His poems pleased his time by their tender sentiment, their rural pictures, the purity of their Latin, the almost Virgilian smoothness of their verse. Paulinus, the future saint, compared his prose with Cicero’s, and Symmachus could not find in Virgil anything lovelier than Ausonius’ Mosella. The poet had grown fond of that river while with Gratian at Trier; he describes it as running through a very Eden of vineyards, orchards, villas, and prospering farms; for a time he makes us feel the verdure of its banks and the music of its flow; then, with all-embracing bathos, he indites a litany to the amiable fish to be found in the stream. This Whitmanesque passion for cataloguing relatives, teachers, pupils, fish is not redeemed by Whitman’s omnivorous feeling and lusty philosophy; Ausonius, after thirty years of grammar, could hardly burn with more than literary passions. His poems are rosaries of friendship, litanies of praise; but those of us who have not known such alluring uncles or seductive professors are rarely exalted by these doxologies.
When Valentinian I died (375), Gratian, now Emperor, called his old tutor to him, and showered him and his with political plums. In quick succession Ausonius was prefect of Illyricum, Italy, Africa, Gaul; finally, at sixty-nine, consul. At his urging, Gratian decreed state aid for education, for poets and physicians, and for the protection of ancient art. Through his influence Symmachus was made prefect of Rome, and Paulinus a provincial governor. Ausonius mourned when Paulinus became a saint; the Empire, threatened everywhere, needed such men. Ausonius too was a Christian, but not too seriously; his tastes, subjects, meters, and mythology were blithely pagan.
At seventy the old poet returned to Bordeaux, to live another twenty years. He was now a grandfather, and could match the filial poems of his youth with the grandparental fondness of age. “Be not afraid,” he counsels his grandson, “though the school resound with many a stroke, and the old master wears a scowling face; let no outcry, or sound of stripes, make you quake as the morning hours move on. That he brandishes the cane for a scepter, that he has a full outfit of birches … is but the outward show to cause idle fears. Your father and mother went through all this in their day, and have lived to soothe my peaceful and serene old age.”28 Fortunate Ausonius, to have lived and died before the barbarian flood!
Apollinaris Sidonius was to Gallic prose in the fifth century what Ausonius had been to Gallic poetry in the fourth. He burst upon the world at Lyons (432), where his father was prefect of Gaul. His grandfather had filled the same office, and his mother was a relative of that Avitus who would become emperor in 455, and whose daughter Sidonius would marry in 452. It would have been difficult to improve upon these arrangements. Papianilla brought him as dowry a luxurious villa near Clermont. His life for some years was a round of visits to and from his aristocratic friends. They were people of culture and refinement, with a flair for gambling and idleness;29 they lived in their country houses, and seldom soiled their hands with politics; they were quite incapable of protecting their luxurious ease against the invading Goths. They did not care for city life; already French and British wealth was preferring the country to the town. In these sprawling villas—some with 125 rooms—all comforts and elegances were gathered: mosaic floors, columned halls, landscape murals, sculptures in marble and bronze, great fireplaces and baths, gardens and tennis courts,30 and environing woods in which ladies and gentlemen might hunt with all the glamour of falconry. Nearly every villa had a good library, containing the classics of pagan antiquity and some respectable Christian texts.31 Several of Sidonius’ friends were book collectors; and doubtless there were in Gaul, as in Rome, rich men who valued good bindings above mere contents, and were satisfied with the culture they could get from the covers of their books.
Sidonius illustrates the better side of this genteel life—hospitality, courtesy, good cheer, moral decency, with a touch of chiseled poetry and melodious prose. When Avitus went to Rome to be emperor, Sidonius accompanied him, and was chosen to deliver the welcoming panegyric (456). He returned to Gaul a year later with Avitus deposed; but in 468 we find him in Rome again, holding the high office of prefect of the city amid the last convulsions of the state. Moving comfortably through the chaos, he described the high society of Gaul and Rome in letters modeled upon those of Pliny and Symmachus, and matching them in vanity and grace. Literature now had little to say, and said it with such care that nothing remained but form and charm. At their best there is in these letters that genial tolerance and sympathetic understanding of the educated gentleman which has adorned the literature of France since the days when it was not yet French. Sidonius brought into Gaul the Roman love for gracious causeries. From Cicero and Seneca through Pliny, Symmachus, Macrobius, and Sidonius to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, and Anatole France is one line, almost, by bountiful avatars, one mind.
Lest we misrepresent Sidonius we must add that he was a good Christian and a brave bishop. In 469, unexpectedly and unwillingly, he found himself precipitated from lay status to the episcopacy of Clermont. A bishop in those days had to be a civil administrator as well as a spiritual guide; and men of experience and wealth like Ambrose and Sidonius had qualifications that proved more effective than theological erudition. Having little of such learning, Sidonius had few anathemas to bestow; instead, he gave his silver plate to the poor, and forgave sins with an alarming readiness. From one of his letters we perceive that the prayers of his flock were sometimes interrupted by refreshments.32 Reality broke into this pleasant life when Euric, King of the Visigoths, decided to annex Auvergne. Each summer, for four years, the Goths laid siege to Clermont, its capital. Sidonius fought them with diplomacy and prayer, but failed; when at last the city fell he was taken captive, and was imprisoned in a fortress near Carcassonne (475). Two years later he was released and restored to his see. How long he survived we do not know; but already at forty-five he wished to be “delivered from the pains and burdens of present life by a holy death.”33 He had lost faith in the Roman Empire, and now put all his hopes for civilization in the Roman Church. The Church forgave him his half-pagan poetry, and made him a saint.
2. The Franks: 240–511
With the death of Sidonius the night of barbarism closed down upon Gaul. We must not exaggerate that darkness. Men still retained economic skills, traded goods, minted coinage, composed poetry, and practiced art; and under Euric (466–84) and Alaric II (484–507) the Visigothic kingdom in southwestern Gaul was sufficiently orderly, civilized, and progressive to draw praise from Sidonius himself.34 In 506 Alaric II issued a Breviarium, or summary, of laws for his realm; it was a comparatively enlightened code, reducing to rule and reason the relations between the Romano-Gallic population and its conquerors. A like code was enacted (510) by the Burgundian kings who had peaceably established their people and power in southeastern Gaul. Until the revival of Roman law at Bologna in the eleventh century, Latin Europe would be governed by Gothic and Burgundian codes, and the kindred laws of the Franks.