Ausonius

AUSONIUS. - Decimus Magnus Ausonius, b. at Bordeaux ca. 310, after a thorough literary education, taught in his homeland for thirty years, first grammar and then rhetoric. Among his disciples was St. Paulinus of Nola. Between 364 and 368 the emperor Valentinian entrusted him with the education of his son Gratian; he was comes and quaestor sacri palatii, then, under Gratian, prefect of the Gauls and afterward of Italy, Illyricum and Africa, together with his son Hesperius, and held the consulate in 379. After Gratian was killed in 383, A. returned to Bordeaux, where he continued his poetic activity. He died after 393.

A.'s literary work generally consists of short compositions, for the most part in verse, gathered in groups, of which we may mention: about a hundred Epigrammata, some in Greek; 25 Epistulae, all in verse except one; Ephemeris, which in compositions of varying meter accompanies a young man through the different occupations of the day; Parentalia, a collection of epigrams on the poet's relatives; Commemoratio professorum Burdigalensium, portraits of notable historical interest; Cento nuptialis, an epithalamium stitched together entirely from Virgilian verses and hemistichs; Gratiarum actio dicta domino Gratiano Augusto for the consulate, in prose; Oratio consulis Ausonii versibus rhopalicis (verses that begin with a monosyllable and continue with words of 2, 3, 4, 5 syllables). The principal work is the short poem Mosella, in praise of the river that bathes Trier, then the imperial residence, in which A. displays his descriptive skill.

A. is a versifier skilled in the most subtle formal artifices, but empty of any religious, moral, or political idealism. His compositions, when they are not intended for the school as a mnemonic aid, are the exercises of a rhetorician, who does not shrink, particularly in the Cento nuptialis, from refined obscenities. A. was a Christian; it is conjectured that he became one at an advanced age, since it does not appear that he interrupted his teaching under Julian (361-63), who removed Christian teachers from the school. But in him, rare exception among the Christian writers of those times, the faith left very faint traces: the Oratio matutina, in 85 hexameters, inserted in the Ephemeris, an imitation of Paulinus of Nola, Carm. 4; the 31 hexameters of the Versus paschales, which are part of the epigrams; passages of the Gratiarum actio and of the Oratio in ropalic verses, and a few other allusions and hints. The letters written to Paulinus to induce him to abandon the ascetic life, which are among his most sincere works, demonstrate the inability of the eighty-year-old rhetorician to understand the ideal that had won over his disciple.

Michele Pellegrino