In the second half of the 5th century the foremost representative of Latin studies in Gaul was Apollinaris Sidonius (fl. 470), whose _Letters_ were modelled on those of the younger Pliny, while his poems give proof of a wide though superficial acquaintance with classical literature. He laments the increasing decline in the classical purity of the Latin language.
An interest in Latin literature lived longest in Gaul, where schools of learning flourished as early as the 1st century at Autun, Lyons, Toulouse, Nîmes, Vienne, Narbonne and Marseilles; and, from the 3rd century onwards, at Trier, Poitiers, Besançon and Bordeaux.
About ten years after the death of Sidonius we find Asterius, the consul of 494, critically revising the text of Virgil in Rome. Boëthius, who early in life formed the ambitious plan of expounding and reconciling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, continued in the year of his sole consulship (510) to instruct his fellow-countrymen in the wisdom of Greece. He is a link between the ancient world and the middle ages, having been the last of the learned Romans who understood the language and studied the literature of Greece, and the first to interpret to the middle ages the logical treatises of Aristotle. He thereby gave the signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning work of his life, the _Consolatio Philosophiae_ (524), was repeatedly expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe. His contemporary, Cassiodorus (c. 480-c. 575), after spending thirty years in the service of the Ostrogothic dynasty at Ravenna, passed the last thirty-three years of his long life on the shores of the Bay of Squillace, where he founded two monasteries and diligently trained their inmates to become careful copyists. In his latest work he made extracts for their benefit from the pages of Priscian (fl. 512), a transcript of whose great work on Latin grammar was completed at Constantinople by one of that grammarian's pupils in 527, to be reproduced in a thousand MSS. in the middle ages. More than ten years before Cassiodorus founded his monasteries in the south of Italy, Benedict of Nursia (480-543) had rendered a more permanent service to the cause of scholarship by building, amid the ruins of the temple of Apollo on the crest of Monte Cassino, the earliest of those homes of learning that have lent an undying distinction to the Benedictine order. The learned labours of the Benedictines were no part of the original requirements of the rule of St Benedict; but before the founder's death his favourite disciple had planted a monastery in France, and the name of that disciple is permanently associated with the learned labours of the Benedictines of the Congregation of St Maur (see MAURISTS).