correspondents evidently agreed—they both disliked, and tried to despise, the fast growing Christian community.
Towards the close of the fourth century, however, when the great Emperor Theodosius was fast fading away, worn out with cares and anxieties for the future of an empire which even his splendid abilities were powerless to preserve even for a little season, in a period which has been graphically compared to the "wan lingering light of a late autumnal sunset," arose a few, a very few distinguished writers, whose works posterity has judged worthy of preservation.[1]
With two of the best known of these, the pagan poet Claudian, whose splendid claims for posthumous fame are undoubted, and somewhat later the half-pagan, half-Christian poet Ausonius, we are not concerned in this study; they were purely poets. Two other authors, however, in this late evening of Roman story especially interest us, as they carry on the tradition on which we have been dwelling,—the love for and interest in "letters," in carefully studied "correspondence," which the Letters of Cicero and Pliny made the fashion in the literary society of imperial Rome.
Symmachus, in the last years of the fourth century, and Sidonius Apollinaris, some half century later in the fifth century, were close imitators of Pliny. Their Letters have come down to us; and the popularity which they enjoyed in their own time, a popularity which has endured more or less in all succeeding ages, tells us what a powerful and enduring influence the correspondence of Pliny must have exercised over the old world of Rome.
Both these writers belonged to the highest class in the society of the dying Empire. Q. Aurelius Symmachus had held some of the highest offices open to the patrician order, he had been governor of several important provinces, prefect of the city, and consul; in his later years he was regarded and generally treated as the chief of the Senate, for whose privileges he was intensely jealous at a time when the despotic
- ↑ The purely Christian writings, mainly theological, are not included in this brief summary—able and brilliant as some of these undoubtedly were; other causes, apart from their literary merits, have largely contributed to their preservation.
