In this noble apostrophe Rutilius addressed the fading mistress of the world as he passed lingeringly through the Ostian gate. Far away in Northern Africa, the most profound thinker and most brilliant writer of the age, as deeply but very differently moved by the ancestral splendours of the city and the tragedy of her fall, was then composing, with all the resources of his vast learning and consummate dialectical skill, the epitaph of the ancient civilisation. It was the capture of Rome by Alaric which induced St. Augustine to undertake his work on the _City of God_. "In this middle age," he says,--_in hoc interim seculo_--the two cities with their two citizenships, the earthly and the heavenly, are inextricably enwound and intermingled with each other. Not until the Last Judgment will they be wholly separated; but the philosophy of history is to trace the steps by which the one is slowly replaced by, or transformed into, the other. The earthly Empire, all the splendid achievement in thought and arts and deeds of the Roman civilisation, already fades away before that City of God on which his eyes are fixed--_gloriosissimam Civitatem Dei, sive in hoc temporum cursu cum inter impios peregrinatur ex fide vivens, sive in illa stabililate sedis aeternae, quam nunc exspectat per patientiam, quoadusque iustitia convertatur in iudicium._ The evolution of this change was, even to the impassioned faith of Augustine, slow, intermittent, and fluctuating: nor, among many landmarks and turning-points, is it easy to fix any single one as definitely concluding the life of the ancient world, and marking the beginning of what St. Augustine for the first time called by the name, which has ever since adhered to it, of the Middle Age. The old world slid into the new through insensible gradations. In nearly all Latin literature after Virgil we may find traces or premonitions of mediaevalism, and after mediaevalism was established it long retained, if it ever wholly lost, traces of the classical tradition. Thus, while the beginning of Latin literature may be definitely placed in a particular generation, and almost in a single year, there is no fixed point at which it can be said that its history concludes. Different periods have been assigned from different points of view. In the year 476, Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western Emperors, handed over the name as well as the substance of sole power to the Herulian chief Odoacer, the first King of Italy; and the Roman Senate, still in theory the supreme governing body of the civilised world, formally renounced its sovereignty, and declared its dominions a diocese of the Byzantine Empire. This is the date generally adopted by authors who deal with literature as subordinate to political history. But the writer of the standard English work on Latin grammar limits his field to the period included between Plautus and Suetonius; while another scholar, extending his scope three centuries and a half