United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Pliny's description of the Clitumnus may be interestingly compared with the passage of this poem in which Ausonius recounts, with fine and observant touches, the beauties of his northern river the liquid lapse of waters, the green wavering reflections, the belt of crisp sand by the water's edge and the long weeds swaying with the stream, the gleaming gravel-beds under the water with their patches of moss and the quick fishes darting hither and thither over them; or the oftener-quoted and not less beautiful lines where he breaks into rapture over the sunset colouring of stream and bank, and the glassy water where, at evening, all the hills waver and the vine-tendril shakes and the grape-bunches swell in the crystal mirror.
See ante, ii. 227. 'Fortunam reverenter habe, quicumque repente Dives ab exili progrediere loco. Ausonius, Epigrammata, viii. 7. A lively account of Quin is given in Humphry Clinker, in the letters of April 30 and May 6. See ante, i. 216. A few days earlier Garrick wrote to a friend: 'I did not hear till last night that your friends have generously contributed to your and their own happiness.
So great was the enthusiasm on both sides, that lectures often lasted for hours. Aleander, when he returned from Orleans to Paris in 1511, kept quiet for a month, in order to awaken public interest. Then he announced a course of lectures on Ausonius, to begin on 30 July. His device was entirely successful.
Between the writers of the fourth century and their few successors of the fifth there is no marked change in language or manner. Sidonius Apollinaris continues more feebly the style of poetry initiated a century before him by Ausonius. Boethius wrote his fine treatise On the Consolation of Philosophy half a century after the extinction of the Empire of the West.
He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales. He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the catalogue of a small library.
We saw that while the great flow of the cycles from dying Rome ran in wave after wave eastward, there was a little backwash also, by reason of which almost the last glow we saw in the west was in fourth century Gaul, in the literary renaissance there which centers round the name of Ausonius.
And how were they living? We have only to read the letters written by Sidonius during the period between 460 and 470, when he was living on his estate in Auvergne, to realize that on the surface all is going on exactly as before. Gaul is shrunk, it is true, to a mere remnant between three barbarian kingdoms, but save for that we might be back in the days of Ausonius.
He saw the terrible German king-maker Ricimer throne and unthrone a series of puppet emperors, he saw the last remnant of Gallic independence thrown away and himself become a barbarian subject, and he saw a few years before he died the fall of the empire in the west. They cannot, Sidonius and his friends, ignore as Ausonius and his friends did, that something is happening to the empire.
In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts furthest from German invasion. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet.
Such is the world depicted for us by Ausonius. But while this pleasant country house and senior common room life was going calmly on, what do we find happening in the history books? Ausonius was a man of nearly fifty when the Germans swarmed across the Rhine in 357, pillaging forty-five flourishing cities, and pitching their camps on the banks of the Moselle.
Word Of The Day