Rutilius Claudius Namatianus
Encyclopedia
Rutilius Claudius Namatianus (fl. 5th century) was a Roman Imperial
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

 poet, notable as the author of a Latin poem
Latin literature
Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings of the ancient Romans. In many ways, it seems to be a continuation of Greek literature, using many of the same forms...

, De Reditu Suo, in elegiac
Elegiac
Elegiac refers either to those compositions that are like elegies or to a specific poetic meter used in Classical elegies. The Classical elegiac meter has two lines, making it a couplet: a line of dactylic hexameter, followed by a line of dactylic pentameter...

 metre, describing a coastal voyage from Rome to Gaul
Gaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...

 in 416. The solid literary quality of the work, and the flashes of light it throws across a momentous but dark epoch of history, combine to give it exceptional importance among the relics of late Roman literature. The poem was in two books; the exordium
Exordium
Exordium may refer to:* Exordium , the introductory section of a discourse in Western classical rhetoric; e.g., the 1st 4 verses of Hebrews in the Bible* Exordium , by Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever....

 of the first and the greater part of the second have been lost. What remains consists of about seven hundred lines.

Whether Rutilius had converted to Christianity, which was well established as the official religion of the Empire
State church of the Roman Empire
The state church of the Roman Empire was a Christian institution organized within the Roman Empire during the 4th century that came to represent the Empire's sole authorized religion. Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches claim to be the historical continuation of this...

 by his time, has been a matter of scholarly debate. In the early 21st century, editors of his work concluded that he had not, and Alan Cameron
Alan Cameron (classical scholar)
Alan Cameron is a British classicist, Charles Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University.Cameron gained a BA from Oxford University, and his MA in 1964. He has taught at Columbia University since about 1977...

, a leading scholar of late antiquity
Late Antiquity
Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world. Precise boundaries for the period are a matter of debate, but noted historian of the period Peter Brown proposed...

, agrees that he "probably" remained unconverted from Rome's traditional religious practices
Religion in ancient Rome
Religion in ancient Rome encompassed the religious beliefs and cult practices regarded by the Romans as indigenous and central to their identity as a people, as well as the various and many cults imported from other peoples brought under Roman rule. Romans thus offered cult to innumerable deities...

.

Origins

The author is a native of southern Gaul
Gaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...

 (Toulouse
Toulouse
Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

 or perhaps Poitiers
Poitiers
Poitiers is a city on the Clain river in west central France. It is a commune and the capital of the Vienne department and of the Poitou-Charentes region. The centre is picturesque and its streets are interesting for predominant remains of historical architecture, especially from the Romanesque...

), and belonged, like Sidonius Apollinaris
Sidonius Apollinaris
Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius or Saint Sidonius Apollinaris was a poet, diplomat, and bishop. Sidonius is "the single most important surviving author from fifth-century Gaul" according to Eric Goldberg...

, to one of the great governing families of the Gallic provinces. His father, whom he calls Lachanius, had held high offices in Italy and at the imperial court, had been governor of Tuscia
Tuscia
Tuscia is a historical region of Italy that comprised the southern territories under Etruscan influence. While it later came to coincide with today’s province of Viterbo, it was originally much larger, including the whole Region of Tuscany, a great part of Umbria and the northern parts of...

 (Etruria
Etruria
Etruria—usually referred to in Greek and Latin source texts as Tyrrhenia—was a region of Central Italy, an area that covered part of what now are Tuscany, Latium, Emilia-Romagna, and Umbria. A particularly noteworthy work dealing with Etruscan locations is D. H...

 and Umbria
Umbria
Umbria is a region of modern central Italy. It is one of the smallest Italian regions and the only peninsular region that is landlocked.Its capital is Perugia.Assisi and Norcia are historical towns associated with St. Francis of Assisi, and St...

), then imperial treasurer (comes sacrarum largitionum
Comes sacrarum largitionum
The comes sacrarum largitionum was one of the senior fiscal officials of the late Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire....

), imperial recorder (quaestor
Quaestor
A Quaestor was a type of public official in the "Cursus honorum" system who supervised financial affairs. In the Roman Republic a quaestor was an elected official whereas, with the autocratic government of the Roman Empire, quaestors were simply appointed....

), and governor of the capital itself (praefectus urbi
Praefectus urbi
The praefectus urbanus or praefectus urbi, in English the urban prefect, was prefect of the city of Rome, and later also of Constantinople. The office originated under the Roman kings, continued during the Republic and Empire, and held high importance in late Antiquity...

) in 414.

Career

Rutilius boasts his career to have been no less distinguished than his father's, and particularly indicates that he had been secretary of state (magister officiorum
Magister officiorum
The magister officiorum was one of the most senior administrative officials in the late Roman Empire and the early centuries of the Byzantine Empire...

) and governor of the capital (praefectus urbi
Praefectus urbi
The praefectus urbanus or praefectus urbi, in English the urban prefect, was prefect of the city of Rome, and later also of Constantinople. The office originated under the Roman kings, continued during the Republic and Empire, and held high importance in late Antiquity...

). After reaching manhood, he passed through the tempestuous period between the death of Theodosius I
Theodosius I
Theodosius I , also known as Theodosius the Great, was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395. Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire. During his reign, the Goths secured control of Illyricum after the Gothic War, establishing their homeland...

 (395), and the fall of the usurper Priscus Attalus
Priscus Attalus
Priscus Attalus was twice Roman usurper , against Emperor Honorius, with Visigothic support.Priscus Attalus was a Greek from Asia whose father had moved to Italy under Valentinian I. Attalus was an important senator in Rome, who served as praefectus urbi in 409...

 near the date when his poem was written. He witnessed the chequered career of Stilicho
Stilicho
Flavius Stilicho was a high-ranking general , Patrician and Consul of the Western Roman Empire, notably of Vandal birth. Despised by the Roman population for his Germanic ancestry and Arian beliefs, Stilicho was in 408 executed along with his wife and son...

 as de facto, though not in title, emperor of the West; he saw the hosts of Radagaisus
Radagaisus
Radagaisus was a Gothic king who led an invasion of Roman Italy in late 405 and the first half of 406. A commited Pagan, Radagaisus evidentily planned to sacrifice the Roman Senators to the gods and burn Rome to the ground. Radagaisus was executed after being defeated by the half-Vandal general...

 rolled back from Italy, only to sweep over Gaul and Spain; the defeats and triumphs of Alaric I
Alaric I
Alaric I was the King of the Visigoths from 395–410. Alaric is most famous for his sack of Rome in 410, which marked a decisive event in the decline of the Roman Empire....

; the three sieges and final sack of Rome, followed by the miraculous recovery of the city; Herodian
Herodian
Herodian or Herodianus of Syria was a minor Roman civil servant who wrote a colourful history in Greek titled History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus in eight books covering the years 180 to 238. His work is not entirely reliable although his relatively unbiased account of Elagabalus is...

's vast armament dissipated; and the fall of seven pretenders to the Western throne.

Religious issues

It is clear that the sympathies of Rutilius were with those who, during this period, dissented from, and when they could, opposed the general tendencies of imperial policy. He himself indicates that he was intimately acquainted with the circle of the great orator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus was a Roman statesman, orator, and man of letters. He held the offices of governor of Africa in 373, urban prefect of Rome in 384 and 385, and consul in 391...

, who scouted Stilicho's compact with the Goths, and who led the Roman senate
Roman Senate
The Senate of the Roman Republic was a political institution in the ancient Roman Republic, however, it was not an elected body, but one whose members were appointed by the consuls, and later by the censors. After a magistrate served his term in office, it usually was followed with automatic...

 to support the pretenders Eugenius
Eugenius
Flavius Eugenius was an usurper in the Western Roman Empire against Emperor Theodosius I. Though himself a Christian, he was the last Emperor to support Roman polytheism.-Life:...

 and Attalus, in the hope of reinstating the gods whom Emperor Julian
Julian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....

 had failed to save.

While making few direct assertions about historical characters or events, Rutilius' poem compels some important conclusions about the politics and religion of the time. The attitude of the writer towards Paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....

 is remarkable: the whole poem is intensely Pagan, and is penetrated by the feeling that the world of literature and culture is, and must remain, pagan; that outside of Paganism lies a realm of barbarism. The poet wears an air of exalted superiority over the religious innovators of his day, and entertains a buoyant confidence that the future of the ancient gods of Rome will not belie their glorious past. He scorns invective and apology, and does not hesitate to reveal, with Claudian
Claudian
Claudian was a Roman poet, who worked for Emperor Honorius and the latter's general Stilicho.A Greek-speaking citizen of Alexandria and probably not a Christian convert, Claudian arrived in Rome before 395. He made his mark with a eulogy of his two young patrons, Probinus and Olybrius, thereby...

, a suppressed grief at the indignities put upon the old religion by the new. As a statesman, he is at pains to avoid offending those politic Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 senators over whom pride in their country had at least as great power as attachment to their new religion. Only once or twice does Rutilius speak directly of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

, and then only to attack the monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

s, whom the secular authorities had hardly as yet recognized, and whom, indeed, only a short time before, a Christian emperor had conscripted by the thousands into the ranks of his army. Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 could be assailed by Rutilius without wounding either pagans or Christians, but he clearly intimates that he hates it chiefly as the evil root from which the rank plant of Christianity had sprung.

Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...

 writes that Honorius excluded all persons who were adverse to the Catholic Church from holding any office in the state, that he obstinately rejected the service of all those who dissented from his religion, and that the law was applied in the utmost latitude and rigorously executed. Far different is the picture of political life painted by Rutilius. His voice is certainly not that of a partisan of a discredited faction. His poem portrays a senate at Rome composed of past office-holders, the majority of whom were certainly still pagans. We may discern a Christian party whose Christianity was more political than religious, who were Romans first and Christians second, whom a new breeze in politics might easily have wafted back to the old religion. Between these two sectors, the broad Roman toleration reigns. Some ecclesiastical historians have fondly imagined that after the sack of Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, the bishop Innocent
Pope Innocent I
-Biography:He was, according to his biographer in the Liber Pontificalis, the son of a man called Innocens of Albano; but according to his contemporary Jerome, his father was Pope Anastasius I , whom he was called by the unanimous voice of the clergy and laity to succeed -Biography:He was,...

 returned to a position of predominance. No one who accepts Rutilius' observations can entertain this idea. The atmosphere of the capital, perhaps even of all Italy, was still charged with paganism. The court was far in advance of the people, and the persecuting laws were in large part incapable of execution.

Perhaps the most interesting lines in the whole poem are those where Rutilius assails the memory of "dire Stilicho", as he names him. In Rutilius' view, Stilicho, fearing to suffer all that had caused himself to be feared, removed the defences of the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

 and Apennines
Apennine mountains
The Apennines or Apennine Mountains or Greek oros but just as often used alone as a noun. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically but not always used "mountain" in the singular to mean one or a range; thus, "the Apennine mountain" refers to the entire chain and is translated "the Apennine...

 that the provident gods had interposed between the barbarians and the Eternal City, and planted the cruel Goths
Goths
The Goths were an East Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin whose two branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe....

, his skinclad minions, in the very sanctuary of the empire: "he plunged an armed foe in the naked vitals of the land, his craft being freer from risk than that of openly inflicted disaster ... May Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....

 rest from all the torments of the damned, that they may seize on Stilicho; for Nero smote his own mother, but Stilicho the mother of the world!"

This appears to be a uniquely authentic expression of the feelings of perhaps a majority of the Roman senate against Stilicho. He had merely imitated the policy of Theodosius with regard to the barbarians; but even that great emperor had met with a passive opposition from the old Roman families. The relations between Alaric and Stilicho had been closer and more mysterious than those between Alaric and Theodosius, however, and men who had seen Stilicho surrounded by his Goth bodyguards, naturally looked on the Goths who assailed Rome as Stilicho's avengers. It is noteworthy that Rutilius speaks of the crime of Stilicho in terms far different from those used by Orosius and the historians of the later empire. They believed that Stilicho was plotting to make his son emperor, and that he called in the Goths in order to climb higher. Rutilius' poem holds that he used the barbarians merely to save himself from impending ruin. The Christian historians even asserted that Stilicho (a staunch Arian
Arianism
Arianism is the theological teaching attributed to Arius , a Christian presbyter from Alexandria, Egypt, concerning the relationship of the entities of the Trinity and the precise nature of the Son of God as being a subordinate entity to God the Father...

) had designed to restore paganism. To Rutilius, he is the most uncompromising foe of paganism. His crowning sin, recorded by this poet alone, was the destruction of the Sibylline books
Sibylline Books
The Sibylline Books or Libri Sibyllini were a collection of oracular utterances, set out in Greek hexameters, purchased from a sibyl by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and consulted at momentous crises through the history of the Republic and the Empire...

. This crime of Stilicho alone is sufficient, in the eyes of Rutilius, to account for the disasters that afterwards befell the city, just as Flavius Merobaudes
Flavius Merobaudes
Flavius Merobaudes was a 5th-century Latin rhetorician and poet, probably a native of Baetica in Spain.He was the official laureate of Valentinian III and Aetius...

, a generation or two later, traced the miseries of his own day to the overthrow of the ancient rites of Vesta
Vesta (mythology)
Vesta was the virgin goddess of the hearth, home, and family in Roman religion. Vesta's presence was symbolized by the sacred fire that burned at her hearth and temples...

. (For a sharply different view of Stilicho, see Claudian
Claudian
Claudian was a Roman poet, who worked for Emperor Honorius and the latter's general Stilicho.A Greek-speaking citizen of Alexandria and probably not a Christian convert, Claudian arrived in Rome before 395. He made his mark with a eulogy of his two young patrons, Probinus and Olybrius, thereby...

.)

Style

With regard to the form of the poem, Rutilius handles the elegiac couplet
Elegiac couplet
The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later...

 with great metrical purity and freedom, and betrays many signs of long study in the elegiac poetry of the Augustan era. The Latin is unusually clean for the times, and is generally classical, both in vocabulary and construction. Rutilius may lack the genius of Claudian, but also lacks his overloaded gaudiness and his large exaggeration; and the directness of Rutilius shines in comparison with the labored complexity of Ausonius
Ausonius
Decimius Magnus Ausonius was a Latin poet and rhetorician, born at Burdigala .-Biography:Decimius Magnus Ausonius was born in Bordeaux in ca. 310. His father was a noted physician of Greek ancestry and his mother was descended on both sides from long-established aristocratic Gallo-Roman families...

. It is common to call Claudian "the last of the Roman poets". That title might fairly be claimed for Rutilius, unless it be reserved for Merobaudes. At any rate, in passing from Rutilius to Sidonius, one might feel as if he has left the realm of Latin poetry, for the realm of Latin verse.

Of the many interesting details of the poem, a few may be mentioned here. At the outset, there is an almost dithyramb
Dithyramb
The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god: Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also...

ic address to the goddess Roma, "whose glory has ever shone the brighter for disaster, and who will rise once more in her might and confound her barbarian foes". The poet shows as deep a realization as any modern historian that the greatest achievement of Rome was the spread of law
Roman law
Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, and the legal developments which occurred before the 7th century AD — when the Roman–Byzantine state adopted Greek as the language of government. The development of Roman law comprises more than a thousand years of jurisprudence — from the Twelve...

. Next, we get incidental but not unimportant references to the destruction of roads and property wrought by the Goths, to the state of the havens at the mouths of the Tiber
Tiber
The Tiber is the third-longest river in Italy, rising in the Apennine Mountains in Emilia-Romagna and flowing through Umbria and Lazio to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It drains a basin estimated at...

, and the general decay of nearly all the old commercial ports on the coast. Most of these were as desolate then as now. Rutilius even exaggerates the desolation of the once important city of Cosa
Cosa
Cosa was a Latin colonia founded under Roman influence in southwestern Tuscany in 273 BC, perhaps on land confiscated from the Etruscans...

 in Etruria, whose walls have scarcely changed since his time. The port that served Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, almost alone of all those visited by Rutilius, seems to have retained its prosperity, and to have foreshadowed the subsequent greatness of that city. At one point on the coast, the villagers everywhere were soothing their wearied hearts with holy merriment in celebration of the festival of Osiris
Osiris
Osiris is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and...

.

History of De Reditu Suo and its editions

The majority of the existing manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s of Rutilius come from an ancient manuscript found at the monastery of Bobbio
Bobbio
Bobbio is a small town and commune in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy. It is located in the Trebbia River valley southwest of the town Piacenza. There is also an abbey and a diocese of the same name...

 by Giorgio Galbiato in 1493, which has not been seen since a French general took the manuscript in 1706. For centuries, scholars have had to depend primarily on the three best witnesses to this lost manuscript: a copy made in 1501 by Jacopo Sannazaro
Jacopo Sannazaro
Jacopo Sannazaro was an Italian poet, humanist and epigrammist from Naples.He wrote easily in Latin, in Italian and in Neapolitan, but is best remembered for his humanist classic Arcadia, a masterwork that illustrated the possibilities of poetical prose in Italian, and instituted the theme of...

 (identified by the siglum V, for Vienna); another copy made by Ioannes Andreas (identified by the siglum R, for Rome); and the editio princeps
Editio princeps
In classical scholarship, editio princeps is a term of art. It means, roughly, the first printed edition of a work that previously had existed only in manuscripts, which could be circulated only after being copied by hand....

of Johannes Baptista Pius (Bologna, 1520). However, in the early 1970s Mirella Ferrari found a fragment of the poem, written in either the 7th or 8th century, that preserves the final of 39 lines, and has forced a re-evaluation not only of the text but of its transmission.

The principal editions since have been those by Kaspar von Barth
Kaspar von Barth
Kaspar von Barth was a German philologist and writer.Barth was born at Küstrin in the Neumark region of Brandenburg. A precocious child, he was looked upon as a marvel of learning. After studying at Gotha, Eisenach, Wittenberg, and Jena, he travelled extensively, visiting most of the countries of...

 (1623), P Bunyan (1731, in his edition of the minor Latin poets), Ernst Friedrich Wernsdorf (1778, part of a similar collection), August Wilhelm Zumpt
August Wilhelm Zumpt
August Wilhelm Zumpt was a German classical scholar, known chiefly in connection with Latin epigraphy. He was a nephew of Karl Gottlob Zumpt....

 (1840), and the critical edition by Lucian Müller
Lucian Müller
Lucian Müller was a German classical scholar.-Biography:Müller was born in Merseburg in the Province of Saxony. After graduating from Humboldt University, Berlin and the University of Halle, he lived for five years in the Netherlands, working on his Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den...

 (Teubner, Leipzig, 1870), and another by Vessereau (1904); also an annotated edition by Keene, containing a translation by George Francis Savage-Armstrong (1906).

There is some variation of Namatianus' name in the manuscripts. Rutilius Claudius Namatianus comes from R, while V has Rutilius Claudius Numantianus. According to Keene Namatianus is used in Codex Theodosianus
Codex Theodosianus
The Codex Theodosianus was a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors since 312. A commission was established by Theodosius II in 429 and the compilation was published in the eastern half of the Roman Empire in 438...

as the name "of a magister officiorum
Magister officiorum
The magister officiorum was one of the most senior administrative officials in the late Roman Empire and the early centuries of the Byzantine Empire...

 in 412 AD", probably to be identified with the author and therefore has the weight of evidence. Other variants date from a later time and have no authority: Numantinus, Munatianus. Müller writes the poet's name as "Claudius Rutilius Namatianus", instead of the usual Rutilius Claudius Namatianus; but if the identification of the poet's father with the Claudius mentioned in the Codex Theodosianus be correct, Müller is probably wrong.

The latest and fullest edition of Namatianus is by E. Doblhofer. Harold Isbell includes a translation in his anthology, The Last Poets of Imperial Rome.

External links

. Text with apparatus, English translation, introduction to Rutilius and the manuscripts, from the 1935 Loeb Classical Library
Loeb Classical Library
The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each...

 edition.
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