The reflection of this unnaturalness is abundantly seen in the literature of the day. Almost any work of Ausonius could be taken as an illustration. He consciously opposes grace to strength, and the result is disappointing. ‘Si qua tibi in his versiculis videbuntur ... fucatius concinnata quam verius, et plus coloris quam suci habere, ipse sciens fluere permisi, venustula ut essent magis quam forticula.’[1377] He takes nineteen lines to express the number six,[1378] and fourteen lines to say that there were thirty oysters.[1379] Such a ‘numerum doctis involutum ambagibus’ seems to have been a common way of expending ‘poetic’ energy. Then, as if this were not enough, he goes on to expound the ‘doctae ambages’ in the baldest possible way (_Septenis quater adde et unum et unum, etc._) in twelve more lines. Similar examples could be indefinitely multiplied. Nor were they just the whim of an idle humour. We meet them everywhere. Bishop Sidonius at the age of fifty says, in a serious estimate of a man’s poetic abilities, that he was good at ‘echoing’ and ‘recurrent’ verses, and at ‘anadiplosis’[1380] (i.e. resuming a verse with the end phrase of the previous one). Asked by a correspondent as to recurrent verses, he gives a stock example (_antiquum_), which shows that the literary practice was of some standing. The point of such a verse was that it could be read backwards letter for letter without altering the sense: Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor, while in a ‘versus echoicus’ the first part of the first verse was the same as the second part of the second. He adds another kind which he had composed while delayed by a swollen river, and here the merit was that the words could be read backwards retaining the order of the letters in each word, without prejudice to the sense: Praecipiti modo quod decurrit tramite flumen tempore consumptum iam cito deficiet.[1381] His appreciation of Remigius’s declamations show the same emphasis on formal and external merits.[1382] The point is not so much that responsible poets went in for writing verses of the kind quoted, but that they attached so much importance to them.