Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/104

 and fortune led to his election by popular voice to the bishopric of Clermont (though not in Holy orders), the episcopal city of his native Auvergne in Gaul. In his new and to him strange position there is no doubt that he fulfilled the expectation of the people who chose him as bishop; and when, some fifteen or twenty years after his election, in the great Auvergne diocese, he passed away, he was deeply, even passionately, mourned by his flock. He had been their devoted pastor, their helper and defender in the troublous and anxious period of the Visigothic occupation of Southern Gaul.

Sidonius Apollinaris was a poet of some power, and a graceful and fluent writer of panegyrics of great personages which in that age were much in vogue. He was also deeply read in the literature to which so many of the leaders of Roman society in the late evening of the Empire were ardently devoted.

But it is from his "Correspondence" that this eminent representative of the patrician order in the last days of the Empire will ever be remembered. We possess some hundred and forty-seven of his letters. They were collected and revised by him after he became Bishop of Clermont. Their publication is usually dated between the years 477 and 488. The letters were divided according to ancient models, Pliny being the principal model, into nine Books. (There was no tenth Book of official correspondence in his case.)

In their present form, revised and redacted by the writer himself, very many of the letters read as though intended for a public far wider than the individuals to whom the communications were originally addressed; and it is more than probable that from a comparatively early period, Sidonius intended to follow a well-known practice, and wrote many of his letters with a view to their being preserved as pieces of literature. He even tells us he proposed to be an imitator of Symmachus, his predecessor in this special form of writing by some fifty or sixty years; and Symmachus, we know, was an ardent admirer and imitator of Pliny.

The Letters, however, of Sidonius possess a far wider interest for us than the correspondence of Symmachus. Symmachus is dull and even prosy, partly from his exaggerated attention