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For the kinsmen, it may be the very sons, of those Franks were now in Gratian's pay; and the Frank Merobaudes was his "Count of the Domestics," and one of his most successful and trusted generals; and all seemed to go well, and brute force and craft to triumph on the earth.
Romans and Franks, heathens and Christians, alike were there: Merobaudes, the Gallic general; Claudian, the poet from Egypt, the worshipper of Stilicho, in verses almost worthy of Virgil; Sidonius Apollinaris, the future bishop of Clermont, who panegyrised three emperors successively deposed and murdered.
For little thought Gratian, as he sat in that amphitheatre, that the day was coming when he, the hunter of game and of heretics would be hunted in his turn; when, deserted by his army, betrayed by Merobaudes whose elder kinsfolk were not likely to have kept him ignorant of "the Frankish sports " he should flee pitiably towards Italy, and die by a German hand; some say near Lyons, some say near Belgrade, calling on Ambrose with his latest breath.
After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the panegyrist; Sedulius, author of the rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of which the Church has appropriated for its services; Marius Victorius, whose gloomy treatise on the Pervesity of the Times is illumed, here and there, with verses that gleam with phosphorescence; Paulinus of Pella, poet of the shivering Eucharisticon; and Orientius, bishop of Auch, who, in the distichs of his Monitories, inveighs against the licentiousness of women whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people.
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