SOURCE: Dill, Samuel. “The Society of Q. Aurelius Symmachus.” In Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, pp. 143-66. Reprint. New York: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1925.

In the following excerpt from a work first published in 1899, Dill examines the Saturnalia and the letters of Symmachus for what they reveal about upper-class Roman society.

In the preceding chapter we have reviewed the adverse judgments of some contemporary moralists on the state of society in the fourth and fifth centuries. But we fortunately possess, in the other literary remains of that age, materials for forming an estimate independent of either Christian or pagan censors. The letters of Q. Aurelius Symmachus,¹ the poems of Ausonius, and the Saturnalia of Macrobius reveal to us the life of the cultivated upper class, both in the capital and the provinces, in the years immediately preceding the first shock of the great...