AUSONIUS. - Decimus Magnus Ausonius, born in Bordeaux around 310, after a thorough literary education, taught in his native city for thirty years, first grammar and then rhetoric. Among his pupils was St Paulinus of Nola.
Between 364 and 368 the emperor Valentinian entrusted him with the education of his son Gratian; he became comes and quaestor sacri palatii, then, under Gratian, prefect of the Gauls and later of Italy, Illyricum and Africa, together with his son Esperius, and held the consulship in 379. After Gratian was killed in 383, A. returned to Bordeaux, where he continued his poetic activity. He died after 393.
Ausonius' literary output generally consists of short compositions, mostly in verse, grouped together. Among them we may mention: about a hundred Epigrammata, some in Greek; 25 Epistulae, all in verse except one; the Ephemeris, which in various metres accompanies a young man through the different occupations of the day; the Parentalia, a collection of epigrams on the poet's relatives; the Commemoratio professorum Burdigalensium, sketches of considerable historical interest; the Cento nuptialis, a wedding poem entirely stitched together with Virgilian verses and half-verses; the Gratiarum actio dicta domino Gratiano Augusto for his consulship, in prose; and the Oratio consulis Ausonii versibus rhopalicis (verses that begin with a monosyllable and continue with words of 2, 3, 4, 5 syllables). His principal work is the short poem Mosella, in praise of the river that waters Trier, then an imperial residence, in which A. displays descriptive skill.
A. was a skilled versifier, adept at the most subtle formal artifices, but devoid of any religious, moral or political idealism. His compositions, when not intended for school use as mnemonic aids, are exercises of a rhetorician who does not shrink from complacent obscenities, particularly in the Cento nuptialis. A. was a Christian; it is conjectured that he became one in old age, since there is no evidence that he interrupted his teaching under Julian (361-63), who removed Christian teachers from the schools. Yet in him, rare among Christian writers of his time, the faith left very faint traces: the Oratio mattutina, in 85 hexameters, inserted in the Ephemeris, an imitation of Paulinus of Nola; the 31 hexameters of the Versus paschales, which form part of the epigrams; passages from the Gratiarum actio and the Oratio in rhopalic verse, and a few other hints and allusions. The letters written to Paulinus to persuade him to abandon the ascetic life, which are among his most sincere works, show the inability of the octogenarian rhetorician to understand the ideal that had won his pupil.