Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

POETRY
which in its turn was besieged by the Goths. Paulinus raised the siege by
coming to terms with the Goths' allies the Alans, a compromise which many
Romans regarded as treasonable. His position was not improved by his accepting
office under the puppet emperor Attalus in 410. For a time he thought of
returning to the tranquillity of the east, or becoming a monk, but both projects
were resisted by his wife. For many years he lived in relative poverty on a farm
near Marseilles, and later returned to Bordeaux to a similar small estate. More
and more alone as his family died one by one and prevented by age from
running his farm, he was saved from destitution by a Goth who gave him a
good price for it, paid in cash.
In his eighty-fourth year he wrote a curious autobiographical poem, the
Eucharisticon Deo sub ephemeridis meae textu 'Thanksgiving to God in the
form of my diary'. The memories of his long life come tumbling out in his
clumsy tortuous Latin. Paulinus was no scholar or man of letters, but was
driven by an urge to examine his own life. His message is to thank God that
things might have been worse. Virgilian tags from his schooldays spring to
his pen, but there is very little else of classical tradition in matter or manner, and
his striving for self-revelation is the antithesis of the classical poetic persona.
He has no animus against the Germans. Paulinus' poem provides a fascinating
picture from an upper-class point of view of the disintegration of a traditional
society.
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