Letter 5008: For a long time now we have been reading your work with admiration and praise — you who are most at home in hexameters.

To Secundinus. For a long time now we have been reading your work with admiration and praise — you who are most at home in hexameters. Your subjects were always delightful, whether you were describing the wedding torches of the marriage chamber or beasts pierced by royal spear-thrusts. But in the triple trochaic hendecasyllables you recently composed, nothing — even by your own judgment, I suspect — matches what you have achieved before. Good God, what bile, what wit, what peppery eloquence I found openly displayed! Except that the lightning of your fiery genius and the salty freedom of your speech were perhaps restrained more by the persons involved than by the subject matter — so that to my mind, Consul Ablabius's famous verse-couplet, secretly posted on the palace doors, seems no sharper a sting on the house and life of Constantine: "Who needs Saturn's golden age? These are gem-studded days — but Nero's." The reason being, of course, that the said emperor had around the same time killed his wife Fausta with the heat of a bath and his son Crispus with the cold of poison. Nevertheless, do not slacken in devoting your talent boldly to the pungent colors of satire. For your writings will be enriched by the mounting vices of our present-day tyrant-townsmen. They are not puffed up to such a modest degree — these men whom the corruption of our age allows fortune to smile upon — that posterity will ever struggle to recall their names. For the infamies of the wicked endure as long as the praises of the good. Farewell.

EPISTULA VIII Sidonius Secundino suo salutem. 1. Diu quidem est, quod te hexametris familiarius inservientem stupentes praedicantesque lectitabamus. erat siquidem materia iucunda, seu nuptiales tibi thalamorum faces sive perfossae regiis ictibus ferae describerentur. sed triplicibus trochaeis nuper in metrum hendecasyllabum compaginatis nihil, ne tuo quidem iudicio, simile fecisti. 2. deus bone, quid illic inesse fellis leporis piperataeque facundiae minime tacitus inspexi! nisi quod ferventis fulmen ingenii et eloquii salsa libertas plus personis forte quam causis impediebantur; ut mihi non figuratius Constantini domum vitamque videatur vel pupugisse versu gemello consul Ablabius vel momordisse disticho tali clam Palatinis foribus appenso: Saturni aurea saecla quis requirat? Sunt haec gemmea, sed Neroniana. quia scilicet praedictus Augustus isdem fere temporibus extinxerat coniugem Faustam calore balnei, filium Crispum frigore veneni. 3. tu tamen nihilo segnius operam saltim facetis satirarum coloribus intrepidus impende. nam tua scripta nostrorum vitiis proficientibus tyrannopolitarum locupletabuntur. non enim tam mediocriter intumescunt quos nostra iudicia saeculi culpa fortunatos putant, ut de nominibus ipsorum quandoque reminiscendis sit posteritas laboratura: namque improborum probra aeque ut praeconia bonorum immortalia manent. vale.