Sidonius Apollinaris
True Orthodox Church | |
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Feast | 21 August |
Major works | Carmina; Epistles |
Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, better known as Sidonius Apollinaris (5 November,
Sidonius is "the single most important surviving author from 5th-century Gaul" according to Eric Goldberg.
Life
Sidonius was born in
Sidonius married
Gallo-Roman aristocrat
Sidonius' letters reveal him to have been part of a wide-reaching network of Roman aristocrats in Gaul.[9] His correspondence focused on his own region of Auvergne, where his main interlocutors were based in Clairmont (like him) and the provincial capital of Lyon. Other key contacts were the aristocrats of Narbonne and Bordeaux, but some of his letters are addressed as far afield as Ravenna, Rome, and Hispania.[10] Notable acquaintances include bishop Faustus of Riez and his theological adversary Claudianus Mamertus. He was recognised in life for his literary accomplishments; in 456 his bronze portrait was added to the gallery of writers in the libraries of Trajan's Forum, the last statue to be erected there.[11]
Sidonius spent time in the court of Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths, in 455 or 456, and wrote a letter about the experience to his brother-in-law Agricola. This letter, placed first in Sidonius's anthology of his correspondence, praises Theodoric as an ideal king.[11]
Sidonius's father-in-law, Avitus became emperor in 455 and Sidonius wrote a panegyric for him. In 457
Bishop
In 469, Sidonius was elected to succeed Eparchius, a relative of his wife, as Bishop of Averna (Clermont). He says little about this in his writing and it appears that he had not desired the role.[13] Writing to the former praetorian prefect Tonantius Ferreolus, he encourages him to exchange his secular life "among Valentianian's prefects" for a religious life "among Christ's perfected men".[14] Gregory of Tours speaks of Sidonius as a man who could celebrate Mass from memory (without a sacramentary) and give spontaneous speeches without any hesitation.[15] He writes in praise of the aristocrats who supported the Church, ascetics, and authors of theological works, including those who incorporated pagan philosophy.[16] On becoming a bishop, he publicly declared that he would give up pagan poetry, as incompatible with a religious life, but he continued to write and exchange poetry privately.[17]
For three years, from 473 to 475, Sidonius and his brother-in-law Ecdicus led the defense of Clermont, which was attacked annually by the
Sidonius accepted a degree of collaboration with Euric's court as necessary to maintain the unity of the Roman aristocracy in Gaul,[18] but he was hostile to the Goths, writing to a senator "You shun barbarians because they have a bad reputation; I avoid them, even when they have a good one."[22] He mocks the literary pretensions of Euric's court, which was known as the Athenaeum, and presents the Visigothic conquest as responsible for a reversal of the social order, which had placed the uneducated in power over the educated.[23] He was involved in legal disputes with a Gothic noble who had seized the majority of his mother-in-law's lands and clashed with Seronatus, whom he considered a collaborator, for encouraging them to billet their troops in the villas of Roman aristocrats.[24] His hostility to Euric is reflected in his decision to open his letter collection, published around 477, with a letter enthusiastically praising Theoderic II, whom Euric had murdered in order to assume the Visigothic throne.[25]
Sidonius was still living in 481,
Descendants
Sidonius's relations have been traced over several generations as a narrative of a family's fortunes, from the prominence of his paternal grandfather's time into later decline in the 6th century under the
Works
Carmina
A collection of twenty-four Carmina by Sidonius survives, consisting of
Other poems have different subjects. For example, Carmen 22 is an
Letters
Nine books of Letters are preserved, containing a total of 147 documents, addressed to 117 different individuals.[9] Sidonius worked on his letter collection over a protracted period, publishing some of them in the early 470s and producing the final version of his collection around 477.[25] The collection was dedicated to Constantius, a priest in Lyon, who was a personal friend, with apologies to the Praetorian Prefect Tonantius Ferreolus, on the grounds that even a minor priest ought to be put before even the greatest members of the laity, because Constantius had helped to edit the volume, and because of Constantius' advice following the siege of Clairmont in 473.[33]
Sidonius' Latin style was highly praised in his own time. His contemporary,
... a language artfully and artistically fashioned from a complex intertextual weave of classical and biblical allusions, and the exclusive preserve of the cultural elite to whom alone it made sense. For Sidonius and his circle the beauty of the Latin language (sermonis pompa Latini) ... refined sensibility and the intellectual life were a bulwark against the barbarians and a last refuge from the progressive dissolution of the old order.
— Mratschek 2020, pp. 237–238
The complexity of the allusions to mythical, historical, biblical
W.B. Anderson notes, "Whatever one may think about their style and diction, the letters of Sidonius are an invaluable source of information on many aspects of the life of his time."[34] Many studies have used the letters in order to reconstruct the social networks of the intelligentsia in fourth-century Gaul. However, the letters cannot be treated as straightforward depictions of Sidonius' times. Sidonius actively models his letters and their representations of his contemporary world on those of earlier epistolographers, notably Pliny the Younger.[37] He represents Rome as a model society. Peter Brown argues that the resulting picture of continuity is actually a response to the rapidity of change in his contemporary Gaul.[38] Sigrid Mratschek says that through his literary work, he sought to build up the literary and cultural element of Roman identity, as compensation for Rome's military and political collapse, to reinforce the position of the Roman aristocracy in Gaul, and the church.[39]
A letter of Sidonius's addressed to Riothamus, "King of the Brittones" (c. 470) is of particular interest, since it provides evidence that a king or military leader with ties to Britain lived around the time frame of King Arthur. An English translation of his poetry and letters by W.B. Anderson, with accompanying Latin text, have been published by the Loeb Classical Library (volume 1, containing his poems and books 1-2 of his letters, 1939;[40] remainder of letters, 1965).
Manuscript tradition
This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience. Specifically, technical language. |
Although Sidonius' works may have been published in part during his lifetime (5th century), there is no textual evidence of this and all manuscripts can be traced back to a single archetype, which is estimated as dating to roughly the 7th century. The oldest witness dates to the 9th century and is likely a fourth-generation copy. Although the archetype contained poems, they were omitted in most copies, and most extant manuscripts contain only his letters, often jumbled together with a garbled transcription of another writer,
Notes
- ^ Apollinaris alludes to the date of his birthday in a short poem addressed to his brother-in-law Ecdicius, Carmen 20.
- ^ The Fall of the Roman Empire Revisited: Sidonius Apollinaris and His Crisis of Identity Archived September 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Ralph W. Mathisen, "Epistolography, Literary Circles and Family Ties in Late Roman Gaul" Transactions of the American Philological Association 111 (1981), pp. 95-109.
- ^ Epistulae, VIII.6.5; translated by W.B. Anderson, Sidonius: Poems and Letters (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1965), vol. 2 p. 423
- ISBN 0-521-20159-4, p. 113
- ^ Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, 2.21. This is confirmed by the otherwise oblique allusion in Sidonius' own Epistuale 2.2.3.
- ^ Severina, Epistulae II.12.2; Roscia, Epistulae V.16.5; Alcima, Gregory of Tours Decem Libri Historiarum, III.2
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 249-253.
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 218.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 217-218, 221.
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 214.
- ^ a b c Chisholm 1911.
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 220.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 223.
- ^ Gregory of Tours, 2.22
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 224.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 225.
- ^ a b c Mratschek 2020, p. 230.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 239.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 230 & 246.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 222.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 232.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 233-234.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 231-232.
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, p. 234.
- ^ Harries 2018.
- ^ Martindale 1980, p. 118.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 231.
- ^ Gregory of Tours, 2.37, 3.2
- ^ Gregory of Tours, 3.9, 11
- ^ Mratschek 2020, pp. 240–241.
- ^ a b Mratschek 2020, pp. 241.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 219-220.
- ^ a b In his introduction to Sidonius: Poems and Letters (Cambridge: Loeb, 1939), vol. 1, p. lxiv.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 237 & 239.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 242.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 215.
- ^ Brown 2012, p. 404.
- ^ Mratschek 2020, p. 216-218.
- ^ "L 296 Sidonius I: 1 2 Poems Letters".
- ^ Franz Dolveck, "The Manuscript Tradition of Sidonius," in Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris, ed. Gavin Kelly (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
Editions and commentaries
- Hindermann, Judith, ed. (2022). Sidonius Apollinaris' letters, book 2: text, translation and commentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781399506304.
- Marolla, Giulia, ed. (2023). Sidonius - Letters book 5, part 1: text, translation and commentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781399510776.
- Waarden, Johannes Alexander van (2016). Writing to survive: a commentary on Sidonius Apollinaris letters book 7. Leuven Paris Bristol: Peeters. ISBN 9789042933538.
Sources and further reading
- Brown, Peter (2012). Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15290-5.
- Nora Chadwick, Poetry and Letters in Early Christian Gaul London: Bowes and Bowes, 1955.
- Egetenmeyr, Veronika; Wiesehöfer, Josef (2022). Die Konstruktion der "Anderen": Barbarenbilder in den Briefen des Sidonius Apollinaris. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 9783447119061.
- M. P. Hanaghan, Reading Sidonius' Epistles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- ISBN 978-0-19-814472-4.
- Harries, Jill (2018). "Sidonius Apollinaris". In Nicholson, Oliver (ed.). ISBN 978-0-19-881625-6.
- Kelly, Gavin (18 March 2020). Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-4744-6170-2.
- Gavin Kelly and Joop van Waarden (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
- Sigrid Mratschek, "Identitätsstiftung aus der Vergangenheit: Zum Diskurs über die trajanische Bildungskultur im Kreis des Sidonius Apollinaris", in Therese Fuhrer (hg), Die christlich-philosophischen Diskurse der Spätantike: Texte, Personen, Institutionen: Akten der Tagung vom 22.-25. Februar 2006 am Zentrum für Antike und Moderne der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) (Philosophie der Antike, 28),
- Mratschek, Sigrid (2020). "Sidonius' Social World / Creating Culture and Presenting the Self in Sidonius". In Kelly, Gavin; van Waarden, Joop (eds.). The Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 214–260.
- C.E. Stevens, Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age. Oxford: University Press, 1933.
- K.F. Stroheker. Der senatorische Adel im spätantiken Gallien. Tübingen, 1948.
- Waarden, Johannes Alexander van; Kelly, Gavin (2013). New approaches to Sidonius Apollinaris: Briefe Buch I. Leuven Paris Walpole: Peeters. ISBN 9789042929289.
- ISBN 0-521-20159-4.
External links
- Apollinaris Sidonius (5 November c. 430 - 21 August c. 483) – Medieval Lectures. Lynn Harry Nelson.
- 1887 critical Latin edition of the works of Sidonius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica
- Biographical introduction to the Letters Archived 2009-09-17 at the O. M. Dalton(1915)
- Complete English translation of the Letters of Sidonius Apollinaris, O. M. Dalton (1915)
- Sidonius Apollinaris, dedicated site, with bibliography and complete Latin text of the correspondence and the poetry, maintained by Joop van Waarden since 2003, frequently updated
- Opera Omnia by Migne Patrologia Latina with analytical indexes
- Wace, Henry; Piercy, William C., eds. (1911). . Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century (3rd ed.). London: John Murray.
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. .
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Apollinaris Sidonius, Caius Sollius". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 183. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the