Sidonius Apollinaris stands at a crossroads between the last days of the Roman Empire in the Auvergne and Provence and the emergence of Burgundian and Visigoths as territorial powers. As an aristocrat, politician, author and bishop who was involved in and bore witness to this takeover, he and his writings have often been taken as representative of the late Roman response to the new dominance of Christianity and to the dissolution of the Empire in the West. Like most late Latin art prose, though, his letters are notorious for their mannerist style, which at times makes passages of his...