Rutilius Claudius Namatianus
Rutilius Claudius Namatianus was a late ancient Roman poet in the 5th century. He is best known as the author of the Latin poem De reditu suo in elegiac metric , which describes a sea voyage along the coasts from Rome to Gaul in 416. The literary quality of the work and the light it sheds on this significant but poor epoch give it exceptional importance among the remnants of late Roman literature. The poem was made up of two books, but the introduction to the first and the greater part of the second are lost. What remains is around 700 verses.
Life
The author comes from southern Gaul ( Toulouse or perhaps Poitiers ) and, like Sidonius Apollinaris , belonged to one of the great ruling families of the Gallic provinces. His father, whom he calls Lachanius, held high offices in Italy and at the imperial court, was governor of Tuscany ( Etruria and Umbria ), then administrator of the imperial treasury ( comes sacrarum largitionum ), overseer of the legal system and author of the imperial speeches ( quaestor ) and 414 prefect of the city of Rome ( praefectus urbi ).
Rutilius boasted that his career was no less excellent than that of his father, and stated in particular that he was head of the imperial office apparatus ( magister officiorum ) and also city prefect of Rome (i. 157, 427, 467, 561). When he grew up he found himself in the stormy time between the death of Emperor Theodosius I in 395 and the overthrow of the usurper Priscus Attalus (414), which is near the date his poem was written. He reports on the career of Stilicho as the actual head of politics in the west of the empire, who was merely not emperor in terms of title, he saw the hordes of Radagaisus move from Italy to Gaul and Hispania , the defeats and victories of Alaric ; the three sieges, and finally the sack of Rome, which was followed by the miraculous restoration of the city; the waste in Heraclianus ' enormous armament against the Vandals and the downfall of seven pretenders on the diadem of the West. Rutilius' sympathies were undoubtedly with those who deviated from the general tendencies of imperial politics at this time and, if they could, also contradicted them. We know from himself 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 who led the Senate to accept the aspirants to the throne Eugenius and Attalus in vain hope support that they would reinstate the gods that Emperor Julian could not save.
De reditu suo
Although the poem gives few direct explanations of historical characters or events, it allows important conclusions to be drawn about contemporary politics and religion. The author's attitude to paganism is noteworthy : the whole poem has often been viewed as pagan throughout and imbued with the idea that the world of literature is and must remain pagan; outside of paganism lies the realm of barbarism. The poet wore a superior air towards the religious innovations of the time and was full of confidence that the ancient gods of Rome would remain true to their glorious past in the future. He despises insults and justifications in equal measure, but on the other hand he is also not reluctant to show Claudian his suppressed pain over the insults inflicted on the old religion by the new one. As a statesman, he tries to refrain from attacks on Christian senators, whose pride in their country is at least as strong as their attachment to their new religion. Rutilius speaks directly of Christianity only once or twice, and then only to attack the monks , whom the secular authorities have hitherto barely noticed, and whom in fact a Christian emperor recently forced thousands into the ranks of his army. Judaism, on the other hand, was able to attack Rutilius without getting too close to pagan or Christianity, but he openly indicates that he hates it mainly as the evil root from which the creeping plant Christianity arose.
However, Alan Cameron has denied in a recent and extensive study that the poem served as some kind of pagan propaganda.
In Edward Gibbon we can read that Emperor Honorius kept anyone who was hostile to the Catholic Church away from public office, that he stubbornly refused the service of all those who contradicted his religion, and that the law was applied here in the most extensive and consistent manner . Far from it, however, is the picture of political life that Rutilius paints. His voice is not that of a partisan of a dishonored and oppressed faction. His poem shows a Roman Senate made up of previous incumbents, the majority of whom may still have been pagan; one recognizes, however, a growing Christian section, whose Christianity was more political than religious, which were first Romans and then Christians, which a new wind in politics could easily have brought back to the old religion. The old Roman tolerance reigned between these two poles. Some ecclesiastical historians have painted a picture according to which, after the sack of Rome, Bishop Innocent had moved to a position of superiority - but nobody who reads Rutilius with an open mind can hold on to this idea. The air in Rome, perhaps even all of Italy, was charged with paganism. The court was far removed from the people, and the pagan laws were in large part not enforceable.
Perhaps the most interesting verses in the whole poem are those in which Rutilius evokes the memory of the terrible Stilicho , as he calls him: Stilicho, who “fears everything that makes him so terrible”, has the lines of defense in the Alps and Apennines destroyed who would have placed the caring gods between the barbarians and the Eternal City, and smuggled the cruel Goths, his leather-clad favorites, into the sanctuary of the empire; his ruse is more godly than the ruse with the Trojan horse , that of Althaea or Scylla ; may Nero rest from all the torments of the damned, so that they may grab Stilicho; because Nero beat his own mother, Stilicho the mother of the whole world.
We may find here the authentic expression of a sentiment shared by the majority of the Roman Senate about Stilicho. With a view to the barbarians he had only imitated the policy of the emperor Theodosius I, and the great emperor also had to struggle with passive opposition from the ancient Roman families. Relations between Alaric and Stilicho were closer and more mysterious than those between Alaric and Theodosius, and men who had seen Stilicho surrounded by his Gothic bodyguard naturally viewed the Goths as Stilicho's avengers when they besieged Rome. It is noteworthy that Rutilius uses very different terms for the crimes of Stilicho than Paulus Orosius and the historians of the time. They believed that Stilicho was planning to make his son emperor and that he was bringing the Goths to rise even higher. Rutilius, however, notes that he only used the barbarians to save himself from impending ruin. Christian historians, in turn, affirm that Stilicho planned to reintroduce paganism. For Rutilius, however, he is the most uncompromising enemy of paganism. His main sin (reported only by Rutilius) was the destruction of the Sibylline Books , a sin worthy of someone who adorned his wife with the ruins of Victoria , the goddess who had been enthroned over the deliberations of the Senate for centuries. In the eyes of Rutilius, this crime of Stilichos alone suffices as an explanation for the catastrophes that befell the city, as Merobaudes , a generation or two later, traced the misery of his days due to the abolition of the ancient rites of Vesta .
A glance at the form of the poem shows that Rutilius treated the elegiac couplet with great metrical purity and freedom, and in many ways reveals the long study of elegiac poetry of the Augustan period . His Latin is unusually pure for the time and quite classic in word choice and structure. Rutilius' taste is also comparatively real. If he lacks the genius of Claudian, then he lacks his overloaded pomp and the great exaggeration and his directness shines in comparison with the elaborate complexity of an Ausonius . Claudian is usually called the last Roman poet. This title could also apply to Rutilius if it is not reserved for Merobaudes. In any case, when switching from Rutilius to Sidonius, one cannot help but notice that one is leaving the region of Latin poetry in the direction of the region of Latin stanzas.
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 misery, and who will once again rise in her power and blind her barbaric opponents. Like every modern historian, the poet shows the deep awareness that Rome's most important achievement was the spread of law. Then you get random but not unimportant references to the destruction of roads and real estate by the Goths, the state of the ports at the mouth of the Tiber , and the general decline of almost all old coastal ports. Rutilius is even exaggerating the destruction of the once important city of Cosa in Etruria, the walls of which have hardly changed since then. The port of Pisa seems to be the only one of those visited by Rutilius to have preserved its prosperity, so he predicts an impending prosperity for this city. At one point somewhere along the coast, the villagers, somewhere, "soothed their tired hearts with holy glee" by celebrating the feast of Osiris .
reception
The majority of the existing manuscripts come from a codex that was found in 1493 in the Bobbio monastery by Giorgio Galbiato , but was hidden until a French general took it in 1706. For centuries, scholars had to rely mainly on the three best witnesses for this lost codex: a copy from 1501 by Jacopo Sannazaro (Sigle V), another copy by Ioannes Andreas (Sigle R) and the first edition by Johannes Baptista Pius (Bologna, 1520). In the early 1970s, Mirella Ferrari found a fragment of the poem that dates from either the 7th or 8th century and included the end of 39 lines and led to a reevaluation of not only the text but also its translation.
Text output
The most important editions are those by Kaspar von Barth (1623), P. Bunyan (1731, in his edition of smaller Latin poets), Ernst Friedrich Wernsdorf (1778, as part of a similar collection), August Wilhelm Zumpt (1840), and the critical ones Editions by Lucian Müller (Teubner, Leipzig, 1870) and Vessereau (1904); also an annotated edition by Keene with a translation by George Francis Savage-Armstrong (1906). The last and most extensive edition of Namatianus is by Ernst Doblhofer (Heidelberg, I, 1972; II, 1977). The text has been re-edited by Étienne Wolff (2007) with some newly found fragments of the second book. Harold Isbell includes a translation in his anthology The Last Poets of Imperial Rome (Harmondsworth 1971, ISBN 0140442464 ).
literature
- Michael von Albrecht : History of Roman literature from Andronicus to Boethius and its continued effect . Volume 2. 3rd, improved and expanded edition. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-026525-5 , pp. 1139-1143
Web links
Remarks
- ^ Alan Cameron : The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-974727-6 , pp. 207 ff.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rutilius Claudius Namatianus |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | roman poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th century |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | South Gaul |
| DATE OF DEATH | 5th century |