Rutilius Namatianus Research Articles

Progression géographique et régression mémorielle dans le De reditu de Rutilius Namatianus

Abstract: The travelogue is intimately linked to memory in Antiquity, as shown in the example of Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo. The structure of the iter, borrowed from geographic literature, is part of a scholarly practice, linked to the arts of memory, which allows location on a mental map marked out by common literary or historical memories. Rutilius’ real journey is thus coupled with a textual and memorial journey which brings him back to Rome, and even, in the footsteps of Aeneas, to the origins of the City. Between spatial progression and temporal regression, the poem thus deploys a paradoxical space.

Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry by Philip Hardie

Reviewed by: Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry by Philip Hardie Dennis Trout Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry Philip Hardie Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 293. ISBN: 978-0-520-29577-3 Specialists in early imperial literature have discovered the treasures of late Latin poetry. Prominent among them is Philip Hardie, who has already published discerning essays on Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola. Perhaps it is unsurprising that scholars who have labored in the well-tilled fields of Augustan and post-Augustan poetry should migrate to fresher terrain. Hardie himself identifies "the relative youth of studies of late antique Latin poetry" as one of the discipline's defining features (3). That such emigrants to this new frontier should also bring along the tools that have proved so effective in rehabilitating Ovid, Lucan, and Statius is equally unremarkable. Nevertheless, it is an act of loyalty that thrusts them into the center of debates over the exceptionality of late Latin poetics. By championing critical principles honed on the poetry of Vergil and his successors, Classicism and Christianity takes its stand on the side of those who see the writing and reading practices of late Latin poets and their audience as fundamentally continuous with those of the classical past. The first chapter of Classicism and Christianity ("Farewells and Returns: Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola") models Hardie's approach and, as he notes, introduces most of the book's themes and strategies. The poetic epistles exchanged by Ausonius and Paulinus have long been a favorite site for exploring the intersection of biography and literature in the later fourth century. Though less interested in lives than some scholars, Hardie like others spotlights the interplay with Vergil (especially the Eclogues) and Ovid (especially the exile poetry) that undergirds the textual maneuvers and emotional complexity of these letters. For Hardie, the "noise and clatter of classical poets" that animate these letter-poems (21) and the "patchwork of old intertexts" (19) that structures them are clear evidence that even the radically committed Christian poet (Paulinus) was licensed to deploy the "verbal resources and stylistic ornament" (43) of pre-Christian poetry in the service of Christian truth. Consequently, Hardie argues, content constitutes the primary difference between Late Antiquity's Christian and traditional Latin poetry and contrastimitation stands as a privileged technique by which Christian poets bridged content and form (e.g., 2 and 39). This position is not in itself new, of course, but Hardie [End Page 440] further argues that late antique Kontrastimitation is broadly continuous with the "emulative and agonistic practices of pre-Christian poetry" (8). In short, as the readings of this chapter are meant to illustrate, the critical methods developed in recent decades by scholars of early imperial poetry are appropriate and effective for assessing late ancient poetry, Christian and traditional alike. There are, then, two ways of engaging Classicism and Christianity, as an assemblage of close readings and as an interpretative primer. Chapters 2–4 focus on late antique elaborations of themes and narrative ploys already present primarily in the works of Vergil. In these chapters Hardie foregrounds the late antique absorption, modification, and transvaluation of Vergilian narratives and ideologies of imperial renewal and exilic longing; the adaption and occasional subversion of the Aeneid's ruminations on cosmic and imperial order; and late Latin poetry's recapitulations of Vergil's emphasis upon the dialectic of concord and discord in perceptions of Roman history and identity formation. Claudian, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and Rutilius Namatianus claim most of the spotlight but the poets of Biblical epic, centones, and carmina figurata, as well as Augustine, that shrewd reader of Vergil, edge in. Less linear argument than a run of soundings bringing to light the classical formations underlying late Latin poetry's political, religious, and aesthetic surfaces, these chapters also reaffirm the centrality of Vergil to the late antique consciousness. In the following two chapters this literary archaeology is brought to bear on topics that are often heralded (inappropriately in Hardie's view) as quintessentially late antique. Chapter 5, which includes an emblematic discussion of the intertextual tapestry that voices the De ave phoenice's program of...

Reading Late Antiquity ed. by Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm

Reviewed by: Reading Late Antiquity ed. by Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm Serena Causo Reading Late Antiquity Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed and Mats Malm, eds. Heidelberg: Winter-Verlag, 2018. Pp. 267. ISBN: 978-3-8253-6787-9 This book is a collection of thirteen contributions from the conference entitled “Reading Late Antiquity,” held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sweden in 2015, with the aim of exploring the current field of reception studies on Late Antiquity. Despite the different methodologies and the diverse content of the contributions, the collection succeeds in a remarkable coherence of purpose, through a functional partition of the volume in three parts, masterfully arranged to guide the reader from the most traditional interpretations to the most dynamic appropriations of late antique literary heritage throughout the centuries. Common to all the contributions is the willingness to assess the independence and uniqueness of Late Antiquity, in constant exchange with other historical periods. In the first section of the book, “Theoretical Outlooks,” traditional theoretical concepts related to Late Antiquity are reversed, thus offering new interpretations of late antique literature. For example, in “Untimely Antiquity,” James Uden subverts the cliché of “untimeliness” of the late antique and positively describes it as the ability of this literature to contain multiple temporalities, recalling the past and anticipating future spirits and periods. Another old trope is subverted in the study by Marco Formisano. He appropriates the past scholarly definition of “decadent” and turns it into an aesthetic paradigm of Late Antiquity which was responsible of producing a sense of instability and disruption with the earlier literary tradition, resulting in thematic and formal features (e.g. fragmentation, allegories, displacement and discontinuity) which are distinctive to this period. Jesús Hernández Lobato advocates Late Antiquity as a major parallel for the postmodern era in which a problematic relationship between philosophy and language turns into a condition of apophaticism, a pronounced mysticism, a tendency to deconstruction, expressions of a crisis of the “logocentrism.” The second section of the book, “Decadence and Decline,” expands the discussion of late antique literature to decadentism and investigates those views that shaped the common perception of Late Antiquity as a period of decline thereafter. Late antique aesthetic, poetics and sensibilities seem to find a close parallel in the postmodernist culture. Accordingly, Olof Heilo’s study convincingly argues that when Burckhardt in his early work Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen (1835) reinforced the idea of degeneration (ausarten) of late antique literature, he was projecting onto it the strong contempt of his own time, in which he experienced a similar sense of decadence and disharmony. In his own contribution, Scott McGill uses Huysmans’s novel, À rebours (1884), to demonstrate the marginalization of late Latin literature in nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle France, when late antique literature was charged with aesthetic value only among decadent movements; Des Essaints, “the decadent antihero” of the novel, is taken as the paradigm of this [End Page 269] marginalization. A comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the hegemony of modern Europe emerges prominently after the World War I, especially in O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. In his contribution Stefan Rebenich discusses the innovative perceptions of Late Antiquity developed by Spengler that transcend stereotypes and especially value the continuity of this period. Rutilius Namatianus and his unfinished poem De redito suo are the focus of Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed’s contribution. The narration of the melancholic travels of this fifth-century Latin poet through the ruins of the Roman Empire and his dreams of recovery of the past glory were praised in post-revolutionary France and even more during the Italian decadentist movement, where it gained great popularity in the fascist context. In the twentieth century the Viennese writer Alma Johanna Koenig chose Byzantium as the setting for her work Der Heilige Palast (1922), and Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla similarly set La Fiamma (1934) in Byzantine Ravenna. The vitality of Late Antiquity as an historical frame is among the motivations that underlie Henriette Harich-Schwarbauer’s contribution on Koenig’s work: she highlights how the empress Theodora of Der Heilige Palast moves in a...

The salinae of O Areal (Vigo) and Roman salt production in NW Iberia

In antiquity, the production of sea salt was one of the most important sources of salt. According to Pliny the Elder (NH 31.81), the most common way of obtaining salt was through marine salinae: facticii varia genera, volgaris plurimusque in salinis mari adfuso. There are plenty of textual references to marine salt evaporation ponds: Livy (1.33) reported that Ancus Marcius opened saltworks on the Tiber next to Ostia; Pliny (NH 31.84-87) mentioned a series of examples of such installations distributed throughout the Mediterranean, while Columella (Rust. 10.135) indicated the existence of saltworks at Pompeii, and Cassiodorus (Var. 12.24) spoke of those located near Venice. Passages in Rutilius Namatianus (De red. 475-90) and Manilius (Astr. 5.682-92) are also well known for their explanations of how ancient saltworks operated.

Le De reditu suo de Rutilius Namatianus : élégie ou voyage vers l'au-delà ?

The literary forerunners of Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo, are well-known but offer no rationale for this writer’s use of elegiacs in the narrative of his journey back home. This journey from Ostia to Gaul could well be more than a mere personal account - what if it were a katabasis in disguise, a trip from the land of the living to the afterworld fraught with danger every step of the way? This may account for the Virgilian allusions to the Underworld; the De reditu suo in the historical context of a triumphant Christianity is, furthermore, a farewell to Roman paideia and a eulogy to a vanishing world. As he celebrates what used to be, Rutilius hopes and is confident it will return. But these are no longer the epic times of an expanding empire: hence, his choice of the elegiac metre over hexameter and the nostalgic tone of his poem. [Author]

The Struggle for Control of the Landscape in Book 1 of Rutilius Namatianus

The late pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus charted his journey back to his estates in Gaul in a lengthy elegiac poem De Reditu composed around A.D. 417. This paper examines Rutilius' descriptions of the various places he encounters in Book 1 of this poem, arguing that they are more metaphorical than some have recognized or considered. It will analyse the ways in which Rutilius' preoccupations with visualisation and personification convey the impression that the landscape is a living entity which is continually challenging attempts to contain it, both by the poet and other people he encounters on the voyage.

La crítica intelectual pagana al monacato primitivo

The criticism that the intellectual pagan elites directed against the early monasticism was originated by causes which were more complex than the strictly religious ones. Therefore, we must speak of antimonastic criticism, not antichristian criticism, caused by cultural, political and social motives. The authors who censured the monasticism — Julianus, Libanius, Eunapius, Palladas, Rutilius Namatianus and Zosimus — criticised the monks for their hypocrisy, as they simulated virtue, but they hid behind their black cloaks to perpetrate all the evildoings they wanted; their misanthropy, which opposed to the Hellenic-Roman philanthropy, and supposed the refusal of the social responsibilities of man; and for not being useful neither to war nor to the State, as they were not allowed to engender new citizens. Moreover, these pagan authors accused them of being traitors to the Roman Empire and of representing an evident danger to the classical cultural inheritance.

Une lecture religieuse des invectives de Claudien est-elle possible?

A recent work has proposed to literary reading of Claudian’s invectives, but this seems excessively restrictive. Indeed, In Rufinum and In Eutropium were drafted at a time when relations between pagans and Christians were polemical to such an extent Claudian could not have absolutely avoided current events, for he was himself a convinced heathen. In this connection Claudian’s poetry seems to show characteristics in common (although expressed with less acrimony) with the religious message which authors like Servius or Rutilius Namatianus were trying to circulate. A glance to the carm. min. 27 on the Phoenix shows that the poet had never given up disputing against Christians. Thus, a passage of In Rufinum (265-267) finds a new interpretation. One must of course raise the issue of several verses in Claudian’s work which seem to be biblical, but these were probably intended in an ironic or polemical way. An analysis of a passage of In Eutropium (2, 288-303) also requires a politico-religious reading of the omen connected with Cybele. Religious issues, which were reinforced by political disputes, appear to be the heart of In Eutropium. On this matter, however, the hypothesis according to which Claudian was an inspiration for the Historia Augusta should be reversed. In fact, it was the other way around, and Claudian actually shares with the author of the Historia Augusta a deep distrust of Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Empire. The study reveals many ideological affinities between Claudian and contemporary pagan authors, and argues for a religious reading of the poet’s invectives.

2. Latin from A to P: The TLL in the 20th Century

after more than a century, the basic look of the TLL, with its two eightyfour line columns per page, remains reassuringly familiar. Yet this superficial continuity masks real changes, not least in the basic corpus of material. Obviously the Thesaurus reflects the discovery of new texts. Some of these, like the new Gallus, are familiar to almost any classicist. Others may be more familiar to specialists, especially students of late antiquity: new letters and sermons of Augustine, new passages of Rutilius Namatianus’s De reditu suo and Tiberius Claudius Donatus’s commentary on the Aeneid, portions of a gospel epic by one Severus, the “Appendix Maximiana.”1 And to these literary texts must be added the constant stream of newly published inscriptions, bringing with them new senses, new constructions, new spellings. On the flip side, the TLL’s corpus has also grown smaller. Users of the 1990 Index are familiar with the annotations non iam affertur and its even more disapproving cousin, nunc spernimus. Most often the work has been dropped because a reattribution or redating pushes it beyond the TLL’s terminus of 600 c.e. But other cases are more curious (for additional instances see Kromer 2003). The 1990 Index still includes a text it refers to as “Epist. Vinisii.” This is a brief text published by Nicholson in 1904, a letter from a fourth-century bishop in Roman Britain warning a parishioner against an Arian rival, a certain Biliconus. Or so it was believed. A little over ten years ago, Roger Tomlin showed, in perhaps the wittiest article ever published in ZPE, that this text is in fact an ordinary curse tablet, one of scores or hundreds that survive from the sacred spring in Bath. The saintly “Bishop Vinisius,” his correspondent “Nigra,” and the dastardly “Biliconus” existed only in the first editor’s fantasy; it did not help that he was trying to read the tablet upside down. Less obtrusive—but far more important in the aggregate—are incremental improvements in familiar texts. New commentaries and other works have 2. Latin from A to P: The TLL in the 20th Century

Un distique vénatoire tardo-antique. À propos d'une inscription latine sur une lance d'apparat de la nécropole mérovingienne de Cutry

During the excavations carried out in the Merovingian necropolis of Cutry (Meurthe-et-Moselle), the archaeologists brought to light a male burial dating from the second half of the 6th century containing an exceptional object: a prestigious spear, datable – by analogy with some other weapons of the same type – of the 5th century. On its blade there is a Latin inscription which so far has not been deciphered. In my article I propose the following reading of this text: HAEC INT[E]R V[ASTAS] STRINGAT VENABVLA SI[L]VAS QVI GAUDET RABID[IS] OBUIU[S I]RE FERIS “Let draw this spear in vast forests Who enjoys to go against the wild animals”. If we suppose that the distich was not copied from an older spear and it was written specifically for the weapon found in the necropolis of Cutry, we cannot but be struck by its correct versification and the construction of the verses which evokes the poetry of Augustean period. The fine workmanship of the spear points unambiguously towards the Gallo-Roman aristocracy whose literary taste is well-known to us owing to the writings of Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus and Sidonius Apollinaris. However, a comparison between the distich and their works does not deliver obvious analogies. Therefore, the text restored above appears to be a phenomenon: its writing on a prestigious hunting weapon, its impeccable versification, its light form, its Ovidian construction and, finally, its assonances which evoke the medieval léonins – all this make it an exceptional epigram which enriches our knowledge on late antique poetry.

Da Avieno a Rutilio Namaziano : spettatori e poeti del mondo tardo-antico

Through the analysis of some significant aspects of the works of Avienus and Rutilius Namatianus we try to test the categories of thinker, artist and spectator in the final period of the classical world, just before it finally succumbs. In this case the artist is the poet who not only feels heir to a long literary tradition, Greek and Latin, but in this tradition he finds the legitimacy for his work. He is a spectator of both the physical reality, geographical and astronomical, both the historical reality contemporary to him ; the readers of his work are the spectators of the world through the mediation of the poetic language. The writer is also a thinker, but for him it is not important to put forward new solutions, but to remain in the wake of tradition and to state his masters’ thought again.

Rutilius Namatianus, Aelius Aristide et les chrétiens

Without any doubt, Rutilius Namatianus, when writing his De reditu suo in 417, was personally acquainted with Aelius Aristides’ oration In praise of Rome. Nevertheless it still remains unobserved how fundamentally different can be, in terms of signification, the eulogy to Roman universalism from a Greek living in the second century and from a Roman living in the fifth. Here is an attempt to demonstrate that the political context in which this pseudo-travel narrative was written in fact shows signs of the climate of intellectual contest between pagans and chritians and, indeed, the De reditu stands at the very hearth of a lobbying network woven by the partisans of the old religion among whom are equally to be found the Symmachi, Servius and Macrobius. The demonstration proceeds according to three stages: the first one reminds us of all that the praise of goddess Roma in the poem owes to the Augustean ideology transmitted by Virgilius, in order to bring out, in the second stage, the differences of significa...

Sub aqua, sub aqua: submerged repetition in Ovid and Rutilius Namatianus

We may begin with Quintilian 9.3.44:prioris sententiae uerbum ultimum ac sequentis primum frequenter est idem, quo quidem schemate utuntur poetae saepius. This is indeed a common phenomenon, and textual corruption is a common consequence; one of the two repeated words is lost by haplography and the gap is filled with a metrical interpolation; this type of corruption is as old as the archetype of Vergil; cf.Aen.10.705,Cisseis regina Parin; <Paris>urbe paterna, wherePariswas lost andcreatinserted;Pariswas restored by Bentley. Similarly at Ov.Tr.1.11.12 all the MSS haveomnis ab hac cura mens releuata mea est, andcura leuatais restored fromCIL6.9632; cf.

L'antitesi in Rutilio Namaziano

The aim of this article is to study the use of parallelism and antithesis in the poem of Rutilius Namatianus. The single passages are discussed in relation to the structure of elegiac distic, the literaiy patterns are quoted. De reditu suo is full of antitheses between two distics, or between hexameter and pentameter, or between the emistics of each verse, because the poet plays upon the feature of the metre. These considerations allow to solve some problems of textual critic.

The voyage of Rutilius Namatianus: From Rome to Gaul in 417 CE

(1989). The voyage of Rutilius Namatianus: From Rome to Gaul in 417 CE. Mediterranean Historical Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 271-280.

Rutilius Namatianus, Constantius III and the Return to Gaul in Light of New Evidence

Rutilius Namatianus, Constantius III and the Return to Gaul in Light of New Evidence

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

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.