Sidonius greets his dear Domitius

• 1. You complain of my being in the countryside, though if anything I could complain that you are now held back in the city. Already spring gives way to summer and the sun, at the highest point of its course, stretches out with wandering ray to the distant Scythian pole. What shall I say here about the climate of our region? Divine workmanship arranged our area so that we are more exposed to the warmth of the western world. What more to say? The world has heated up, the ice in the Alps is disappearing and the earth is inscribed with gaping and curving dry furrows. The gravel is parched in the fords, the mud on the banks, the dust in the fields. All the waters that normally flow continuously now dribble weakly and the liquid is not just hot, but boiling.

• 2. And now, while one man sweats in linen and another in silk, you are wearing a woollen cloak on the outside and underneath you are wrapped with bands. Moreover, cramped in a curved chair of wicker from Ameria and yawning, you start commenting on the verse ‘A Samian was my mother’ to students who are pale from the heat no less than from fear. Why not rather, if you care for your health, save yourself quickly from the suffocating constrictions of the city and eagerly join my company, defying the Dog Star's inclemency in the most clement of retreats?

• 3. Anyway, if you’d like to know the situation of the estate to which you are invited, listen. We are at Avitacum: this is the name of the estate, which, because it is my wife’s, is dearer to me than my father’s. Under God's protection – unless you suspect it to be witchcraft – I live there with my family in harmony. A steep mountain, though covered in earth, lies in the west. It rolls out into smaller hills, as though in two branches, which extend away from it to a breadth of about four iugera. But up to the point where there is a wide space big enough for an entrance-court for my domicile, the hillsides follow the valley in the middle in straight lines until they come to the border of my villa. Its fronts face north and south.

• 4. The bath clings in the south-west to the bottom of a wooded rock, so when the wood which is ready for felling is cut on the ridge above, it is cast down into the mouth of the oven in tumbling heaps as if it had itself decided to fall. Here rises the room with hot water, which is the same size as the following anointing room except for a spacious tub shaped in a semicircle, where a powerful hot stream enclosed by the bends of the pliant lead-piping gurgles through the pierced wall. Inside the room, which is heated from below, there is full daylight and, indeed, so much light that it forces modest people to think that they are more than naked.