Such is the world depicted for us by Ausonius.  But while this pleasant country house and senior common room life was going calmly on, what do we find happening in the history books?  Ausonius was a man of nearly fifty when the Germans swarmed across the Rhine in 357, pillaging forty-five flourishing cities, and pitching their camps on the banks of the Moselle.  He had seen the great Julian take up arms (’O Plato, Plato, what a task for a philosopher’) and in a series of brilliant campaigns drive them out again.  Ten years later when he was tutor to Gratian he had himself accompanied the emperor Valentinian on another campaign against the same foes.  While he was preening himself on his consulship ten years later still, he must have heard of the disastrous battle of Adrianople in the east, when the Goths defeated a Roman army and slew an emperor.  He died in 395 and within twelve years of his death the host of Germans had burst across the Rhine, ’all Gaul was a smoking funeral pyre’, and the Goths were at the gates of Rome.  And what have Ausonius and his correspondents to say about this?  Not a word.  Ausonius and Symmachus and their set ignore the barbarians as completely as the novels of Jane Austen ignore the Napoleonic wars.

3.  SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS

Going, going....  Some thirty-five years after the death of Ausonius, in the midst of the disastrous sixth century, was born Sidonius Apollinaris, Gallo-Roman aristocrat, father-in-law of an emperor, sometime prefect of Rome and in the end Bishop of Clermont.  Sidonius Apollinaris, 431 (or thereabouts) to 479 or perhaps a few years later.  Much had happened between the death of Ausonius and his birth.  The lights were going out all over Europe.  Barbarian kingdoms had been planted in Gaul and Spain, Rome herself had been sacked by the Goths; and in his lifetime the collapse went on, ever more swiftly.  He was a young man of twenty when the ultimate horror broke upon the West, the inroad of Attila and the Huns.  That passed away, but when he was twenty-four the Vandals sacked Rome.  He saw the terrible German king-maker Ricimer throne and unthrone a series of puppet emperors, he saw the last remnant of Gallic independence thrown away and himself become a barbarian subject, and he saw a few years before he died the fall of the empire in the west.

They cannot, Sidonius and his friends, ignore as Ausonius and his friends did, that something is happening to the empire.  The men of the fifth century are concerned at these disasters and they console themselves, each according to his kind.  There are some who think it cannot last.  After all, they say, the empire has been in a tight place before and has always got out of it in the end and risen supreme over its enemies.  Thus Sidonius himself, the very year after they sacked the city; Rome has endured as much before—­there was Porsenna, there was Brennus, there was Hannibal....  Only that time Rome did not get over it.  Others tried to use the disasters