APPENDIX TO AUSONIUS
This Appendix, corresponding to book XXII. of the Teubner edition, contains various poems of relatively ancient date which, though ordinarily edited with the works of Ausonius, are in fact anonymous. Two only of these works call for notice.
The elegiac poem De Rosis Nascentibus (II.) is interesting—apart from some trace of naturalistic feeling in 11. 7 ff.—both as the humble source of Herrick’s Gather ye Rosebuds (11. 49 f.), and as having once been attributed to Virgil himself.1 It cannot, however, be regarded as earlier than the fourth century a.d., and was associated with the works of Ausonius by Aleander in the Paris edition of 1511.
Sulpicia’s Complaint on the State of the Commonwealth (V.) seems to belong to the same age and is not unreasonably considered a school-piece or literary exercise. The real Sulpicia flourished in the later part of the first century a.d. and was famous for a series of amatory poems composed in a variety of metres (see 11. 4 ff.) and addressed to her husband Calenus. According to Martial (Epigr. x. 35. I ff.) her work was distinguished by its morality, though not perhaps by its delicacy (id. x. 38. I ff.), and Ausonius in his exculpatory address to Paulus at the close of the Cento Nuptialis2 alleges that prurire opusculum Sulpiciae, frontem caperare. The piece was first published in an edition of Ausonius by Ugoletus in 1496 a.d.