No More Learning

Nemesianus is
African, and his poems were not written in Rome. But his graceful genius
perhaps owes something to the impulsion given to literary studies by
Numerian--one of the few emperors of the period who exhibit any interest
in the progress of literature. The fourth century is the period of
Renaissance. We may see in Tiberianus the herald of this Renaissance.
The four poems which can be certainly assigned to him are distinguished
by great power and charm. It is a plausible view that he is also the
author of the remarkable _Peruigilium Veneris_--that poem proceeds at
any rate from the school to which Tiberianus belongs. The style of
Tiberianus is formed in the academies of Africa, and so also perhaps his
philosophy. The Platonic hymn to the Nameless God is a noble monument of
the dying Paganism of the era. Tiberianus' political activities took him
to Gaul: and Gaul is the true home of this fourth-century Renaissance.
In Gaul around Ausonius there grew up at Bordeaux a numerous and
accomplished and enthusiastic school of poets. To find a parallel to the
brilliance and enthusiasm of this school we must go back to the school
of poets which grew up around Valerius Cato in Transpadane Gaul in the
first century B. C. The Bordeaux school is particularly interesting from
its attitude to Christianity. Among Ausonius' friends was the austere
Paulinus of Nola, and Ausonius himself was a convert to the Christian
faith. But his Christianity is only skin-deep.
His Bible is Vergil, his
books of devotion are Horace and Ovid and Statius. The symbols of the
Greek mythology are nearer and dearer to him than the symbolism of the
Cross. The last enemy which Christianity had to overcome was, in fact,
Literature. And strangely enough the conquest was to be achieved
finally, not by the superior ethical quality of the new religion, but by
the havoc wrought in Latin speech by the invasion of the Barbarians, by
the decay of language and of linguistic study. To the period of
Ausonius--and probably to Gaul--belong the rather obscure Asmenidae--the
'sons', or pupils, of Asmenius. At least two of them, Palladius and
Asclepiadius, exhibit genuine poetical accomplishment. But the schools
both of Ausonius and of Asmenius show at least in one particular how
relaxed had become the hold even upon its enthusiasts of the true
classical tradition. All these poets have a passion for triviality, for
every kind of _tour de force_, for conceits and mannerisms. At times they
are not so much poets as the acrobats of poetry.

The end of the century gives us Claudian, and a reaction against this
triviality. 'Paganus peruicacissimus,' as Orosius calls him, Claudian
presents the problem of a poet whose poetry treats with real power the
circumstances of an age from which the poet himself is as detached as
can be. Claudian's real world is a world which was never to be again, a
world of great princes and exalted virtues, a world animated by a
religion in which Rome herself, strong and serene, is the principal
deity. Accident has thrown him into the midst of a political nightmare
dominated by intriguing viziers and delivered to a superstition which
made men at once weak and cruel. Yet this world, so unreal to him, he
presents in a rhetorical colouring extraordinarily effective. Had he
possessed a truer instinct for things as they are he might have been the
greatest of the Roman satirists. He has a real mastery of the art of
invective.