This chapter focuses on the cultural transformations of Late Antiquity, using poems and letters produced between 300–600. Late Antique poets used rivers as ways of addressing changing religious, political, and religious identities, and to help them create new images of self and country. These early writers were responding to both literary and cultural rivers and to real encounters with river ecosystems. They shaped a sense of place and community alongside the rivers of Gaul, and their poetry reflects not only a sensitivity to the aesthetics of these riverscapes but also an awareness of the non-human world of river ecosystems. All told, Gallo-Roman poetry highlights an appreciation for the natural beauty of rivers, an awareness of their ecological abundance, and a recognition of the manifold ways in which human cultures, histories, and economies were drawn up in their watery webs.

The literary epigram is one of the most versatile ancient literary genres, and epigrammatists have often used it as a testing ground for the recollection and construction of their literary past. This chapter compares the corpus of Decimus Magnus Ausonius and Palladas of Alexandria, two eminent representatives of the epigrammatic genre from the later imperial period. Ausonius’ dialogue with the literary past is characterised by a discourse about the value, validity and reliability of classical authors and authorities from the Greek and the Roman world. For this purpose, Ausonius uses various techniques such as the juxtaposition of acknowledged and anonymous sources, the inclusion of ‘fake sources’, and a recurring discussion of Greek versus Roman authorities. In contrast, Palladas constructs a persona of himself which resorts to Greek authorities only and, especially, to Homer. Palladas appropriates Homer and the Homeric epics in order to construct his personal voice, whereas the actual discourse about classical authors and authorities remains comparatively flat and limited as compared to Ausonius.

Historians must tread carefully when they deal with both modern and ancient slavery, for every time they brand the practice as an archaic form of domination, it reappears adapted to new ages. Although most of the modern world, since the nineteenth century, has strived to make the ownership of one human being by another illegal, slavery keeps returning in the most insidious ways. At the turn of the century, when modern societies claimed to have finally gotten rid of it, slavery began to resurface, masquerading as free labour all across the globe (and not just in the Global South), bringing the need to discuss and to enforce policies against ‘practices similar to slavery’ back to international forums. It is striking that while this notion of an ‘insidious return’ has recently appeared in studies on rural slavery in the ancient world, it seems not to have influenced ones focused on late Roman Gaul.

The visual and intertextual effects of Ausonius’ versified riverscape, the Mosella, make it a prize specimen for modern study of late antique Latin poetics and aesthetics. What kind of performance – and then what kind of a book – would this poem originally have been, in the empire of Valentinian and his sons, in the 370s and ’80s? The chapter measures the oddity of the Mosella, and of the poet’s oeuvre, against the background of prior fourth-century Latin opuscular poetizing, to argue that Ausonius’ “poetical fame” (Gibbon) was at once enabled by his profile as an imperial officeholder and an effect of his deliberately stepping aside from it. A following generation of Latin writers, many of whom would style Christian literary careers for themselves, may be seen reprising – if not emulating – the trick that Ausonius performed in improvising a personal poetic subjectivity at the edge of the cognitive ecology of Roman empire.