German Invasions 59 Sidonius had held high offices under the Roman emperors. He was born in Lyons about 430. He received a good education, made many friends, became bishop of Averni, died of a fever about 489, and left to posterity a great number of letters which give a lively idea of the world in which he lived. " Sometimes we think of the hundred years between Theodosius and Theodoric as wholly filled with rapine and bloodshed. Sometimes we carry back into the fifth century the thick darkness which hung over the intellectual life of Merowingian France or Lombard Italy. In both these estimates we are mistaken. A careful perusal of the three volumes of the letters and poems of Sidonius reveals to us the fact that in Gaul, at any rate, the air still teemed with intellectual life, that authors were still writing, amanuenses still transcribing, friends complimenting or criticising, and all the cares and pleasures of literature filling the minds of large classes of men just as though no empires were sinking and no strange nationalities were suddenly rising around them" (HoDGKlN, Italy and her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 305). For an extract from a letter of Sidonius, see below, pp. 150 sq. The numerous Lives of the saints, although a very uncritical kind of biography, are sometimes helpful to the historical student. The best known of those for the fifth century is the Life of Severinus (d. 482), a missionary who labored in Noricum among the Germans on the Danube. His biography was prepared by his disciple Eugisippus in 51 1. (Text in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. New edition in the octavo edition of the Monumenta; translation in the Geschichtschreiber der deut- schen Vorzeit. 1 ) CASSIODORUS (ca. 477-^7. 57o),Theodoric's minister, was the chief liter- ary promoter of the sixth century. He edited a Tripartite History made up of extracts from three ecclesiastical historians, Sozomenus, Socrates, and Theodoret, who had written in Greek a hundred years before. This compilation comes down to 441. Cassiodorus also wrote a history of the Goths, which has unfortunately been lost. But most important of all is his own vast correspondence, which forms an invaluable source for the period. (Text of the Letters, Variarum (epistolarum} Libri XII, edited by Mommsen in the Monumenta. Hodgkin has published a condensed English translation.) We have an abridgment of Cassiodorus' lost History of the Goths made by the illiterate Jordanes about 551. Here for the first time the ancient religious legends of the Germans and the tales of their heroes found their way into Latin. (See above, pp. 39 sqq?) 1 For a description of the Monumenta and its various divisions and offshoots, see below, pp. 262 sq. Lives of the saints, especially that of Severinus. Cassiodorus, Historia Tripartita. Jordanes.
