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CLAUDIANUS TO POPE SIDONIUS, GREETING. If it were possible to bring about that I might meet you, my lord, even occasionally and a little, I would not from any quarter inquire into the wishes or needs of any persons, but those things which could be of use to me in the matter of my debt. For the power of seeing you again is, in many ways and by equally wretched causes, cut off; and indeed the opportunity of writing either rarely presents itself fittingly, or does not present itself at all. Whether these same things be excusable or not, you yourself shall judge. But further, that very often others are favoured with your writings—who neither solicit that very thing as much as I do, and perhaps deserve it no more—I do not think can be committed with impunity against the laws of friendship.
This too I will now make a grievous silence about—that those little books which you do not refuse to be ennobled by your name, you have never favoured with any reply? But perhaps you have no leisure to spare, which, though small, you might expend on a friendship so very great. By what so engrossing occupation, or where, will you ever be so entangled, that it would not redound to the advantage of others? When by prayer you appease God, you reconcile that same God not only to friends but to strangers too. When you probe the mysteries of the heavenly Scriptures, the more studiously you imbue yourself, the more copiously you pour out doctrine to the rest. When you lavish your wealth upon the uses of the needy, you provide indeed most of all for yourself, but you also make provision for others.
Accordingly nothing, indeed truly nothing, is so unfruitful among all your actions that it would bring richer fruit to you alone and not to many others along with you. No occasion of any hindrance, therefore, can be alleged, even falsely, why I—your special and intimate friend—should bear no fruit from my special one, from whom even strangers, very many of them, derive much. But, as I suppose, according to the model of the Gospel giver, what you do not give to a hungry friend, you will give to a shameless knocker. Further, if you still harden yourself as is your wont, I shall do something that you will repent of: for if you sin further by keeping silent, I shall straightway take vengeance—by writing. For indeed it is beyond doubt that you must be punished by my writing as much as I am punished by your silence.
Farewell. SIDONIUS TO HIS OWN CLAUDIANUS, GREETING. You pronounce, my greater lord, that an offence is committed against the rights of close friendship, in that, as concerns the greeting due to you, I have long held back from pen and writing-tablets, and that thereafter my papyrus has loaded none of the travellers' palms which might bestow on you the cultivation of diligent well-wishing.
You conjecture these things beyond what is fair, if you suppose that any mortal (to whom, however, it is dear to converse in the Latin tongue) does not quake when, being one written down, he is brought into the examination of your ears—of your ears, I say, to whose expertise, unless the prerogative of the ages that have run their course down to this present time were to crush me, I could not match even the river of Frontonian gravity or Apuleian weight; compared with which, in the present, the Varros (whether Atacinus or Terentius) and the Plinys (whether the uncle or Secundus) would play the rustic.
That volume confirms my judgment, which you—most rich in the knowledge of things and of words—published concerning the state of the soul; in which, while you address a proem to my name, I gained this gift above all: that the renown of my person—which it was not worth the labour to make famous by the titles of your books—should be perpetuated by the benefit of yours. But, great God, how great and of what kind is that work—enclosed in its matter, conspicuous in its declamation, blocked off in its proposition, unlocked in its disputation, and, though thorny by reason of the barbed points of its syllogisms, yet honeyed with the flower of a flourishing eloquence.
There the words are new, because they are old, and to them, when compared, the style even of the ancient letters would deservedly be made to seem antiquated; and—what is more precious—that whole diction is so trimmed in clauses while yet flowing, that, ample in matter and tight in sentences, you would feel it teaches more than it speaks. In short, once—and not unjustly—this was reckoned the chief fecundity, whose care it was, while confining many things into few, rather to fill out the cause than the page.
But indeed in your books how excellent is this too—that a continuous maturity nevertheless admits tenderness, and interweaves a timely sweetness with severity, so that it suddenly refreshes the reader's attention, wearied as it passes through the winnowed limbs of the disciplines of philosophy, by means of delightful digressions, as though by certain harbours of its own sea. O book, powerful in many directions! O eloquence of an ingenuity not meagre but subtle, which neither swells up through hyperbolic gushings nor is thinned through depressed diminutions!
Besides this, a learning unique and singular, and conspicuous in the assertion of diverse matters, whose custom it is to philosophize about single arts with single craftsmen, and which, if chance demands it, does not refuse to hold with Orpheus the plectrum, with Aesculapius the staff, with Archimedes the rod, with Euphrates the horoscope, with Perdix the compass, with Vitruvius the plumb-line; and which has never ceased to investigate with Thales the seasons, with Atlas the stars, with Zetus weights, with Chrysippus numbers, with Euclid measures. In sum, no one in my age has been able so to affirm what he wished, since, while he displays himself against the one against whom he speaks, he rightly claims for himself the badge of the manners and studies of both tongues.
He perceives like Pythagoras, divides like Socrates, unfolds like Plato, enfolds like Aristotle; like Aeschines he flatters, like Demosthenes he is angry; he blooms like Hortensius, seethes like Cethegus, urges on like Curio, delays like Fabius, feigns like Crassus, dissembles like Caesar, counsels like Cato, dissuades like Appius, persuades like Tullius. And if one comes for comparison to the most sacred Fathers, he instructs like Jerome, destroys like Lactantius, builds up like Augustine, is uplifted like Hilary, is subdued like John, like Basil he rebukes, like Gregory he consoles, like Orosius he flows abundantly, like Rufinus he is concise, like Eusebius he narrates, like Eucherius he stirs up, like Paulinus he provokes, like Ambrose he perseveres.
But now, if you would ask what I think of your hymn: it is clausulate, copious, sweet, exalted, and surpasses any lyric dithyrambs whatsoever in poetic charm and historical truth; and that is your peculiar gift in it, that—the feet of the metres being preserved, and the syllables of the feet and the natures of the syllables—within the bound of its space the poor verse encloses rich words, nor does the brevity of the cramped song eliminate the length of the embellished speech. Thus it is easy for you to surpass, with tiny trochees and yet tinier pyrrhics, not only the ternary molossic and anapaestic junctures, but even the quaternary junctures of the epitrites and paeons.
The amplitude of your utterance outgrows the regular narrows, and, like a great gem scarcely held by a little gold, it flashes out like the spirit of a powerful horse, which, when, as it champs, it is held within the law of the bridle amid wastes or rough ground, you understand that not so much the course as the field is lacking. Why say more? With me as arbiter, in either kind of speaking, neither will Athens be judged so Attic nor the Muses so musical—if only a too-long indolence has not robbed me of the capacity to assess. For while, under the pretext of an imposed profession, I gradually approach a new manner of writing and unlearn the old by fits and starts, of a good orator I have nothing further left than that I have begun to be more of a bad poet.
Therefore, I beg, grant me pardon for this fault—that, mindful of myself for a while, I more rarely mingle my parched little vein with your river. Your trumpet the whole world, so far as it extends, will rightly venerate, which it is agreed you sounded with a doubled felicity, since it found neither rival nor equal, when long ago it wandered abroad through the ears and mouths of the peoples, with me too carrying it about. But for us it is a great boldness if we so much as chatter even among municipal and chair-bound orators or forensic pettifoggers, who, even when they hold forth, by the leave of their betters are a more numerous crowd who give their leisure to most illiterate letters. For you—to whom it is granted to alternate speech whether free or bound, and to thunder forth in both manners—few, whom kindly Jupiter has loved, will imitate. Farewell.
CLAUDIANUS TO THE MOST LEARNED MAN SAPAUDUS, THE RHETORICIAN. Greece, the mistress of all disciplines and arts, was for this reason most of all advanced by noble studies and embraced almost the whole world with manifold doctrines: because there was no one there, of all men, who brought forth anything of good fruit to whom an honour was not equal to his merit. Hence not a few mortals, having well-nigh surpassed the nature of mortals, probing the hidden things of reality with the everywhere-extended strengths of excellent talents and with untiring cares, having grasped by tracking and by art the stored-up causes of the original first-beginnings and the limits fixed by eternity for substances that flow with time, entered not only within the worldly but even the supercelestial secret.
Which it is now my present business to say, since, from the ages of our forefathers onward, a loss of the good arts having been incurred, and spitting out the cultivation of the mind—by which alone the human race excels the beast—the human race, a slave to delights and riches, a handmaid of sloth and ignorance, has utterly ruined virtue together with learning. For the fact that, not only to innovate anything, but not even to unlearn, does anyone of noble discipline aspire apart from you alone—shall we ascribe this to human negligence or to nature?
If we attribute this evil to a defect of nature, can the human race be said to differ from the human race? Either men's talents are not the same as they were before, or else Cicero, the foremost orator of his age, did not simply possess the gifts born with him; rather, holding things domestic and civic of little account, he travelled abroad as far as Greece for the sake of acquiring a richer learning. Or perhaps Plato, the summit and crown of philosophy, was not content with nature's own particular gift, but after the teachings of Socrates—believing Greece too narrow for learning than he found her for virtues—made his way, a tireless searcher of things, all the way to Egypt, even to the Brahmans of the Indians, and even to the heirs of the Pythagorean doctrines.
I pass over the rest, since neither time nor this work has room for the matter. This one thing I would say beyond all doubt: that in our age it is not talents that are lacking, but study. I would have buried these very studies, as it were, in a dead man's grave with a mournful epitaph, had you not yourself revived them by your venerable profession, your praiseworthy skill, your keen intellect, and your flowing eloquence. And this good is the more admirable to me in proportion as it had been the more despaired of.
For I see that the Roman tongue is to Romans a matter not only of neglect but of shame: that grammar, like some barbarian, is driven off with the fist and heel of barbarism and solecism; that dialectic, like an Amazon ready to fight with drawn sword, is dreaded; that rhetoric, like some grand mistress, is not received into a narrow house; that music, geometry, and arithmetic—these three—are spat upon like Furies; and that thereafter philosophy is reckoned, as it were, some ill-omened beast. But these things tend to your praise, since if there were many of your studies, you would of course be, even if not superior to all, at least one among many.
But here, without any injury to the rest, you are throughout our Gaul the one and only peer of your profession; and let this be ascribed neither to flattery nor to fawning. By no means indeed can I flatter, nor do you need to be falsely praised. But the sweetness of your declamations, mingled with virtue after the manner of Attic honey, cannot be plucked out or torn from my soul, where it is fixed deep—a sweetness in which by its own nature are set healing, strength, and delight.
Just as on the ridges of Hybla the winged little craftsman-bee, catching with her draught what falls heaven-sent, pours it into cells skilfully built of flowery matter, and the maker of her own virginity nourishes and steeps her brood with the udder of the honeycombs—so you indeed, from the highest authors as from great mountains, plucking beforehand all that is most learned, like fragrant thyme, and all that is most fruitful, like certain blossoms, fashion from them honeycombs of eloquence which you fill with the honey of genius; and from these likewise is shaped the beloved multitude of your disciples, as it were of your sons, who, steeped also in the nectar of Greek learning as though fed on Attic honey, once they have begun to whir on the wings of knowledge, will themselves too fashion honeycombs of eloquence.
Only see to it that you remember the office of teaching has come to you from your forefathers and not by inheritance alone, and that you must therefore strive after knowledge the more abundantly, the more manifold the learning that has flowed into you, derived from your ancestors. You ought also to be reminded of the ancient nobility of the city of Vienne, of which you are both citizen and teacher; by no idleness will you pay your twofold debt, by which it is sought of you in two ways either to answer to your fathers or to your fatherland. And now, at the close of my discourse, I beg you most familiarly: that, despising the childish trifles of the new-fangled petty reasonings, you spend no time in reading these things—which whirl about certain whips of resounding little speeches and emasculate oratorical strength with applauding harmonies:
Let Naevius and Plautus serve your turn for elegance, Cato for gravity, Varro for expertise, Gracchus for sharpness, Chrysippus for discipline, Fronto for splendour, and Cicero for acquiring eloquence. For whoever among more recent writers has penned anything worthy of memory did not himself read the moderns. Those men, then, are to be winnowed again and committed to memory, from whom these whom we admire were able to profit. Yet I have perhaps put forward this testimony of friendship a little too familiarly; but the indulgence of your goodwill will pardon the boldness of love.