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Sidoine et les BarbaresSidonius and the Barbarians
Abstract
Sidonius Apollinaris has let us the most important testimony we have of the Vth century in the Roman West. One of the main problems this member of the Romano-Gaulish political and cultural elite confronted was that of Barbarian populations and Barbarian kingdoms established in Gaul, especially the Wisigothic one at Toulouse and the Burgundian one at Lyon. At Toulouse as well as at Lyon, his native city, and Clermont-Ferrand, where he finished his life as a bishop of the city and a foe to the Gothic king Euric, Sidonius was able to know and appreciate them in different manners, but always with the scorn due to that kind of people. The paper tries to evaluate the notions of barbarian and barbarism compared with the use made of them by Augustine and other Christian writers, and to measure the similarities and differences of Sidonius’ behaviour towards the Goths of Theodoric and then to those of Euric, and of that of his friend Syagrius towards the Burgundians.
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In his poem ‘The Last Hours of Cassiodorus’, Peter Porter has the Christian sage ask: ‘After me, what further barbarisms?’. Yet, Cassiodorus himself accepted, even valorized, at least one form of barbarism that had been rejected by earlier rhetoricians: sardismos (σαρδισμός), the mixture of multiple languages in close proximity. In its earliest attestation, Quintilian classified it as a type of solecism ( Inst. 8.3.59). By contrast, five centuries later Cassiodorus in his Commentary on the Psalms used the term three times to praise the mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Latin in the Latin Psalter. This reversal, from vice to virtue of speech, illustrates some significant changes in attitudes toward language and multilingualism that developed as Christianity reshaped Roman literary culture. For one, Christian preachers, modelling themselves on the plain style of the Gospels, embraced forms of speech that had been regarded as low and stigmatized. In the words of Augustine ( In psalm. 36, Serm. 3.6): ‘better you understand us in our barbarism than to have been deserted in our eloquence’ ( melius in barbarismo nostro uos intelligitis, quam in nostra disertudine uos deserti eritis ). ¹ Secondly, Hebrew now entered the linguistic consciousness of the Roman literary elite as one of the three languages of Scripture. Even if in-depth knowledge remained rare, it was worthy of being mentioned alongside Greek and Latin, just as it had appeared with them in the inscription on Jesus’ cross (Luke 23:38, John 19:20). Lastly, linguistic variety itself came to be positively valued since it reflected the diversity of a church coming together out of many peoples. Commenting on the bride's appearance in Psalm 45, both Augustine and Cassiodorus saw the variegated adornment of her robe as a reference to the diversity of Christian languages.
Sidonius Apollinaris and his age
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