388 COSMOS. 



tanian Gaul, the poet had accompanied Valentinian in his 

 campaign against the Allemanni. The Mosella, which was 

 composed in ancient Treves,* describes in some parts, and 

 not ungracefully, the already vine-clad hills of one of the 

 loveliest of our rivers, but the barren topography of the 

 country, the enumeration of the streams falling into the 

 Moselle, and the characteristic form, colour, and habits 

 of some of the different species of fish that are found in 

 these waters, constitute the main features of this wholly 

 didactic composition. 



In the works of the Roman prose writers, among which we 

 have already cited some remarkable passages by Cicero, 

 descriptions of natural scenery are as rare as in those of 

 Greek authors. It is only in the writings of the great his- 

 torians, Julius Ca3sar, Livy, and Tacitus that we meet with 

 some examples of the contrary, where they are compelled to 

 describe battle fields, the crossing of rivers or difficult moun- 

 tain passes, in their narrations of the struggle of man against 

 natural obstacles. In the Annals of Tacitus, I am charmed 

 with the description of the untoward passage of Germanicus 

 over the Amisia, and the grand geographical delineation of 

 the mountain chains of Syria and Palestine.! Curtius has 

 left us a fine natural picture of a woody desert to the west of 



* Dedi Magm Ausonii Mosella, v. 189-199, pp. 15, 44, Booking. 

 See also the notice of the fish of the Moselle, which is not unimportant 

 with reference to natural history, and has been ingeniously applied by 

 Yalenciennes, v. 85--150, pp. 9--12, and contrast it with Oppian (Bem- 

 Larcly, Griech. Litt., th. ii. s. 1049.) The Orthinogonia and Theriaea 

 of JSmilitus Macer of Verona (imitations of the works of Nicander of 

 Colophon) which have not come to us, belonged to the same dry didactic 

 style of poetry which treated of the products of nature. A natural 

 description of the southern coast of Gaul, which is to be found in a poeti- 

 cal narrative of a journey by Claudius Rutilius Numatianus, a statesman 

 under Honorius, is more attractive than the Mosella of Ausonius. Ruti- 

 lius, who was driven from Rome by the irruption of the Gauls, is return- 

 ing to his estates in Gaul. We unfortunately possess only a fragment 

 of the second book of this poem, and this does not take us beyond the 

 quarries of Carara. See Rutilii Claudii Numatiani de. Reditu suo 

 (e Roma in Galliam Narbonensem] libri duo, rec. A. W. Zumpt, 1840, 

 p. xv. 31-219 (with a fine map by Kiepert). Wernsdorf, Poetce Lot. 

 Min., t. v. pt. i. p. 125. 



f Tac. Ann., ii. 23-24; Hist., y. 6. The only fragment preserved 

 by the Rhetorician Seneca, (Suasor., i. p. 11, Bipont) that we possess of 



