Decimus Magnus Ausonius

Decimus Magnus Ausonius (c. AD 310 – c. 395) was born at Burdigala (Bordeaux), where he taught grammar and rhetoric for some thirty years. About 364 the emperor Valentinian I called him to Trier as tutor to his son Gratian; when Gratian became emperor in 375 Ausonius rose rapidly, becoming quaestor, prefect of Gaul and, in 379, consul. After Gratian's death in 383 he withdrew to his estates near Bordeaux and lived there until about 395.

His verse is the learned, occasional poetry of a professional teacher: the Parentalia and the Commemoratio Professorum Burdigalensium, in which he commemorates his kin and his colleagues; the Mosella, a poem on the river Moselle; Cupid Crucified; the verbal tours de force of the Technopaegnion and the Griphus; the Caesares; and many epistles and epigrams. The English prose given here is Hugh G. Evelyn-White's Loeb Classical Library translation (1919–21), which renders each verse piece as prose, so the lines of the originals do not appear as verse; only the pieces he translated are included.