Rutilius Claudius Namatianus
Rutilius Claudius Namatianus (* in southern Gaul ) was a late ancient Roman poet in the 5th century AD; He is known as author of the Latin poem De Reditu Suo in elegiac metric in which a sea voyage along the coasts of Rome to Gaul in 416 is described. The literary quality of the work and the light it casts on this important, but poor source era, giving it extraordinary importance among the remains of late Roman literature. The poem consisted of two books, the introduction to the first and the greater part of the second are lost. What remains includes about 700 verses.
Life
The author comes from southern Gaul (Toulouse or perhaps Poitiers) and belonged - as Sidonius Apollinaris - one of the great ruling families of the Gallic provinces. His father, whom he calls Lachanius, held high offices in Italy and the imperial court, was governor of Tuscany ( Etruria and Umbria ), then imperial treasurer ( comes sacrarum largitionum ), imperial recorder ( Quaestor ) and 414 governor of the capital itself ( Prefect urbi ).
Rutilius brags about his career is no less excellent than his father's, and, in particular, to have been Secretary of State ( magister officiorum ) and also governor of the capital (i. 157, 427, 467, 561). When he was grown up, he was in the tumultuous period between the death of Emperor Theodosius I. 395 and the fall of the usurper Priscus Attalus (414 ), which lies close to the date on which the poem was written. He tells of the career of Stilicho as actual Emperor of the West, not only title after he saw pull, the defeats and victories of the hordes of Alaric I Radagaisus from Italy to Gaul and Hispania, the three sieges and finally the sack of Rome, which followed the wonderful restoration of the city; the waste Herodians huge upgrade; and the sinking of seven pretenders to the diadem of the West. Doubtless Rutilius ' sympathies with those who differed in the time of the general trends of imperial policy and, if they could, also disagreed. We know of him saying that he was familiar with those who belonged to the circle around the great orator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, who learned of Stilicho's treaty with the Goths, and the Senate brought to the pretender Eugenius and Attalus in the vain hope of support that they would use again the gods could not save the Emperor Julian.
De Reditu Suo
Although the poem is little direct explanations about historical characters and events, it allows important conclusions on contemporary politics and religion. Noteworthy is the attitude of the author to paganism: The whole poem has often been regarded as entirely pagan and imbued with the idea that the world of literature was pagan and had to stay; outside of paganism lies the realm of the barbarism. The poet bears against the religious innovations of the time a superior face to the public and is full of confidence that the ancient gods of Rome will remain true in the future of their glorious past. Abuse and justifications he despised alike, it is not repugnant to him the other hand also to show with Claudian his suppressed grief over the insults that are the old religion inflicted by the new. As a statesman he is trying to refrain from attacks on Christian senators, their pride in their country at least as strong as the bond to their new religion. Only once or twice speaks Rutilius directly from Christianity, and then only to attack the monks who had the secular authorities so far hardly noticed, and recently a Christian emperor had forced thousands into the ranks of his army still in effect. Judaism, however, could Rutilius attack without contacting the Gentiles or Christianity too close, but he is open to understand that he is mainly used as the root of evil hates, from the creeping plant Christianity has sprung.
Alan Cameron, however, has denied in a recent and comprehensive study that the poem has served as a kind of pagan propaganda.
When Edward Gibbon is indeed read that Emperor Honorius anyone who faced the Catholic Church is adverse, kept away from public office that he stubbornly the service of all those rejected that contradicted his religion, and that the law has been applied here in the utmost design and consistently. However, is far from the image of political life that draws Rutilius. His voice is not that of a partisan of a disgraced and oppressed group. His poem shows a Roman Senate, which consists of former office holders, the majority of which perhaps was still pagan; However, you can see see rising Christian section whose Christianity was more political than religious, the Romans were at first and then Christians who would readily yield a new wind in the policy to the old religion. Between these two poles ruled the ancient Roman tolerance. Some church historians have painted a picture, after the sack of Rome by the Bishop Innocent was moved to a position of superiority - but no one who reads Rutilius bias can, stick to this idea. The air in Rome, perhaps even in the whole of Italy, was charged with paganism. The court was far away from the people, and the paganism pursuing laws were not to enforce in many parts.
Perhaps the most interesting verses in the whole poem are those in which Rutilius the memory of the terrible Stilicho, as he calls it conjures: Stilicho, the " fear everything that makes him so terrible," destroyed the defense lines in the Alps and Apennines which would question the gods caring between the barbarians and the Eternal City, and smuggled the cruel Goths, his leather-clad minions in the inner sanctum of the empire; his cunning was godless than the list with the Trojan horse, which the Althaea or Scylla; Nero may rest from all the torments of the damned, so they pack Stilicho; because Nero beat his own mother, Stilicho but the mother of the world.
We may find here the authentic expression of a feeling that was shared by the majority of the Roman Senate regarding Stilicho. He had only imitated overlooking the barbarians of the Emperor Theodosius I. politics, and even the great Emperor had to deal with passive opposition of the old Roman families. The relationship between Alaric and Stilicho were narrower and more mysterious than that between Alaric and Theodosius, and men who had seen the Stilicho surrounded by its Gothic bodyguard, of course regarded the Goths when they besieged Rome, when Stilicho avenger. It is noteworthy that Rutilius used entirely different terms than Paul Orosius and the historians of the time for the crime of Stilicho. They believed that Stilicho was planning to make his son emperor, and that he brought the Goths to rise even higher. Rutilius, however, finds that he only used the barbarians in order to save themselves from impending ruin. The Christian historian in turn assure that Stilicho planned to introduce paganism again. For Rutilius, however, he is the most uncompromising enemy of paganism. His main sin ( which is, however, reported only by Rutilius ) was the destruction of the Sibylline books, a sin worthy for someone with the debris of the Victoria adorned his wife, the goddess who had enthroned for centuries over the deliberations of the Senate. This crime of Stilicho alone is sufficient in the eyes of Rutilius ' out as an explanation for disasters that befell the city then, as Merobaudes, a generation or two later, the misery of his days because of the abolition of the old rites of Vesta tracked down.
A look at the form of the poem shows that the elegiac couplet Rutilius treated with great metric purity and freedom, and in many ways reveals the long study of the elegiac poetry of the Augustan period. His Latin is unusually pure for the time and pretty classic in word choice and structure. Rutilius ' taste is also comparatively safe. If he lacks the genius of Claudian, so it lacks the overloaded pageantry and big exaggeration and his directness shines in comparison with the elaborate complexity of Ausonius. Usually Claudian is called the last Roman poet. This title could also apply to Rutilius, if it is not reserved for Merobaudes. In any case, one can not help but notice the change from Rutilius to Sidonius, that the region of Latin poetry in the direction of the region leaves Latin verses.
Among the many interesting details of the poem, few can be mentioned here. The beginning is an almost dithyrambic speech to the goddess Roma whose fame always outshone the misery, and once more ascend in their power and their barbarian opponents will dazzle. The poet shows how each modern historians, the deep awareness that the most important achievement of Rome was the dissemination of law. Then you get random, but not unimportant references to the destruction of roads and property by the Goths, the state of the ports at the mouth of the Tiber, and the general decline of almost all ancient coastal ports. Rutilius exaggerates even the destruction of the once important city of Cosa in Etruria, the walls of which are likely to have since that time has not changed much. The port of Pisa seems to have preserved the only one of its prosperity to the visited by Rutilius, so that he predicts this city an impending bloom. At one point somewhere on the coast " calmed the villagers somewhere their tired hearts with holy cheerfulness " by celebrating the festival of Osiris.
History of the text and of its expenditures
The majority of existing manuscripts comes from a manuscript that was found in 1493 in the monastery of Bobbio by Giorgio Galbiato, but which was hidden until a French general in 1706, it took them. For centuries, scholars had to rely mainly on the three best witnesses for this lost manuscript: a copy in the year 1501 by Jacopo Sannazaro (identified by the suffix V); another copy of Ioannes Andreas ( with the abbreviation R); editio princeps, and by J. B. Pius (Bologna, 1520). In the early 1970s, Mirella Ferrari found a fragment of the poem, which originates from either the 7th or 8th century and included the end of 39 rows and led to a reassessment not only of the text but also its translation.
The most important issues are those of Kaspar von Barth ( 1623), P. Bunyan (1731, in his edition of smaller Latin poet ), Ernst Friedrich Werndorf (1778, as part of a similar collection ), August Wilhelm Zumpt (1840 ), as well as the critical editions of Lucian Müller ( Teubner, Leipzig, 1870) and Vessereau (1904 ); furthermore an annotated edition of Keene with a translation of George Francis Savage - Armstrong ( 1906). Müller wrote the name of the poet as Claudius Rutilius Namatianus instead of the usual Rutilius Claudius Namatianus; However, should the equating of the father of the poet mentioned in the Theodosian Code ( 2.4.5 ) Claudius be correct, Müller would perhaps wrong. The last and most comprehensive edition of Namatianus by Ernst Doblhofer (Heidelberg, i, 1972, ii, 1977). Harold Isbell includes a translation in his anthology The Last Poets of Imperial Rome ( Harmondsworth 1971, ISBN 0140442464 ).