Ausonius
Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, declared that "the poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age." The target of that jab was Decimus Magnus Ausonius, a Roman poet and teacher of rhetoric from Burdigala, the city now called Bordeaux in France.
Yet the age Gibbon scorned had admired the man, and few schoolmasters in any era have climbed as high as this one did. How does a teacher from Aquitaine end up standing beside emperors? Why do historians of technology and of wine keep returning to a poet whom critics wave away? And what became of such a man when the world he had risen in began to shift beneath him?
Two women named Aemilia, his aunt and his grandmother, raised Ausonius with a firm hand. He was born around the year 310 in Burdigala. His father, Julius Ausonius, was a physician of Greek ancestry. His mother, Aemilia Aeonia, was the daughter of Caecilius Argicius Arborius. Both sides of the family belonged to established, land-owning Gallo-Roman houses of southwestern Gaul.
Toulouse offered the next stage of his schooling, and it came with a family connection. His maternal uncle, Aemilius Magnus Arborius, was a professor there. Ausonius did well in grammar and rhetoric, but he admitted that his progress in Greek was unsatisfactory. In 328 the empire called Arborius away to Constantinople, to tutor Constans, the youngest son of Constantine the Great. Ausonius went back to Bordeaux and finished his education under the rhetorician Minervius Alcimus.
Death touched the household early. A sister named Aemilia Melania died in infancy, and a younger brother, Avitianus, died before reaching puberty. Another sister, Dryadia, lived to the age of 60. Ausonius would eventually mourn Avitianus in verse, in a collection called the Parentalia.
Law was Ausonius's first professional training. After finishing his studies he prepared for some time as an advocate, but the classroom pulled harder than the courtroom.
In 334 he became a grammaticus, an instructor, at a school of rhetoric in Bordeaux. He later rose to the rank of rhetor, or professor. The work lasted thirty years, and his teaching drew many pupils. Some of them went on to eminent careers in public life.
The most famous of them was the poet Paulinus. Paulinus later became a Christian and ended his days as Bishop of Nola.
Emperor Valentinian I wanted the best teacher for his son Gratian, the heir-apparent, and he summoned Ausonius to the task. When Valentinian took the boy on the German campaigns of 368-369, Ausonius went along. The emperor rewarded his services with the rank of quaestor. Ausonius had turned literary skill into political capital.
Court life put influential people within reach. In 369 he met Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, and the friendship proved useful to both men.
Gratian came to like and respect his old tutor. When he became emperor in 375, he began heaping the highest civil honors on Ausonius and his family. That same year Ausonius became Praetorian Prefect of Gaul. He campaigned against the Alemanni and took a slave girl named Bissula as part of his booty. He later addressed a poem to her. His father, though nearly ninety years old, was given the rank of prefect of Illyricum.
In 376 his son Hesperius was made proconsul of Africa. Then in 379 Ausonius himself received the consulate, the highest Roman honour. He marked it at Treves that year with a prose speech of thanks to Gratian.
At Lyons in 383, soldiers loyal to Magnus Maximus, whose army of Britain had revolted, assassinated Gratian. Emperor Valentinian II was driven out of Italy. Ausonius withdrew to his estates near Burdigala.
In 388 the emperor Theodosius I overthrew Magnus Maximus, but Ausonius did not leave the countryside. He called his estates his nidus senectutis, the "nest of his old age." There he spent his remaining years composing poetry and writing to eminent contemporaries, several of whom had once been his pupils. The land now owned by Château Ausone is supposed to have been part of those estates, and the wine estate takes its name from him.
Ausonius appears to have come late to Christianity. He died about 395.
His grandson, Paulinus of Pella, was also a poet. The grandson's writings bear witness to the devastation that Gaul would suffer soon after the old man's death.
About 120 epigrams on assorted subjects make up one of the collections Ausonius left behind, and they show how wide his interests ran. Twenty pieces sit together under the arbitrary title Idyllia. The most famous of them is the Mosella, a description of the River Moselle.
His most personal work looked at the shape of an ordinary day and at the dead. The Ephemeris follows the occupations of a day from morning to evening, in various meters. He composed it before 367, and only its beginning and its end survive. The Parentalia holds 30 poems of varying length on deceased relatives, mostly in elegiac meter. He wrote them after his consulate, when he had already been a widower for 36 years. A sequel, the Commemoratio professorum Burdigalensium, turns to the famous teachers of Bordeaux whom he had known.
His learned side ranged further still. The Epitaphia gathers 26 epitaphs for heroes of the Trojan War, translated from Greek. The Caesares treats the 12 emperors described by Suetonius. After Maximus fell in 388 he wrote the Ordo urbium nobilium, 14 pieces in hexameters on 17 towns, running from Rome to Bordeaux. The Ludus VII Sapientium is a kind of puppet play in which the seven wise men step forward one after another to have their say. There are also 25 verse letters and a book of astronomical and astrological verse.
An imperial commission produced his Cento Nuptialis, a wedding poem built on the trope of love as war. He wrote it as a cento, assembled entirely from lines and half-lines of Vergil. A prose summary of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey is attributed to him but probably is not his. His prefaces to various collections include a reply to a request from the emperor Theodosius I for copies of his poems.
Bordeaux is famous wine country today, and Ausonius supplies some of the earliest evidence of how old that reputation may be. Historians frequently cite his references to winemaking as early evidence of large-scale viticulture around his native city.
He may also have added to the carpe diem tradition of urging the reader to seize the day, although the attribution of that poem to him is uncertain.
His contemporaries admired his writing. Later readers have not placed it among the finest of Latin literature. The style is easy and fluent, and the Mosella is valued for how well it evokes the life and landscape along the Moselle. Even so, critics regard him as derivative and unoriginal.
One more passage in that river poem matters to people who study machines, and it concerns a tributary of the Moselle.
"Renowned is Celbis for glorious fish, and that other, as he turns his mill-stones in furious revolutions and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble, hears from either bank a ceaseless din." With that passing image, Ausonius described a water mill cutting stone.
References of this kind are rare in Roman literature. They show water power serving more than one purpose. Vitruvius had written about the widespread use of mills in De Architectura around 25 BC, and Pliny the Elder did so in his Naturalis Historia, published in 77 AD. In the 1st century AD, builders at Barbegal in southern France set up 16 mills in a parallel sequence on a hill near Arles, and those ground grain into flour.
A sawmill is mechanically simpler than a grinding mill. No gearing is needed, because the saw blade can be driven straight from the axle of the water wheel, as at Sutter's Mill in California.
At Hieropolis in Asia Minor, a different design used a frame saw worked by a crank and connecting rod. Mills of these kinds would multiply after the fall of the empire, through the Middle Ages and into the modern era.
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Common questions
Who was Ausonius?
Decimus Magnus Ausonius was a Roman poet and teacher of rhetoric from Burdigala, now Bordeaux in France. He tutored the future emperor Gratian and was later awarded the consulate.
What are Ausonius's best-known poems?
The Mosella, a description of the River Moselle, and the Ephemeris, an account of the occupations of a day from morning to evening, are his best known. Only the beginning and the end of the Ephemeris survive.
When did Ausonius become consul?
He received the consulate in 379, the highest Roman honour. He thanked the emperor Gratian with a prose speech delivered at Treves that year.
Why do historians value Ausonius beyond his poetry?
His references to winemaking are cited as early evidence of large-scale viticulture around Bordeaux. His mention of a water mill sawing marble also sheds light on Roman use of water power.
What happened to Ausonius after Gratian was killed?
After Gratian was assassinated in 383, Ausonius retired to his estates near Bordeaux. He stayed there even after Theodosius I overthrew Magnus Maximus in 388, and he died about 395.
Was Ausonius a Christian?
He appears to have been a late convert to Christianity. His most famous pupil, Paulinus, later became a Christian and Bishop of Nola.
All sources
11 references cited across the entry
- 1Olli Salomies, "The Nomenclature of the Poet Ausonius", Arctos 50 (2016), pp. 133–142
- 2Harvard Magazine, Harvard Alumni Association, University of Michigan, p.2
- 3The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Edward John Kenney, Cambridge University Press, p.16
- 4BookMediterranean Families in Antiquity: Households, Extended Families, and Domestic SpaceGeoffrey Nathan — Wiley — 2016
- 5BookPaulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and PoemsDennis E. Trout — University of California Press — 1999
- 8Note 1 to chapter XXVII
- 9translated as A Nuptial Cento by H.G. Evelyn-White for Loeb Classical Library
- 11A Relief of a Water-powered Stone Saw Mill on a Sarcophagus at Hierapolis and its ImplicationsTullia Ritti et al. — 2007