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ESSAYS ON SIDONIUS

This edited volume, the fruit of two international conferences in Clermont-Ferrand in 2009 and 2010, is a major event in the burgeoning field of Sidonius scholarship. It sets out to explore Sidonius’ ties with the past, his relationship to his own time and his reception up to the present, examined from a variety of angles: philology, linguistics, metrics, literature, rhetoric, history and anthropology. What we get is a highly interesting collection of essays which, despite its multidisciplinary objective, relies mainly on textual analysis. The book consists of six main sections: ‘Sidoine et son temps’, ‘Histoire, poétique et politique: les Panégyriques’, ‘Poétique’, ‘Intertextualité’, ‘Culture antique et chrétienne’ and ‘Sidoine Apollinaire au miroir des autres’, framed by an introduction, plurilingual abstracts, a bibliography and an index locorum. It comprises 32 articles whose authors include many leading specialists in the field. In the first section, C. Delaplace intelligently argues in favour of deconstructing Sidonius’ picture of the Visigothic ‘conquest’ of the Auvergne. Rather than taking advantage of a power vacuum, Euric remained loyal to his obligations to Anthemius in the conflict between the latter and Ricimer. It was Sidonius who, in 470/71, changed sides from the Visigoths to the Burgundians. In an original contribution, É. Faure and N. Jacquemard, taking Sidonius’ fit of – presumably – malaria as their starting point, analyse the deteriorating health situation from the fifth into the sixth century. The remaining items in this section, on the women in the Apollinares family by P. Mascoli and on the bishop’s function according to Sidonius by D. Viellard, might have had a greater edge, beyond the useful descriptions they offer, by elaborating on their conceptual framework. In the second section, all contributions somehow consider the construction of images. While one of the editors, S.-M., offers a beautifully conceived, in-depth analysis of the figure of Fabricius as a blueprint for Avitus, J.-C. Jolivet cleverly displays an array of Virgilian intertexts for this monarch’s portrayal, en passant doing away with the outdated notion of Sidonius’ ‘preciosité’. In a balanced piece by A. Delattre, the utterly negative portrayal of Genseric and the Vandals is put in opposition to the emperors’ heroisation, in an interplay of panegyric and epic, which makes sense of the ambiguous role of Africa as both hereditary enemy and cherished part of the empire. In a preliminary study for her forthcoming commentary on the Panegyric of Avitus, L. Furbetta carefully dissects a number of literary models. Similarly, for her commentary on the Panegyric of Majorian, L. Brolli analyses Sidonius’ use of myth and intertexts in describing the Roman relationship with the Franks. Finally, F.E. Consolino writes a richly detailed and illuminating account of the goddess Roma’s representation, different in every Panegyric, which Sidonius brings about by combining an obvious primary hypotext with hints of a second one. The third section takes a rather more technical approach to Sidonius’ poetry. C. Longobardi tries to elicit a metaphorical sense from his use of memoratus, not quite convincingly and without mentioning TLL. M. Squillante takes the reader on an interesting tour of Sidonius’ water world, which appears to oscillate between live observation and literary filtering. Literary types are among Sidonius’ stock in trade for throwing light on contemporary society, as S. Condorelli demonstrates in an extensive paraphrase of the Gnatho THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 151