Announcing Renunciation

Abstract This chapter offers an account of Sidonius Apollinaris’s renunciation of verse composition upon his entry into the episcopacy in ca. 470. It explores why he continued to write verse during his episcopal tenure and what his late poetic exercises might have signified to his Gallo-Roman audience. To help explain Sidonius’s fraught relationship to poetry, readings probe his connections to the monks of Lérins and their ascetic literary program, developed through correspondence within the Gallic episcopacy. The chapter concludes with treatment of the last texts in Sidonius’s corpus, a series of prosimetric letters from the late 470s that seem to contravene the bishop’s disavowal of verse writing. By virtue of these final poems, the chapter suggests, Sidonius raised anew the question of whether a classical lyrical mode of self-presentation could be converted to a pious practice of ascetic self-reflection.