Resultados25 letters/passages
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
Sidonius to his lord, Bishop Mamertus [of Vienne]. The word is that the Goths have moved their forces onto Roman soil. And as always, we wretched Arverni [people of Clermont] are the gateway to this invasion. We are a particular target for their hatred, because the only thing preventing them from extending their border …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
But if verses devoid of ease and happiness cannot win approval, you too will find nothing pleasing on the page I append below. [The poem that follows describes the barbarian peoples gathered at the court of Euric in Bordeaux:] Why do you try to rouse the Muses now, Lampridius, glory of our poetry, and force me to compo …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
To the Lord Bishop Graecus [Bishop of Marseille]. Here once again our Amantius — that gossipmonger of ours — returns to his Marseille, doubtless planning to bring home some profit from the city's markets, if only a favorable cargo-ship should arrive. Through him I would chatter at length in a lighter vein, if my heart …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
To Syagrius [a young Gallo-Roman aristocrat, great-grandson of a consul, living among the Burgundians]. You are the great-grandson of a consul — and through the male line, though that matters less to my present point. You are descended from a poet [Syagrius's ancestor, the consul, was also a literary man] whose statues …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
Sidonius to his lord Bishop Basilius, greetings. 1. By God's gift and the new example of our times, we have the old rights of friendship, and it is long since we have loved one another equally. Moreover, as regards our shared conscience, you are my patron -- though I speak presumptuously and arrogantly in saying even t …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.02
Sidonius to his dear Namatius, greetings. 1. The dictator Julius Caesar, who they say administered military affairs with greater generalship than any other, was claimed in turn by the rival pursuits of writing and reading. And though in the person of this one man the military and oratorical sciences competed for primac …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
Sidonius to his friend Felix. Gozolas, a Jew by nationality and a client of your household — a man whose person would be dear to me as well, if his religion were not an object of contempt — carries this letter, which I have written in a state of deep anxiety. The armed forces of the nations surrounding us terrify our l …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
Sidonius To His Dear Ecdicius, greetings. Duo nunc pariter mala sustinent Arverni tui. 'quaenam?' inquis. praesentiam Seronati et absentiam tuam. Seronati, inquam: de cuius ut primum etiam nomine loquar, sic mihi videtur quasi praescia futurorum lusisse fortuna, sicuti ex adverso maiores nostri proelia, quibus nihil es …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Apollinaris [a kinsman, likely the same as above]. As soon as summer gave way to autumn and the fears of the Auvergne could be somewhat relieved by the change of season, I came to Vienne [an important city on the Rhone in southeastern Gaul], where I found your brother Thaumastus — whom I embrace with the reverence d …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To the Lord Bishop Censorius. The bearer of this letter is honored by the office of deacon. He fled with his family from the storm of Gothic raids and was carried to your territory, driven, as it were, by the very weight of his flight. On church land overseen by Your Holiness, this hungry newcomer sowed a small crop in …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Ecdicius. If ever there was a time when my people in the Auvergne [Clermont-Ferrand, the central city of the Arverni in south-central Gaul] needed you, it is now. Their love for you is overwhelming, and for many reasons. First, the land that gave you birth claims the deepest share of your affection by right. Second, …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Pannychius. You know that Seronatus [a corrupt Roman official who collaborated with the Visigoths] is returning to Toulouse — or if you do not know yet (and I believe you do not), learn it from these signs. Already Euanthius is hurrying ahead to Clausetia, assembling work-crews to clear whatever autumn leaves may ha …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Eucherius. I honor the ancients, but not so much that I would rank below them the virtues or merits of my contemporaries. Even if the Roman state has sunk to these last extremities of misfortune, so that it never rewards those who serve it, the ages of men still produce their Brutuses and Torquatuses [Roman heroes f …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
When daylight revealed that their clumsy fraud had exposed their losses, they finally undertook proper funeral rites in the open — concealing their disaster by speed no better than they had concealed it by deception. They did not even give the bones a proper mound of turf; the unwashed dead received neither clean garme …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
For the sake of the hope of this glorious peace, we tore herbs from the cracks in the city walls for food, often poisoned by unfamiliar plants whose undistinguished leaves and green juices were gathered by hands as pale as famine itself. And for all these proofs of devotion, we are told that our people have been sacrif …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Domnitius. You who love the sight of arms and armed men — what pleasure you would have felt if you had seen young Prince Sigismer [a Burgundian royal], dressed in the full splendor of his people's fashion, making his way to his father-in-law's palace as a suitor and bridegroom! Horses decked in jeweled trappings wen …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Thaumastus [brother of Apollinaris, a kinsman of Sidonius]. We have finally tracked down the men who have been slandering your brother's friendships at the court of our tetrarch [the Burgundian king Chilperic] — and equally those of the new emperor's faction — if indeed the careful detective work of our friends has …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
4. He was being held in custody on the Capitoline, under the guard of his host Flavius Asellus, Count of the Sacred Largesses, who still revered in him the half-extinguished dignity of a prefecture so recently torn away. Meanwhile the envoys of the province of Gaul -- Tonantius Ferreolus, a former prefect and grandson …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Euodius [a Gallo-Roman courtier at the Visigothic court]. When the letter-carrier delivered your letter — he confirmed to certain friends that you were about to depart for Toulouse on the king's orders — I too was leaving town for a distant country estate. It was the chance of receiving your letter that, early that …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Bishop Prosper. You have been urging me, with the highest praise for the holy Anianus [Bishop of Orleans, who rallied the city during Attila's siege in 451] — a supreme and consummate bishop, the equal of Lupus and not inferior to Germanus — to engrave his character, his merits, and his virtues on the hearts of the …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
God willing, such prayers will be blessed with favorable outcomes, and there will yet be time to remember these terrors amid the pleasures of peace — but the present dangers make us cautious, even if the future will make us secure. In the meantime, the bearer of this letter sighs over certain losses he claims were infl …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
In the midst of all this water, we were thirsty, because nowhere was there a clean aqueduct, a settleable cistern, a flowing spring, or an unsullied well. 7. Moving on from there, we came to the Rubicon, which takes its name from the crimson color of its gravel, and which was once the boundary between the Cisalpine Gau …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To Trygetius [a wealthy Gallo-Roman landowner near Bazas]. Has the city of Bazas — set on dust, not turf — has that Syrtic soil with its shifting, wind-blown sands claimed you so thoroughly that neither public office, nor friendship, nor oysters fattened in their beds can draw you the short distance to Bordeaux? Or doe …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
Sidonius to his dear Candidianus, greetings. 1. You congratulate me on being in Rome -- but with a touch of wit and some salt mixed in with the teasing. You say you are glad that at last your friend is seeing the sun, which I, as a drinker of Saone water, have presumably rarely glimpsed. So you reproach me with the fog …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
Their entire battle line withdrew at once to the ridge of a steep hill; though they had been pressing the siege, the moment they saw you they refused to form up for battle. Meanwhile, you cut down their best fighters — men whose courage, not cowardice, had placed them at the rear — and without losing a single one of yo …