Rutilius Namatianus, St. Augustine, and the Date of the De Reditu

Abstract

One of St. Augustine's purposes in writing the De Civitate Dei was to counter the view which became current in pagan circles after Alaric's sack of Rome that Christianity was responsible for the disaster. To this end he quoted, introduced with the refrain ‘Ubi ergo erant illi dii ?’, many examples of similar disasters which the old gods had apparently been unable to ward of f in the pre-Christian period (III, 17 f.). In 1905 A. Dufourc pointed out that Rutilius Namatianus devotes a number of eloquent lines in his De Reditu to precisely the opposite claim, that Rome had risen with renewed and increased strength from each of these disasters (the Gauls, Samnites, Pyrrhus, Hannibal). Dufourc suggested that Rutilius had read Civ. Dei I–III, and that the De Red. was a pagan reply to Augustine's thesis. Little attention was paid to this suggestion at the time, but in 1948 P. Courcelle adduced further parallels between the two works, and claimed that Rutilius had read not only Civ. Dei I–III, but IV and V as well.