rhetorician, the scholar of Dion of Prusa, the friend of Plutarch and of Herodes Atticus, assailed polemically in the field of science by Galen and in light literature by Lucian, sustaining lively relations generally with the noted men of letters of the second century, and not less with the emperor Hadrian. His manifold investigations, among other matters, concerning the names of the companions of Odysseus that were devoured by Scylla, and as to the name of the first man who was at the same time a man of letters, make him appear as the genuine representative of the erudite dealing in trifles that was then in vogue; and his discourses for a cultivated public on Thersites and the ague, as well as his conversations in part recorded for us "on all things and some others," give not an agreeable, but a characteristic, picture of the literary pursuits of the time. Here we have to call attention to what he himself reckoned among the remarkable points of his career in life, that he was by birth a Gaul and at the same time a Greek author. Although the _literati_ of the West frequently gave, as occasion offered, specimens of their Greek, but few of them made use of this as the proper language of their authorship; in this case its use would be influenced in part by the scholar's place of birth. [Sidenote: Latin literature in the south province.] South Gaul, moreover, had so far a share in the Augustan bloom of literature, that some of the most notable forensic orators of the later Augustan age, Votienus Montanus († 27 A.D.), from Narbo--named the Ovid of orators--and Gnaeus Domitius Afer (consul in 39 A.D.) from Nemausus, belonged to this province. Generally, as was natural, Roman literature extended its circulation also over this region; the poets of Domitian's time sent their free copies to friends in Tolosa and Vienna. Pliny, under Trajan, is glad that his minor writings find even in Lugudunum not merely favourable readers, but booksellers who push their sale. But we cannot produce evidence for the south of any such special influence, as Baetica exercised in the earlier, and northern Gaul in the later, imperial period, on the intellectual and literary development of Rome. The fair land yielded richly wine and fruits; but the empire drew from it neither soldiers nor thinkers. [Sidenote: Literature in imperial Gaul.]