Sidonius to his friend Leo.
I have sent you the Life of Apollonius of Tyana [the famous 1st-century Pythagorean philosopher and wonder-worker] — not as Nicomachus the elder transcribed it from Philostratus's text, but as Tascius Victorianus copied it from Nicomachus's draft. Since you ordered it, I sent it, but in my haste to prepare it, a turbulent, headlong, and thoroughly unpolished translation threw it together into a rough copy. And do not hold it against me that the work was not more carefully done: while I was kept shut up within the walls of Livia [during a Gothic siege], from which imprisonment I owe my eventual release, after Christ's help, to you — my mind was too sick with worry to go through even the roughest draft with any care. I was pulled apart between sleepless nights of anxiety and the duties of the day.
On top of this, when the twilight hour finally called me, exhausted from sentry duty, back to my quarters, I could barely close my eyes for a moment's rest before I was jarred awake by the racket of two old Gothic women living next to the atrium of my bedroom. No two people were ever more quarrelsome, more bibulous, or more prone to vomiting. At any rate, as soon as I had recovered a little leisure, I offered you this rough and half-baked book — a "new vintage," as they say — driven more by the memory of your request than by any satisfaction with my own work.
So set aside for now the Pythian laurels and the Hippocrene spring, and those poetic meters that are so intimately your own — meters which, for men as learned as yourself, are sweated out more from the brow than from the fountain. Suspend for a moment that celebrated torrent of oratory, a gift not merely of your family but of your household, poured into your heart across the generations from your great-grandfather Fronto [the famous rhetorician]. Set aside for a little while those widely acclaimed speeches you compose in the voice of the king [Euric, King of the Visigoths], by which that illustrious ruler now strikes terror into the hearts of peoples beyond the sea, now seals a victor's treaty on favorable terms with the trembling barbarians along the Waal [river in the Low Countries], now, along the advancing frontier, brings peoples under arms as he brings arms under laws.
Shake yourself free somehow from your relentless duties and steal a moment of leisure from the burdens and commotions of court life. You will find the right moment to review this history when, alongside our man from Tyana, you make a kind of pilgrimage yourself — now to the Caucasus and the Indus, now to the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia and the Brahmans of India — giving yourself wholly to the reading.
Read about a man who, with all due respect to the Catholic faith, resembles you in many ways: sought out by the wealthy yet never seeking wealth himself; greedy for knowledge, restrained with money; abstemious amid feasts, clad in linen among men in purple, austere among perfume bottles; rough, bristling, and unkempt in the midst of nations dripping with ointments — among the satraps of turbaned kings, coated in myrrh, pumiced smooth, drenched in balsam — precious in his venerable squalor. And while he took nothing from any animal for his food or clothing...
EPISTULA III
Sidonius Leoni suo salutem.
1. Apollonii Pythaghorici vitam, non ut Nicomachus senior e Philostrati sed ut Tascius Victorianus e Nicomachi schedio exscripsit, quia iusseras, misi; quam, dum parare festino, celeriter eiecit in tumultuarium exemplar turbida et praeceps et Opica translatio. neque mihi rem credito diuturnius elaboratam vitio vertas: nam dum me tenuit inclusum mora moenium Livianorum, cuius incommodi finem post opem Christi tibi debeo, non valebat curis animus aeger saltim saltuatim tradenda percurrere, nunc per nocturna suspiria, nunc per diurna officia districtus.
2. ad hoc, et cum me defetigatum ab excubiis ad deversorium crepusculascens hora revocaverat, vix dabatur luminibus inflexis parvula quies; nam fragor ilico, quem movebant vicinantes impluvio cubiculi mei duae quaepiam Getides anus, quibus nil umquam litigiosius bibacius vomacius erit. sane, cum primum reduci aliquid otii fuit, inpolitum hunc semicrudumque et, ut aiunt, tamquam musteum librum plus desiderii tui quam officii mei memor obtuli.
3. quocirca sepone tantisper Pythicas lauros Hippocrenenque et illos carminum modos tibi uni tantum penitissime familiares, qui tamen doctis, ut es ipse, personis non tam fonte quam fronte sudantur. suspende perorandi illud quoque celeberrimum flumen, quod non solum gentilicium sed domesticum tibi quodque in tuum pectus per succiduas aetates ab atavo Frontone transfunditur. sepone pauxillulum conclamatissimas declamationes, quas oris regii vice conficis, quibus ipse rex inclitus modo corda terrificat gentium transmarinarum, modo de superiore cum barbaris ad Vachalin trementibus foedus victor innodat, modo per promotae limitem sortis ut populos sub armis, sic frenat arma sub legibus.
4. exuere utcumque continuatissimis curis et otium tuum molibus aulicis motibusque furare. historiam flagitatam tunc recognosces opportune competenterque, si cum Tyaneo nostro nunc ad Caucasum Indumque, nunc ad Aethiopum gymnosophistas Indorumque bracmanas totus lectioni vacans et ipse quodammodo peregrinere.
5. lege virum fidei catholicae pace praefata in plurimis similem tui id est a divitibus ambitum nec divitias ambientem; cupidum scientiae continentem pecuniae; inter epulas abstemium, inter purpuratos linteatum, inter alabastra censorium; concretum hispidum hirsutum in medio nationum delibutarum atque inter satrapas regum tiaratorum murrhatos pumicatos malobathratos venerabili squalore pretiosum; cumque proprio nihil esui aut indutui de pecude conferret, regnis ob hoc, quae pererravit, non tam suspicioni, quam [fuisse] suspectui; et a fortuna regum sibi in omnibus obsecundante illa tantum beneficia poscentem, quae mage sit suetus oblata praestare quam sumere.
6. quid multis? si vera metimur aestimamusque, fors fuat an philosophi vitae scriptor aequalis maiorum temporibus accesserit, certe par saeculo meo per te lector obvenit. vale.
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Sidonius to his friend Leo.
I have sent you the Life of Apollonius of Tyana [the famous 1st-century Pythagorean philosopher and wonder-worker] — not as Nicomachus the elder transcribed it from Philostratus's text, but as Tascius Victorianus copied it from Nicomachus's draft. Since you ordered it, I sent it, but in my haste to prepare it, a turbulent, headlong, and thoroughly unpolished translation threw it together into a rough copy. And do not hold it against me that the work was not more carefully done: while I was kept shut up within the walls of Livia [during a Gothic siege], from which imprisonment I owe my eventual release, after Christ's help, to you — my mind was too sick with worry to go through even the roughest draft with any care. I was pulled apart between sleepless nights of anxiety and the duties of the day.
On top of this, when the twilight hour finally called me, exhausted from sentry duty, back to my quarters, I could barely close my eyes for a moment's rest before I was jarred awake by the racket of two old Gothic women living next to the atrium of my bedroom. No two people were ever more quarrelsome, more bibulous, or more prone to vomiting. At any rate, as soon as I had recovered a little leisure, I offered you this rough and half-baked book — a "new vintage," as they say — driven more by the memory of your request than by any satisfaction with my own work.
So set aside for now the Pythian laurels and the Hippocrene spring, and those poetic meters that are so intimately your own — meters which, for men as learned as yourself, are sweated out more from the brow than from the fountain. Suspend for a moment that celebrated torrent of oratory, a gift not merely of your family but of your household, poured into your heart across the generations from your great-grandfather Fronto [the famous rhetorician]. Set aside for a little while those widely acclaimed speeches you compose in the voice of the king [Euric, King of the Visigoths], by which that illustrious ruler now strikes terror into the hearts of peoples beyond the sea, now seals a victor's treaty on favorable terms with the trembling barbarians along the Waal [river in the Low Countries], now, along the advancing frontier, brings peoples under arms as he brings arms under laws.
Shake yourself free somehow from your relentless duties and steal a moment of leisure from the burdens and commotions of court life. You will find the right moment to review this history when, alongside our man from Tyana, you make a kind of pilgrimage yourself — now to the Caucasus and the Indus, now to the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia and the Brahmans of India — giving yourself wholly to the reading.
Read about a man who, with all due respect to the Catholic faith, resembles you in many ways: sought out by the wealthy yet never seeking wealth himself; greedy for knowledge, restrained with money; abstemious amid feasts, clad in linen among men in purple, austere among perfume bottles; rough, bristling, and unkempt in the midst of nations dripping with ointments — among the satraps of turbaned kings, coated in myrrh, pumiced smooth, drenched in balsam — precious in his venerable squalor. And while he took nothing from any animal for his food or clothing...
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.