Sidonius greets his dear Desideratus

• 1. It is with the greatest sadness that I inform you of the following. Three days ago the lady Filimatia died and all business was suspended in mourning for her. She was an accommodating wife, a merciful mistress, a helpful mother, a dutiful daughter, who was due the obedience of younger persons inside the house and outside, the respect of her seniors and love of her peers. Even though she was the only child of a mother long gone, with her various forms of kindness she easily ensured that her father, still young, did not feel the lack of a child of the other sex. With her sudden death, though, she gave her husband the pain of singleness and her father of childlessness. In addition, the mother of five children turned her fertility into misfortune through her early death. If these young children had lost their already feeble father while their mother had been unharmed, they would seem less orphaned.

• 2. But at least – if we do not honour the bodies of dead in vain – she was not buried by the portentous services of undertakers and corpse-bearers. Instead, while everyone, even outsiders, were crying and trying to touch the bier, to hold it back and even to kiss it, she was carried by the hands of the priests and her relatives and, looking more as if she were asleep, was laid to rest in her last bed. After this I wrote a funerary dirge at her bereaved father's request, not in elegiac distiches, but in verses of eleven syllables, which was engraved on marble while grief was still raw. If you do not wholly disapprove, the hired scribe will take it to add to the other volumes of my poems; if you think otherwise, it is enough that the stony poem is set in stone.

• 3. This is my epitaph:

  She was seized by a sudden cruel death

  from her five children, her father and husband

  and the hands of her weeping homeland put

  the matron Filimatia in this grave.

  O you, glory of your whole family, your husband's ornament,

  prudent, chaste, decent, severe, sweet

  and a model even for elders,

  characteristics generally thought contradictory

  you combined through your amiability of character.

  For accompanying you in your good life

  were dignified freedom of speech and eloquent modesty.