Ausonius

"Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam! tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis."

"Jejunis nil scribo: meum post pocula si quis legerit, hic sapiet. Sed magis hic sapiet, si dormiet: et putet ista somnia missa sibi."

"Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes, et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum."

"Tot species, tantosque ortus variosque novatus una dies aperit, conficit ipsa dies."

"Multis terribilis timeto multos."

"Omne aevum curae; cunctis sua displicet aetas."

"Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive."

"The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age."

"Iniurium est de poeta male sobrio lectorem abstemium iudicare."

"In the history of versification did anyone ever juggle so wildly well with iambics, sapphics, dactylics, anapestics, and all the rest? He fabricated verses most ingeniously, most enthusiastically. His virtuosity is amazing. Almost every line he wrote was a tour de force. And in spite of all this highly self-conscious technical facility he managed occasionally to write poetry."

"Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos, quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores."

"It is the things which Ausonius reveals unconsciously that win him liking, not those which he sets out to celebrate with a kind of innocent pomp: not the chair of rhetoric at twenty-five, nor the imperial tutorship in his fifties, nor the consulship at sixty-nine, but that he loved and taught rhetoric all his life, and kept his simplicity."