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POETRY
personal involvement in the matters which he recounts leads to a change in the
traditional persona of the narrative poet. It is no longer a mask concealing the
man.
Juvencus sought to adapt the traditional form of didactic poetry to new
purposes. Others continued to follow age-old models in form and content.
Postumius Rufius Festus Avienius was a member of an ancient Italian family
of Volsinii in Etruria, who numbered among his ancestors Musonius Rufus,
the Stoic philosopher of the age of Nero and the Flavian emperors, teacher of
Epictetus and the younger Pliny, and author of a manual of pagan theology in
Greek. He was related to Valentinian's Praetorian Prefect Petronius Probus and
held the proconsulships of Achaea and Africa probably a little after the middle
of the fourth century, and his tombstone survives with a verse inscription
celebrating his fame as a poet. Three didactic poems by Avienius survive: an
adaptation in hexameters of the Greek astronomical poem of Aratus (PAaenomena),
a similar adaptation of the geographical poem of Dionysius Periegetes
(Descriptioorbis terrarum) and the beginning of a poem on the sea-coast in iambic
senarii, which describes the coast of Europe from Britain to Massilia (Ora
maritime?). The last is of particular interest since Avienius chose to adapt a
Greek original of the fourth century B.C., and his poem therefore represents
the earliest account we possess of western Europe. He •was not a mere translator,
but supplemented his sources with material from commentators, encyclopaedias
and other sources. His style is smooth, classical and somewhat flat.
His antiquarian interest is characteristic of the senatorial class of the fourth
century, as is the maintenance of a poetic persona wholly detached from the
age and circumstances in which the writer lived. The correct form of his name
is given by an inscription. Until its publication he was generally known as
Avienus. An epitome of Livy and a poem on the legends used by Virgil, both
lost, and attributed by Servius to Avienus, are possibly the work of the fabulist
'Avianus', whose real name has recently been shown to have been Avienus
and who wrote in the first half of the fifth century.
After this discouraging catalogue of poetasters and minor versifiers we at last
reach in Ausonius a poet who can claim some stature, if only on account of the
quantity and range of his writings. Decimus Magnus Ausonius -was born in
Bordeaux in 310. His father was a doctor, probably of Greek descent. His
mother was descended on both sides from long-established aristocratic families
of southwestern Gaul. Educated first at Toulouse by his uncle Arborius, who
held a chair of rhetoric at Constantine's new capital city on the Bosphorus, and
later at Bordeaux, the young Ausonius was appointed about 334 to an official
teaching post in his native city, first as a grammarian and soon afterwards as a
rhetorician. Thirty years later, when he had acquired a reputation as a teacher
throughout Gaul, he was suddenly summoned to the imperial residence at
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