Cultural memory and classical education in late antique Gaul

Abstract

As the western Roman empire gradually lost direct control and influence throughout parts of Gaul in the fifth century, Gallo-Roman aristocrats increasingly looked to traditions of their cultural and intellectual heritage to feel anchored to their Roman identity, and to assert and confirm this identity to themselves and their peers. Traditional literary education, largely unchanged for centuries, was a key aspect of such elite Roman identity. This chapter explores how Gallo-Roman aristocrats clung to the educational pursuits of their ancestors, and memories of the classical Roman past transferred and preserved in such literary education, to define and understand themselves and their past amid the shifting political, cultural, and religious landscapes of fifth-century Gaul. This study takes a diachronic approach, considering sources from the fourth, fifth, and early sixth centuries, including Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella, edicts from the Theodosian Code, Sidonius Apollinaris, Claudianus Mamertus, and Ruricius of Limoges. Such an approach will allow us to understand the changes in attitudes towards traditional education across late antique Gaul and contemplate how such shifts in perceptions and practices of traditional literary education can be linked to, and help to explain, the larger political and societal changes taking place in this period.