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It's a foolish story, but very widely believed. There is something of the sort in Celtic folk-lore, and there's a reference to it in Ausonius. Also the bandits in the Bakhtiari have a version of it in a very excellent ballad." "Kings of Orion," said Thirlstone musingly. "I like that idea. Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice.
At various times after the publication of the Thebaid appeared the five books of Silvae, miscellaneous and occasional poems on different subjects, often of a personal nature. Another epic, on the campaign of Domitian in Germany, has not been preserved. The Thebaid became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian, constantly imitate it.
In the fourth century of our era Ausonius referred to it as "Rome beyond the Alps," and the extent and variety of the Roman remains would seem to justify the epithet.
Moreover, Ausonius, Sidonius, Appollinaris, and Fortunatus, who are so eager to glorify their own land, maintain a similar silence with regard to these structures. Sulpicius, Severus, and Gregory of Tours, old chroniclers of French history, also pass them over without a word.
In this poem, alike by the classic beauty of his language and the modernism of his feeling, Ausonius marks one of the great divisions in the history of poetry. He is the last of the poets of the Empire which was still nominally co-extensive with the world, which held in itself East and West, the old and the new.
Enough for our purpose to remark that even some Christian writers, of the age immediately succeeding that of the early martyrs, showed themselves more than half pagans in their tastes and productions. Ausonius in the West, the preceptor of St. Paulinus, is so obscene in some of his poems, so thoroughly pagan in others, that critics have for a long time hesitated to pronounce him a Christian.
But Rome ended by conquering, by means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and Augusta Trevirorum, though claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old council-house now called the Red House and used as a hotel became, as Ausonius condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens, temples, theatres and all that went to make up an imperial capital.
As DECIUS AUSONIUS Gallus, in libris Fastorum, penned the occurrences of the world from the first creation of it to this time; that is, to the reign of the Emperor GRATIAN: so WARNER, in his absolute Albion's England, hath most admirably penned the history of his own country from NOAH to his time, that is, to the reign of Queen ELIZABETH. I have heard him termed of the best wits of both our Universities, our English HOMER.
They filled the dying Empire with their cries; the Christian Ausonius with his Centon Nuptial, and his exuberant, embellished Mosella; Rutilius, with his hymns to the glory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks, his journey from Italy into Gaul and the impressions recorded along the way, the intervals of landscape reflected in the water, the mirage of vapors and the movement of mists that enveloped the mountains.
But the first result of the alliance between the Empire and the Church was to give added dignity to the latter and renewed energy to the former. The partial revival of letters in the fourth century may induce us to extend our survey so far as to include Ausonius and Claudian as legitimate, though remote, successors of the Augustan poets.
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