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Updated: June 26, 2025
The fortune of Sidonius far exceeded the customary wealth of a poet; but if he had pursued the allusion, he might have painted many of the Gallic nobles with the hundred heads of the deadly Hydra, spreading over the face of the country, and devouring the substance of a hundred families.
We find Sidonius writing for information.... He began to fear that something was going on behind his back, and that the real danger to Auvergne came no longer from determined enemies but from pusillanimous friends. His suspicions were only too well founded.
They would make a bold attempt to recover the command of the sea. As the Macedonian fleet was divided, part watching the Sidonian and part the Egyptian harbour, they could freely select to contend with which portion they preferred. Their choice fell upon the Cyprian contingent, which was stationed to the north of the mole, keeping guard on the "Portus Sidonius."
One of the last acts of jurisdiction, which the Roman senate exercised over their subjects of Gaul, was the trial and condemnation of Arvandus, the Prætorian præfect. Sidonius, who rejoices that he lived under a reign in which he might pity and assist a state criminal, has expressed, with tenderness and freedom, the faults of his indiscreet and unfortunate friend.
Bishop Sidonius had brought his science and sagacity to the rescue, and under his treatment Odorik had been restored to his senses, and was on the fair way to recovery.
Between the writers of the fourth century and their few successors of the fifth there is no marked change in language or manner. Sidonius Apollinaris continues more feebly the style of poetry initiated a century before him by Ausonius. Boethius wrote his fine treatise On the Consolation of Philosophy half a century after the extinction of the Empire of the West.
Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son. Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them? This is indeed a question almost as absorbing as the question why their civilization fell, for au fond it is perhaps the same question.
But Sidonius' quiet days came to an end when, layman and lawyer as he was, the people of Clermont begged him to be their Bishop. The Church stood, whatever fell, and people trusted more to their Bishop than to any one else, and wanted him to be the ablest man they could find.
We have in Greek absolutely no such letters from the flourishing time of the literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny and even of Seneca while as we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and Synesius in the older language cannot touch Sidonius Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus in the younger.
The ancient Gauls, says Sidonius Apollinaris, wore their hair long before and the hinder part of the head shaved, a fashion that begins to revive in this vicious and effeminate age. The Romans used to pay the watermen their fare at their first stepping into the boat, which we never do till after landing: "Dum aes exigitur, dum mula ligatur, Tota abit hora."
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