Ausonius

AUSONIO. — 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. Paolino

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 subsequently of Italy, Illyricum, and Africa, together with his son Hesperius, and he 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.

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

A. is a versifier expert in the subtlest formal artifices, but devoid of every religious, moral, and political ideal. His compositions, when not intended for the school as mnemonic aids, are exercises by a rhetorician who does not shrink, particularly in the Cento nuptialis, from polished obscenities. A. was a Christian; it is conjectured that he became one at an advanced age, since there is no evidence that he interrupted his teaching under Julian (361–63), who excluded Christian teachers from the schools. But in him, rare

(from Durrenberg and Saglia, Urtiana, des antiquités grecques et romaines)
AUSPICIO - Cage with the sacred chickens used for the auspices.

An exception among the Christian writers of those times, faith left only the faintest traces in him: the Oratio matutina, in 85 hexameters, included in the Ephemeris, an imitation of Paulinus of Nola, Carm. 4; the 31 hexameters of the Versus paschales, which form part of the epigrams; passages from the Gratiarum actio and from the Oratio in rhopalic verses, and a few other allusions and hints. The letters written to Paulinus to persuade him to abandon the ascetic life, which are among his most sincere writings, demonstrate the inability of the eighty-year-old rhetorician to understand the ideal that had won over his disciple.