Literature and history

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Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 94, Alsonius.

This program is on the Roman poet and academic Decimus Magnus Alsonius who lived roughly from 310 to

395 CE and served in the court of Rome's Valentinian dynasty from the mid-360s until the mid-380s.

Alsonius was well regarded during his own life and in the subsequent century.

The son of a doctor, Alsonius took a scholarly path, developing an excellent reputation as a class Dr. Aus' surviving corpus of work is expansive, including autobiographical pieces on his home and family,

eulogies to his academic colleagues, praise poems dedicated to the emperor, short poems and epigrams on an

encyclopedia of subjects from homeric heroes to past Roman emperors to Roman cities, and strange unclassifiable pieces on classical themes.

His most famous poem today is The Mosell, a long piece about the picturesque river that flows where modern day France, Luxembourg, and Germany all come together.

Ausonius's output then forms quite a diverse array of works from formulaic pieces written within long established genres to more experimental

and anomalous works.

An author whose long life spanned Rome's pivotal fourth century and who knew some of the most powerful

figures in the Roman world, Alsonius's writings offer a window into a transformative

period of European history.

Alsonius is not, however, particularly well known, even within the discipline of classics.

Like so many writers of late Antiquity, Alsonius falls into a gap between

classics and medieval studies departments between pagan and Christian belonging

neither to the classical world that came before him nor the Christian

one that followed him.

He was not, like Sophocles, at the helm of a city in the midst of an artistic renaissance, nor, like Ovid, attached to a broadly celebrated Roman

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