Sidonius in Antiquity and Modernity

‘Dedicated to spiritual ladies in general, and to all abbesses, prioresses, and nuns in particular.’ A pious female audience was the target group for the prestigious edition, in four volumes, of an illustrated saints’ calendar, Tägliche Erbauung eines wahren Christen, which saw the light in Augsburg between 1753 and 1755. This ‘Daily Edification of a True Christian’ was an instant success: a second edition was put out in 1762/63. For every day there was an engraving of the day’s saint provided with a ‘synopsis’ in Latin, and followed by a short life, a meditation, and a prayer in German. In volume 3, July-September, on the 23rd of August, the pious ladies were meant to be edified by Sidonius Apollinaris. Here is his portrait:

Sidonius is depicted as a poet-bishop at his desk in front of a cross; next to him on the floor are a lyre and an overturned bust of Apollo (?) with a laurel wreath. The synopsis underneath runs:

Poeta fuit insignis ex Gallia: carmen pietate condivit, non eo usus ad fabulas, et ineptias, sed ad res divinas, et castas, quo ceteris scribendi norma(m) dedit: alluditur ad appellationem ipsius Apollinaris.

‘He was a famous poet from Gaul, who seasoned his verse with piety, not using it for idle tales, but for divine and chaste purposes, providing others with a standard in writing. This is an allusion to his surname Apollinaris.’

The biographical note goes on to specify Sidonius’ merits as a panegyrist, while the ensuing description of his lavish care of the poor and the smear campaign against him by two of his priests is essentially a free adaptation of Gregory of Tours’ account (Hist. Franc. 2.22-23) [1]. In the meditative section, the stress is on the humility of the saint who exemplarily waived his worldly success as an orator. The author then goes on: ‘And you, dear Christian, do you also leave the world’s vanities behind out of love for God?’

Well, the pious ladies no doubt got enough material for self-reflection (who wouldn’t?), but note that the edifying part in German does not match the Latin synopsis, which is only about poetry and about Sidonius applying it ‘for divine and chaste purposes’. The ladies might indeed have wondered why Sidonius (who?) figured in their book at all, along with other little known, foreign saints. It would have been more logical if a local saint had been picked for their devotion than an unknown ‘French’ one.

Mascolo’s Encomia coelituum
As a matter of fact, the publisher, in his foreword, had drawn the reader’s attention to the fact that the Latin original was also in the house’s catalogue: Encomia coelituum, by the Napolitan Jesuit Giovanni Battista Mascolo. And in the foreword to that publication, he had pointed out Mascolo’s idiosyncratic selection of saints, aiming at ‘τὸ θαυμαστόν et inaspectatas sententias’ (‘the marvellous and unexpected observations’). The layout of the items in this calendar is, however, different: the portrait (the publisher’s unique selling point) and the synopsis are the same, but they are followed by a one-page ‘Encomium’. Both the synopsis and the encomium come directly from Mascolo’s work. But that takes us more than a century back.

In 1638, Mascolo (1582-1656) published Encomia coelituum (‘Eulogies of the Saints’) with the intention of comparing the glorious deeds of the Christian saints to the superseded exploits of the Ancients. Each month is provided with an introduction in which Mascolo explains why he picked the saint for each day, preferring stories that were revealing to those that were conventional. Each saint then receives a ‘Synopsis’ and an ‘Encomion’, one page in all.

We have seen that the synopsis for Sidonius stresses the divine and the chaste in his poetry. The ‘encomion’ praises him for being both a lyrical poet and a prefect of Gaul [sic], which is reflected in his name: a Sidone accepit purpuram, ab Apolline lauream (‘from Sidon he got the purple, from Apollo the laurel’, p. 378). Of course his inspiration was non Venus, sed virtus (‘not Venus, but virtue’). The introduction to the month (p. 346) explains that, from amongst other laureati, Sidonius is selected because he truly chastened the laurel (qui laurum ex incesta, vere fecit innubam, ‘he made the laurel truly virginal, from being unchaste’) [2].

Chaste poetry, that is the catchword. It finally takes us to the reason why Mascolo chose Sidonius. One of his pivotal works is the Lyricorum sive Odarum libri XVI from 1625, Christian odes in the style of Horace. Mascolo dedicates the work to casto lyricorum poetarum choro (‘the chaste choir of lyrical poets’). For him, Horace’s genius, rid of Venus and replete with virtue, is the supreme weapon to defend Catholicism against Protestantism. Horace is his instrument of Counter-Reformation [3], and Sidonius … is Mascolo himself (though, judging by the text, one might wonder if the Jesuit ever really read the Saint).

Baumgartner’s oil sketches
Back to the Sidonius engraving and the Tägliche Erbauung project. Augsburg boasted a huge production of similar calendar sets of saints and other devotional prints [4]. In the production process, engravers were employed to cut the plates that were used for printing the illustrations. They worked on the basis of artists’ designs. The Sidonius portrait was designed by Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner (1702-1761). In 2009, the former Salzburger Barockmuseum devoted an exposition to this Augsburg rococo painter [5]. Baumgartner was one of the best artists around in Augsburg and the most prominent designer in the Tägliche Erbauung project, contributing up to 280 portraits of saints for as many days. What is special about these portraits is that he executed them carefully in colour oil paint instead of the usual throw-away grisaille, which makes the ca. fifty surviving pieces an important testimony of rococo art. Here, to conclude, is one of these, more or less similar to the Sidonius portrait: St Leopold (15 November) [6].

Notes
[1] Curiously, the author states that Sidonius died ‘im 36. [a typo for 56?] seines Alters, und im 15. seiner Regierung’. The author refers to Sur(ius), Luther’s Carthusian opponent, and the Jesuit hagiographer Ribad(eneira), both sixteenth-century, as his sources.
[2] Compare Daphne in Ov. Met. 10.92.
[3] See Ludwig 2014.
[4] See Bailey 2014, 124.
[5] See Straßer 2009.
[6] It is not known whether the original portrait of Sidonius is still extant.

Bibliography

G.A. Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, Farnham, 2014

W. Ludwig, ‘Horaz als Instrument der Gegenreformation: Die horazisierenden Oden des Johannes Baptista Masculus’, in W. Ludwig, Opuscula historico-philologica: Ausgewählte Aufsätze 2008-2013, Hildesheim, 2014, 115-34

J. Straßer, Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, 1702-1761: Ölskizzen und Hinterglasbilder, catalogue Salzburger Barockmuseum, Salzburg, 2009

Encomia coelituum online:
– Mascolo’s original from Naples (Sidonius is on p. 378)
– Augsburg illustrated edition, volume 1 (January)

Tägliche Erbauung online:
– volume 1 (January-March)
– volume 3 (July-September) (contains Sidonius’ portrait, followed by his life, a ‘Betrachtung’, and a ‘Gebet’ on pp. 705-706)

Mascolo, Lyricorum sive Odarum libri XVI online

Sidonius in Occupied France

‘The fundamental interest of Sidonius’ writings is that they are historical documents’. The son-in-law of the emperor Avitus was indeed entangled over a period of half a century in what was perhaps the most awesome political, social, and ethnic upheaval in history: the barbarian stranglehold on the tottering Roman empire. Sidonius Apollinaris, born a Roman citizen at Lyon in 430 or 431, dying at Clermont around 486 as the subject of a Visigothic king, was present at the performance of the great drama that is probably most poignant for us French: the fall of Roman Gaul beneath the surge of the Germani.

André Loyen, Recherches historiques, 11 [1]

Sidonius lived in interesting times, as the Chinese proverb has it. But this personal misfortune is part of the reason for his literary fortune. Blessed with distinguished ancestry and an advantageous marriage, at various moments he appeared on the cusp of great worldly success. He was only about twenty-five in 456 when he found himself praising his imperial father-in-law before the senate, and being honoured for his accomplishment with a statue in the Forum of Trajan. But within the year his father-in-law had been deposed and, we presume, killed (Sidonius tells us nothing about it). Twelve years later in 468 a panegyric of another emperor led to his appointment as prefect of Rome. But this was not the launch-pad to still higher offices, and within a couple of years, in what probably seemed a backward step in worldly terms, he had been ordained bishop of a minor city in central Gaul. (Sidonius, again, tells us nothing of the circumstances of his ordination). Most striking of all, he lived through the end of Roman rule in Gaul and the west. His defence of Clermont as its bishop against King Euric’s annual raids led to his temporary removal and imprisonment, and more than that, he gained the clear insight that the political arrangements he and his friends had grown up with were gone for ever.

André Loyen (1901-1974) lived in interesting times too, but his life was, to my knowledge, less interesting than that of Sidonius, the author on whom he founded his reputation as a Latinist and historian. He held a series of appointments as an academic researcher and administrator ending with a chair at Paris X Nanterre, and had a couple of dozen publications centred on the works of Sidonius, capped by the three-volume Budé edition (1960, 1970). The words quoted above, from the introduction of his first short monograph on Sidonius (Recherches historiques sur les Panégyriques de Sidoine Apollinaire, Paris, 1942), are of course emblematic of a general reason for interest in Sidonius – the mighty events of which he was an eyewitness — but they also bear particular testimony to the place and moment of publication: occupied France (Loyen was based at Rennes), a few months before the Germans overran the Zone libre in November 1942. The cover bears the words ‘Série de Guerre’, and the paper quality is not particularly high. The foreword explains that present difficult circumstances (‘les difficultés de l’heure’, 9) meant that the text, translation and commentary that he had prepared would not be included.

The introduction tells the story of fifth-century Gaul as a tale of gradual barbarian conquest. At the original establishment of the Visigothic kingdom in Aquitaine in 418, the Visigoths did not appear to be enemies of the Romans (p. 11): these skin clad barbarians called themselves defenders of the Romans, and, Loyen suggests, many contemporaries held towards them the same sympathetic curiosity as for the Spahis or Senegalese tirailleurs (these were ‘native’ regiments in the French army, the latter fighting for the Free French against the Germans at the time Loyen was writing). The fantasy that their new neighbours were their allies lasted decades, but at last Euric discarded the fiction and broke the treaty. Despite the heroism of Sidonius and his brother-in-law Ecdicius, Clermont was ceded to the Gothic invaders by a regular treaty signed by the emperor Nepos: ‘on that day, Sidonius must have felt his confidence collapse, the perhaps slightly naïve confidence he clung to all his life because of a belief that a centuries-old state of affairs would last for ever’ (p. 12) [2].

Loyen’s discussion moves on to other barbarian groups, to the internal situation of the empire, and the state of culture (pp. 13-16); he looks at the reactions of the governing class in the course of the fifth century. Some of them seemed to accommodate to the new regime of the Visigoths, which at least offered some shelter from the horrors of war; several served Gothic kings faithfully as ministers or advisers; some, like the traitors Arvandus and Seronatus, even plotted to destroy imperial authority beyond the Alps. Loyen then moves on to a more detailed account of Sidonius’ life within this context, closing by repeating what he has already told in part: his hero’s glorious and determined attempt to defend Clermont. It was Sidonius that organised the resistance against the Aryan Visigoths, and sought both political and divine support. He inveighed against the traitors, and his courageous attitude brought reprisals from the victors (p. 18-19). The language of ‘résistance’, ‘trahison’, and ‘représailles’ must have struck readers as markedly close to contemporary discourse – a (not very) coded replacement for the free speech that was unavailable, not unlike what many readers have seen in Sidonius himself.

This emphasis of the introduction is all the more striking when it is considered that the events to which it gives most repeated and starkest emphasis, the surrender of Clermont, and the subsequent end of Roman power in Gaul, are subsequent to the events discussed in the rest of the book: Sidonius’ panegyrics were given between 456 and 468, and the chronology at the end of the book (p. 99) does not go beyond 468. It seems a reasonable conjecture that the introduction belongs to the time of writing in a way that the rest of Loyen’s text does not (he explains in the preface that his text is a small sample of a larger thesis approved in January 1937). But from this point on, Loyen always seems to have viewed Sidonius to some extent through the prism of France’s experience in the second world war: as Ian Wood has pointed out, in 1963 he published an article with the suggestive title ‘Résistants et collaborateurs en Gaule à l’époque des Grandes Invasions’. [3]

To see relations between Gaul and Germany, or the Roman Empire and the barbarians, as in some sense prefiguring modern geopolitics was nothing new, and this blog will consider other examples. Since the Franco-Prussian war such implicit comparisons had been common – even more, perhaps, since the flowering of scholarship on the Germanen under the influence of National Socialism. And this evocation of Sidonius as peculiarly relevant to the situation of modern France is interestingly matched in fiction. In an innovative chapter on Sidonius’ reception in twentieth-century literature to be published in the forthcoming Prolegomena, Filomena Giannotti draws attention to the Auvergnat author Jean Anglade’s novel Sidoine Apollinaire (1963), whose chapter headings make the parallel explicit: 14. Le résistant. 15. An 475: Munich! 16. Le déporté 17. Devant le führer [i.e. King Euric].

Part of Sidonius’ appeal to readers is as a symbol of the doomed attempt to preserve civilisation against barbarism and chaos – which sometimes leads moderns to share his stereotyped portrayal of barbarians. Loyen was inclined, like most twentieth-century scholars, to an old-fashioned view of the barbarian invasions of the fifth century and of the barbarians themselves. But in the few pages of his wartime introduction to a highly technical scholarly study of the panegyrics, Loyen does not just exploit this approach but goes beyond it, to deploy Sidonius for his own personal act of passive resistance.

Gavin Kelly (Edinburgh)

[1] ‘“L’intérêt fondamental des écrits de Sidoine, c’est d’être des documents d’histoire.” Le gendre de l’empereur Avitus fut en effet, durant un demi-siècle, mêlé au bouleversement politique, social, ethnique, le plus formidable peut-être de l’Histoire: la mainmise des barbares sur l’Empire romain décrépit. Sidoine Apollinaire, né citoyen romain à Lyon en 430 ou 431, mort vers 486 sujet d’un roi wisigoth, à Clermont, assista à l’acte du grand drame le plus poignant sans doute pour nous Français: la chute de la Gaule romaine sous la poussée des Germains.’ The opening quotation is from Labriolle, Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne (1924), p. 639.

[2] ‘Ce jour-là, Sidoine dut sentir crouler sa confiance, cette confiance peut-être un peu naïve à laquelle toute sa vie il s’était malgré tout accroché car il croyait à la pérennité d’un état de choses qui durait depuis des siècles’.

[3] I. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford 2013), 293. Loyen’s article is in Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé 22 (1963), 437-450.

Sidonius Apollinaris makes an unexpected appearance in ‘The Wind in the Portico’, a story in John Buchan’s 1928 collection The Runagates Club, in which the members of a London dining club swap yarns. Henry Nightingale, a Cambridge don, visits the remote Shropshire estate of Vauncastle to view a rare manuscript for his critical edition of Theocritus. He learns that Dubellay, the owner, has recently discovered a shrine to the Celtic god Vaunus (associated by the Romans with Apollo) and has re-housed it in the portico of his manor. Nightingale humorously suggests that Dubellay re-dedicate it as a Christian altar and cites an entirely fictional passage in Sidonius, where ‘you begin by sacrificing a white cock or something suitable, and tell Apollo with all friendliness that the old dedication is off for the present’ (Buchan (1974) 32). Dubellay hurriedly rejects the suggestion as if Nightingale ‘had offended his ears by some horrid blasphemy’. When, however, Nightingale returns for a final look at the Theocritus manuscript in summer 1914, his host’s attitude is markedly different. He begs Nightingale to read him the relevant passage from the edition of Sidonius held in the manor’s splendid classical library. Realizing that Dubellay is in deadly earnest, Nightingale urges him to ‘let old Vaunus stick to his altar’ and reminds him that ‘we’re in the twentieth century and not in the third’ (137). Dubellay ignores Nightingale’s advice, performs the ritual, and is apparently slain by a vengeful Vaunus in the form of a scorching wind. His house and library are burnt to the ground and the invaluable Theocritus manuscript destroyed, but, as Nightingale remarks, ‘that didn’t worry me much’ for ‘six weeks later came the War, and I had other things to think about’ (147).

The mention of the Great War at the tale’s conclusion clearly situates ‘The Wind in the Portico’ among the many works in which Buchan treats the conflict as an unleashing of primal or barbaric forces. In his wartime production, whether literary or propagandistic, Buchan persistently presented Britain and her allies as engaged in a struggle to preserve civilization (see Strachan (2009) 87-88). While he recognized that the ideals of the nineteenth century were in decline, he argued that the fervently nationalistic militarism embodied by Germany — ‘the kind of crazy patriotism which becomes a religion’ (Buchan (1993) 67) —was no solution to contemporary spiritual malaise. In its desire to ‘cleanse and simplify life’ (83), it represented, conversely, a return to the pagan and atavistic.

Peace, paradoxically, brought a darkening of Buchan’s vision. In the words of Dr Greenslade in The Three Hostages (1924), war had produced ‘a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning’. Until recently ‘the barriers between the conscious and the subconscious’ had been ‘pretty stiff in the average man’, but now ‘they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting mixed’. One can no longer ‘take the clear psychology of most civilised human beings for granted’ for ‘something is welling up from primeval deeps to muddy it’ (Buchan (1995) 12-14).

Buchan’s fiction of the 1920s insistently portrays the resurgence of the subconscious and the primeval, particularly in the form of revived pre-Christian rites. ‘Wind in the Portico’ particularly echoes two novels of this period: The Dancing Floor (1926), where the post-war ‘unsettlement of men’s minds’ leads modern-day Greek islanders to make a human sacrifice to Koré/Persephone (Buchan (1993) 70), and Witch Wood (1927), where Calvinist elders cavort before an altar to Apollo in a last surviving remnant of the ancient Caledonian Forest.

‘The Wind in the Portico’ is set in a liminal landscape: the Welsh Marches, which are likened to the ‘debatable lands’ of the Scottish Borders. The river Vaun, threading through a ‘fantastically un-English’ (119) country, reminds Nightingale of the ‘wan water’ (134) of the Border Ballads. This immediately recalls Witch Wood, with its Border setting and its heroine Katrine Yester’s love of balladry, and evokes a long folk and literary tradition of real and symbolic border-crossing.

Dubellay discovers the shrine to Vaunus in the ‘high woods’ (130) on the slopes of the ‘Welsh Mountains’. As in The Dancing Floor, the mountain country is figured as home to the ‘Outland Things’ (Buchan (1997) 106), where ‘wild men from the hills’ (85) and ‘dwellers in the stony mountains’ (99) preserve pre-Christian cults. Dubellay’s own estate is set in a clearing in ‘a very good imitation of a primeval forest’ 126). Both the shrine’s original location and its new setting are examples of temenos, Buchan’s term for enchanted places which ‘function as thresholds or portals between worlds’, where ancient mysteries were once celebrated and where pagan deities may still be evoked (see Grant (2009) 185). In Buchan’s 1920s fiction, such places are linked not only to supernatural manifestations but to the invasion of the conscious mind by the subconscious and to the conquest of the rational by the instinctual and animalistic. The ‘hierophants’ of Vaunus are portrayed with ‘only half-human faces’ in a frieze in Dubellay’s temple. Similarly the devotees of Persephone in The Dancing Floor are likened to centaurs, and in Witch Wood, the worshippers of Apollo don animal masks.

What is Sidonius doing, though, in this tale of a dangerous dalliance with the subconscious? Does Buchan cite him solely for the symbolic associations of his name, drawing on the tradition that temples to Apollo (like that discovered by Dubellay) were often re-dedicated as churches of St Apollinaris? The entirely spurious nature of the quotation from Sidonius, together with Nightingale’s erroneous belief that he lived in the third century, might encourage the suspicion that Buchan had little authentic knowledge of Sidonius.

There is much to suggest, though, that his use of Sidonius is altogether more informed and meaningful. Michael and Isobel Haslett have highlighted the influence of Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars (1927) on Buchan’s post-war work. They briefly list a number of instances where Buchan cites authors or works treated by Waddell, including both Sidonius and Ausonius in ‘The Wind in the Portico’ (Haslett and Haslett (2009) 21). If we turn to the passage in which Waddell first cites Sidonius, we find that it alludes specifically to the revival of pagan elements in a Christian context:

The scholar’s education as one sees it in Ennodius’ college exercises was still purely pagan, and the battle between the Muses and Christ, even as it was for Anselm of Bisate long after, ‘either company so sweet, so fair, my heart cried out for both’. In its sharpness the gods who to the untroubled pagan, to Claudian for instance, are little but machines, recover something of their ‘faded splendour wan’. Sidonius Apollinaris saw Venus asleep with her cheek pillowed on her round arm, and violets withering in her hair [carm x, 47-49]. This is not the dignified figure of the Aeneid, ‘vera incessu patuit dea’, but Botticelli’s Venus, with the ‘roses browned a little at the stalk’ the tender dangerous goddess of the medieval legends. Ennodius, who ‘hates the very name of liberal studies’, saw her asleep by the sea, and Cupid coming to wake her, bitterly complaining,

Rare in the vast fields of the centuries,
Rare is love’s harvest:

The grey cult of virginity has taken the colour from the world. ‘Fear not’, says his mother, ‘the gods are never so dangerous as when they awake from sleep’. [Ennod. Carm i. iv.] (Waddell (1954) 43)

As a reader of Waddell, then, Buchan might perceive Sidonius as a ‘troubled’ Christian whose vivid evocations of ‘tender dangerous’ pagan deities risk awakening them from their sleep. It is highly plausible that this passage prompted Buchan to think of Sidonius when portraying the resuscitation of a woodland god in ‘The Wind in the Portico’ and the fatal attempt to Christianize his shrine. As the Hasletts note (21), though, Waddell’s work was by no means Buchan’s first encounter with Late Antique literature. He was introduced to many of the figures discussed by Waddell, doubtless including Sidonius, in the wide-ranging lectures of eccentric classicist and medievalist Frederick William Bussell at Brasenose College, Oxford, where Buchan studied from 1895 to 1899. His acquaintance with Sidonius might, though, go back to his earlier studies (1892-95) at Glasgow University, whose library contains a copy of the 1609 Plantin Sidonius, precisely the edition owned by Dubellay. It was at Glasgow too that Buchan first met Gilbert Murray, who held the Chair of Greek there from 1889 to 1899 and who would become a lifelong friend. Murray’s anthropological approach to classical studies would influence Buchan’s use of pagan themes in his 1920s fiction and, in particular, the evocation of Greek spring fertility rites in The Dancing Floor.

Perhaps, however, Buchan’s first encounter with Sidonius occurred in a very different setting. As a young man, Buchan was an admirer of Walter Pater and published three of his earliest fictions in The Yellow Book (see Holmes (2013) 2-3). However brief his infatuation with the Aesthetic Movement and Decadence, Buchan would surely have known the original ‘yellow book’, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, where Sidonius figures among the literary enthusiasm of the protagonist Des Esseintes:

he enjoyed dipping into the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, studded with witticisms, conceits, archaisms, and enigmas, he found intriguing. He was fond of rereading the panegyrics in which that Bishop invokes, in support of his self-satisfied encomia, the deities of the pagan world, and, in spite of everything, he had to admit to a weakness for the affectations and innuendos of these poems, constructed by an ingenious mechanic who takes good care of his machine, keeping its working parts well oiled, and who if required can devise new ones which are both complicated and useless. (Huysmans (1998) 30)

Like Waddell, Huysmans portrays Sidonius as a Christian poet bringing pagan gods back to live. Perhaps, then, The Wandering Scholars reminded Buchan of a youthful encounter with Sidonius in the pages of the Decadent Bible. Dubellay can certainly be read as a descendant of Des Esseintes. A neurotic Anglo-French aristocrat, he hermetically seals his ancestral pile against the modern world and ensconces himself in a library of Late Antique arcana, while the surrounding landscape has a perennial ‘autumn smell of decay’ (p. 134).

Is ‘The Wind in the Portico’ a cautionary tale then? Is the destruction of the Plantin Sidonius, blasted, along with Dubellay, by Vaunus’ scorching wind, a warning of the dangers of flirting with the pagan and barbaric? Is Nightingale’s reaction – unembarrassed flight – the only sane response to the reawakening of the atavistic? Sidonius, though, is not the only victim of Vaunus’ vengeful fury. The Idylls of Nightingale’s beloved Theocritus also perish in the flames. Here we must recall the dual nature of the temenos in near-contemporary works by Buchan. In both Witch Wood and The Dancing Floor, the glade or vale consecrated to pagan rites initially strikes the rational Christian onlooker as a place of primaveral innocence. In each novel the mission to cleanse such sites of barbaric rituals is paired with a desire to restore them to an original prelapsarian purity. Buchan’s heroes ultimately discover that such an ambition is both naïve and unrealizable. Innocence and barbarism are inseparable: the deities who inhabit the temenos are, in Waddell’s words, both ‘tender’ and ‘dangerous’. One cannot destroy part without destroying the whole.

Paul Barnaby (Edinburgh)

Bibliography
Buchan, J. (1974) The Runagates Club, Bath
Buchan, J. (1993) Greenmantle, ed. K. Macdonald, Oxford
Buchan, J. (1995) The Three Hostages, ed. K. Miller, Oxford
Buchan, J. (1997) The Dancing Floor, ed. M. Deegan, Oxford
Grant, P. B. (2009) ‘Buchan’s Supernatural Fiction’, in Macdonald (2009) 183-92
Haslett, M., and Haslett, I. (2009) ‘Buchan and the Classics’, in Macdonald (2009) 17-28
Holmes, M. (2013) ‘John Buchan (1875-1940)’, in The Yellow Nineties Online
Huysmans, J.-K. (1998) Against Nature, trans. M. Mauldon, Oxford
Macdonald, K (ed.) (2009) Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’, London
Strachan, H. (2009) ‘John Buchan and the First World War: Fact into Fiction’, in Macdonald (2009) 77-90
Waddell, H. (1954) The Wandering Scholars, 2nd ed., Harmondsworth

I would like to thank Joop van Waarden for drawing my attention to Sidonius’ presence in ‘The Wind in the Portico’.