Letters
Nine books of Letters are preserved, containing a total of 147 documents, addressed to 117 different individuals. 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. The collection was dedicated to Constantius, a priest in Lyon, who was a personal friend, with apologies to the Praetorian 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's advice following the siege of Clairmont in 473.
Sidonius's 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's 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. Sigrid Mratschek characterises Sidonius's Latin as intentionally elaborate and learned, calling it
... 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.
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. 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.
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." 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's times. Sidonius actively models his letters and their representations of his contemporary world on those of earlier epistolographers, notably Pliny the Younger. 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. 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.
A letter of Sidonius's addressed to Riothamus, "King of the Brittones" (c. 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; remainder of letters, 1965).
