The ending of the theatre in the West was in very similar fashion. Chrysostom’s great Latin contemporaries, Augustine and Jerome, are at one with him and with each other in their condemnation of the evils of the public stage as they knew it[67]. Their divergent attitude on a minor point may perhaps be explained by a difference of temperament. The fifth century saw a marked revival of literary interests from which even dignitaries of the Church did not hold themselves wholly aloof. Ausonius urged his grandson to the study of Menander. Sidonius, a bishop and no undevout one, read both Menander and Terence with his son[68]. With this movement Augustine had some sympathy. In a well-known passage of the _Confessions_ he records the powerful influence exercised by tragedy, and particularly erotic tragedy, over his tempestuous youth[69]. And in the _City of God_ he draws a careful distinction between the higher and the lower forms of drama, and if he does not approve, at least does not condemn, the use of tragedies and comedies in a humane education[70]. Jerome, on the other hand, although himself like Augustine a good scholar, takes a more ascetic line, and a letter of his protesting against the reading of comedies by priests ultimately came to be quoted as an authority in Roman canon law[71]. The references to the stage in the works of two somewhat younger ecclesiastical writers are of exceptional interest. Orosius was a pupil of both Jerome and Augustine; and Orosius, endeavouring a few years after the sack of Rome by the Goths to prove that that startling disaster was not due to Christianity, lays great and indeed exaggerated importance on the share of the theatre in promoting the decay of the Empire[72]. About the middle of the fifth century the same note is struck by Salvian in his remarkable treatise _De Gubernatione Dei_[73]. The sixth book of his work is almost entirely devoted to the _spectacula_. Like Tertullian, Salvian insists on the definite renunciation of _spectacula_ by Christians in their baptismal vow[74]. Like Orosius, he traces to the weakening of moral fibre by these accursed amusements the failure of the West to resist the barbarians. _Moritur et ridet_ is his epigram on the Roman world. The citizens of Tréves, three times destroyed, still called upon their rulers for races and a theatre. With the Vandals at the very gates of Cirta and of Carthage, _ecclesia Carthaginiensis insaniebat in circis, luxuriebat in theatris_[75]. Incidentally Salvian gives some valuable information as to the survival of the stage in his day. Already in 400 Augustine had been able to say that the theatres were falling on every side[76]. Salvian, fifty years later, confirms the testimony, but he adds the reason. It was not because Christians had learnt to be faithful to their vows and to the teachings of the Church; but because the barbarians, who despised _spectacula_, and therein set a good example