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At this period, there can be no doubt, the surrounding plain was in the highest state of cultivation, whilst its prolific rose-gardens—biferi rosaria Paesti—have supplied the theme of every Roman poet from Vergil to Ausonius. Yet in spite of its apparent prosperity, the seeds of coming decline had already been sown.
Such amongst the Romans is the famous Cento of Ausonius, where the words are Virgil's, but by applying them to another sense they are made a relation of a wedding-night, and the act of consummation fulsomely described in the very words of the most modest amongst all poets.
We cannot say what date marked the moment of final recovery, or who were the men who were to represent advancing civilization as fully as Ausonius or Gregory of Tours represented civilization in retreat: Dante, Shakespeare, Capernicus, Newton?
His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poetasters.
They rediscovered together the Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so child-like, superstitious if you will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from the fish called Picarel called Garon by the fishers of Antibes, and Giroli at Venice, both these last names corruptions of the Latin Gerres then did the two fashionable poets of France, Etienne Dolet and Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their muse to sing the praises of the sauce which Horace had sung of old.
Ended the quiet otium cum dignitate of the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius.
His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations, happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poetasters.
But Rome ended by conquering, by means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and Augusta Trevirorum, tho 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, theaters and all that went to make up an imperial capital.
It is not easy to trace any direct influence, unless, as perhaps we should, we credit to Calpurnius the suggestion of those poems in which a 'wise' shepherd describes to his less-travelled hearers the manners of the town. A few pieces from the Idyllia of Ausonius appear in some of the bucolic collections, but they cannot strictly be regarded as coming within the range of pastoral poetry.
At Rome, the dying paganism had modified its prosody and transmuted its language with Ausonius, with Claudian and Rutilius whose attentive, scrupulous, sonorous and powerful style presented, in its descriptive parts especially, reflections, hints and nuances bearing an affinity with the style of de Goncourt. At Paris, a fact unique in literary history had been consummated.
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