Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/103

 rule of the Emperor had reduced the once proud assembly to a group of shadowy names whose principal title to honour and respect was the splendid tradition of a great past.

This Symmachus, statesman and ardent politician, was a writer of no mean power. Like Pliny, whom in common with all the literary society of Rome he admired and longed to imitate, he determined to go down to posterity as a writer of Letters.

These Letters of his were read and re-read in his day and time; his contemporaries classed him as on a level with Cicero, and loved to compare him with the younger Pliny, whom Symmachus adopted as his model. Many copies were made of his correspondence; his letters were treasured up in precious caskets, and after he had passed away, his son, Memmius Symmachus, collected them all together, dividing them, as Pliny's had been divided, into ten Books. Nine of them, like the compositions of the great writer whom he strove to imitate, are mainly concerned with private and domestic matters; the tenth, as in the case of Pliny, being made up of official communications which had passed between his father and the reigning Emperor.

It is somewhat dull reading this "Symmachus" correspondence, but it gives us a picture of the nobler and purer portion of Roman society in the closing years of the fourth century. He was too good a scholar, too able a man, not to see his inferiority to Pliny; and evidently he had his doubts respecting the claim of his correspondence to immortality, and he apologizes for their barrenness of interesting incident; but his contemporaries and his devoted son thought otherwise, and to their loyal admiration we owe the preservation of his carefully prepared and corrected, though somewhat tedious, imitation of the charming Letters of Pliny.

Sidonius Apollinaris, who flourished a little more than half a century later, belonged also to the great Roman world; he was born at Lyons about 430, and partly owing to the elevation of his father-in-law Avitus to the imperial throne, was rapidly preferred to several of the great offices of the Empire—amongst these to the prefecture of Rome. His undoubted ability, his high character, and great position