Sidonius’ Political World Michael Kulikowski
The Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris,
03/2020
Book Chapter
Sidonius Apollinaris was born into a world that had ceased to exist at the time of his death. At one level simply banal – none of us dies in the world we were born into, presuming we live more than a ...week or two – that statement is true of Sidonius in a non-trivial way: his letters show us that Sidonius, probably not alone, experienced his own biography within a generation aware of its own political belatedness – elegiacally, sometimes bitterly, nostalgic for the world they were raised in, a world that was utterly and irrevocably gone.¹ To take the
Augustine’s Epistula 11* was addressed to the bishop of Hippo by an aristocratic laymen called Consentius. The letter recounts, ostensibly verbatim, the tribulations of the Spanish monk Fronto in his ...efforts to prosecute what he regards as a heretical conspiracy amongst the clergy ofHispania Tarraconensis.Fronto's narrative is a rare first‐person account of the late antique judicial process, in all its complexity of overlapping imperial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The present article examines the letter's evidence for judicial strategies and rhetoric, as well as the role of status, power and violence in influencing legal outcomes.
Ancient Greek and Latin authors had strict rules about genre that they obeyed even though they lacked a fixed vocabulary to describe them. Classicizing history formed a continuous tradition in Greek ...and a discontinuous one in Latin, but was one of the major ways of writing about the past in late antiquity. This contribution surveys the development of classicizing history and breviaria from the third to the seventh centuries, taking in the fragmentary Greek historians of the period, Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius, and the last Greek historians of antiquity.
