ge.

An interest in Latin literature lived longest in Gaul, where schools of
learning flourished as early as the 1st century at Autun, Lyons,
Toulouse, Nimes, Vienne, Narbonne and Marseilles; and, from the 3rd
century onwards, at Trier, Poitiers, Besancon and Bordeaux.

About ten years after the death of Sidonius we find Asterius, the consul
of 494, critically revising the text of Virgil in Rome. Boethius, who
early in life formed the ambitious plan of expounding and reconciling
the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, continued in the year of his sole
consulship (510) to instruct his fellow-countrymen in the wisdom of
Greece. He is a link between the ancient world and the middle ages,
having been the last of the learned Romans who understood the language
and studied the literature of Greece, and the first to interpret to the
middle ages the logical treatises of Aristotle. He thereby gave the
signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which
exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning
work of his life, the _Consolatio Philosophiae_ (524), was repeatedly
expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the
earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe.
His contemporary, Cassiodorus (c. 480-c. 575), after spending thirty
years in the service of the Ostrogothic dynasty at Ravenna, passed the
last thirty-three years of his long life on the shores of the Bay of
Squillace, where he founded two monasteries and diligently trained their
inmates to become careful copyists. In his latest work he made extracts
for their benefit from the pages of Priscian (fl. 512), a transcript of
whose great work on Latin grammar was completed at Constantinople by one
of that grammarian's pupils in 527, to be reproduced in a thousand MSS.
in the middle ages. More than ten years before Cassiodorus founded his
monasteries in the south of Italy, Benedict of Nursia (480-543) had
rendered a more permanent service to the cause of scholarship by
building, amid the ruins of the temple of Apollo on the crest of Monte
Cassino, the earliest of those homes of learning that have lent an
undying distinction to the Benedictine order. The learned labours of the
Benedictines were no part of the original requirements of the rule of St
Benedict; but before the founder's death his favourite disciple had
planted a monastery in France, and the name of that disciple is
permanent