Mark Vessey Sidonius Apollinaris Writes Himself Out: Aut(hol)ograph and Architext in Late Roman Codex Society For John Matthews It was Ernest Stein who dubbed Sidonius Apollinaris “the last Latin poet and prose- writer of antiquity”. Stein also pointed up the historical value of the account given by Sidonius of “the fall of the [Roman] empire in the West” and, as he saw it, the merely accessory role of Christianity in his work as a publishing writer.¹ Recent schol- arship on Sidonius has created a favourable context in which to reassess these reput- edly terminal-Roman and incidental-Christian facets of his œuvre.² This essay looks again at Sidonius’ letter collection, with an eye to the textual and bibliographic whole(s) therein finally composed. It begins, after other recent studies, at the place where Sidonius first appears to be about to make an end of his last work, the Epistularum libri. ³ It finds its focus in Book 9 of that work, specifically in the ar- ticulation between the book’s two parts, the former of which is preoccupied with the modalities of Christian discursive performance and production, whereas the latter re- places both writer and reader within an horizon of expectations projected from Rome as centre at once of empire and of “literary” value.⁴ In an effort to explain certain Note: Quotations from the works of Sidonius Apollinaris follow the edition of Loyen (1960 – 1970). Translations are my own, borrowing freely from Anderson (1936 – 1965).  Stein (1959) 370 – 371 (546 – 547 in the original German edition of 1928): “Sidoine Apollinaire […] est […] pour nous le dernier poète et prosateur latin de l’Antiquité. Car d’une part, ses œuvres, contem- poraines de la chute de l’Empire d’Occident, reflètent cet événement avec une vivacité saisissante; d’autre part, s’il est chrétien et a même fini évêque, Sidoine, à la différence de ceux qui viendront après lui, appartient encore à l’Antiquité par sa culture, sa manière de vivre et sa conception du monde; aussi le christianisme joue-t-il dans son œuvre un rôle au fond accessoire […] [I]l est aussi, par ses œuvres en prose, le dernier représentant notable de l’art épistolier de l’Antiquité et, parmi les Latins, probablement le plus sympathique depuis Pline le Jeune.” Sidonius was already the last man standing in Dill (1899). The traditional picture was nuanced by Stevens (1933) and has since been reframed in Anglophone scholarship by, among others, Rousseau (1976), Drinkwa- ter/Elton (1992), Mathisen (1993), Harries (1994 and 1996), and Heather (2005). Sidonius is still a limit-figure of choice for latergoing narratives of classical Latin literature: see now van Waarden (2010 – 2016) and, for a dissenting sense of irony, Kitchen (2010).  Van Waarden/Kelly (2013), the first fruits of a major international collaboration, offers a view of the field. See, too, Poignault/Stoehr-Monjou (2014).  See now esp. Mratschek (2017), a fine-grained account of Sidonius’ construction of his literary per- sona in the Epistularum libri; Egelhaaf-Gaiser (2010). For the œuvre as a whole, Loyen (1943) and Gualandri (1979) remain fundamental.  Quotation marks around “literary” here and below are a reminder that the historical relationships of the modern discourse of “literature” to earlier totalizing discursive formations, including those de- https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643503-007