The state of our unhappy region is miserable indeed.  Everyone declares that things were better in wartime than they are now after peace has been concluded.  Our enslavement was made the price of security for a third party; the enslavement, ah—­the shame of it!, of those Avernians ... who in our own time stood forth alone to stay the advance of the common enemy....  These are the men whose common soldiers were as good as captains, but who never reaped the benefit of their victories:  that was handed over for your consolation, while all the crushing burden of defeat they had to bear themselves....  This is to be our reward for braving destitution, fire, sword and pestilence, for fleshing our swords in the enemy’s blood and going ourselves starved into battle.  This is the famous peace we dreamed of, when we tore the grass from the crannies in the walls to eat....  For all these proofs of our devotion, it would seem that we are to be made a sacrifice.  If it be so, may you live to blush for a peace without either honour or advantage.

Auvergne had been sacrificed to save Rome.  But Rome was not to enjoy her peace with honour for long.  These things took place in 475; and in 476 the last emperor was desposed by his barbarian bear-leader, and the empire in the west came to an end.  As for Sidonius, the Goths imprisoned him for a time and before he could recover his estate he had to write a panegyric for King Euric (he who had written panegyrics for three Roman emperors).  It is clear that the old country house life went on as before, though the men who exchanged letters and epigrams were now under barbarian rule.  But in one letter shortly before his death there breaks from Sidonius a single line in which he unpacks his heart. O neccessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera dura moriendi. ’O humiliating necessity of birth, sad necessity of living, hard necessity of dying.’  Shortly after 479 he died and within twenty years Clovis had embarked upon his career of conquest and Theodoric was ruler of Italy.

4.  FORTUNATUS AND GREGORY OF TOURS

Going, going, gone....  There is only the time and only the heart to look for a moment at the Frankish kingdom which once was Gaul, and to survey the world of Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours, born both of them just about a century later than Sidonius, in the 530s.  For a moment when you look at Fortunatus you think the world of the sixth century is the same world as that in which Sidonius entertained his friends with epigrams and tennis.  Fortunatus, that versatile, gentle, genial, boot-licking gourmet, who somehow managed to write two of the most magnificent hymns of the Christian church, came from Italy on a visit to Gaul in 565 and never left it again.  He travelled all over the Frankish lands, in what had been Germania as well as in what had been Gaul.  From Trier to Toulouse he made his way with ease by river and by road, and it might be Ausonius again.  Fortunatus