Sidonius to his dear Vincentius, greetings.
1. The fate of Arvandus [the Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, tried for treason in Rome around 469 AD] distresses me, and I do not pretend otherwise. For this too redounds to the emperor's credit: that one may openly love even those condemned to death. I was a friend to the man, as much as his changeable and easygoing character allowed. My recent clash with public opinion on his account is proof of this -- its flame, which I had not been cautious enough to avoid, singed me.
2. But my loyalty to a friendship was something I owed myself. For his part, he simply did not have the character to persevere in it. I complain freely, not insultingly, because he despised the counsel of loyal friends and was in all things the plaything of Fortune. In the end, I am less surprised that he eventually fell than that he stood so long. How often he boasted of having endured adversity, while we, from a deeper affection, pitied his recklessness that we knew would one day bring him down, declaring that a man was not truly fortunate if he was judged to be so merely often rather than always.
3. But you ask for the sequence of his condemnation. With all due respect to the loyalty owed even to a friend in affliction, I shall set out the matter briefly. He governed his first prefecture with great popularity, and the one that followed with the greatest devastation. Simultaneously crushed by a mountain of debt and fearing his creditors, he intrigued against the nobles who were to succeed him. He laughed at everyone's conversation, marveled at their advice, and scorned their services. He suffered suspicion from the rarity of visitors and disgust from their frequency -- until, hemmed in by a wall of public hatred, he was arrested and stripped of his power, brought to Rome still swelling with pride because he had sailed past the stormy coast of Tuscany with favorable winds, as though the very elements were at the service of his clear conscience.
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 through his daughter of the consul Afranius Syagrius, along with Thaumastus and Petronius, men of the highest knowledge in both substance and speech who deserve to be counted among the chief ornaments of our homeland -- followed in pursuit, bearing official decrees to prosecute Arvandus in the public name.
5. Among the other matters the provincials had charged them to handle, they brought intercepted letters which Arvandus's secretary, when seized, declared his master had dictated. The document appeared to have been sent to the king of the Goths [Euric], dissuading him from making peace with the Greek emperor [the Eastern Roman Emperor], urging that the Britons settled above the Loire should be attacked, and confirming that the Gauls should be divided with the Burgundians according to the law of nations -- and much more madness of this sort, calculated to provoke rage in a fierce king and shame in a peaceable one. Legal experts interpreted this letter as burning with the crime of treason.
6. This business was not unknown to me and to Auxanius, an outstanding man. We considered it perfidious, barbarous, and cowardly to avoid the friendship of Arvandus amid his troubles, whatever the circumstances. So we reported the entire scheme to Arvandus, who suspected nothing -- a scheme that keen and passionate men were carefully concealing until the time of trial, intending to trap an incautious adversary who, having rejected the advice of his friends and rashly trusting only himself, would incriminate himself with a hasty response. We told him what we and our closest friends thought safe. We urged him to admit nothing as trivial if anything were demanded by his enemies, however slight their charge might seem -- that even this pretense of unconcern would be most perilous, making it easier for them to shake loose his careless confidence through cross-examination.
7. On hearing this, he leapt up and burst into sudden abuse: "Be gone, you degenerates," he said, "unworthy of your prefectorian fathers, with this needless panic! Since you understand nothing, leave this part of the business to me. Arvandus has his conscience, and that is enough. I shall scarcely deign to allow advocates to defend me in an embezzlement trial." We departed, grieved and confounded not so much by the insult as by our sorrow -- for what doctor can justly be angered when a desperate patient seizes him in a frenzy?
8. Meanwhile our defendant paraded about the Capitoline square in his best white clothes, now feeding on sly greetings, now gladly listening to the popping bubbles of flattery as if acknowledging old acquaintances, now rummaging through the displays of silk, gems, and precious wares of the money-changers -- inspecting, handling, deprecating, and unrolling them as if about to buy. And through it all he complained loudly about the laws, the times, the Senate, the emperor -- that they had not punished him before examining his case.
9. A few days passed. The Senate assembled in full session in the council chamber (so I later learned, for I had left by then). Our defendant appeared in court, freshly shaven and pumiced, while the prosecutors, half in mourning and unkempt, waited for the summons of the judges and, deliberately squalid, had preempted the pity owed to the accused by their own display of grief. They were called and admitted. The parties, as is customary, took their positions on opposite sides. The former prefects were offered the right to sit before the opening of the case. Arvandus, with his characteristic unlucky impudence, strode forward and virtually thrust himself into the very laps of the judges. Ferreolus, flanked by his colleagues, sat modestly and quietly at the far end of the lowest bench, showing that he remembered he was an envoy no less than a senator -- and was later all the more praised and honored for it.
10. While these proceedings continued and the absent senators arrived, the parties rose and the envoys stated their case. After the provincial mandate was presented, the letter mentioned above was produced. As it was read aloud, word by word, Arvandus -- without even being asked -- proclaimed that he had dictated it. The envoys replied that, though his admission was wicked, they could at least confirm that he himself had dictated it. But when the raging man, oblivious to how far he was falling, ran himself through with his confession repeated two and three times, the prosecutors declared, and the judges concurred, that the defendant stood self-confessed of treason. He was further destroyed by a thousand legal formulas establishing the penalty.
11. Only then, they say, did the wretched man turn pale with belated remorse for his talkativeness, realizing too late that even a man who had never sought the purple could be pronounced guilty of treason. He was immediately stripped of the privileges of two prefectures, which he had held for five years in repeated terms of office. Reduced to plebeian rank -- not so much added to common humanity as returned to it -- he was consigned to the public prison. The most pitiful thing, according to those who witnessed it, was that because he had presented himself to the judges groomed and polished while his prosecutors wore mourning, when he was led away condemned he was wretched but not pitiable. For who could be deeply moved at the fate of a man who was being carried off to the quarries or the workhouse looking sleek and perfumed?
12. Yet when the trial had been adjourned for barely two weeks, he was sentenced to death and cast onto the island of the Serpent of Epidaurus [Tiber Island in Rome, which housed a temple of Aesculapius], where, stripped of all distinction to the point of distressing even his enemies, and spewed out from human affairs as if by the nausea of a sickened Fortune, he now drags out thirty days of life after his sentence according to the old Tiberian decree, trembling hour by hour at the thought of the hook, the Gemonian Steps, and the noose from a frenzied executioner.
13. For our part, as best we can, whether absent or present, we offer our prayers and double our supplications that the imperial clemency may grant this half-dead man at least exile, though his property has been confiscated, and that the suspended blow of the drawn sword may be stayed. Yet whether he awaits the worst or merely endures it, nothing is more unfortunate than this: that after so many brands of infamy and humiliation, he now fears nothing more than simply being alive. Farewell.
EPISTULA VII
Sidonius Vincentio suo salutem.
1. Angit me casus Arvandi nec dissimulo, quin angat. namque hic quoque cumulus accedit laudibus imperatoris, quod amare palam licet et capite damnatos. amicus homini fui supra quam morum eius facilitas varietasque patiebantur. testatur hoc propter ipsum nuper mihi invidia conflata, cuius me paulo incautiorem flamma detorruit.
2. sed quod in amicitia steti, mihi debui. porro autem in natura ille non habuit diligentiam perseverandi: libere queror, non insultatorie, quia fidelium consilia despiciens fortunae ludibrium per omnia fuit. denique non eum aliquando cecidisse sed tam diu stetisse plus miror. o quotiens saepe ipse se adversa perpessum gloriabatur, cum tamen nos ab affectu profundiore ruituram eius quandoque temeritatem miseraremur, definientes non esse felicem qui hoc frequenter potius esse quam semper iudicaretur!
3. sed damnationis suae ordinem exposcis. salva fidei reverentia, quae amico debetur etiam afflicto, rem breviter exponam. praefecturam primam gubernavit cum magna popularitate consequentemque cum maxima populatione. pariter onere depressus aeris alieni metu creditorum successuros sibi optimates aemulabatur. omnium colloquia ridere, consilia mirari, officia contemnere, pati de occurrentum raritate suspicionem, de assiduitate fastidium, donec, odii publici mole vallatus et prius cinctus custodia quam potestate discinctus, captus destinatusque pervenit Romam, ilico tumens, quod prospero cursu procellosum Tusciae litus enavigasset, tamquam sibi bene conscio ipsa quodammodo elementa famularentur.
4. in Capitolio custodiebatur ab hospite Flavio Asello, comite sacrarum largitionum, qui adhuc in eo semifumantem praefecturae nuper extortae dignitatem venerabatur. interea legati provinciae Galliae, Tonantius Ferreolus praefectorius, Afranii Syagrii consulis e filia nepos, Thaumastus quoque et Petronius, maxima rerum verborumque scientia praediti et inter principalia patriae nostrae decora ponendi, praevium Arvandum publico nomine accusaturi cum gestis decretalibus insequuntur.
5. qui inter cetera, quae sibi provinciales agenda mandaverant, interceptas litteras deferebant, quas Arvandi scriba correptus dominum dictasse profitebatur. haec ad regem Gothorum charta videbatur emitti, pacem cum Graeco imperatore dissuadens, Britannos super Ligerim sitos impugnari oportere demonstrans, cum Burgundionibus iure gentium Gallias dividi debere confirmans, et in hunc ferme modum plurima insana, quae iram regi feroci, placido verecundiam inferrent. hanc epistulam laesae maiestatis crimine ardere iurisconsulti interpretabantur.
6. me et Auxanium, praestantissimum virum, tractatus iste non latuit, qui Arvandi amicitias quoquo genere incursas inter ipsius adversa vitare perfidum barbarum ignavum computabamus. deferimus igitur nil tale metuenti totam per<niciter> machinam, quam summo artificio acres et flammei viri occulere in tempus iudicii meditabantur, scilicet ut adversarium incautum et consiliis sodalium repudiatis sibi soli temere fidentem professione responsi praecipitis involverent. dicimus ergo, quid nobis, quid amicis secretioribus tutum putaretur. suademus nil quasi leve fatendum, si quid ab inimicis etiam pro levissimo flagitaretur; ipsam illam dissimulationem tribulosissimam fore, quo facilius exc<uterent> sciscitan<do incautam persua>sionis securitatem.
7. quibus agnitis proripit sese atque in convicia subita prorumpens: 'abite, degeneres', inquit, 'et praefectoriis patribus indigni, cum hac superforanea trepidatione; mihi, quia nihil intellegitis, hanc negotii partem sinite curandam; satis Arvando conscientia sua sufficit; vix illud dignabor admittere, ut advocati mihi in actionibus repetundarum patrocinentur.' discedimus tristes et non magis iniuria quam maerore confusi; quis enim medicorum iure moveatur, quotiens desperatum furor arripiat?
8. inter haec reus noster aream Capitolinam percurrere albatus; modo subdolis salutationibus pasci, modo crepantes adulationum bullas ut recognoscens libenter audire, modo serica et gemmas, et pretiosa quaeque trapezitarum involucra rimari et quasi mercaturus inspicere prensare, depretiari devolvere et inter agendum multum de legibus, de temporibus, de senatu, de principe queri, quod se non prius, quam discuterent, ulciscerentur.
9. pauci medii dies: it in tractatorium frequens senatus (sic post comperi; nam inter ista discesseram); procedit noster ad curiam paulo ante detonsus pumicatusque, cum accusatores semipullati atque concreti nuntios a decemviris opperirentur et ab industria squalidi praeripuissent reo debitam miserationem sub invidia sordidatorum. citati intromittuntur: partes, ut moris est, e regione consistunt. offertur praefectoriis ante propositionis exordium ius sedendi: Arvandus iam tunc infelici impudentia concito gradu mediis prope iudicum sinibus ingeritur; Ferreolus, circumsistentibus latera collegis verecunde ac leviter in imo subselliorum capite consedit, ita ut non minus legatum se quam senatorem reminisceretur, plus ob hoc postea laudatus honoratusque.
10. dum haec, et qui procerum defuerant affuerunt: consurgunt partes legatique proponunt. epistula post provinciale mandatum, cuius supra mentio facta, profertur; atque, cum sensim recitaretur, Arvandus necdum interrogatus se dictasse proclamat. respondere legati quamquam <fatenti> nequiter <sane> constare, quod ipse dictasset. at ubi se furens ille quantumque caderet ignarus bis terque repetita confessione transfodit, acclamatur ab accusatoribus, conclamatur a iudicibus reum laesae maiestatis confitentem teneri. ad hoc et milibus formularum iuris id sancientum iugulabatur.
11. tum demum laboriosus tarda paenitudine loquacitatis inpalluisse perhibetur, sero cognoscens posse reum maiestatis pronuntiari etiam eum, qui non affectasset habitum purpuratorum. confestim privilegiis geminae praefecturae, quam per quinquennium repetitis fascibus rexerat, exauguratus et, plebeiae familiae non ut additus sed ut redditus, publico carceri adiudicatus est. illud sane aerumnosissimum, sicut narravere qui viderant, quod, quia se sub atratis accusatoribus exornatum ille politumque iudicibus intulerat, paulo post, cum duceretur addictus, miser nec miserabilis erat. quis enim super statu eius nimis inflecteretur, quem videret accuratum delibutumque lautumiis aut ergastulo inferri?
12. sed et iudicio vix per hebdomadam duplicem comperendinato capite multatus in insulam coniectus est serpentis Epidauri, ubi usque ad inimicorum dolorem devenustatus et a rebus humanis veluti vomitu fortunae nauseantis exsputus, nunc ex vetere senatusconsulto Tiberiano triginta dierum vitam post sententiam trahit, uncum et Gemonias et laqueum per horas turbulenti carnificis horrescens.
13. nos quidem, prout valemus, absentes praesentesque vota facimus, preces supplicationesque geminamus, ut suspenso ictu iam iamque mucronis exerti pietas Augusta seminecem quamquam publicatis bonis vel exilio muneretur. illo tamen, seu exspectat extrema quaeque seu sustinet, infelicius nihil est, si post tot notas inustas contumeliasque aliquid nunc amplius quam vivere timet. vale.
◆
Sidonius to his dear Vincentius, greetings.
1. The fate of Arvandus [the Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, tried for treason in Rome around 469 AD] distresses me, and I do not pretend otherwise. For this too redounds to the emperor's credit: that one may openly love even those condemned to death. I was a friend to the man, as much as his changeable and easygoing character allowed. My recent clash with public opinion on his account is proof of this -- its flame, which I had not been cautious enough to avoid, singed me.
2. But my loyalty to a friendship was something I owed myself. For his part, he simply did not have the character to persevere in it. I complain freely, not insultingly, because he despised the counsel of loyal friends and was in all things the plaything of Fortune. In the end, I am less surprised that he eventually fell than that he stood so long. How often he boasted of having endured adversity, while we, from a deeper affection, pitied his recklessness that we knew would one day bring him down, declaring that a man was not truly fortunate if he was judged to be so merely often rather than always.
3. But you ask for the sequence of his condemnation. With all due respect to the loyalty owed even to a friend in affliction, I shall set out the matter briefly. He governed his first prefecture with great popularity, and the one that followed with the greatest devastation. Simultaneously crushed by a mountain of debt and fearing his creditors, he intrigued against the nobles who were to succeed him. He laughed at everyone's conversation, marveled at their advice, and scorned their services. He suffered suspicion from the rarity of visitors and disgust from their frequency -- until, hemmed in by a wall of public hatred, he was arrested and stripped of his power, brought to Rome still swelling with pride because he had sailed past the stormy coast of Tuscany with favorable winds, as though the very elements were at the service of his clear conscience.
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 through his daughter of the consul Afranius Syagrius, along with Thaumastus and Petronius, men of the highest knowledge in both substance and speech who deserve to be counted among the chief ornaments of our homeland -- followed in pursuit, bearing official decrees to prosecute Arvandus in the public name.
5. Among the other matters the provincials had charged them to handle, they brought intercepted letters which Arvandus's secretary, when seized, declared his master had dictated. The document appeared to have been sent to the king of the Goths [Euric], dissuading him from making peace with the Greek emperor [the Eastern Roman Emperor], urging that the Britons settled above the Loire should be attacked, and confirming that the Gauls should be divided with the Burgundians according to the law of nations -- and much more madness of this sort, calculated to provoke rage in a fierce king and shame in a peaceable one. Legal experts interpreted this letter as burning with the crime of treason.
6. This business was not unknown to me and to Auxanius, an outstanding man. We considered it perfidious, barbarous, and cowardly to avoid the friendship of Arvandus amid his troubles, whatever the circumstances. So we reported the entire scheme to Arvandus, who suspected nothing -- a scheme that keen and passionate men were carefully concealing until the time of trial, intending to trap an incautious adversary who, having rejected the advice of his friends and rashly trusting only himself, would incriminate himself with a hasty response. We told him what we and our closest friends thought safe. We urged him to admit nothing as trivial if anything were demanded by his enemies, however slight their charge might seem -- that even this pretense of unconcern would be most perilous, making it easier for them to shake loose his careless confidence through cross-examination.
7. On hearing this, he leapt up and burst into sudden abuse: "Be gone, you degenerates," he said, "unworthy of your prefectorian fathers, with this needless panic! Since you understand nothing, leave this part of the business to me. Arvandus has his conscience, and that is enough. I shall scarcely deign to allow advocates to defend me in an embezzlement trial." We departed, grieved and confounded not so much by the insult as by our sorrow -- for what doctor can justly be angered when a desperate patient seizes him in a frenzy?
8. Meanwhile our defendant paraded about the Capitoline square in his best white clothes, now feeding on sly greetings, now gladly listening to the popping bubbles of flattery as if acknowledging old acquaintances, now rummaging through the displays of silk, gems, and precious wares of the money-changers -- inspecting, handling, deprecating, and unrolling them as if about to buy. And through it all he complained loudly about the laws, the times, the Senate, the emperor -- that they had not punished him before examining his case.
9. A few days passed. The Senate assembled in full session in the council chamber (so I later learned, for I had left by then). Our defendant appeared in court, freshly shaven and pumiced, while the prosecutors, half in mourning and unkempt, waited for the summons of the judges and, deliberately squalid, had preempted the pity owed to the accused by their own display of grief. They were called and admitted. The parties, as is customary, took their positions on opposite sides. The former prefects were offered the right to sit before the opening of the case. Arvandus, with his characteristic unlucky impudence, strode forward and virtually thrust himself into the very laps of the judges. Ferreolus, flanked by his colleagues, sat modestly and quietly at the far end of the lowest bench, showing that he remembered he was an envoy no less than a senator -- and was later all the more praised and honored for it.
10. While these proceedings continued and the absent senators arrived, the parties rose and the envoys stated their case. After the provincial mandate was presented, the letter mentioned above was produced. As it was read aloud, word by word, Arvandus -- without even being asked -- proclaimed that he had dictated it. The envoys replied that, though his admission was wicked, they could at least confirm that he himself had dictated it. But when the raging man, oblivious to how far he was falling, ran himself through with his confession repeated two and three times, the prosecutors declared, and the judges concurred, that the defendant stood self-confessed of treason. He was further destroyed by a thousand legal formulas establishing the penalty.
11. Only then, they say, did the wretched man turn pale with belated remorse for his talkativeness, realizing too late that even a man who had never sought the purple could be pronounced guilty of treason. He was immediately stripped of the privileges of two prefectures, which he had held for five years in repeated terms of office. Reduced to plebeian rank -- not so much added to common humanity as returned to it -- he was consigned to the public prison. The most pitiful thing, according to those who witnessed it, was that because he had presented himself to the judges groomed and polished while his prosecutors wore mourning, when he was led away condemned he was wretched but not pitiable. For who could be deeply moved at the fate of a man who was being carried off to the quarries or the workhouse looking sleek and perfumed?
12. Yet when the trial had been adjourned for barely two weeks, he was sentenced to death and cast onto the island of the Serpent of Epidaurus [Tiber Island in Rome, which housed a temple of Aesculapius], where, stripped of all distinction to the point of distressing even his enemies, and spewed out from human affairs as if by the nausea of a sickened Fortune, he now drags out thirty days of life after his sentence according to the old Tiberian decree, trembling hour by hour at the thought of the hook, the Gemonian Steps, and the noose from a frenzied executioner.
13. For our part, as best we can, whether absent or present, we offer our prayers and double our supplications that the imperial clemency may grant this half-dead man at least exile, though his property has been confiscated, and that the suspended blow of the drawn sword may be stayed. Yet whether he awaits the worst or merely endures it, nothing is more unfortunate than this: that after so many brands of infamy and humiliation, he now fears nothing more than simply being alive. Farewell.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.