Rachel C. Morrison (UCLA)
ubique praesentem mihi: Long-Distance Amicitia and Physical Presence in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola
This paper explicates two competing visions of friendship in the fourth-century correspondence of Paulinus of Nola. In his tense verse letters to his former teacher Ausonius of Bordeaux, Paulinus downplays both the importance of physical presence and the exclusivity of their bond. Scholars have sometimes interpreted this exchange as suggesting that Ausonius holds to an older, classical notion of amicitia based on repetition and togetherness, while Paulinus heralds the arrival of a more generalized, less exclusive, and less embodied Christian version of friendship (Konstan 1996, Conybeare 2000). I read their exchange alongside a letter to Sulpicius Severus to show that, in a late antique world on the cusp of transformation, two different views on long-distance amicitia could coexist—even within the same person.
Amicitia is a broad category, and it must be to accommodate Ausonius and Paulinus, two men who met as teacher and student, who often metaphorize their relationship as one between a father and son, and who write of their intense longing for each other in terms that have earned them a place in the history of homoerotic love letters (Norton 1998, Knight 2005). Written in elegiac couplets, iambic distichs, and hexameters, the letters express longing, affection, and disappointment through layers of reverberant classical intertext: Ausonius ends one letter with a line from Eclogue 8, while Paulinus calls classical literature empty (vanis, 3.33) even as he sprinkles in allusions to Horace, Terence, and Ovid (Hardie 2019). When Ausonius imagines a reunion, he anticipates Paulinus showing up on his doorstep, teasingly outlining each movement Paulinus would need to take in order to return to him while adding iam or iam iam every step of the way in order to foreground the urgency of the travel and reunion happening right now. Whereas Ausonius imagines a future corporeal, here-and-now encounter, however, Paulinus assures Ausonius that he will be ubique praesentem mihi, “everywhere present to me,” as his body wastes away and after he dies—even if the two never see each other again or continue their correspondence.
It would not be entirely correct, however, to conclude that these letters represent Paulinus’s only philosophy of friendship. In a (prose) letter to Sulpicius Severus, Paulinus craves physical togetherness in the here and now, urging his friend, “Come to me and if you can, hurry” (veni ad nos et si potes, advola). Here he longs for the other man’s presence so much that he lingers on descriptions of the physicality of both the letter itself (characterizing it as a piece of Severus’s latus) and the letter-carriers (whose eyes and mouths serve as proxies for Severus’s body parts).
From these two case studies, we can see how theories of amicitia break down in the face of the particularity of individual relationships. In both cases, Paulinus believes that long-distance bonds can be emotionally significant, but only with Severus does he long for physical reunion. Comparing the two can help us better understand the complexity of friendship and desire at the intersection of the classical and Christian worlds.