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On the Ruin of Britain
St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899
20. Letter to Agitius (Aetius). A.D. 446
The miserable remnant therefore send a letter to Agitius, a man holding high office at Rome;1 they speak as follows:—To Agitius, in his third consulship, come the groans of the Britons; a little further in their request: the barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us upon the barbarians; by one or other of these two modes of death we are either killed or drowned; and for these they have no aid. In the meantime, the severe and well-known famine presses the wandering and vacillating people, which compels many of them without delay to yield themselves as conquered to the bloodthirsty robbers, in order to have a morsel of food for the renewal of life. Others were never so compelled: rather issuing from the very mountains, from caves and defiles and from dense thickets, they carried on the war unceasingly.
The victory over Picts and Scots
Then for the first time, they inflicted upon the enemy, which for many years was pillaging in the land, a severe slaughter: their trust was not in man but in God, as that saying of Philo goes: we must have recourse to divine aid where human fails.2 The boldness of the enemy quieted for a time, but not the wickedness of our people; the enemy withdrew from our countrymen, but our countrymen withdrew not from their sins.
Notes
- Agitius. Gildas seems to have had access to a copy of the actual letter sent, but either he or the Britons made a mistake in the Consul’s name. This is generally regarded as Aetius; and some continental editions of Gildas, e.g., the Bibl. P.P. Paris, read Aetium, and Aetio here. Aetius was Consul for the third time, along with Symmachus, in A.D. 466; his other consulships fell in 432 and 437. From 433 to 450, he exercised supreme control over the affairs of the Western Empire, under Placidia and Valentinian. The abject tone of the letter to him is in keeping with the times: its florid wording is not strange.
- Dr. Wendland, the co-editor with Dr. Leopold Cohn of the edition of Philo that is now being published in Berlin, regards the following as the
nearest approach to Gildas’ quotation from Philo, but adds that no Latin version is known of the Vita Mosis (Letter to Dr. Mommsen. See his edition, p. 6). Philo vita Mosis I, 31, p. 108; Mangey: οὐχ ὁμοίως ἄνθρωπος ἀμύνεται καὶ θεός .... παρασκευῆς οὐδεμίας ἐστι χρεῖος ὁ θεὸς βοηθός: ἐν ἀπόροις πόρον εὑρεῖν ἴδιον θεοῦ.