Sidonius greets his dear Serranus

• 1. Your letter was shown to me by the advocate Marcellinus, an experienced person and a man with friends. After offering a greeting with its preliminary words, in the rest of its course, which is certainly considerable, it contained the praise of your patron the emperor Petronius Maximus. You call him most lucky – with more determination or friendship than accuracy or truth – because he was elevated through the most important offices up to imperial power. But I can never consent to such an opinion of thinking that those who set foot upon the steep and slippery heights of our state are fortunate.

• 2. For there is no telling how much misery in earthly life hourly the lives of these fortunate ones entail, if one nevertheless wants to call them that, because they arrogate the name to themselves like Sulla – of course because they go beyond what is lawful and right and think the highest power to be the highest happiness, and they are all the more unhappy precisely because they understand too little that they are subject to a most restless servitude. For just as kings have mastery over men, the wish for mastery masters kings.

• 3. If we omit at this point the cases of the preceding and following emperors, by himself this Maximus, who is special to you, can provide us with maximum proof; though he ascended fearlessly to the height of the prefecture, the patriciate and the consulate, and though he insatiably repeated the offices that he had held for a second time as if following in his own tracks, still, when he came after mobilising all his forces to the cliff-edge of imperial honour, under the crown he suffered a sort of vertigo at his measureless rank and he could no longer bear to be the master, just as he had not endured being under a master.

• 4. And as for the aforementioned man, look next at the favour, the power and the durability of his earlier life; and on the contrary the beginning, the storminess and the end of his principate, which lasted not much longer than two months. Certainly, you will find out that the man was happier before he was called the happiest.