Sidonius greets his dear Ecdicius

• 1. There are now two evils your fellow Arvernians endure in equal measure. ‘What kind of evils?’, you ask. ‘The presence of Seronatus and your absence. Of Seronatus, I answer. To speak first also about his name: Fortuna seems to me to have played a trick, as if already aware of the future. Just like our ancestors called wars – there is nothing more horrible than these – ‘nice’ from their opposite. With equal contrariness they also called the fates ‘Parcae’ because they spare no one. This man, the very Catiline of our time, has recently returned from Aire so he can create utter chaos here with the blood and fortune of the wretched, which he had only a partially taste of there.

• 2. You should know that the spirit of madness that he has long dissimulated is more and more evident in him from day to day. He is envious openly, he pretends abjectly, and he is proud slavishly; he commands like a master, demands like a tyrant, sentences like a judge and lies like a barbarian. All day long he is armed out of fear, goes hungry from stinginess, is fearsome from greed, cruel from vanity, and he unceasingly both punishes thefts and commits them. In public, while everybody around is laughing, he rants about battles in front of civilians, and about literature in front of barbarians; although he barely knows the alphabet, he dictates letters in public to show off and corrects them out of impertinence.

• 3. Everything that he covets he procures in some way, but neither does he pay in his disdain nor does he accept any contracts in his suspicion. In the council he commands, in the counsel he is silent, in church he jokes, at the banquet he preaches, he convicts in his bedroom and keeps falling asleep during court examination. Every day he fills the woods with refugees, estates with barbarians, the altars with defendants, the prisons with priests. He exalts the Visigoths and insults the Romans. He mocks the prefects and colludes with the accountants, he tramples on the laws of Theodosius and issues those of Theoderic, he eagerly seeks out old claims and new taxes.