Ausonius kept a sort of diary, in which before going to sleep he recorded events, impressions, sketches of poems, and short bits of verse--a custom whose regular observance he scarcely omitted even in camp. A touch of pedantry was one of his characteristics. Yet the diary was not a monologue, rather a sort of dialogue; for he addressed it in the form of a letter to his oldest and most intimate friend, Arius Paulus of Bigerri, rhetorician, but also an old soldier. Every three months he collected what he had written and forwarded it to him to receive his criticisms and answers on the margin of the manuscript when returned.
So, during these days of involuntary leisure he wrote.
CHAPTER XXIII.
V. BEFORE THE KALENDS OF SEPTEMBER.
Ausonius sends greetings to his Paulus.
I wrote to you yesterday about the charming Barbarian child. Child? She is one no longer. The delicate, yet lovely outlines of her form have developed into exquisite roundness. And Barbarian? If she ever was one she has ceased to be so, since Ausonius taught her the pomp of the Latin language. How shall I describe her to you without drawing, no, painting her? For it is precisely the charm of her coloring that is so peerless. If only I had brought with me Paralos, my Ionian slave, who painted the nymphs so exquisitely--you know--in my little dining hall yonder, in the villa in the Province Noverus! And the expression--the vivacity--in those ever varying features, now full of mischievous wrath, now mirth, now jest, and anon of a sorrowful yearning which to me is full of mystery.
And the dainty figure! Recently her leather sandals stuck fast in the mire outside the camp ditch. How white and charming were the little feet! How can they even support the figure, lightly as it floats along? The muse which so long has shunned me has again returned in the form of this Suabian girl: a fairer metamorphosis than ever Ovid dreamed. Verses well up in my mind ceaselessly. Just listen!
"Nature had dowered Bissula with charms which the greatest of artists
Vainly to picture would strive. Doubtless to full many another
Justice he might do by use of the pigments of red and of white lead: