Thoughtful men seem to consider that in the Roman Empire, under Hadrian, under the noble Antonine princes and their successors, “the soil, the race, the language were alike exhausted.” Be that as it may, there is no doubt that from the time of Trajan until the latter days of the wondrous story of Rome, late in the fourth century, apart from a group of purely Christian writers, Latin literature was practically extinct; certainly it produced nothing worthy to be transmitted to later ages. Perhaps a solitary but not a very notable exception might be made in the few fragments that have come down to us of Fronto, the tutor and dear friend of Marcus Aurelius. These fragments are chiefly pieces of his correspondence with his pupils Marcus and his shortlived colleague in the Empire, Lucius Verus. It is not, however, probable that these letters were ever intended for publication or for general reading. It has been said with some truth that the Emperor Marcus and his scholar friend and tutor wrote to each other with the effusiveness of two schoolgirls.[24] In one particular these correspondents evidently agreed--they both disliked, and tried to despise, the fast growing Christian community. Towards the close of the fourth century, however, when the great Emperor Theodosius was fast fading away, worn out with cares and anxieties for the future of an empire which even his splendid abilities were powerless to preserve even for a little season, in a period which has been graphically compared to the “wan lingering light of a late autumnal sunset,” arose a few, a very few distinguished writers, whose works posterity has judged worthy of preservation.[25] With two of the best known of these, the pagan poet Claudian, whose splendid claims for posthumous fame are undoubted, and somewhat later the half-pagan, half-Christian poet Ausonius, we are not concerned in this study; they were purely poets. Two other authors, however, in this late evening of Roman story especially interest us, as they carry on the tradition on which we have been dwelling,--the love for and interest in “letters,” in carefully studied “correspondence,” which the Letters of Cicero and Pliny made the fashion in the literary society of imperial Rome. Symmachus, in the last years of the fourth century, and Sidonius Apollinaris, some half-century later in the fifth century, were close imitators of Pliny. Their Letters have come down to us; and the popularity which they enjoyed in their own time, a popularity which has endured more or less in all succeeding ages, tells us what a powerful and enduring influence the correspondence of Pliny must have exercised over the old world of Rome.