Post by Senbecc on Jan 14, 2008 20:19:17 GMT -5
Decimus Magnus Ausonius
A.D. c.310 - c.395
Attius Patera, the elder, the Rhetorician Patera, renowned speaker, although in years you outpassed the men named earlier, yet, seeing that your prime was in the age next before my own, and that in my youth, I saw you in your old age, you shall not lack the tribute of my sad dirge, teacher of mighty rhetoricians. If report does not lie, you were sprung from the stock of the Druids of Bayeux, and traced your hallowed line from the temple of Belenus; and hence the names borne by your family: you are called Patera; so the mystic votaries call the servants of Apollo. Your father and brother were named after Phoebus, and your own son after Delphi. In that age there was none who had such knowledge as you, such swift and rolling eloquence. Sound in memory as in learning, you had the gift of clear expression cast in sonorous and well chosen phrase; your wit was chastened and without a spice of bitterness; sparing of food and wine, cheerful, modest, comely in person, even in age you were as an eagle, or a steed grown old.
Poems commemorating the professors of Bordeaux
translated by H.G.E. White
Let Macrinus be named amongst these, to him I was entrusted first as a boy; and Sucuro, the freedman's son, temperate and well suited to form youthful minds. You too Concordius, were another such, you who, who fleeing your country, took in exchange a chair of little profit in a foreign town. Nor must I leave unmentioned the old man Phoebicius, who, though the keeper of Belenus' temple, got no profit thereby. Yet he, sprung, as rumor goes, from the stock of the Druids of Armorica (Brittany), obtained a chair at Bordeaux by his son's help: Long may his line endure!
Poems commemorating the professors of Bordeaux
translated by H.T.G. White