paths of virtue with a married lady in Bordeaux and left the place
rather hastily, but fortunately fell on his feet in Spain. There is
Victorius the usher, who liked only the most abstruse historical
problems, such as what the pedigree of the sacrificial priest at Cureo
was long before Numa's day, or what Castor had to say on all the shadowy
kings, and who never got up as far as Tully or Virgil, though he might
have done so if he had gone on reading long enough, but death cut him
off too soon. They seem oddly familiar figures (except of course,
Dynamius) and their chronicler contrives to make them live.

Such is the world depicted for us by Ausonius. But while this pleasant
country house and senior common room life was going calmly on, what do
we find happening in the history books? Ausonius was a man of nearly
fifty when the Germans swarmed across the Rhine in 357, pillaging
forty-five flourishing cities, and pitching their camps on the banks of
the Moselle. He had seen the great Julian take up arms ('O Plato, Plato,
what a task for a philosopher') and in a series of brilliant campaigns
drive them out again. Ten years later when he was tutor to Gratian he
had himself accompanied the emperor Valentinian on another campaign
against the same foes. While he was preening himself on his consulship
ten years later still, he must have heard of the disastrous battle of
Adrianople in the east, when the Goths defeated a Roman army and slew an
emperor. He died in 395 and within twelve years of his death the host of
Germans had burst across the Rhine, 'all Gaul was a smoking funeral
pyre', and the Goths were at the gates of Rome. And what have Ausonius
and his correspondents to say about this? Not a word. Ausonius and
Symmachus and their set ignore the barbarians as completely as the
novels of Jane Austen ignore the Napoleonic wars.

3. SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS