decision of the “palmary synod.” The remainder of the pontificate of Symmachus was uneventful; history speaks of various churches in Rome as having been built or beautified by him.
SYMMACHUS, the name of a celebrated Roman family of the 4th to 6th centuries of our era. It belonged to the gens Aurelia and can be traced back to Aurelius Julianus Symmachus, proconsul of Achaea (according to others, vicar or vice-prefect of Macedonia) in the year 319. Lucius Aurelius Avianius Symmachus, presumably his son, was prefect of Rome in the year 364, and had also other important posts. He was celebrated for his virtues and the senate awarded him in 377 a gilded statue.
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345–410), son of the last-named, was one of the most brilliant representatives in public life and in the literature of 4th-century paganism in Rome. He was educated in Gaul, and, having discharged the functions of praetor and quaestor, rose to higher offices, and in 373 was proconsul of Africa (for his official career see C.I.L. vi. 1699). His public dignities, which included that of pontifex maximus, his great wealth and high character, added to his reputation for eloquence, marked him out as the champion of the pagan senate against the measures which the Christian emperors directed against the old state religion of Rome. In 382 he was banished from Rome by Gratian for his protest against the removal of the statue and altar of Victory from the senate-house (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. 28), and in 384, when he was prefect of the city, he addressed to Valentinian II. a letter praying for the restoration of these symbols. This is the most interesting of his literary remains, and called forth two replies from St Ambrose, as well as a poetical refutation from Prudentius. After this Symmachus was involved in the rebellion of Maximus, but obtained his pardon from Theodosius, and appears to have continued in public life up to his death. In 391 he was Consul ordinarius. His honesty, both in public and in private affairs, and his amiability made him very popular. The only reproach that could be made against this last valiant defender of paganism is a certain aristocratic conservativeness, and an exaggerated love of the past. As his letters do not extend beyond the year 402, he probably died soon after that date.
Of his writings we possess: (1) Panegyrics, written in his youth in a very artificial style, two on Valentinian I. and one on the youthful Gratian. (2) Nine books of Epistles, and two from the tenth book, published after his death by his son. The model followed by the writer is Pliny the Younger, and from a reference in the Saturnalia of Macrobius (bk. v., i. § 7), in which Symmachus is introduced as one of the interlocutors, it appears that his contemporaries deemed him second to none of the ancients in the “rich and florid” style. We find them vapid and tedious. (3) Fragments of Complimentary Orations, five from a palimpsest (also containing the Panegyrics), of which part is at Milan and part in the Vatican, discovered by Mai, who published the Milan fragments in 1815, the Roman in his Scriptorum veterum nova collectio, vol. i. (1825), and the whole in 1846. (4.) The Relationes, which contain an interesting account of public life in Rome, composed for the emperor. In these official writings (reports as prefect of the city), Symmachus is not preoccupied by style and becomes sometimes eloquent; especially so in his remarkable report on the altar of Victory.
His son, Quintus Fabius Memmius Symmachus, was pro-consul of Africa (415) and prefect of the city (418). He was probably the father of the Symmachus who was consul in 446, and whose son was Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (d. 525), patrician, one of the most cultivated noblemen of Rome of the beginning of the 6th century, editor {e.g. of Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis) and historian, and especially celebrated for his building activity. He was consul in 485. Theodoric charged him with the restoration of the theatre of Pompey. He was father-in-law of Boetius (q.v.), and was involved in his fate, being disgraced and finally put to death by Theodoric in 525.
See E. Morin, Études sur Symmaque (1847); G. Boissier, La Fin du paganisme (1891), vol. ii.; T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century (1901); S. Dill, Roman Society in the last century of the Western Empire (1898); T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, (1880–1899) vol. hi. (on the Boetius “conspiracy”); M. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur (1904), vol. iv. pt. 1; and Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans., 1900), pp. 425, 477, 4. All editions of the works of Symmachus are now superseded by that of O. Seeck in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Auctores antiquissimi (1883), vi. 1, with introductions on his life, works and chronology, and a genealogical table of the family.
SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON (1840–1893), English critic and poet, was born at Bristol, on the 5th of October 1840. He was the only son of John Addington Symonds, M.D. (1807–1871), the author of an essay on Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams (2nd ed., 1857). His mother, Harriet Symonds, was the eldest daughter of James Sykes of Leatherhead. He was a delicate boy, and at Harrow, where he was entered in 1854, took no part in school games and showed no particular promise as a scholar. In 1858 he proceeded to Balliol as a commoner, but was elected to an exhibition in the following year. The Oxford training and association with the brilliant set of men then at Balliol called out the latent faculties in Symonds, and his university career was one of continual distinction. In 1860 he took a first in “Mods,” and won the Newdigate with a poem on The Escorial; in 1862 he was placed in the first class in Literae Humaniores, and in the following year was winner of the Chancellor’s English Essay. In 1862 he had been elected to an open fellowship at Magdalen. The strain of study unfortunately proved too great for him, and, immediately after his election to a fellowship, his health broke down, and he was obliged to seek rest in Switzerland. There he met Janet Catherine North, whom, after a romantic betrothal in the mountains, he married at Hastings on the 10th of November 1864. He then attempted to settle in London and study law, but his health again broke down and obliged him to travel. Returning to Clifton, he lectured there, both at the college and to ladies’ schools, and the fruits of his work in this direction remain in his Introduction to the Study of Dante (1872) and his admirably vivid Studies of the Greek Poets (1873–1876). Meanwhile he was occupied upon the work to which his talents and sympathies were especially attracted, his Renaissance in Italy, which appeared in seven volumes at intervals between 1875 and 1886. The Renaissance had been the subject of Symonds’ prize essay at Oxford, and the study which he had then given to the theme aroused in him a desire to produce something like a complete picture of the reawakening of art and literature in Europe. His work, however, was again interrupted by illness, and this time in a more serious form. In 1877 his life was in acute danger, and upon his removal to Davos Platz and subsequent recovery there it was felt that this was the only place where he was likely to be able to enjoy life. From that time onward he practically made his home at Davos, and a charming picture of his life there will be found in Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891). Symonds, indeed, became in no common sense a citizen of the town; he took part in its municipal business, made friends with the peasants, and shared their interests. There he wrote most of his books: biographies of Shelley (1878), Sir Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Jonson (1886), and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and of essays, and a fine translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887). There, too, he completed his study of the Renaissance, the work by which he will be longest remembered. He was assiduously, feverishly active throughout the whole of his life, and the amount of work which he achieved was wonderful when the uncertainty of his health is remembered. He had a passion for Italy, and for many years resided during the autumn in the house of his friend, Horatio F. Brown, on the Zattare, in Venice. He died at Rome on the 19th of April 1893, and was buried close to Shelley.
He left his papers and his autobiography in the hands of Mr Brown, who published in 1895 an excellent and comprehensive biography. Two works from his pen, a volume of essays, In the Key of Blue, and a monograph on Walt Whitman, were published in the year of his death. His activity was unbroken to the last. In life Symonds was morbidly introspective, a Hamlet among modern men of letters, but with a capacity for action which Hamlet was denied. Robert Louis Stevenson described him, in the Opalstein of Talks and Talkers, as “the best of talkers,
