graphical,
grammatical and antiquarian, the main value of which lies in its
quotations from early Latin literature. About the middle of the same
century grammar had a far abler exponent at Rome in the person of Aelius
Donatus, the preceptor of St Jerome, as well as the author of a
text-book that remained in use throughout the middle ages. The general
state of learning in this century is illustrated by Ausonius (c.
310-393), the grammarian and rhetorician of Bordeaux, the author of the
_Mosella_, and the probable inspirer of the memorable decree of Gratian
(376), providing for the appointment and the payment of teachers of
rhetoric and of Greek and Latin literature in the principal cities of
Gaul. His distinguished friend, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, the consul of
A.D. 391, aroused in his own immediate circle an interest in Livy, the
whole of whose history was still extant. Early in the 5th century other
aristocratic Romans interested themselves in the textual criticism of
Persius and Martial. Among the contemporaries of Symmachus, the devoted
adherent of the old Roman religion, was St Jerome (d. 420), the most
scholarly representative of Christianity in the 4th century, the student
of Plautus and Terence, of Virgil and Cicero, the translator of the
_Chronology_ of Eusebius, and the author of the Latin version of the
Bible now known as the Vulgate. St Augustine (d. 430) confesses to his
early fondness for Virgil, and also tells us that he received his first
serious impressions from the _Hortensius_ of Cicero, an eloquent
exhortation to the study of philosophy, of which only a few fragments
survive. In his survey of the "liberal arts" St Augustine imitates (as
we have seen) the _Disciplinae_ of Varro, and in the greatest of his
works, the _De Civitate Dei_ (426), he has preserved large portions of
the _Antiquitates_ of Varro and the _De Republica_ of Cicero. About the
same date, and in the same province of northern Africa, Martianus
Capella produced his allegorical work on the "liberal arts," the
principal, and, indeed, often the only, text-book of the medieval
schools.

In the second half of the 5th century the foremost representative of
Latin studies in Gaul was Apollinaris Sidonius (fl. 470), whose
_Letters_ were modelled on those of the younger Pliny, while his poems
give proof of a wide though superficial acquaintance with classical
literature. He laments the increasing decline in the classical purity of
the Latin langua