younger’s disciplina and maturitas (Cicero he puts beyond imitation).
For those unfamiliar with Sidonius and his world, I will pass in review some of the highlights of the letters collected here. 1.5 and 1.9 describe a visit to Rome in 467-8 on an official mission. The account of the laborious voyage by cursus publicus echoes Horace’s trip to Brundisium in Satire 1.5; once in the city, Sidonius ends up delivering a panegyric to the emperor Anthemius and being appointed city prefect. 2.9, from sometime in the 460s, recounts a stay at two adjoining country estates in Gaul, with descriptions of a library containing both secular and Christian classics and a temporary outdoor sauna by a river (the villas apparently did not have functioning baths). 4.20 and 5.5 reflect interactions with “barbarians” in Gaul; the former details the exotic attire of a Germanic prince visiting Lyon, while in the latter Sidonius gives qualified praise to a younger relative who has learned the language of the Burgundians and obtained a position in their court, but also warns him to practice his native tongue and keep a cor Latinum. In 5.16, Sidonius’s only letter to a woman, he informs his wife Papianilla about the promotion of her brother Ecdicius to the rank of patricius. There is something poignant about this continuing investment in the system of Roman honores—in the autumn of 474, a year before the reign of the last Roman Emperor. In the brief recommendation letter 6.11, Sidonius asks a fellow bishop to overlook the error and perfidia of the letter’s bearer, an unnamed Jew, and to assist the man with an unspecified civil matter.
In Book 7, the tone dramatically shifts. 7.1 describes the hardships associated with the Visigothic attack on Clermont in 473, drawing on Lucan’s description of the capture of Rimini. 7.7, from 475, is an angry reaction to the treaty ceding the Auvergne, including Clermont, to the Visigoths, addressed to one of the bishops who negotiated it: facta est servitus nostra pretium securitatis alienae, Sidonius protests. In 7.17, from 477, Sidonius politely vies with the new Visigothic governor of Clermont to honor a respected local abbot who has died. In 8.3, he has returned from a period of exile and imprisonment connected with the Visigothic takeover and is sending a Latin translation of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana to an influential friend, whom he flatteringly compares to Apollonius, fidei catholicae pace praefata. 8.15 is a short missive to a fellow bishop in which he declines to write a history of the war with Attila. 9.16, the closing letter of the nine-book collection, is dominated by a long embedded poem in which Sidonius declares he will not write any more poetry.
As this partial summary suggests, this is a rich and varied collection. I am sure van Waarden would concur that there are many other letters of Sidonius that students at different levels and with different backgrounds might find compelling (the account of the trial at Rome of Sidonius’s friend Arvandus for maiestas in 1.7 is but one example).
Van Waarden provides Lütjohann’s text (1887), with no apparatus criticus but adjusted in some forty-seven places, usually to restore a manuscript reading against a conjecture. The commentary is impressively detailed and scholarly, sometimes in ways that made me wonder about the intended audience. Van Waarden is generous in providing parallels, both Classical and Christian: for instance, to explain desudatam (applied to the works of Cicero) he cites a panegyric of Claudian and a homily from the Eusebius Gallicanus collection (172). He sometimes offers notes like: “evolvere auspicabantur: evolvere OLD 7. auspicari OLD 3a” (75), which are not so helpful for a casual reader. He is also attentive to Sidonius’s use of prose rhythm—a topic that I confess no one, van Waarden included, has ever convinced me is interesting. I found the statement in the introduction (24-25) that Sidonius’s prose is “consistently metrical” and “much closer…than most of his contemporaries” to the Classical system of clausulae puzzling, given the citation to van Waarden’s own study that seems to reach a different conclusion.[3] I am not sure that the final words of 9.16, exisse videatur, on the basis of the clausula alone “refer back to Cicero” (251).
Sidonius wears his Classical learning and Roman identity on his sleeve; his references to Christianity can seem, by contrast, perfunctory. He is silent about why and how he became bishop of Clermont, besides occasional laments about his lack of qualifications (he modestly describes himself at the time of his election as a novus clericus, peccator antiquus who was ante compulsus docere quam discere).[4] Van Waarden is concerned to combat the impression that Sidonius’s religious sentiments were superficial, which sometimes leads him to exaggerate the presence of Christianity in the letters selected for inclusion here. For instance, van Waarden sees the account of the trip to Rome in 1.5, with its emphasis on water transport, as an allegory for an “inward journey of conversion” (71), and speaks of Sidonius on arrival as having “found his spiritual centre in the Rome of the apostles” (85). Van Waarden is not the first to suggest such a reading, and I am not the first to find it unsupported by the text.[5] Van Waarden is right that Sidonius’s surviving writings may skew our overall picture of the man: we have none of his sermons or liturgical texts, which he presumably wrote—although van Waarden’s suggestion that the recusationes about writing history or further poetry in 8.15 and 9.16 actually imply lost “hagiography and hymns” is not entirely compelling (5).[6] One may be more inclined than van Waarden is to conclude that when Sidonius does mention religion it is out of deference to social or literary conventions (particularly when he is himself a bishop or is writing to one—four of the letters included here have episcopal addressees).
Here is one example that illustrates both the depth and perhaps the slant of van Waarden’s approach. On 9.16.2, where Sidonius refers to February in a characteristically wordy way as duodecimum nostrum, quem Numae mensem uos nuncupatis, van Waarden ingeniously suggests that Sidonius had read a passage in the Instructions to Salonius of Eucherius (bishop of Lyon in 439-449) that explains names of the Hebrew months found in scripture and equates Adar in libro Esther with Februarius qui apud nos duodecimus. Van Waarden proposes that by likewise (albeit tacitly) aligning the months of the Hebrew and Roman calendars Sidonius (1) differentiates himself as a cleric from his (learned but lay?) addressee, one Firminus of somewhat murky identity, and (2) compares the situation of Romans under the Visigoths to the Jews under the Persians. Possibly—but in the absence of other hints in this direction from the text it seems at least equally conceivable that Sidonius is making some kind of antiquarian joke about the vexed history of the historical order of the Roman months. It is certainly strange for a man who had delivered panegyrics for consuls entering office to so casually abandon the notion, standard from the Republican era, that the Roman year begins in January. Ausonius (Eclogae 2 and 3), whom van Waarden cites for the association of Numa Pompilius with February, clearly thinks of it as the second month.
Sidonius definitely lived in much more dramatic and interesting times than his model Pliny the Younger. In the political and social tumult that surrounded him, he was anxious to defend meram linguae Latiaris proprietatem de trivialium barbarismorum robigine (2.10.1). It is ironic, then, that many readers since have found him to be a bad writer. Ruricius of Limoges would write, with reference to an unspecified text by his older contemporary, that reading it prae obscuritate dictorum non accendit ingenium (Letter 2.26). Closer to our day, Eduard Norden declined even to give Sidonius detailed discussion, classifying him among those whose prose oft bis zur völligen Unverständlichkeit verzerrt ist.[7] Although scholars now may be inclined to dismiss such aesthetic pronouncements as subjective and timebound, Sidonius is for some reason an author who continues to inspire them.[8] He certainly does not flee unusual words or miss opportunities for rhetorical figures, even at the cost of clarity; his allusions and other displays of learning can come off as superfluous and bombastic. For most readers Sidonius will thus probably mérite un détour rather than le voyage, but either way van Waarden has given us a valuable guide.
Notes
[1] Somewhat oddly, the volume also includes as an appendix the text (without commentary) of two versions of an epitaph for Sidonius (the identification is debated) found in the manuscripts and, in part, on stone fragments.
[2] Van Waarden has written a two-volume commentary on Book 7: Writing to Survive: a Commentary on Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters, Book 7 (2010, 2016). He has also co-edited with Gavin Kelly New Approaches to Sidonius Apollinaris (2013, BMCR 2014.05.42) and The Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris (2020, BMCR 2020.11.29). Other books of Sidonius’s letters have also recently received dedicated commentaries, e.g. Book 2 by Judith Hindermann (BMCR 2023.11.28).
[3] See Kelly and van Waarden, “Prose Rhythm in Sidonius,” in The Edinburgh Companion, Note 1, where van Waarden concludes that “in the letters, there is no evidence of statistically convincing patterns in sentence endings, whether metrical or accentual” (465).
[4] Letters 9.2.3 and 5.3.3 (not in this volume).
[5] See, e.g, Michael Hanaghan, “Latent Criticism of Anthemius and Ricimer in Sidonius Apollinaris’s Epistulae 1.5,” CQ 67:631–49 (2017). Van Waarden cites a forthcoming publication on this question, which I have not seen.
[6] A key text for the question of Sidonius’s lost works is the puzzling Letter 7.3 (not in this volume), in which Sidonius sends a fellow bishop some contestatiunculae he has composed.
[7] Die antike Kunstprosa, II:638-9.
[8] See Piet Gerbrandy’s “The Failure of Sidonius’ Poetry” in New Approaches, Note 1, and Amy Oh on Stefania Filosini’s edition of two of Sidonius’s poems in this journal (BMCR 2016.06.10).