The Gallo-Roman imperial accession of Avitus, following the Vandal plunder,
is presented by Sidonius Apollinaris (Carm. 7) as an effective opportunity for the revival
of the Western empire in a utopian and mythical-historical perspective, which uses repertoires
of Roman Republican History. An neglected tradition of that same history is
thus revived, incidentally, with precedents ranging from the Gallic siege to civil wars and
beyond. In this context, some senatorial ateliers where communications functional to
the idea of a senate “free from the emperor” were experimented, could have made use
of a certain “republican” modality of the use of prodigies in the most unscrupulous way,
with recourse to even very complex propaganda paradigms.
Sidonius Apollinaris and the ‘Senate in Exile’: On a 'Republican' Poetic Metaphor