LETTER VI
Sidonius to his dear Eutropius, greetings.
1. I have long wanted to write to you, but now I am especially impelled to do so, since I am traveling to the city with Christ's blessing. My chief or sole reason for writing is to summon you from the depths of your domestic tranquility to take up the duties of the Palatine service.
2. To this I add that, by God's gift, you possess undiminished vigor of age, body, and mind. You are well equipped with horses, arms, clothing, resources, and attendants. Unless I am mistaken, it is only the beginning that frightens you, and though you are energetic at home, a sluggish despair makes you timid when it comes to undertaking a journey abroad. And yet can a man of senatorial stock, who is daily confronted by the robed images of his ancestors, rightly say he has been abroad if, even once in his youth, he has seen the home of laws, the school of letters, the senate of honors, the summit of the world, the homeland of liberty -- the one city in all the earth where only barbarians and slaves are foreigners?
3. And now, for shame, if you were to remain among your bumpkin cowhands and snoring swineherds! If you split the field with a trembling plow, or stoop with a curved sickle to plunder the flowering riches of the meadow, or bend over as a digger turning your vine-heavy trellises with the hoe -- then the height of your ambition is contentment. Instead, wake up! Let your spirit, grown flabby and nerveless from rich idleness, rise to greater things. Is it any less fitting for a man of your birth to cultivate his own person than his estate?
4. In short, what you call the exercise of youth is really the retirement of veterans, in whose worn-out hands rusty swords are belatedly exchanged for hoes. Granted, your vintages will foam with multiplied vineyards, your granaries will burst with countless heaps of grain, and a fat shepherd will pen your teeming flocks with swollen udders into the milking pail in the reeking caves of the sheep-folds. But what is the point of advancing your patrimony by such coarse profit, and not merely living amid such things, but -- what is worse -- living for them? Do you not realize that in council time, while young men sit and vote behind you, the judgment of a poor but honored man will weigh upon you as an inglorious rustic, an old man standing unnoticed -- when you see with grief that those whom it would have been shameful to follow in your footsteps have passed you by?
5. But why say more? If you will hear my urging, I shall be the companion, helper, guide, and partner of your endeavors. But if, entangled in the sweet snares of pleasure, you prefer to ally yourself, as they say, with the doctrines of Epicurus -- who, abandoning virtue, defines the highest good by bodily pleasure alone -- then I call our ancestors to witness, I call our descendants to witness, that I am no party to this fault. Farewell.
EPISTULA VI
Sidonius Eutropio suo salutem.
1. Olim quidem scribere tibi concupiscebam, sed nunc vel maxime impellor, id est cum mihi ducens in urbem Christo propitiante via carpitur. scribendi causa vel sola vel maxima, quo te scilicet a profundo domesticae quietis extractum ad capessenda militiae Palatinae munia vocem.
2. ** his additur, quod munere dei tibi congruit aevi corporis animi vigor integer; dein quod equis armis veste sumptu famulicio instructus solum, nisi fallimur, incipere formidas et, cum sis alacer domi, in aggredienda peregrinatione trepidum te iners desperatio facit; si tamen senatorii seminis homo, qui quotidie trabeatis proavorum imaginibus ingeritur, iuste dicere potest semet peregrinatum, si semel et in iuventa viderit domicilium legum, gymnasium litterarum, curiam dignitatum, verticem mundi, patriam libertatis, in qua unica totius orbis civitate soli barbari et servi peregrinantur.
3. et nunc, pro pudor, si relinquare inter busequas rusticanos subulcosque ronchantes. quippe si aut campum stiva tremente proscindas aut prati floreas opes panda curvus falce populeris aut vineam palmite gravem cernuus rastris fossor invertas, tunc tibi est summa votorum beatitudo. quin potius expergiscere et ad maiora se pingui otio marcidus et enervis animus attollat. num minus est tuorum natalium viro personam suam excolere quam villam?
4. ad extremum, quod tu tibi iuventutis exercitium appellas, hoc est otium veteranorum, in quorum manibus effetis enses robiginosi sero ligone mutantur. esto, multiplicatis tibi spumabunt musta vinetis, innumeros quoque cumulos frugibus rupta congestis horrea dabunt, densum pecus gravidis uberibus in mulctram per antra olida caularum pinguis tibi pastor includet: quo spectat tam faeculento patrimonium promovisse compendio et non solum inter ista sed, quod est turpius, propter ista latuisse? nonne quid concilii tempore post sedentes censentesque iuvenes inglorium rusticum, senem stantem latitabundum, pauperis honorati sententia premat, cum eos, quos esset indignum si vestigia nostra sequerentur, videris dolens antecessisse?
5. sed quid plura? si pateris hortantem, conatuum tuorum socius adiutor, praevius particeps ero. sin autem inlecebrosis deliciarum cassibus involutus mavis, ut aiunt, Epicuri dogmatibus copulari, qui iactura virtutis admissa summum bonum sola corporis voluptate determinat, testor ecce maiores, testor posteros nostros, huic me noxae non esse confinem. vale.
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LETTER VI
Sidonius to his dear Eutropius, greetings.
1. I have long wanted to write to you, but now I am especially impelled to do so, since I am traveling to the city with Christ's blessing. My chief or sole reason for writing is to summon you from the depths of your domestic tranquility to take up the duties of the Palatine service.
2. To this I add that, by God's gift, you possess undiminished vigor of age, body, and mind. You are well equipped with horses, arms, clothing, resources, and attendants. Unless I am mistaken, it is only the beginning that frightens you, and though you are energetic at home, a sluggish despair makes you timid when it comes to undertaking a journey abroad. And yet can a man of senatorial stock, who is daily confronted by the robed images of his ancestors, rightly say he has been abroad if, even once in his youth, he has seen the home of laws, the school of letters, the senate of honors, the summit of the world, the homeland of liberty -- the one city in all the earth where only barbarians and slaves are foreigners?
3. And now, for shame, if you were to remain among your bumpkin cowhands and snoring swineherds! If you split the field with a trembling plow, or stoop with a curved sickle to plunder the flowering riches of the meadow, or bend over as a digger turning your vine-heavy trellises with the hoe -- then the height of your ambition is contentment. Instead, wake up! Let your spirit, grown flabby and nerveless from rich idleness, rise to greater things. Is it any less fitting for a man of your birth to cultivate his own person than his estate?
4. In short, what you call the exercise of youth is really the retirement of veterans, in whose worn-out hands rusty swords are belatedly exchanged for hoes. Granted, your vintages will foam with multiplied vineyards, your granaries will burst with countless heaps of grain, and a fat shepherd will pen your teeming flocks with swollen udders into the milking pail in the reeking caves of the sheep-folds. But what is the point of advancing your patrimony by such coarse profit, and not merely living amid such things, but -- what is worse -- living for them? Do you not realize that in council time, while young men sit and vote behind you, the judgment of a poor but honored man will weigh upon you as an inglorious rustic, an old man standing unnoticed -- when you see with grief that those whom it would have been shameful to follow in your footsteps have passed you by?
5. But why say more? If you will hear my urging, I shall be the companion, helper, guide, and partner of your endeavors. But if, entangled in the sweet snares of pleasure, you prefer to ally yourself, as they say, with the doctrines of Epicurus -- who, abandoning virtue, defines the highest good by bodily pleasure alone -- then I call our ancestors to witness, I call our descendants to witness, that I am no party to this fault. Farewell.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.