This is the fourth instalment in a series of articles by Classics Ambassador Ffion Shute introducing lesser-known Roman authors. The series covers forgotten gems ranging from history to architecture to military tactics, whose authors deserve to be more widely known. Strictly no Livy or Tacitus here: these articles will help you to know your Frontinus from your Fronto! This time, Ffion takes a step out of her expert area to cover…

Ausonius

Decimus Magnus Ausonius lived much later than the other authors covered so far in this series. He was born in Burdigala (Bordeaux) in around 310 CE, during the reign of Constantine I. We are privileged to know a lot about him, mainly from his own writings. He was given the finest tuition that the Roman Empire could provide outside Italy, studying under several esteemed rhetoricians in both Bordeaux and Toulouse. His studies sparked his interests in grammar and the theory of oratory, which led him on to a thirty-year career as a rhetor (professor), making a name for himself in his native province.

According to Ausonius’ brief memoir, he was “summoned to the golden imperial palace” in middle age to teach Gratian, the son and heir of the emperor Valentinian I. Using his newfound political leverage as a member of the court, Ausonius climbed the ranks to attain the office of consul in 379. However, this unexpectedly illustrious career came to an abrupt end in 383, when the rebel Maximus had Gratian assassinated and took control of the state. Ausonius, though saddened at the death of his former pupil, considered himself too old to involve himself in such political intrigue and retired back to his hometown to write poetry.

Left: Gratian, emperor of the Western Roman Empire 375-383. His father
wasted no time with his education and gave him his first military command at
the tender age of eight. Right: Magnus Maximus, usurper and emperor 383-388.
His reign was eventually ended by Valentinian II, Gratian’s half-brother.

Works

Ausonius wrote a very large number of short works in Latin. Many of them depict scenes of everyday life, including Totius Diei Negotium (Doings of a Whole Day), in which he describes his daily routine. He starts the day by waking up with a hangover, before offering a lengthy and not terribly sincere prayer to God (Christianity had been the Empire’s official religion only since 313) and sending his slave to invite his friends over for dinner. He says that five guests plus one host is “the number I recommend for a meal… if there are more, it is chaos”. He then orders the cook to prepare the meal, urging him to “dip your fingers in the hot gravy and lick them with your salivating tongue”.

Most of the rest of the work is missing, but the last section contains a vivid description of having terrifying nightmares after eating a heavy meal. In them, Ausonius is subjected to visions of “men on horses cutting down criminals” while he himself is mauled by wild beasts and is “butchered with a sword”. Was Ausonius perhaps suffering from PTSD as a result of Maximus’ violent uprising? Doings of a Whole Day’s genre as lyric poetry seems ill suited to its mundane and then dark and violent subject matter. Though curious, this mix presents an interesting perspective on the empire’s early Christian era: a view of idyllic everyday life, yet with an unsettling background fear that violence could re-erupt at any moment.

Ausonius’ other notable works include the Parentalia, a collection of touching poems addressed to deceased family members. Longevity seemed to run in his family, as the poem addressed to his father specifies that he lived to see “twice eleven Olympiads” (i.e. to 88 years of age). One section describes his sister-in-law as a “cheerful” woman who “managed her own property”, while another commemorates his twin uncles who were unfortunately “badly matched in their fated lifespans”. A particularly poignant section mourns the loss of his own infant son, who died just as he was “forming comprehensible words”. These poems are raw depictions of bereavement and grief that were not usually presented in such personal terms in the Roman era. Ausonius is striking in his decision to lay bare his pain and vulnerability in a way that reaches out across the ages to touch us even now.

Ausonius’ longest and most ambitious poem is considerably more light-hearted: The Moselle is an almost 500-line description of the journey down the River Moselle, a tributary of the Rhine that spans modern France, Germany and Luxembourg. He uses skilful lyricism to paint a picture of the natural world along the river, describing the local wildlife, the sunsets and the beauty of the water itself. The first part is largely addressed to the various breeds of fish found in the river – “O red-bodied salmon… with ample belly fat” – while the later parts are addressed to nymphs and personifications of tributaries, giving the whole poem a distinctly pagan character. All this poetic description of the countryside was not an innovation: a common theme of earlier Roman poetry was bucolic scenery, for example in Horace’s second Epode or Virgil’s Georgics. However, The Moselle differs from these in its bare appreciation of natural beauty and descriptions of human harmony with the land. While Horace and Virgil paint a deliberately idealistic picture of agriculture and harmony in contrast to the disintegration of the Roman Republic, Ausonius sits back and invites the reader simply to appreciate the natural bounty of the river, with particular regard to its gastronomic offerings: you can almost taste the fish! The quality of the poem was appreciated to such an extent that one of the roads along the Moselle was named the Via Ausonia, which has now been incorporated into a modern hiking trail for us to retrace his steps along the majestic river in the present day.

The Moselle River. Almost nothing has changed since Ausonius’
day: it is still known for its hiking trail, its wine regions and its fish! The poet
would have been pleased to know that there is now a dedicated fish museum.

Ausonius wrote a host of other, smaller works. He converted Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars into pleasant verse that is rather jarringly juxtaposed with its violent subject matter, as well as writing a series of four-line verses for each emperor up to his own day, including one where he calls Elagabalus “a foul and treacherous monster”. A curious letter in verse is titled Cupid Crucified, which attempts to interpret a famous painting at Trier that depicted Cupid being nailed to a cross by people whose lives he had destroyed. A compilation of miscellaneous letters and poems in the form of Epistles and Epigrams have also survived, along with his translations of ancient poems about heroes of the Trojan War, which he rendered from their original Greek into Latin “not slavishly… but paraphrasing freely without missing the point”, a well-stated solution to the dilemma we inevitably share today when translating any work.

A particularly striking piece is a section of the Epistles in which Ausonius attacks a British critic of his poetry named Silvius, repeatedly writing two short lines containing some variation of the same syllogism, including:

“This is Silvius ‘the Good’. Who is Silvius? He is a Briton.

Either this Briton is not Silvius, or he is ‘the Bad’.”

“Ah, Silvius, the good Briton! Yet you could not be described

as a good man, nor do ‘Brit’ and ‘good’ belong together.”

It is difficult to tell whether he meant to write so many verses expressing the same sentiment as a result of his fury, or whether these are a series of drafts, roughly jotted down to try and find the most biting way of insulting his critic. Whichever is the case, they seem as if they may come from a commonplace prejudice towards Britons.

Reception

Although Ausonius was showered with praise and honours in his own time, his style has since been condemned as derivative. Edward Gibbon, in a footnote in his Decline and Fall, scathingly dismissed him, saying that “the poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age”. In daring to favour descriptions of everyday life and personal addresses to close friends and family over highbrow treatises, epic or satire, Ausonius condemned himself to the scorn of eighteenth-century scholarship, which possibly says more about Gibbon that it does about Ausonius. Even by the time of the 1921 Loeb translation by the Oxford scholar Hugh Evelyn White, he was not considered a great writer. White attacks him in his introduction at every turn: he says that “from first to last his verse is barren of ideas” and accuses him of being “insensible… to sentiment and unappreciative of the human sympathy which should pervade true poetry”. For all his dismissal of Ausonius, White translated his surviving works in their entirety, with the notable exception of some lewd verses in the Epigrams, which were published only in Latin.

A 17th century monument to Ausonius in the Piazza Mercanti
in Milan.

It is certainly true to say that some of Ausonius’ works are derivative – a reader of Ovid’s more obscure works may find Ausonius’ Eclogues (X-XVIII; XXIII) familiar: they follow the same pattern as Ovid’s Fasti, going through the months of the lunar calendar and identifying important dates and their significance, including the influence of particular deities and their religious festivals. While Ausonius’ version is pleasantly lyrical and mildly entertaining, it does rather lack Ovid’s creative flair. However, Ausonius himself seems to recognise his inferiority to ‘serious’ writers, addressing the reader in his Bissula poem collection:

“Whoever wishes to read this little book of unperfected poems,

don’t look so haughty…

I am giving you a fair warning: drink before you read.”

Regardless of the quality of the poetry, Ausonius’ works are well suited to twenty-first century appreciation, as they present so much insight into provincial life and culture at the time. I personally have found it entertaining and often touching, and it stands in contrast to the issues traditionally attributed to the era: the division of the empire, the political focus on Constantinople and religious controversy. Although Ausonius was nominally Christian, most of his literary output has a distinct pagan flavour, with recurring themes of nature, magic, traditional anecdotes and ancestor worship. These elements, drawn from earlier Roman poetry, are combined inextricably with references, prayers and thanksgiving to the Christian God, whose worship was just coming to be standardised during the 4^th century. This harmonious co-existence of tradition and official religion in Ausonius’ poetry is a testament to the lives of ordinary people of the period, who were beginning to accept the empire’s new religious doctrine at the same time as being shaped by and indeed honouring the deep-rooted pagan traditions of the past.

The works of Ausonius are a pleasant antidote to the serious religious and political concerns of the 4^th century, but exploring his works more thoroughly is completely optional! If you find yourself intrigued enough, his complete works are available across two Loeb volumes.