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He insisted, however, and he certainly believed, that he was advancing the interests of science; nor could any argument turn him. We wish we could say that it was chiefly for their beauties that he now set himself to translate Catullus, Ausonius, and Apuleius.
In that culture and in that social order much of what Ausonius and Sidonius and even Fortunatus represented was brought to life again, albeit in a form they would not always have recognized as their own. To this extent, at least, they were not only the epigones of Rome but the true precursors of the Middle Ages.
Though in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Salmacis's being in Love with Hermaphroditus, and not succeeding in her amorous Wishes, her praying to the Gods to join their Bodies in one, has no Weight in it; yet, that the Notions of Hermaphrodites are not entirely fictitious, I need only mention the Servant of Montuus, who took his Hermaphrodite to be a Male when he lay with his Maids, and for a Female when she lay with her Husband to propagate their Species, the two Hermaphrodites of Licetus, and the Story of Ausonius, which he relates of an Hermaphrodite of Bonavento in Italy; and Histories are full of Confirmations, that many Persons in the World have had the privy Parts of both Sexes.
Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his class: a placid, cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.
He travelled all over the Frankish lands, in what had been Germania as well as in what had been Gaul. From Trier to Toulouse he made his way with ease by river and by road, and it might be Ausonius again. Fortunatus too writes a poem on the Moselle; and there is the same smiling countryside with terraced vineyards sloping down to the quiet stream and the smoke of villas rising from the woods.
The new Christian spirit arose with Paulinus, disciple of Ausonius; Juvencus, who paraphrases the gospels in verse; Victorinus, author of the Maccabees; Sanctus Burdigalensis who, in an eclogue imitated from Vergil, makes his shepherds Egon and Buculus lament the maladies of their flock; and all the saints: Hilaire of Poitiers, defender of the Nicean faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has been called; Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homelies, the wearisome Christian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the monastic vows and celibacy of the priests.
For what she did, as it were by necessity and her blind inhering power, he knew. Therefore he must have been Wisdom itself. And thus I knew that he could not be Dionysus the Saviour, though he might have many of his attributes; nor simply that son of Venus whom Ausonius alone of our poets saw fastened to a cross. So at last, "I will tell you," said I, "who this god really is, as it seems to me.
The big country houses go on having their luncheon and tennis parties, the little professors in the universities go on giving their lectures and writing their books; games are increasingly popular and the theatres are always full. Ausonius has seen the Germans overrun Gaul once, but he never speaks of a danger that may recur.
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