“At nostra longe condicio dispar”: elements of suggestion in Sidonius Apollinaris’s letter
The Bulletin of Novosibirsk State University. Issue: history, philology. 2015. Vol. 15. № 1. PP. 28–38.
Dmitriy S. Konkov
The author analyzes a letter by Sidonius Apollinaris (approx. 430 – approx. 486), a Gallo-Roman poet and political actor who lived during the period of Western Roman Empire’s decay. Sidonius was one of the inspirers of resistance to the spread of the Visigoths’ power in Roman Gaul. This movement had failed, and this had a negative impact on Sidonius’s career. The letter under study is the one addressed to Leo of Narbonne who was an advisor to the King of the Visigoths Euric, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat, orator, and an official. The original text and its translation are given. Through hermeneutic interpretation of the text, those aspects of the letter contents are showed which are suggestive, that is implicitly encouraging certain action, and which presuppose the reformatting of personal statuses and relationships to restore Sidonius’s career. These aspects are contained in the specific ways the text is structured, in epithets, tropes, and in transfer of semantic emphases. Thus, not only narrative or literary functions of the ancient writing are identified but the instrumental ones as well.
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