The history of Roman poetry is virtually at an end with Claudian. Other poets there were, but none whose works are living and breathing exponents of the ancient Roman life. [Sidenote: Avianus. Sedulius. Dracontius.] About 400 A. D. Avianus published forty-two fables of Æsop in elegiac verse; about the middle of the fifth century the presbyter Sedulius wrote several religious poems, in which he shows acquaintance not with Biblical literature alone, but also with the Latin classics; and at the end of the century the African poet Blossius Æmilius Dracontius wrote a didactic poem _On the Praise of God_, in three books, a number of short epics, chiefly mythological, and several other poems. Dracontius is not unskillful in his versification and his use of language, and his poems prove that rhetorical training was still to be found in Africa. Moreover, his knowledge of the Roman classics is as evident as his knowledge of the Bible. But neither Dracontius nor the other poets whose works are preserved to us from the fifth century could do more than help to pass on to the Middle Ages something of the ancient feeling for beauty of form in literature. And even that had ceased to be understood by the people. CHAPTER XXI CONCLUSION The end of the ancient civilization—Boëthius, about 480-524 A. D.—Later literature no longer Roman—Practical character of Roman literature—The first period—The Augustan period—The period of the empire—Our debt to the Romans. [Sidenote: The end of the old civilization.] Long before the end of the fifth century the power of Rome was broken, and the centre of what had been the Roman empire was at Constantinople. The western provinces were in the hands of barbarians, Angles and Saxons ruled in Britain, Franks in northern Gaul, Visigoths in southern Gaul and Spain, and Vandals in Africa. Italy itself had been repeatedly overrun by hardy warriors from the north, and Rome had twice been sacked, by the Goths under Alaric in 410 and by the Vandals under Genseric in 455 A. D. With the establishment by Theodoric, in 493 A. D., of the Gothic kingdom with its seat at Ravenna, the last vestige of the Roman empire of the West passed away. Henceforth western Europe is the scene of strife and disorder, through which men were to struggle onward to the new order of modern life. In the empire of the East much of the old civilization survived, and throughout the Middle Ages the ancient culture still shed some rays of light from Constantinople to the darkened west; but in western Europe there was little culture, and learning was for the most part shut up in the walls of monasteries.