Chapter 5 - Literary Friendships and Elite Identity

Summary

MAKING CONNECT IONS AND maintaining friendship networks were major rea-sons to write letters, as they enabled these links to be created and preserved even across distances. Merovingian writers drew on classical and Christian concepts of friend-ship, which began to merge in the fourth century. Literary networks were important not just for mutual solidarity and support but also for aristocratic identity. In the rapidly changing world of the fifth century, when ideas of literary decline first appear amongst Gallic writers, the ability to participate in shared intellectual culture was a sign of elite status, no matter what had happened to one’s wealth or lands. Sidonius Apollinaris maintained that literary culture would become the only sure sign of nobility. In its own way the sixth century was as turbulent as the fifth and the ability to write and understand poetry and letters of friendship continued to signify elite identity.

Fortunatus’ poetry provides important evidence for the role of literary skill in the ability of the Merovingian elite to make and maintain networks amongst themselves. In fifth-and sixth-century Gaul, messages travelled between friends via the networks of old Roman roads and along the major rivers. Although this communication came with hassles and frustrations, the importance of networks of friendship and patronage made them worthwhile. These concepts of friendship included a well-developed ideology of long-distance friendship, on which Fortunatus drew heavily. Many of the poet’s friendships were conducted over significant distances, a condition which shaped his use of imagery of absence and presence.

Ideas of absence and presence were commonplaces in late antique statements about friendship inherited from classical thought. Augustine and Paulinus of Nola’s ideas of friendship included thinking about the effect of distance on their relationships. Augus-tine had written that friendships conducted across distances were more stable than those conducted face-to-face. Fifth-century Gallic writers developed these ideas further. In one of Sidonius Apollinaris’ letters this argument about the effect of distance on friendship is connected to theo logical understanding of the soul. Because one loves the rational souls of one’s friends, which are not fixed in any one place, their physical absence is irrelevant. For Claudianus Mamertus, friends physically absent from each other were united in God.