Over the last fifty years there has been an ever-increasing scholarly interest in C. Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius’ Letters. Commentaries on single books of the letter collection have been issued since Helga Köhler published the commentary on Book 1 in 1995, followed by David Amherdt on Book 4, Filomena Giannotti on Book 3, Johannes van Waarden on Book 7 and Judith Hindermann on Book 2. Commentaries on other Sidonian letter books are also being undertaken at the time of writing (2022): Willum Westenholz on Book 6, Marco Onorato on Book 8 and Silvia Condorelli on Book 9. Thus, this volume (the first of two volumes on Book 5, covering letters 1–10, with a second to cover letters 11–21) falls within a broader intellectual programme of providing the fundamental tool of a commentary for the complete Letters of Sidonius.

This volume, with its projected sequel, is the first commentary on Book 5 to be published. My study seeks to pursue a holistic approach, combining philological, historical and literary angles. For this reason, I provide readers with a freshly edited text, having collated the letters in the highest manuscripts of Franz Dolveck's stemma codicum.

Letters as autobiography?

As an aristocrat, an office-holder, a poet and later bishop of Clermont in the period when Roman government was replaced by kingdoms under the Romans’ former ‘barbarian’ allies, Sidonius (c. 430 – 479 or after) gives us vivid eyewitness testimony to both high politics and ordinary life. In Michael Kulikowski's words, ‘Sidonius was born into a world that had ceased to exist at the time of his death’. His artful letters are often the only source for the events described, and Book 5 provides readers with crucial insight on the transition to post-imperial Gaul. It testifies to the shift in relations between the (former) centre and peripheries, and to how the old categories are not applicable to the new local powers. Burgundians and Visigoths are the creators of a new system, which Sidonius finds hard to conceptualise, and is therefore even harder for scholars to conceptualise.