Ausonius of Bordeaux: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Establishment of a Christian Culture in the Late Roman West

In 1991 a new critical edition of Ausonius appeared, with commentary in the customary style of classical philologists of the twentieth century. The first comprehensive study of Ausonius's poetry ever published, it provided the basis for the present project, an attempt to explore the context and discover a hermeneutic for interpreting Ausonius's work in their historical and literary milieu. This project treats not only Ausonius's more ambitious works, in particular the Mosella and the Cupido Cruciatus, but also what can be called his "grammatical poetry", including the Technopaegnion, Eclogues, Epigrams, Ephemeris, and other short poems normally dismissed as nugatory or mere translations of the Greek Anthology.;Ausonius was a representative of both the professional teachers---grammarians and rhetoricians---and the creative literary figures of the period from the Edict of Constantine to the Edict of Theodosius. They lived to see the toleration, then the establishment, of Christianity under the Roman government. This period includes the careers of two generations of these professionals, called "guardians of language" by Robert Kaster in his recent, influential book on education in late antiquity: that of Ausonius and Symmachus, and that of Paulinus of Nola and Augustine of Hippo. The dissertation shows that Ausonius was representative of the single generation of Christian laymen who had far less to gain or lose in worldly terms by their religious profession than did their parents or children. Ausonius appears in this light as a conservative committed to the classical canon of texts which were the substance of ancient paideia, whose poetry we can understand only in light of his professional formation as student and as teacher. Ausonius's fame and esteem were derived from his talent, conservatism, and excellence in his field. This talent and technical excellence he had in equal share with the fathers of the Church, who were his students, or his professional peers. When the progressive grammatici pushed the scales back from style toward substance, and replaced the classical canon with the Scriptures, they parted ways with the conservative Ausonius, who remained a grammaticus, and themselves became the bishops and leaders of established Christianity.