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

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.

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

I've never written for a fasting man;
A taste of wine is good before my verse.
But sleep is better than a little wine,
For when sleeping one thinks my songs are dreams.