Ennodius has himself informed us that he regarded Arles as his native place. We also know that he was born in 473, because he died in 521 at the age of forty-eight. His family was highly respectable, if, indeed, it was not actually illustrious. Our poet always shows a familiarity with the affairs of good society; and in those times good society had only one meaning. It was a society which educated its scions in the polite learning of Greece and Rome, and which made much of the ability to speak and write the Latin tongue. It is scarcely to be questioned that this was the theory on which the early education of Ennodius proceeded. He was sent to Milan in order to become versed in what was called humane learning. If he is himself to be believed he acquired both bad and good in this school. He laments with a mock humility (for so it would appear by his later literary derelictions) that he had obtained a great deal of wicked and ungodly information; and really no one can read some of his nasty epigrams and doubt his assertion. For, whether it was permissible to a saint or not, it is a fact, that the editors of his works have not scrupled to print some exceedingly profane and improper pieces which are undoubtedly the product of his pen. His aunt, who was bearing the cost of this admirable instruction, died in 489—that is, when he was sixteen—and he was left without means to proceed with his studies. He avows that he had come to detest the very name of liberal education, and this, under the circumstances, cannot well be regarded as anything very surprising. We soon after find him married to a lady who is described as of a “most noble” and therefore highly appropriate family. She was, moreover, “very rich”—another satisfactory point. With this wealthy and fashionable wife, Ennodius rapidly obtained a view of earth, and what earth can give, which was so far limited in that the money did not equal the desires of the married pair. It ran low and the bitterness of financial perplexities mingled with the cup of their happiness. Judging the husband by his epigrams he was pretty fairly exhausted by the speed of their career, and was quite ready to shake off the encumbrance of a family and devote himself to the lofty purpose of being supported by somebody else. An unprejudiced mind fails to see in this any particular “admonition” or “example” to his age. It is merely the selfish escape of a worldly but embarrassed man. Divorces were not available then with the ease with which a less scrupulous and more intellectual generation can now procure them. The proper, and, indeed, the meritorious way, was to slip into a cloister and become one of that vast army which was soon to be the tower of strength of the Pope. He himself ascribes this step to a serious illness in which he had been healed through the miraculous interposition of St. Victor, after the doctors had given up his case.