Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/312

 294 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. dation of classical culture ; they received Christianity- more as a "little child"; and through it they also received civilization and Latin culture. The effect of Christianity upon the German character, language, and institutions was revolutionary.^ feut the German character was never Latinized, though greatly altered in those countries where Germanic speech was aban- doned for a Romance tongue. Even there German mood and tradition long endured, though deeply Chris- tianized. A poet who writes for Franks, Goths, and Thuringians, is not writing for people who have drawn in classical culture with their mother's milk. And the tendency will be for Latin poetry, written within the sphere of influence of the Christianized German mood, to change in feeling, if not to find new themes. An illustration of this is afforded by Venantius Fortunatus, whose divers works are curiously hetero- geneous. He was a Latin, born in upper Italy about the year 530. He spent his youth and early manhood at Eavenna. Then he left his home, to pass through Germany into France, and first stayed at the court of the Austrasian Sigebert, where he wrote a poem upon the marriage of that prince with Brunhild. Some time afterward at Poictiers he won the patronage and friendship of St. Radagunda, a Thuringian princess, who on the overthrow of her father's kingdom by the Franks had been forcibly married to Clotaire I, the son of Chlodowig. Fortunatus was a voluminous and versatile writer. 1 From the time of Ulfilas say to the year 1000 by far the greater part of the extant German literature is religious, as may be noticed by glancing through Piper's Die dlteste Literatur.