Roman Exile to Islands

Exile, removal from the centre of things to the periphery, or beyond, was normal part of punishment in antiquity; the Romans didn’t invent it, but they used it a lot, especially in the later empire.

Roman Britain was a place of exile, which is why it may have become such a hotbed of trouble. Valentinian exiled Palladius, chief marshal of the court at Chalcedon (Ammianus XXII.3) to Britain, while ‘Frontinus, an adviser of the said Hymetius, was charged with having drawn up the form of prayer that was made, he was mangled with rods, and having confessed his guilt, was exiled to Britain’ (Amm. XXVIII.1.21). Similarly, Valentinus, a senior military officer, was exiled to Britain and was involved with the barbarian conspiracy of AD365, and in its suppression. The mysterious fifth province, Valentia, taken to be named for Valentinian, might actually have derived its name from Valentinus (Amm. XXVIII. 3.5).

Scilly Islands, off Cornwall, England

Followers of the supposed heretic Priscillian, including two bishops, Instantius and Tiberianus, were exiled to Sylina ‘which is beyond Britain’; believed to be today’s Scilly Islands, which many think were once a single island Scillonia Insula, of which Sylina is a variant. The action taken against Pricillian was by Magnus Maximus, who had him executed (the first major Christian figure to be murdered for heresy; figures like St Ambrose of Milan and St Martin of Tours, opponents of Priscillian, urged him not to be executed). These two prelates were too risky to be sent even to Britain; sending them to the delightful Scillies was almost like sending them to Ireland.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Being exiled to an island (deportatio in insulam) was a common Roman punishment; the future emperor Tiberius was sent to Rhodes in 6BC and spent right years there, unable to return, eventually coming back as a private citizen. Agrippa Postumus, an heir to Augustus, was sent to Planasia (Pianosa) and kept in solitary confinement for eight years until his death. Cornelius Laco, deputy emperor and head of the Praetorian Guards under Galba, was taken to an unnamed island and then killed by Otho. Apuleius in The Golden Ass tells the story of an imperial official sent to Zakynthos after losing the emperor’s favour (fictively Antoninus Pius). While this is fiction, there is nothing to suggest this was unusual.

Julia Caesaris 'the Elder'

This is distinguished from  relegatio in insulam, mainly used for women. The Italian island of Pandateria (modern Ventotene) was a frequent base for exiling imperial women. Augustus exiled his daughter Julia Caesaris there, along with his ex-wife, her mother Scribonia. Tiberius exiled Agrippina the Elder there, where she died. Gaius brought her body back to Rome, but exiled his own sister, Julia Livilla there in turn. Nero’s first wife, Claudia Octavia was exiled there in AD62, then killed. Finally Flavia Domitilla, a relative of Vespasian, was exiled to a neighbouring island by Domitian. She may have converted to either Judaism, or to an early form of Christianity.

Ventotene Island, anciently Pandateria

 Under deportatio, one lost all one’s goods and property and forfeited Roman citizenship.  By contrast, relegatio did not involve such losses, perhaps because a married woman’s property was at her husband’s disposal anyway.

Those who were to be watched were sent to Italian islands. Tiberius went to Rhodes before he could be exiled. Sending someone to Britain suggests they were not watched; one wonders why they were not simply killed. There seems to have been a tradition of sending troublemakers to Britain. It has been suggested that the satirist Juvenal was sent there for some extended period by Trajan in the second century AD.

Exile of political rivals was established punishment in the fourth century. Valens sent Phronimius, a former commander of Julian’s armies, to exile in the Crimea (Chersonesus) for having backed the usurpation of Procopius in 371. This is odd. The Crimea was a Gothic stronghold at that time, so sending someone who knew the Goths quite well into exile in Gothland reads more like an undercover mission. Two other relatives by marriage of Constantius, Eusebius and Hypatius, brothers, were exiled by Valens, but soon recalled and restored to favour (Amm. XXIX.2.11). Then again, Valens had no sons, so they may have been considered for elevation (rather than the fanatic Theodosius – how different might the end of the Roman Empire have been without him?)

Nor was Valens unusual: following the defeat of the British usurper Magnentius, Constantius II, while at Arles, ‘among other atrocities … tortured Gerontius, a count of the party of Magnentius, and visited him with the sorrow of exile’ (Amm. XIV.5.1). Constantius also enabled his urban prefect Leontius to exile to unspecified islands (Amm. XV.7.2) anyone who stood up to him in what appears at first to be a non-political matter: the arrest of a charioteer Philoromus. This may have been a disguised political cell, since there had recently been an attempted coup by the Frankish leader Silvanus; the name of the charioteer – ‘I love Rome’ – may be a secret phrase used by conspirators, a bit like shouting ‘Verdi’ in the Risorgimento of 19^th century Italy. Valentinian also exiled several senators who were said to be conspiring with Auchenius, another charioteer; some others were also tried, but acquitted (Amm. XXVIII.1.27). Julian did much the same, exiling Florentius, chief marshal of the imperial court, to an island called Boae off the coast of Dalmatia (Amm. XXII.3.6).

Banishment seems to have become normalised in the Dominate after AD284 as discussed in depth in Washburn D.A. (2012) Banishment in the Later Roman Empire 284-476 Routledge, especially p.136 . We should consider whether Britain was unusual in receiving exiles. It was an island, with the benefits of movement control. It was distant and it would be very easy for an emperor to have enemies bumped off quietly. It seems the emperor wanted political and religious troublemakers moved from the core of the empire to its periphery, but not outside it.

Given the powers of the emperor, why were these enemies not simply killed then? Since both pagan and Christian emperors, and among Christians both Catholics and Arians, exiled opponents, including those who were guilty of attempting to overthrow the state, we can’t say it was because of Christian scruples.

The difference between the early imperial processes of deportatio and relegatio, which were confined to family rivalries, including disputes over heirs and potential illegitimacies and the use of islands near Elba (these same islands had Bourbon prisons, restocked by Mussolini), the later exiles to islands were primarily aristocrats involved in coups and conspiracies. By the fourth century the old division of patrician and plebeian orders had largely disappeared, to be replaced by those of honestiores and humiliores. Honestiores couldn’t be killed without overriding reasons. It was likely that the Roman upper order would take revenge. The emperor needed them on his side.

Life in the upper orders depended very strongly on the social network individuals could command. Patrons offered endorsement to their clients. Membership of colleges of priests depended very much on people cooperating and collaborating. Exile places the individual outside the network. To be exiled was social murder.

Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was exiled

 If we wanted a modern equivalent, the placement of South African revolutionaries like Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, intended to be permanent would be comparable. Napoleon was left on Elba and then St Helena rather than face execution in the afterglow of the Enlightenment. It need not be an island. In the 1930s, the Turinese writer Carlo Levi was sent as punishment for anti-Fascist agitation to the Italian Mezzogiorno, where he wrote his great book Christ Stopped At Eboli.

Certainly the later empire was no kinder than the earlier configuration. If the idea was to store errant officials who might have powerful connections, literally isolating them, rendering them powerless, it didn’t work. While the empire was united, exiles could be sent anywhere, and Westerners could be sent east; Bishop Lucifer of Cagliari was sent by Constantius II to Marash in south eastern Anatolia and from there to Egyptian Thebes. Constantius also exiled Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria to Trier in Gaul, and in total Athanasius was exiled five times, although it was increasingly notional – the fifth exile ordered by Valens was from Alexandria to the suburbs of the same city, which strikes me as simply a forced retirement.

The creation of twin empires in AD395 limited this, of course. An emperor could not simply exile a troublesome political or politico-religious figure to an area outside his authority. There are some instances of indulgentia, under which exiles were allowed to return and jurisprudence about whether this meant simply they were to come home, or whether property seized under deportatio and, perhaps most importantly, prior status (dignitas) were to be restored or compensated for. We can imagine that people who had legitimately bought an exile’s farming estate would resist it being given back to him. Christian emperors did use the celebration of Easter to free criminals and exiles (shades of Barabbas!), which was a way to exteriorise this: it wasn’t me who freed him, it was God.

We should note that the Romans did not have a policy of imprisonment as a punishment. If found guilty of a major crime, the alternatives were a fine, the mines, beheading, the arena or crucifixion. Prisons were generally lockups, to hold people prior to trials or pending transfer or execution. Foucault considered it a significant rise in humanity that France had moved from torturing convicts to death to holding them captive for many years, watching them perpetually in panopticon prisons (Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1991) London: Penguin).

It’s hard to see that any Roman punishment was designed to reform criminal behaviour, except for fines.  The level of the fine would have been designed, like the medieval wergild, to be one which required support from the criminal’s family and patron to be paid, imposing a future discipline and severely limiting the resources to achieve much.

The mines were a form of slow death, where the criminal was to be worked to death, and the galleys would have been a similar fate. Forcing people into the arena to face wild beasts only works if the victim is frightened. Efforts to kill Christians failed because the Christians believed they would go to heaven. We might remember the attitudes of ISIS: you don’t love life as much as we love death.

Exile was often a sentence outside the court system. It was not a death sentence, any more than a concentration camp was, but (except for relegatio in insulam, mainly used as I said above for women) it transferred the convicts’ resources to the control of the state. Deportatio could be used to store the victim till a more politically convenient time, when they had been forgotten, so they could be killed when required with impunity.

Whether Foucault was right to see an increase in humanity and the concept of reforming the individual’s attitudes rather than damaging his body as signs of progress, the Romans never tried this.

Philip the Arab, Rome's Millennium and the Rise of Christianity

We are so used to east and west being opposed to each other that we forget that Rome had an Arab emperor. More than that, he was the empire’s first Christian ruler and celebrated the city’s millennium. And all in five years.

Marcus Julius Philippus, dubbed Philippus Arabus, Philip the Arab, was born in Shahba, south of Damascus, in the Province of Arabia in c.204 AD and was the son of a local citizen Julius Marinus. The cognomen Julius suggests one of his ancestors was given citizenship under one of the Julian dynasty. During his reign Philip had the Senate deify Marinus, a rare occasion where someone other than an emperor or empress received the Romano-Greek ceremony of Apotheosis. Possibly Philip was cocking a snook at the whole process, if he were himself a Christian.

Philip was helped in his reign by his elder brother, Gaius Julius Priscus, who received the title Rector Orientis, a quasi-emperor. Later he probably would have been made eastern emperor, but the bad example of Caracalla and Geta fresh in senatorial minds probably precluded that. Priscus had however held several imperial posts before this.

What we are seeing is an attempt to consolidate Arab power within the empire. Caracalla was half-Syrian through his mother, Julia Domna. This brings up the question as to whether the two families were linked. Julia Domna was descended from the priest-kings of El-Gebal at Emesa (modern Homs); these were a Bedouin dynasty who had ruled in that area for several hundred years. El-Gebal (God of the Mountain) was worshipped by a black holy stone, foreshadowing Islam, and possibly linked to the lapis niger in the Roman Forum. The priest-kings of  Emesa took the Roman names Gaius Julius in AD14, perhaps to mark Augustus who died that year, added to which was their personal name; one has ‘Asiscus’, that is, Aziz.

Roman coins exist showing the black stone topped by an eagle, showing an effort to align the symbolism of Rome and Emesa. Clearly the best known emperor was Elagabalus, who has been a favourite since a comic description of him by Gibbon.

Antoninus coin of Uranius Alexander, showing Black Stone of El-Gabal on the reverse.

Philip’s brother, Gaius Julius Priscus, carries the same name as the priest-kings of Emesa; ‘priscus’ means ‘pure’, just the sort of cognomen a religious man might adopt. Modern Homs is quite close to the sea, but a man might receive a cognomen of ‘Marinus’ if he came back to it from military service in the Roman navy or from simply living for a while by the sea. In a previous posting, I discussed a ‘St Marina’ and a ‘St Pelagia’ of Syria who seem to be the same person.

So I speculate that the family of Philip the Arab were (or claimed to be) related to the former imperial family. Shahba is in modern Jordan and was only a modest village; the emperor turned it into Philippopolis and endowed it with the sort of buildings a major city would expect to have. This was a vast expense and may ultimately have hastened his overthrow.

Certain family names crop up in the royal family of Emesa which had an impact on the wider empire: Iotapus/ Iotapa; Bassianus/ Bassiana; Iamblicus; Balbillus/ Balbilla.

Caracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus, and the real name of Elagabalus was Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, while his cousin Marcus Julius Gessius Bassianus Alexianus ruled as Alexander Severus. It does show that the Bassianus clan of Syria was as important as or even more important than the Severus name.

Iotapus/ Iotapa is a name from Commagene, the area discussed in my previous posting. Balbillus/ Balbilla is a Syrian name, and the family of Julia Balbilla, the sister of Philopappos, mentioned repeatedly in her poems.

Iamblichus was an Emesene writer, author of the Babyloniaka, written in Greek, a romantic novel, but deriving from Babylonian stories. It was written towards the end of the second century AD. He was a relative of the empress Julia Domna, and may have been part of the salon of writers she developed. He was also a cousin of Gaius Julius Sohaemus, who had been a Roman senator and allegedly consul (though I can’t find this name on the consular lists) before becoming King of Armenia 144-61 and 163-86. It does show how flexible identity had become, and how layered.

There were probably other Babylonian stories floating around the Graeco-Roman world in the early empire. Ovid has the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses. It’s the only one of his stories to have no known precursor, so it’s likely to come from a Syrian original (there is a river Pyramos in ancient Syria). Other well-known myths such as Venus and Adonis and Diana and Actaeon derive from Syrian sources (discussed in Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer by Robin Lane Fox, Penguin 2008).

The double, parallel nature of local identity within the eastern part of the empire is shown by the usurper who sought to overthrow Severus Alexander. His real name was Sampsiceramus and he was a priest of El Gebal at Emesa, and was related to its royal family. He took the name Lucius Julius Aurelius Sulpicius Severus Uranius Antoninus, but is generally known as Uranius Alexander. There is a tendency throughout history that the longer and more grandiose the name, the weaker the link to power.

His coins show only Greek lettering and portray the temple of El-Gebal with its pre-Islamic black stone, but are dated according to the system of the Seleucid kingdom, a Hellenistic creation, not to the local, Greek or Roman systems. This is an interplay of various norms, as if he was feeling his way how best to balance various benefits and liabilities. Although of course, Rome has its own lapis niger, which was in turn given aetiological interpretation.

Finally, Zenobia, the famous queen of Palmyra who weakened Roman rule in the middle east, claimed descent from Julia Domna, although she also claimed descent from Cleopatra and even Dido Queen of Carthage, who is a myth.

Painting of Julia Domna, with her distinctive Syrian hairstyle.

A lot clearly turns on Julia Domna, who was born in AD170 in Emesa and married the future emperor Septimius Severus when she was just seventeen, five years before he became emperor; according to the Historia Augusta, she married the widower general on the basis of a favourable horoscope. Her entourage included Philostratus, author of the Life of the Sophists and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a first century wonder worker performing miracle in Palestine at the same time as Christ. She committed suicide at 47 after the murder of Caracalla by Macrinus; apparently she went on hunger strike.

Returning to Philip, he does show the continuing level of involvement of Arabs in the empire beyond the Severans. Besides deifying his father and making his brother almost joint emperor, and spending taxpayers’ money embellishing his home village, he made his infant son co-Augustus, with the intention of him succeeding. The failure of dynasty in the third century crisis seems to have been a clash between the public taste for stability versus the ambitions unleashed when dynasties imploded.

Philip increased his popularity by celebrating the millennium of the foundation of Rome; by tradition, it had been founded in 753BC, so AD247 marked its millennium. Philip used the Secular Games and repackaged the resources intended to be the triumph of Gordian III against the Persians (Gordian had died). To some extent the Millennium Games in Rome were intended to distract the Roman masses from the Persian failure.

Whether or not Rome had actually reached its millennium, the Romans thought it had. Claudius had held Secular Games in AD47, to mark Rome’s 800^th anniversary, in 148 under Antoninus Pius and so Philip was just doing what emperors did. Modern commentators have argued that since the Secular Millennial Games would have involved pagan sacrifices and as a Christian Philip would have been forbidden to do so. The only recent sacrifice was a batch of ritual cakes, and the games lasted just three days. As the Church was then undercover and papal supremacy had not yet been established, Philip’s approach might have been heterodox, but there was no mechanism to consider him a heretic.

Coin with a bearded Philip the Arab, showing the secular games column on the reverse

The imperial biographer and chronicler Eusebius, writing during the reign of Constantine, claims that Philip was a Christian, and that he tried to celebrate Easter at Antioch, but was turned away as a sinner by St Babylas, a powerful Antiochene bishop whose memorial church was a hundred and ten years later seen as a block to the temple of Apollo at Daphne, which was destroyed by Christian fanatics under Julian. The same story about Babylas making Philip wait with the common people features in a homily by John Chrysostom. Modern scholars have claimed this as untrue, but given that Eusebius was born in nearby Caesarea in AD260 to an eastern Christian family, this snub of an emperor would have been spoken of in his youth, since it had happened only twelve years before.

An unbearded Philip the Arab, in a classical bust at St Petersburg

The doubt about whether Philip was a Christian may be shown by his imagery: his coins show him bearded, as all adult emperors had been since Hadrian, but the statue shown above, which is in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, shows him clean shaven. Other than him, and child-emperors, emperors were always portrayed bearded until Constantine, after which they were universally clean-shaven, except for the pagan Julian, who wrote his famous rant Misopogon (the Beard Hater) while in  at Antioch in Syria.

Persecution of Babylas, medieval painting

The man who made Philip wait, archbishop Babylas of Antioch, was martyred in 253 at the instigation of the emperor Valerian as a result of a crackdown on Christians following Philip’s assassination in AD249. Babylas was thrown into prison in Antioch in 250 and died three years later. Philip was overthrown by the Urban Prefect Gaius Messius Quintus Decius, who managed to vanish in the Danube swamps while losing Dacia to the Goths in 251. Decius and his successor Valerian appear in Lactantius’ book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, written in the reign of Constantine. While he ignored Trebonianus Gallus (emperor 251-3), Lactantius made Decius and Valerian the first persecuting emperors since Domitian 150 years previously, and rejoiced in their juicy deaths.

The emperor Trajan Decius (r.249-251)

The persecutions of Decius only lasted a year and were mainly in Carthage, where surviving transcripts of investigations by magistrates show a reluctance to grant Christians the martyrdom they sought. All anyone had to do was obtain a certificate (libellus) that they had sacrificed to the traditional gods, and knowing how prone the empire was to fraud, this could have been faked up easily enough. All religions, except Jews were targeted, and while many were killed, the Plague of Cyprian, which raged at the same time, killed a hundred times as many every day. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage was beheaded, and much of the death tolls seems to have been in Egypt and Africa.

The Decian persecution of Christians lasted only eight years and had been preceded by 150 years of tolerance. Valerian’s son and successor Gallienus (r.253-68) oversaw the forty year ‘Little Peace of the Church’ in which Christianity thrived following imperial edicts which recognised the religion, its places of worship and property. While this was ended in the west by Maximian, Christianity was in a much stronger position thanks initially to Philip the Arab.

The focus of persecuting regimes on harming people in Africa, Syria, Egypt and away from Europe does seem to show a desire to rid the Roman Empire of a powerful oriental element. Never after this would a non-European hold power in the empire.

Neither Useful Nor Honourable: the End of Roman Gaul

In AD475, four men sat in a room in Arles and destroyed the Roman Empire.

It was probably summer, and the four men were probably accompanied by others. They met with a representative of the Visigothic king, Euric, so it was very likely to have been in summer. But despite all the others in the room, they were the ones charged by the western emperor, Julius Nepos, with the negotiations he instructed them to undertake.

The four men were all bishops: Leontius was bishop of Arles, and as a friend of Pope Hilary, had established his see as the leading one of Gaul. Then there was Basilius of Aix, Graecus of Marseille and Faustus of Riez, the Briton considered the foremost Christian writer of his day. The men they met were not Visigoths by background; they were Roman officials who had changed sides to save their own hides. In Euric’s delegation, perhaps leading it, would have been Victorius, who Euric made Duke of Aquitania Prima in 479. He may have been, or been related to, another Victorius of Aquitaine, a contemporary intellectual and mathematician.

A year before, Euric’s troops had occupied Provence. Julius Nepos wanted it back. The negotiation with Euric’s men was to determine what price might be needed. They would have had in their minds the Battle of Arles in 458, in which the Visigothic king Theodoric, elder brother of Euric, had been massively defeated by the Romans under Majorian. Now Euric (who had overthrown his brother) had broken the pact (foedus) which governed de facto Visigothic rule in southern Gaul.

Euric promised the Romans could have Provence back, if he could have the Auvergne (Arvernia). The bishops agreed to this on behalf of the emperor. With Roman connivance, Euric invaded the Auvergne and took it in 475. Then he invaded Provence again and seized that in 476. The loss of Gaul was a catastrophe, and Odoacer used this to depose the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and seize power.

Arles had become the capital of Gaul in the early fifth century, when Trier, an imperial capital a mere twenty five years earlier, was abruptly abandoned. Leontius would have had in his mind the substantial fees and earnings Arles received because of the Elisii Campi (Elysian Fields), now known as the Alyscamps. This was a highly fashionable burial ground, so popular that people were ferried across the Mediterranean from North Africa to be interred there. Even the guild of Rhone bargemen made a small fortune ferrying the dead of the empire to the must-have funeral they aspired to. They had to be stacked three deep to be accommodated there.

Around the table, next to Leontius no doubt, was Faustus of Riez. He was the leading clergyman of his day for theology. He was aged about 48 and British, and travelled back to Britain from time to time, testing the still widespread belief that his homeland was being devastated by the Anglo-Saxons. Faustus was quite probably the son of the British king we call Vortigern. The Historia Britonnum refers to St Germanus of Auxerre returning from Britain to Gaul with an illegitimate and allegedly incestuous son of Vortigern called Faustus (‘Lucky’) to make the boy a priest, and the ages match. In addition, Faustus of Riez was known as a ‘semi-Pelagian’, one holding  a modified version of the teachings of Pelagius, a Briton condemned as a heretic a generation back. Germanus had travelled to Britain to resolve a dispute between the teachings of the Church and the popular philosophy of Pelagius.

Basilius of Aix must have been a young man, because he was still bishop in AD500, when he caused to be built a spanking new cathedral, on top of the Forum, which survived for centuries until being destroyed in Saracen raids. But we can imagine the young bishop (not so uncommon, as life expectancy was quite low) thinking about how he might be able to remodel his city for the glory of God, and perhaps himself. The baptistery of Aix cathedral was built over a temple to Apollo and survives to this day. His name suggests he might have been of Greek ancestry, but there were other Greek settlements along the coast.

Graecus of Marseille sounds like he ought to be of Greek ancestry, but since Marseille was so Greek, the name holds no distinction. Perhaps it was a nickname which became his church name. He was an older man, and had a reputation as a bit of a maverick. Faustus had rebuked him harshly for espousing Nestorianism, a Christian sect that became a heresy (Ralph Mathiesen Ruricius of Limoges and Friends: A collection of letters from Visigothic Gaul, Liverpool University Press, 1999). So in that room in Arles, there would have been little love lost between Faustus and Graecus.

We should pause for a moment to consider what these four men had done: they had handed fellow Romans, who had managed to hold the Visigoths at bay, over to the enemy. They had in doing so betrayed their friend and fellow bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris. They had failed to see that Euric had already conquered Provence once, and knew how to do it again.

Once he had taken Arvernia and its capital Arvernis (formerly Augustonemetum and from the 9^th century Claremontum (now Clermont-Ferrand)), and taken Sidonius prisoner, transporting him in chains to Liviana, near Carcasso (modern Carcassonne), then to Bordeaux, putting him in prison there for some time, Euric almost surrounded Provence, enabling him to take it anyway.

Sidonius wrote letters, and eventually published nine books of them, in emulation of Pliny the Younger (all translations derived from O.M. Dalton, 1915 Loeb edition). If he imagined there would be a tenth book compiled by his admirers, that never occurred, although several people tried to engage him in writing the history of his times.

But Letter 7.7 to Graecus of Marseille is the bitter gall of a man who has been betrayed by his friends. It came after a siege of the Auvergne for four years (471-5) by the Visigoths. Clermont was his wife’s home town, but he had adopted its defence as his life’s cause.

Letter 7.7 is quietly furious at the betrayal: ‘Our enslavement is the price paid for the safety of others’ he says, adding that he now finds himself ‘amidst an unconquerable, yet alien people’ . Sidonius knew that Vercingetorix had been king of the Arveni facing Caesar and echoes Lucan’s Pharsalia in condemning ‘the servitude of the Arvernians who dared once to call themselves “brothers of Latium” and counted themselves “a people sprung from Trojan blood”’.

The sense of betrayal Sidonius expresses is keen: ‘you are the channel through which embassies come and go; to you first of all, although the emperor is absent, peace is not only reported when negotiated, but entrusted to be negotiated’ , adding later ‘you are surrounded by those most holy pontiffs, Leontius, Faustus, and Graecus; you have a middle place among them in the location of your city and in seniority, and you are the centre of their loving circle; you four are the channels through which the unfortunate treaties flow; through your hands pass the compacts and stipulations of both realms’.

Sidonius sums up his condemnation with these words: ‘You should be ashamed of this peace treaty for it is neither useful nor honourable’.

So who was Sidonius?

Sidonius Apollinaris was born  in Lyon on 5 November 430; he came from a rich family with a long history of public office. His grandfather Apollinaris was praetorian prefect of Gaul  for part of AD408, replacing a certain Limenius, but had quit in protest at the corruption of politics. In one of his letters, Sidonius talks of visiting his grandfather’s grave, which was neglected and overgrown, and mourned this; but his grandfather had been a rebel, prefect for Constantine III, so maybe somebody held a grudge.

The father of Sidonius was also Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls, as was Tonantius Ferreolus, a kinsman, related to Sidonius by blood and marriage. The father in law of Sidonius, Marcus Avitus, was Prefect in 439 and the father of Avitus, Flavius Julius Agricola, had been Prefect in 416 ­– 421. Marcus Avitus, the candidate of the Visigoths, was acclaimed emperor by their king Theodoric in Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, 455 after the assassination of Valentinian III. Sidonius wrote a panegyric to his own father in law on his elevation. He grew up and lived within the nexus of power.

With the coming of Christianity into the power structures of the Roman Empire, a new channel was opened for status and display. Bishops were elected by their parishioners and for life; decurions were expressly forbidden to enter the Church, but several time, so the law must have been quite ineffective. Constantine had given bishops the power to run courts and dispense summary justice. And while bishops were forbidden to marry, there has never been a law preventing a married man becoming a bishop. Sidonius had sons and daughters too. A middle aged bishop with grown up sons to effectively inherit episcopal power was far from unusual.

Had Avitus held the throne for any time, he might well have made Sidonius Prefect of Gaul. However Avitus, once the richest man in Gaul, was deposed as emperor, but then made Bishop of Placentia (modern Piacenza). Although that didn’t stop Avitus being murdered, it does show that becoming a bishop was an alternative route to power.

Forgiven his connection to Avitus, Sidonius rose again to become Urban Prefect of Rome, a position he had to resign from because his friend Arvandus was found guilty of treason for supporting the Visigothic king Euric. The epitaph of Sidonius, discovered recently, stresses his civic roles

noble through his titles, powerful through his office, head of the administration, magistrate at the court, quiet amid the world's billowing waves, then managing the turmoil of lawsuits, he imposed laws on the barbarian fury; for the realms that were involved in an armed conflict he restored peace by his great prudence.

His death is noted at ‘August 22, under the reign of Zeno’, as if the Roman Empire still existed at that time. By that date in AD489, there had been no western emperor for thirteen years. Note it stresses his public role, not his clerical one.

Making ex-leaders into bishops was a kind of exile. Once tonsured as priests, they could not in theory return to civilian life. Julius Nepos, once dethroned, was made Bishop of Salona, the capital of Dalmatia, the former province, which he had ruled for a long time before briefly becoming emperor. All of this can be dated back to St Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who had been the local provincial governor before that.

Sidonius also attacks (Ep.7.6, to Basilius, dated 474) the damage to the Church:

Diocese and parish lie waste without ministers. You may see the rotten roofs of churches fallen in, the doors unhinged and blocked by growing brambles. More grievous still, you may see the cattle not only lying in the half-ruined porticoes, but grazing beside altars green with weeds. And this desolation is not found in country parishes alone; even the congregations of urban churches begin to fall away.

Noting that ‘Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Comminges, Auch, and many another city are all like bodies which have lost their heads through the death of their respective bishops. No successors have been appointed to fill their places’ and that ‘for every bishop snatched from our midst, the faith of a population is imperilled. I need not mention your colleagues Crocus and Simplicius, removed alike from their thrones and suffering a common exile’. He ends the letter

To you these miserable treaties are submitted, the pacts and agreements of two kingdoms pass through your hands. Do your best, as far as the royal condescension suffers you, to obtain for our bishops the right of ordination in those parts of Gaul now included within the Gothic boundaries, that if we cannot keep them by treaty for the Roman State, we may at least hold them by religion for the Roman Church.

This shows a change in perception from Rome as state to Roman as the body of the faithful. In Ireland at about the same time, St Patrick was telling the soldiers of the king of Strathclyde ‘you are not Romans but demons’, when they were never politically Romans in the first place.

Sidonius adds a comment about the successes of Euric:

I must confess that formidable as the mighty Goth may be, I dread him less as the assailant of our walls than as the subverter of our Christian laws. They say that the mere mention of the name of Catholic so embitters his countenance and heart that one might take him for the chief priest of his Arian sect rather than for the monarch of his nation. Omnipotent in arms, keen-witted, and in the full vigour of life, he yet makes this single mistake – he attributes his success in his designs and enterprises to the orthodoxy of his belief, whereas the real cause lies in mere earthly fortune.

The thinking behind this comment is that of Orosius: the victories of the enemy cannot be because God favours them, but because of simple numbers and main force. It should be noted that Arians called themselves Catholics; Sidonius is engaging in a little rhetoric here.

In a letter (Ep. 7.1, dated 474) to Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, Sidonius refers to

earthquake, shattering the outer palace walls with frequent shocks; now fire, piling mounds of glowing ash upon proud houses fallen in ruin; now, amazing spectacle! wild deer grown ominously tame, making their lairs in the very forum. You saw the city being emptied of its inhabitants, rich and poor taking to flight.

The earthquake of September 470 is recorded by Gregory of Tours, quoting the now lost Chronicle of Angers (Historiae 2.18,19). Mamertus invented Church Rogations, still practised today; by doing so, he encouraged the panicked people of Vienne to return to the city. The bishop remaining in his city seems to have been crucial to that city’s survival. If a bishop left it and settled his see elsewhere, the former see tended to collapse and the latter to survive. In addition, where no replacement bishop could be appointed after a bishop died or was exiled, there were sometimes too few bishops left to ordain another, something which Sidonius alludes to in his letter (Ep.7.5, dated 472) to Agroeclus, bishop of Sens, a famous grammarian, where he says ‘Clermont is the last of all the cities in Aquitanica Prima which the fortune of war has left to Rome; the number of provincial bishops is therefore inadequate to the election of a new prelate at Bourges, unless we have the support of the metropolitans’.

Sidonius ends Letter 7.7 with unerring bitterness:

I ask your pardon for telling you hard truths; my distress must take all colour of abuse from what I say. You think too little of the general good; when you meet in council, you are less concerned to relieve public perils than to advance private fortunes. By the long repetition of such acts you begin to be regarded as the last instead of the first among your fellow provincials.
But how long are these feats of yours to last? Our ancestors will cease to glory in the name of Rome if they have no longer descendants to bear their memory. Oh, break this infamous peace at any cost; there are pretexts enough to your hand. We are ready, if needs must, to continue the struggle and to undergo more sieges and starvations. But if we are to be betrayed, we whom force failed to conquer, we shall know beyond a doubt that a barbarous and cowardly transaction was inspired by you. … The other conquered regions have only servitude to expect; Auvergne must prepare for punishment. If you can hold out no help in our extremity, seek to obtain of Heaven by your unceasing prayers that though our liberty be doomed, our race at least may live. Provide land for the exile, prepare a ransom for the captive, make provision for the emigrant. If our own walls must offer an open breach to the enemy, let yours be never shut against your friends.

That the Auvergne was singled out for punishment does bring to mind the famous practice of the pharmakos of Marseille, where someone was singled out as a scapegoat for all society’s ills, kept apart and eventually killed. Letter 7.7 was written to Graecus of Marseille, a bishop who must have been aware of the ancient practice, and I think Sidonius is hinting at it to make Graecus squirm.

We are beginning to see a picture of former imperial officials starting to become rulers of new semi-autonomous states: Syagrius in what became Neustria, Julius Nepos in Dalmatia, Theodoric in Acquitaine, Childeric, father of Clovis, in Belgica Secunda, under the guidance of St Remigius (and portrayed in Roman uniform on his seal ring) and Sidonius in the Auvergne. As the former urban prefect of Rome, Sidonius became de facto the ruler of the Auvergne.

We should end as Sidonius ended Book 7 of his letters (Ep.7.18 to Constantius of Lyon, the author of the Vita of St Germanus of Auxerre, dated 479):

while Christ is my defender I will never suffer my judgement to be enslaved; I know as well as any one that with regard to this side of my character there are two opinions: the timid call me rash, the resolute a lover of freedom; I myself strongly feel that the man who has to hide his real opinions cuts a very abject figure.