"The fall of the Roman Empire has fascinated generations of men, and this volume offers an insight into the literary world of Rome in the fourth century A.D., in the century and a half before the fall of the Western Empire. The writers of this period have long been over-shadowed by the pre-eminence accorded since the eighteenth century to the writers of the Golden and Silver Ages. Yet the Latin literature of the fourth century has come down to us in considerable bulk, and this volume should do much to increase the interest being felt in the period by modern readers, who also live in an age of convulsion and change." [Book jacket].