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Medieval People by Eileen Edna Power
page 14 of 295 (04%)
fifth Sidonius Apollinarius, in the sixth Gregory of Tours and
Fortunatus, a stranger from Italy, who made his home in Poitiers. They
show us Auvergne and the Bordelais in the evening light. The fourth, the
fifth, and the sixth centuries--going, going, gone!

2. AUSONIUS

Going! This is the world of Ausonius, south-western France in the latter
half of the fourth century, 'an Indian summer between ages of storm and
wreckage'. Ausonius himself is a scholar and a gentleman, the friend
alike of the pagan Symmachus and of St Paulinus of Nela. He is for
thirty years professor of rhetoric in the university of Bordeaux, for
some time tutor to a prince, praetorian prefect of Gaul, consul, and in
his last years just an old man contentedly living on his estates. His
most famous poem is a description of the Moselle, which for all its
literary affectations evokes most magically the smiling countryside
which was the background of his life. High above the river on either
bank stand the villas and country houses, with their courts and lawns
and pillared porticos, and the hot baths from which, if you will, you
can plunge into the stream. The sunny hillside is covered with vines,
and from slope to hill-top the husbandmen call to each other and the
wayfarer on the towpath or the bargemen floating by, shout their rude
jests to the loitering vinedressers. Far out in midstream the fisherman
trails his dripping net and on a rock by the shore the angler plies his
rod. And, as twilight falls, the deepening shadow of the green hillside
is reflected in the water and gazing downward the boatman can almost
count the trembling vines and almost see the swelling of the grapes.

Equally peaceful, equally pleasant is life on Ausonius' own estate in
the Bordelais, his little patrimony (he calls it) although he had a
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