Editing Sidonius Apollinaris (section)

==Works==
===Carmina===
[[File:Caii Sollii Apollinaris Sidonii Opera.tif|thumb|''Opera'' (1598)]]
A collection of twenty-four ''Carmina'' by Sidonius survives, consisting of [[occasional verse]], including ''[[panegyric]]s'' on different emperors , which document several important political events and draw largely upon [[Statius]], [[Ausonius]] and [[Claudian]].{{sfn|Chisholm|1911}} Sidonius emphasises Rome's past successes and glories as a "[[mirror of princes|crisis mirror]]" for contemporary rulers, suggesting both the degree to which Rome had declined but also the possibility of revitalisation. In both ''Carmen'' 7 for Avitus and ''Carmen'' 5 for Majorian, Sidonius reviews past emperors and concludes that only those who earnt the title through virtue, especially the military virtue of [[Vespasian]] and above all [[Trajan]], deserved praise – an implicit challenge to the new emperors.{{Sfn|Mratschek|2020|pp=240-241}} Other virtues are also important; ''Carmen'' 2 praises Anthemius for his mastery of the [[liberal arts]].{{Sfn|Mratschek|2020|pp=241}}

Other poems have different subjects. For example, ''Carmen'' 22 is an [[ecphrasis]] of a painting of the [[Third Mithridatic War]] on the wall of the villa of Pontius Leontius "Dionysus", one of Sidonius' friends, at Burgus. Sidonius' visit to the villa is compared to a meeting of [[Apollo]] with Dionysus, at which they decide to settle in [[Aquitania]] and establish learned symposiastic culture there.{{Sfn|Mratschek|2020|pp=241}}

===Letters===
Nine books of ''Letters'' are preserved, containing a total of 147 documents, addressed to 117 different individuals.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=218}} Sidonius worked on his letter collection over a protracted period, publishing some of them in the early 470s and producing the final version of his collection around 477.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=234}} The collection was dedicated to Constantius, a priest in Lyon, who was a personal friend, with apologies to the Praetorian Prefect [[Tonantius Ferreolus (prefect)|Tonantius Ferreolus]], on the grounds that even a minor priest ought to be put before even the greatest members of the laity, because Constantius had helped to edit the volume, and because of Constantius' advice following the siege of Clairmont in 473.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=219-220}}

Sidonius' Latin style was highly praised in his own time. His contemporary, [[Claudianus Mamertus]], dubbed him the "resuscitator of ancient eloquence." By contrast, in his introduction to his translation of Sidonius' letters in 1939, [[W.B. Anderson]] characterised them as very stilted in diction, but revealing him as a man of genial temper, fond of good living and of pleasure.<ref name="WBS"/> [[Sigrid Mratschek]] characterises Sidonius' Latin as intentionally elaborate and learned, calling it 
{{blockquote|... a language artfully and artistically fashioned from a complex intertextual weave of classical and biblical allusions, and the exclusive preserve of the cultural elite to whom alone it made sense. For Sidonius and his circle the beauty of the Latin language (''sermonis pompa Latini'') ... refined sensibility and the intellectual life were a bulwark against the barbarians and a last refuge from the progressive dissolution of the old order.|{{harvnb|Mratschek|2020|pp=237–238}}}}
The complexity of the allusions to mythical, historical, biblical [[exempla]] often makes his writing very difficult to understand, but the difficulty was intentional and Sidonius disparages those unwilling to put in the effort necessary for a complete education in Roman language, literature, and culture.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=237 & 239}} For Sidonius, familiarity with Classical Latin authors was the central point of education and the justification for the social position of the aristocrat; he says that difference between educated and uneducated men is the same as the difference between men and animals.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=242}}

W.B. Anderson notes, "Whatever one may think about their style and diction, the letters of Sidonius are an invaluable source of information on many aspects of the life of his time."<ref name="WBS">In his introduction to ''Sidonius: Poems and Letters'' (Cambridge: Loeb, 1939), vol. 1, p. lxiv.</ref> Many studies have used the letters in order to reconstruct the social networks of the intelligentsia in fourth-century Gaul. However, the letters cannot be treated as straightforward depictions of Sidonius' times. Sidonius actively models his letters and their representations of his contemporary world on those of earlier epistolographers, notably [[Pliny the Younger]].{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=215}} He represents Rome as a model society. Peter Brown argues that the resulting picture of continuity is actually a response to the rapidity of change in his contemporary Gaul.{{sfn|Brown|2012|p=404}} Sigrid Mratschek says that through his literary work, he sought to build up the literary and cultural element of Roman identity, as compensation for Rome's military and political collapse, to reinforce the position of the Roman aristocracy in Gaul, and the church.{{sfn|Mratschek|2020|p=216-218}}

A letter of Sidonius's addressed to [[Riothamus]], "King of the Brittones" ({{Circa|470}}) is of particular interest, since it provides evidence that a king or military leader with ties to Britain lived around the time frame of [[King Arthur]]. An English translation of his poetry and letters by W.B. Anderson, with accompanying Latin text, have been published by the [[Loeb Classical Library]] (volume 1, containing his poems and books 1-2 of his letters, 1939;<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://archive.org/details/L296SidoniusI12PoemsLetters|title = L 296 Sidonius I: 1 2 Poems Letters}}</ref> remainder of letters, 1965).

===Manuscript tradition===
{{Overly detailed|section|details=technical language|date=January 2024}}
Although Sidonius' works may have been published in part during his lifetime (5th century), there is no textual evidence of this and all manuscripts can be traced back to a single archetype, which is estimated as dating to roughly the 7th century. The oldest witness dates to the 9th century and is likely a fourth-generation copy. Although the archetype contained poems, they were omitted in most copies, and most extant manuscripts contain only his letters, often jumbled together with a garbled transcription of another writer, [[Ausonius]]. Most of the work on textual variants was done by {{Interlanguage link|Christian Lütjohann|de}} in the 1870s, but Lütjohann died prematurely before he had developed the [[stemmatics]], which are crucial for reconstructing Sidonius' idiosyncratic Latin. Lütjohann's work was published in the 1887 ''[[Monumenta Germaniae Historica]]'' with inferior stemmatics provided by other scholars. Franz Dolveck provided a partial new stemma, including only those editions complete with poetry, in 2020.<ref>Franz Dolveck, "The Manuscript Tradition of Sidonius," in ''Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris'', ed. Gavin Kelly (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).</ref>