Ausonius
Charles Johnston describes how, during the latter half of the fourth century, one of the last of the Roman poets was appointed by Valentinian I, Emperor of the West, to undertake the education of his hopeful son Gratian.
About the year 367 of our era, a middle-aged professor of rhetoric in the provincial university town of Bordeaux was invited to court by the Emperor of the West and appointed tutor to the imperial heir apparent.
Under Constantine the Great and his successors the Western part of the Roman Empire enjoyed its last period of calm and prosperity. There was certainly a threat from the restless barbarian beyond the Rhine.
But the Rhine frontier defences, established in the time of Augustus, nearly four hundred years before, were firmly held; and close behind them, in the walled and towered city of Trier on the Moselle, was the imperial capital which had replaced Rome as the administrative centre of the West.
In fact, the danger seemed to come more from inside the frontiers than from outside them.
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