In another letter to Domidius he described a visit to the
country-seat of two of his friends:

We were torn from one pleasure to another--games, feastings,
chatting, rowing, bathing, fishing.

As a true adherent even as a bishop of classic culture and humanity,
Sidonius is thus an interesting figure in these wild times, with his
Pliny-like enthusiasm for country rather than city, and his
susceptibility to woodland and pastoral life.

The limit of extravagance in the bombastic rhetoric of the period was
reached in the travels of Ennodius,[32] who was scarcely more than a
fantastic prattler. The purest, noblest, and most important figure of
the sixth century was undoubtedly Boetius; but it is Cassiodorus, a
statesman of the first rank under Theodoric, who in his _Variorium
libris_ gives the most interesting view of the attitude of his day
towards Nature. He revelled in her and in describing her. After
praising Baja for its beauty[33] and Lactarius for its healthiness,
he said of Scyllacium:

The city of Scyllacium hangs upon the hills like a cluster of
grapes, not that it may pride itself upon their difficult ascent,
but that it may voluptuously gaze on verdant plains and the blue
back of the sea. The city beholds the rising sun from its very
cradle, when the day that is about to be born sends forward no
heralding Aurora; but as soon as it begins to rise, the quivering
brightness displays its torch. It beholds Phoebus in his joy; it
is bathed in the brightness of that luminary so that it might be