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POETRY
which Valentinian and his family were depicted, a short poem in hendecasyllables
on the birthday of Aetius' infant son Gaudentius, part of a prose panegyric
on Aetius' second consulate in 437, and a verse panegyric on his third in
446 (of which about 200 hexameters are readable), and a short poem on Christ.
Merobaudes models himself on Claudian and Statius. He handles classical
Latin and classical allusion with neatness and even elegance, but he lacks the
force of Claudian and his inventive verbal imagination. The torch of classical
tradition was clearly burning rather low in fifth-century Ravenna. The main
interest of his poems today is as historical sources for a period in which the
historian is ill served.
Yet in neighbouring Gaul, despite the establishment of Visigothic and
Burgundian kingdoms in a large part of the province, a society of rich senatorial
landowners not only maintained Roman culture in the fifth century but
even re-established some intellectual contact with the Greek east. Knowledge
of Greek was not uncommon, and could be more than merely superficial or
school-based. Men read Plotinus and Porphyry and the Greek Fathers. They
were interested in Greek astronomical and astrological learning. They translated
Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, with its clear message that the
moral virtues are independent of the Christian faith. It is against the background
of this short-lived Greek renaissance that we must view the life and
work of Sidonius Apollinaris.
Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius was born in Lyons about 431 of a very
wealthy senatorial family of Auvergne. Both his father and his grandfather
had been Praetorian Prefects of Gaul. Educated in grammar and rhetoric at
Lyons and probably at Aries, where public schools seem to have continued
to exist, he was married in 451 to the daughter of another aristocrat from
Auvergne, Flavius Eparchius Avitus, who had close connexions with the
Gothic court at Toulouse. In 455, after the Vandal sack of Rome and the
lynching of the ineffectual emperor Petronius Maximus, Avitus was proclaimed
western Roman emperor at Aries. Sidonius accompanied his father-inlaw
to Rome and delivered a verse panegyric upon him, for which he was
rewarded by the now customary statue in the forum of Trajan. The Italian
aristocracy, the eastern court, and the Frankish general Ricimer made common
cause against Avitus, and in October 456 he was obliged to abdicate and accept
a bishopric. Sidonius was in danger for a time but soon made his peace with
the new emperor Majorian, on whom he pronounced a panegyric in 458 when
the emperor came to Lyons. Appointed comes, he accompanied Majorian on
his campaigns until his assassination in 461. Sidonius then returned to Gaul and
spent some years in private study, the management of his estates, and the
dolce vita of the late Roman aristocrat. When in 467 the eastern emperor Leo
appointed Anthemius, a Greek and a Neoplatonist, to the imperial throne of
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