Episode 95: Rutilius Namatianus

De Reditu Suo and the Sack of Rome in 410 CE

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 95: Rutilius Namatianus. This episode will cover the work of the late Latin poet Rutilius Namatianus, whose famous poem De Reditu Suo, or “On His Return Home,” chronicles the author’s journey from the city of Rome back to his homeland of Gaul. Written in about 417 CE, what makes Rutilius’ poem famous is perhaps the history surrounding its composition. During the first two decades of the 400s, the western Roman Empire suffered multiple invasions of the Italian Peninsula and a sack of the city Rome. Between 400 and 410, the western empire lost the provinces of Britannia, and also lost much of Rutilius’ own homeland of Gaul. While the long poem that we’ll read in this program is called “On His Return Home,” as a result of various barbarian groups converging in Gaul between 405 and 415, Rutilius Namatianus scarcely knew whether or not he had anything to return home to. But barbarian invasions were only one of the two major forces threatening the wellbeing and the culture of conservative aristocratic Romans of Rutilius’ generation. Christianity, by the time the 300s gave way to the 400s, was ascendant in the late empire, both in the powerful bishoprics of Rome’s urban centers, and in the scattered monasteries and hermitages of the countryside. Not everyone, however, was on board with the new religion and its ambitious clergy. For conservative Romans like Rutilius, invested in Roman civilization’s ancient past, the proliferation of Christianity was occurring at the expense of Rome’s long established cultural traditions, and empire’s spirit was decaying from within just as barbarians from without seized its territories for themselves.

Rutilius lived in a place and time we don’t often associate with poetry. When we learn about the years between 376 and 476 CE in European history, the main narrative thread is the final collapse of the western Roman Empire. This collapse began in earnest with the Gothic Greuthungi and Thervingi crossing the Thracian Danube in the summer of 376. And it ended with the abdication of the imperial throne by the final Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus at the behest of the monarch Odoacer in 476. There are so many moving parts to European history during this dizzying century that its literary history seems almost immaterial. But even beyond the theological texts being set down by writers like Jerome and Augustine, the whirlwind decades between 376 and 476 produced some marvelous late Latin poetry. Ausonius, our writer from the previous episode, was still in his silver years during the century’s beginning. The imperial court poet Claudius Claudianus wrote praise poems and invectives, and an unfinished epic about the abduction of Proserpine by Hades. The Iberian Christian poet Prudentius wrote an allegorical long poem about a great clash between good and evil, which was quite influential during the Middle Ages. Even as Gaul collapsed, a Roman Gallic poet named Paulinus of Pella wrote about the twilight of Roman life there some time in the 460s. While the works of these later Latin poets will likely never be as famous as the great historical saga of the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, Rome’s last Latin poets nonetheless give us firsthand accounts of a historical period in transition – a transition from the 500-year epoch of Rome’s hegemony over the Mediterranean to the more mottled centuries of the Early Middle Ages. Out of all of this work that the western empire’s final century produced, I think that Rutilius Namatianus’ De Reditu Suo, again our poem for today, gives us the most vivid picture of the Roman experience of the ancient empire’s last decades. As two of Rutilius’ translators put it nearly a century ago, “His tender Stoic melancholy, coloured rather than seared by the memory of Rome’s recent capture by the Goths, does not prevent him from cherishing an optimistic confidence in [Rome’s] recovery, even as in long-past history she had recovered after the [past sacks and assaults]. And so in his encomium upon the imperial city. . .Rutilius has uttered the swan-song of Rome.”¹

A travel log of a week or so of sailing along the northern Italian coast, Rutilius’ poem depicts a Roman aristocracy in decline – one proud, but nostalgic; plucky, but unsettled by the terrifying course of recent historical events. As Rutilius’ ship passed along the northwestern Italian coast, he made careful note of the many sites he passed, conscious of how this and that region fit into the course of Roman history as he understood it. A nobleman, as skilled and learned as any Roman poet we’ve met in our podcast, Rutilius was no stranger to Roman history, and among the poet’s passages about the weather or the flora or fauna of his voyage’s various stages, he leaves us with numerous meditations on some of his acquaintances and the recent events that they’ve lived through.

These events – namely the catastrophic invasions that rocked the western empire between 400 and 415 – are something that we’ll need to cover upfront in this program. And in order to do so, I I’m going to tell you the story of Rutilius Namatianus’ life alongside the life of one of his historical contemporaries – a much more famous contemporary. This contemporary was Alaric the Visigoth, that barbarian king who rose to prominence a little before 400 and, after a series of fraught negotiations with Roman executive power, in 410 became the first person to lead a successful sack of Rome in 800 years. So again, the centerpiece of our story for today will be Rutilius Namatianus’ poem “On His Journey Home,” done around 417. But to understand the vortex of history that produced this melancholy masterwork of late Latin literature, I think it will be useful to first hear the tale of two people – Rutilius and Alaric, a Roman and a barbarian, and how their story was the story of an entire generation. So let’s begin today’s tale in what is today Toulouse, France, in roughly the year 370 CE. [music]

Visigoths in Rome after 376

The poet Rutilius Namatianus was born roughly around 370 CE, under Rome’s Valentinian dynasty.² When Rutilius was a boy in the 370s, enjoying an aristocratic childhood and the mild climate of what again is today southwestern France, a thousand miles away, in the colder territories north of the Danube frontier, a migration was happening – the most consequential population migration Rome would ever face. This was the southward and westward migration of the Goths, driven toward the Danube from the north by the arrival of the Huns. In the year 376, the Goths were granted provisional admission into the Roman Empire by Valens, the Emperor Valentinian’s brother and eastern co-emperor. By this point, the Goths were partially Romanized, having lived in a region permeated by Roman culture for centuries, but poor settlement policies and general clannishness in the regions of Thrace and Moesia led to the Gothic War of 376-382. The most famous outcome of this war was perhaps the death of the eastern Emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. But the Gothic War of 376-382 had much greater consequences than the death of a single emperor. Scarred from years of conflict, at the war’s end, Rome was compelled to compromise with the Goths who’d come down into Thrace, and in 382, it was agreed that the immigrant population would settle within the Empire’s borders. The Goths were not, like so many other populations that Rome had absorbed, required to disperse and tacitly expected to assimilate. Instead, the Goths remained an internal foreign body, installed in the northeastern and central Balkans, coalescing into an unofficial nation that history would later call the Visigothic Kingdom.

Between 380 and 390, as the Edict of Thessalonica was ratified and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, as Augustine converted to Christianity in Milan and Jerome studied Hebrew in Jerusalem, the poet Rutilius Namatianus was living out his teenage years in southern Gaul, and abroad with his father, wherever his father, a high level Roman officeholder, happened to be assigned. Rutilius underwent a traditional Roman education, rich in rhetoric, literature, and nationalistic history, becoming versed in the ways of the Roman gentility. And as Rutilius enjoyed these youthful privileges, meanwhile, a thousand miles to the east, a generation of Visigoths was also growing up in the Roman world, including their future king, Alaric, again roughly a contemporary of Rutilius. Rutilius’ world was Roman and Latin through and through. Alaric’s generation of Visigoths lived in a hybrid world. They were both Roman and barbarian. The Visigoths were conscripted to fight Roman wars, but often in designated Visigothic units. Alaric’s generation of Visigoths enjoyed some security as an internal barbarian population, but their ethnic identity also made them subalterns in the late empire, compelled into military service and paying taxes, but held at arm’s length by the empire’s highest power brokers. After a decade and a half of being treated as lower-caste citizens, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius died in 395, the Visigoths sprang into action.

The Visigoths had good reason to. The Emperor Theodosius, a barracks emperor and son-in-law of Valentinian I, had ended the Gothic War of 376-382 and outlived all of Valentinian’s sons. Hardened by civil wars and foreign campaigns alike, Theodosius ended his military career with a final domestic conflict against the usurper emperor Eugenius. This conflict stretched from 392-394. The civil war between Theodosius and Eugenius terminated the Eugenius’ bid for power, and led to the Emperor Theodosius, in his twilight years, becoming the last person to ever rule over the entire Roman Empire. And while these victories might seem to signal a new stability in Roman executive power, two major problems emerged from decisions the Emperor Theodosius made in the twilight of his reign. First, like so many burly barracks emperors before him, Theodosius passed power down to young and less than qualified male heirs. The Roman Empire had probably seen worse than Theodosius’ sons Arcadius, elevated in the east at the age of 18, and Honorius, elevated in the west at the age of 10, but neither of the children, understandably, proved capable of managing the manifold catastrophes plaguing the late empire. The second consequential decision that Theodosius made in his final years was one related to that final civil war he fought. In the culminating conflict of this civil war in the year 394, at the Battle of the Frigidus River, Theodosius made use of Visigothic foederati, or conscripted troops. But the Emperor Theodosius didn’t treat these allied forces like normal Roman soldiers. Instead, Theodosius balled together ten thousand Goths and, clearly considering them expendable, flung them into the usurper emperor Eugenius’ front lines, where most of them died. The strategy worked. Theodosius not only won the civil war. As historian Douglas Boin puts it, “Within a few years of the Battle of the Frigidus River, Romans would say that the loss of Gothic lives that day had secretly been Rome’s ‘gain’ and that whenever the Goths had suffered, it was Rome’s ‘victory.’”³ In other words, Theodosius was praised specifically for using the Goths as cannon fodder.

Some of the Visigothic foederati survived this Battle of the Frigidus River in 394. One of the survivors was Alaric himself. Again, roughly Rutilius Namatianus’ contemporary, Alaric would have been in his twenties when he saw his friends and countrymen who’d been conscripted sent out by a Roman Emperor to be killed by a man trying to become a Roman Emperor. And Alaric, who would lead a sack against Rome a decade and a half later, clearly held a grudge. A hybrid between Roman and Visigoth all of his life, Alaric was not some savage clad in bearskins, but instead a person fluent in Latin and Roman culture, whose life’s work was trying to find a home for himself and those like him. Some time in the mid-390s, perhaps prior to Theodosius’ death or just a little after, Alaric began a new phase of Visigothic military offensives against Rome. These offensives would, over the next 25 years, meet with setbacks and the occasional slapdash peace treaty. But ultimately, what Alaric began in 395 or so eventually led to the Goths grinding westward along the Aegean, and then the Adriatic, and then central Mediterranean coasts, sacking and pillaging along the way to the Iberian Peninsula. [music]

Honorius and Alaric

The early life of our author for today, Rutilius Namatianus, was rather different than this. But being a citizen of the western empire, naturally, Rutilius was impacted by all of the military developments that unfolded at the turn of the fifth century. Rutilius grew up around modern day Toulouse, France, the son of a successful politician and public servant. His father Lachanius had been a governor in central Italy, a high ranking deputy in Roman Britain, a treasurer, and had even been mayor of the city of Rome. Rutilius’ childhood thus may have been an itinerant one, in which the young man followed his father’s various posts around modern day France, England, and Italy. Rutilius’ father Lachanius would have spent his service under the late Constantinian and then the Valentinian dynasties – imperial administrations that, while not without their share of problems, at least endured for multiple decades. Rutilius, however, a generation younger, came of age in a different world. Rutilius’ life, just like Alaric’s, was touched by the far-reaching actions of the Emperor Theodosius – especially Theodosius’ decision to leave his 10-year-old son Honorius in charge of the western half of the empire.

Honorius held onto power in the west for 28 years, miraculously managing to die of natural causes in spite of the fact that his reign was marked by apocalyptic losses for the western Roman Empire. During Honorius’ early years on the throne, de facto power in the west was in the hands of his regent and paramount general Stilicho. The poet Rutilius would have seen the young emperor Honorius ascend to the purple at the age of 10 in the year 395, and, being about 25 and well-versed in the geography, culture, and politics of the Western Empire, Rutilius cannot have been optimistic about the untested youngster’s coronation.

Rutilius would eventually work for the young emperor Honorius, and likely knew Honorius directly. And what happened during Honorius’ reign from 395-423 effectively destroyed the western Empire, though it sputtered on for another half century after this in a reduced form. While many forces were arrayed against the young Emperor Honorius, they can be grouped into three main categories very familiar to students of later Roman imperial history. First, barbarian populations were pressing westward over the Rhine frontier. Second, barbarian populations were pressing southward from the region of the Danube frontier. Third, as always after the third century, domestic revolts and the appearance of various barracks emperors during Honorius’ reign added civil wars to the ones Rome was fighting with invaders. Let’s go through the basics of the Emperor Honorius’ reign – the events that I’m about to describe were definitive ones for Rutilius Namatianus as the poet lived through his late 20s, and then 30s and 40s and saw his civilization begin its final downward spiral.

The western Emperor Honorius, who again ruled from 395-423, faced crises from his earliest years on the throne, when he was just a child. In 398, a rebellion flared up in Roman Africa. Its leader pledged allegiance to a man who was then the Eastern Byzantine shadow emperor, Eutropius – Eutropius was the steward who managed the young Eastern Emperor Arcadius’ affairs. Losing the agriculturally rich territories around Carthage was unacceptable to the western empire, and so Stilicho, again the western general and shadow emperor, deployed troops to quell the defection. They were successful, a bit of tactical luck helping their peace negotiations, and the rebellion was thwarted before it could do any real damage. This relatively minor crisis in 398 soon gave way to a much more severe several years later. The aforementioned Alaric the Visigoth led two major campaigns into Italy from the Balkans. The first of these campaigns occurred in 402. Leading up to 402, Alaric had emerged as a leader of the Visigoths at a unique moment of opportunity. The boy heirs of Theodosius in the west and the east were growing into their crowns, relying on more experienced men of the military and court to guide their actions. Between east and west were the Balkans, and the unassimilated Visigothic nation. The shadow emperor of the east, Eutropius, did not like the shadow emperor of the west, Stilicho, and so in 397, Alaric, likely through negotiations with Eutropius, was made the general of the Roman province of Illyricum – a land mass in the western Balkans that includes most of the Adriatic Sea coast. This promotions gave Alaric money and resources. It gave the Byzantine Empire a buffer zone from any western offensives. And of course, Alaric’s elevation was not appreciated Romans on the Italian Peninsula, who at this juncture considered themselves in a cold war with the Byzantine side of the house.

Thus, Alaric the Visigoth, between 397 and 401, was the leader of a marchland between east and west, a barbarian king astoundingly funded by Constantinople who surely used his years of service to shore up military power and connections. Alaric’s command was terminated in 401 by Byzantine authorities, leaving Alaric in limbo – certainly a powerful military leader, but one no longer authorized by either half of the empire; one revered among his people, but also one who had grown used to Roman funding as part of his operations as a leader. As of 401, however, Alaric and the Goths had no love lost for Romans – just the year before, a massacre in Constantinople had led to the deaths of thousands of Goths, and Alaric had not forgotten the sight of 10,000 of his countrymen purposely sent out to be killed by Theodosius back in 394 at the Battle of the River Frigidus. When Alaric lost his command of Illyricum, then, Alaric, as much of anyone, would have been aware of the egregious mistreatment of Goths by Roman powerbrokers ever since the Goths had showed up as refugees back in 376. To quote historian Douglas Boin once more,

For three decades, Gothic families had been forced to live without the legal protections afforded their Roman neighbors. Some, we can assume, found work and settled down. Others, like the majority of Alaric’s followers, seem to have shuffled temporarily between cities where they might be fortunate to receive some generous handouts of food. But regardless of their own individual success stories, every Goth lived precariously, their property and their person subject to seizure at the government’s whim, and everyone was told to be content with second-tier legal categories as Rome took no action to address their plight.⁴

Denied the securities and prerogatives of Roman citizens, and yet, paradoxically, living within Roman borders and conscripted to fight Rome’s wars, Alaric and a key faction of the Visigoths had had enough. In late 401 or early 402, Alaric and his forces steered westward, and invaded Italy. [music]

The 402 and 405 Gothic Invasions of Italy

The capital of the western empire was at that point in Milan. In 402, the Emperor Honorius would have been about 17, and the poet Rutilius in his early 30s. Reports arrived that the Visigoths were on the loose, and at the beginning of this first Visigothic invasion, Honorius’ star general and regent Stilicho was up north at the central German frontier. The Emperor Honorius, hearing of the Gothic presence in the eastern Po Valley, fled west and south. His steward, shadow emperor, and master general Stilicho came to the rescue. Beating Alaric first at Pollentia, at the far western end of the Po Valley, and then 160 miles to the northeast, at Verona, Stilicho sent Alaric’s forces packing back to Illyricum, defeated and compelled to sign a peace treaty. One outcome of this initial invasion was that the Roman capital was moved from Milan to Ravenna in 402, Ravenna being a bit further from the frontier, and more importantly, having stronger fortifications and marshy surroundings to help protect it from invaders. Moving the capital of the western empire, however, did not make the rest of Italy safe. The western general Stilicho didn’t attempt to finish Alaric and his forces off, and instead signed a peace treaty with them. This treaty of 402, though it may have simply been an expedient due to other things on the general’s to-do list, was fiercely criticized by some of Stilicho’s enemies in the Roman court. As it turned out, though, for the moment, Alaric wasn’t the Goth that the Italian peninsula needed to worry about the most. Just three years after Alaric’s invasion of 401-402 a second contingent of Gothic forces made landfall on the Italian peninsula in 405, these under the command of a king called Radagaisus.

This second Gothic invasion seems to have come from a slightly different direction. Alaric’s headquarters, by 405, were a broad oval of land all along the eastern Adriatic coast. Radagaisus’ forces, though, seem to have come from farther off to the northeast, perhaps pressed south through modern day Slovenia and Austria by Hunnic forces swelling in the center and south of Eastern Europe. Wherever they came from, Radagaisus and his army had reached the Po Valley by the end of 405, and for several months, they ransacked northeastern Italy, managing to make it over the northern Apennines and lay siege to Florence in 406. The western emperor Honorius’ protector-general Stilicho saved the day again, laying waste to Radagaisus’ Goths.

While Stilicho’s victory was worth celebrating, the circumstances that had necessitated it were nonetheless shocking. A second full on Gothic invasion in five years, and from a whole different group of Goths, no less? Italy, clearly, needed better homeland security. And looking for this security, later in 406, Stilicho turned to an unlikely source – Alaric the Visigoth. Stilicho asked if Alaric would serve as a western Roman ally in Illyricum – again the Eastern Adriatic coast, in exchange for an unknown sum of money. Alaric, out of cash and recently defeated, took Stilicho up on the offer. But the agreement proved empty on the Roman side. Alaric rallied his troops, marched, and waited for payment. But none came. Two years later, in 408, Stilicho, knowing the threat posed by Alaric, managed to wheedle money out of the Senate to send a belated payment to Alaric, as the western empire at that point was reeling from crises in Gaul and Britannia. And this payment may have cost Stilicho his life.

The general Stilicho, like so many figures in all sides of later Roman history, had some barbarian heritage. His father was a Vandal who’d served as a Roman soldier, and his mother a Roman. The imperial guardian and general Stilicho, who’d steered Italy through two terrifying crises, was nonetheless the subject of prejudice at a crucial juncture of his late career. Back in 402, Stilicho had signed a peace treaty with Alaric rather than finishing Alaric off, following Alaric’s first invasion. By 408, Stilicho had extracted a treasure chest full of gold from the Senate for the Visigothic king to keep Alaric from invading Italy again. And in 408, resentment over Stilicho’s tribute payment, together with general suspicion and prejudice toward the half-barbarian general resulted in a conspiracy against him. Asking for money to give to a known foe of the Roman Empire – this didn’t look great on paper. Nor did several other moves the half-Vandal general had made, including marrying his daughter to Honorius, or hurrying off to the Byzantine court when Honorius’ brother Arcadius died to try and help settle affairs. We don’t know whether Stilicho ever had any real plans to usurp anyone, or defect, because when Stilicho returned from being an imperial envoy in Constantinople, the Emperor Honorius, having absorbed the suspicions of one of his ministers, had ordered his guardian and general killed. And Stilicho, in August of 408, to use an often quoted passage from Edward Gibbon, “with a firmness not unworthy of the last of the Roman generals, submitted his neck to the sword.”⁵

Stilicho’s son was also executed. An anti-immigrant purge of citizens with Vandal, Gothic, and other barbarian heritage – one of unknown proportions – followed, with the city of Rome in particular becoming a flashpoint of conflict. Stilicho’s barbarian Roman confederates, and their families, though they were Roman allies, also became targets of nativist Italian Romans who had been queasy about having a half-Vandal general as imperial regent. The disparate factions of the Italian Peninsula hardened into barbarian, and non-barbarian camps, with many persecuted immigrants outright defecting to swear their allegiance to the nearby King Alaric, who was now only kept at bay by the flimsy peace treaty of the deceased Stilicho.

As we’ve talked about in past episodes, the word “barbarians,” though it unfortunately has demeaning connotations, is still the word used by historians to describe the populations from the north and east, over the Danube and Rhine, who crossed into Roman territories in increasing numbers in and after the third century. The men and women of Italy who were killed by racist mob violence in and after 408 would have largely been Visigoths and Vandals, with smatterings of others like the Alemanni and Suebi, or the children of members of these populations, or the half-children of them, like Stilicho himself. These barbarian populations had roots in modern day Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic, and while the military conflicts in the air in the first years of the 400s clearly caused nativist animosities toward men and women who had immigrated down from the north, Rome had always sopped up phenotypically and linguistically diverse groups without much of a fuss. In the late fourth century, though, the stakes were different, as the scale of population migrations into the empire had escalated to higher levels. And nativist Italian Romans, during this period, then, may have felt that they had special cause to persecute their neighbors, even though these barbarian and half-barbarian civilians around them would have generally spoken Latin, worn Roman clothes, and done Roman stuff, and who just wanted homes. Needless to say, the racial violence that sprang up did little to appease Alaric the Visigoth, who now only had the parchment of a dead general’s peace treaty to keep him from attacking Italy again.

This treaty, partly responsible for Stilicho’s downfall, and again signed in 406, had not come out of nowhere. By the end of 406, the Italian peninsula had suffered invasions from two different Gothic armies – first Alaric’s and then Radagaisus’. But out in the provinces to the northwest, catastrophes of equally severe magnitude had been unfolding. What was happening down in Italy – namely invasion and crisis, wasn’t exactly kept a secret from the outer regions of the empire, and those who smelled blood in the water were quick to take advantage of the chaos. [music]

406-410: The Western Empire Contracts

In 406, the Roman soldiers stationed there up in Britannia declared a commander named Marcus as emperor. While this usurpation was short lived – Marcus was dead within a year – it began a period of half a decade during which Roman Britain produced several usurper emperors in short sequence. Another barracks emperor named Gratian briefly rose to power, elevated and then done away with by his troops. Following these two would-be British emperors, a more substantial one appeared in 407, a man whom history would know as Constantine III. No relation to the Constantinian dynasty, by the way – this guy was just a military man with an auspicious name. This Constantine III, not content to sit idly by in Britain, crossed the channel to invade Gaul, and thinking big, elevated his son to the status of emperor, so that the young man could help manage the breakaway British state’s military affairs.

As serious as all of this was, in the winter between 406 and 407, something even more consequential was happening over in eastern Gaul, and this was a major migration of Alans, Vandals, and Suebi – a commingled group of tribes that converged in the western part of modern day Germany, and then moved westward over the Rhine and into Roman territories. This migration, traditionally dated to December 31, 406, sounded the death knell for Roman Gaul, the homeland of Rutilius Namatianus, who would have been in his mid-30s when a critical mass of barbarians finally traversed the Rhine frontier for good and began to branch out from there. These catastrophes – chaos up in Britain and Gaul suddenly flooded with invaders – these catastrophes were some of the circumstances under which the general Stilicho desperately sought to pay off Alaric between 406 and 408. Upstart emperors were seizing control of Britain. Gaul was buckling under the weight of barbarian migrations. Italy was becoming a popular destination for Gothic invasions. Stilicho had sought to make a tribute payment to secure peace on at least the eastern frontier of the peninsula, but conspiracy and prejudice led to the general’s execution in the summer of 408. If Stilicho were indeed innocent of pursuing imperial power for himself – and that’s a big if – then Honorius’ decision to execute him in 408 was one of the worst decisions ever made by a Roman emperor. Because in 408, as Alans, Vandals, and Suebi made themselves comfortable in Gaul, and Britain’s self-made dynasty began its own expansionist activities in modern day France and Spain, the old Roman heartland also had an extremely capable and pissed off Visigoth just east over the Adriatic, in addition to countless Gothic civilians, disgruntled and incensed by the ethnic violence that had followed Stilicho’s death.

In the later months of 408, then, Alaric began a second invasion of Italy, sending word to his equally capable brother-in-law Athaulf, sometimes Atawulf, to join him. Alaric’s forces first sacked the coastal town of Arminum, just 30 miles southeast of the capital of Ravenna. They then proceeded down to Rome. A blockade of the Tiber halted supplies from entering the city. In an ugly episode of late Roman history, the general Stilicho’s widow Serena, the niece of the Emperor Theodosius, was accused of conspiring with Gothic invaders, and she was murdered by city officials. The Romans behind the siege walls realized no help was coming from Ravenna, or anywhere else. The city Rome had not been sacked by a foreign power for 800 years, but, as the last months of 408 saw famine in the old capital’s streets, it seemed that the unthinkable would soon happen. Ambassadors were sent out of the city walls to negotiate with Alaric. The conversation between them, as captured by the Byzantine historian Zosimus roughly a hundred years later, is worth quoting here for entertainment value, whether or not it’s historically accurate. Zosimus paints this picture of Alaric the Visigoth, conversing with Roman emissaries outside the city walls in November or December of 408.

When the ambassadors came to [Alaric], they. . .delivered the message of the senate. When Alaric heard it, and that the [Roman] people having been exercised to arms were ready for war, he remarked, “The thickest grass is more easy to cut than the thinnest.”. . .But when they spoke of peace, he. . .declared, that he would not relinquish the siege on any condition but that of receiving all the gold and silver in the city, all the household goods, and the Barbarian slaves. One of the ambassadors observing, [said] “If you take all these, what will you leave for the citizens?” He replied, “Their Souls.”⁶

Historians of Rome write the best one liners, ever. Anyway, however exactly negotiations took place, the Romans in 408 acquiesced to Alaric’s demands. Ancient sources report Alaric receiving thousands of pounds of gold, tens of thousands of pounds of silver, thousands of silk tunics, crimson cloaks, and thousands of pounds of pepper – so much that Rome’s senators had to dig into their personal reserves to pay him off, and that pagan statues were melted down for the sake of the tribute. Of equal importance, Alaric was also given Rome’s barbarian slaves – a population that surely included many Goths captured in the recent invasions who were happy to join ranks with Alaric, who now had money to pay them. Rome’s tribute payments proved sufficient, and some time during the spring of 409, Alaric and his army headed north.

This very well might have been the end of young emperor Honorius’ domestic problems with the Goths on the peninsula. The initial payment opened diplomatic channels between the Visigoths encamped in central Italy in the summer of 409, and the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna. Without going into all the details, though, negotiations between Alaric and Honorius were unsuccessful. The Visigothic king wanted what he’d always wanted – a secure and ratified homeland for Goths in the west central Balkans, and a salaried, legitimate relationship with the Roman Empire. Honorius refused, and Alaric laid siege to Rome a second time. The outcome of this second siege was that Alaric compelled the city of Rome to elevate its own emperor. After all, the actual young Emperor Honorius, insulated in his swamp in Ravenna, seemed to care little for the old capital of Rome. And in a moment of extreme historical irony, the city of Rome elevated a usurper Roman emperor to rival the stubborn Honorius over in Ravenna. Little came of this elevation – the puppet emperor also proved obstinate to Visigothic demands, and by the summer of 410, he was deposed. Honorius, though perhaps frightened at the prospect of a Visigothic-backed Roman emperor and dizzied at the cataclysmic events unfolding up in Gaul and Britain, only dug in deeper, and in August of 410, the city of Rome, for the first time in 800 years, was sacked. Christian theologians like Jerome recorded the sack of 410 as a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Other near contemporary sources, though, like Orosius of Spain, paint quite a different picture of what happened after Rome’s walls were breached. Orosius wrote that refuge was honored for all those who sought shelter in churches, that a tactical removal of valuable goods took place, and that orders were issued not to shed blood for the sake of looting. The Visigothic sack of Rome, then, can’t have been a pretty picture, but in the annals of historical records of ancient sackings of cities, it comes across as more of a strategic financial punishment than a bloodthirsty rampage, and if this were indeed the case, then Alaric the Visigoth, treated with relentless prejudice by Romans his entire life, acted with astonishing mercy when he finally pillaged the old Roman capital in the last days of August of 410.

All of this history we’ve gone through upfront here is extremely relevant to our poet for today, Rutilius Namatianus. Because Rutilius served as the mayor of Rome after its sack in 410. But before we open the pages of Rutilius’ long poem De Reditu Suo, that story of a voyage back to Gaul from Rome the author took in 417, we need to turn our attention slightly westward, and follow the paths of the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Alans, and the Suebi as they move in a counterclockwise arc around the central and western Mediterranean. The Visigoths, when Rutilius was a child in modern day Toulouse, were a far off presence – a knuckle of foreigners installed in the no man’s land in between the western and eastern empires. Around the time he wrote his famous poem, though, in a series of events that must have truly been staggering to behold for the generation who experienced it, Gaul was largely overrun, and the capital of the new Visigothic kingdom was not the city of Rome, but instead, Rutilius’ own home region of Gallia Aquitania. [music]

After the Sack: The Visigoths in Gaul and Hispania

As of the autumn of 410, the Emperor Honorious, aged 26, could not have been feeling very peppy about his future or that of the western empire. One of the few nice things about being a later Roman emperor, however, was that sometimes, those who had rebelled against you had others rebel against them, and such was the case in the year 409, when the usurper emperor Constantine III, who’d risen up in Britain, had one of his generals try to take him out. In the resulting chaos, Honorious was able to dredge up a competent general. This competent general was Constantius III, not to be confused with the usurper Constantine III. Honorius’ new general Constantius III took advantage of the turbulence to the northwest, and in 411, put down the rebellion of the usurper Constantine III. This was good news, and at some point in 411, Honorious had some more good news. The Visigoths under Alaric had sacked Rome the previous year. Following the sack of the city, the Visigoths thundered southward with an unknown quantity of Gothic citizens and hangers-on, freighted with treasures, intending to sail to Sicily and Carthage. Unfortunately, before the Visigoths could get out to sea, a severe storm capsized a number of the ships that they’d hired, thwarting the group’s efforts to get offshore. Alaric knew he had money. But Alaric, surely, also knew that the sack of Rome would not go unanswered by either half of the empire, and as I’ve tried to emphasize in this program so far, more than a bloody conquest of Roman civilization, Alaric simply sought a home for his people. Before he could steer the Visigoths any further, though, Alaric died of unknown causes in 411, his brother-in-law Athaulf taking on the responsibility of leading the Goths. Seeking a homeland like Alaric had, Athaulf steered the Goths on an overland journey north through the Italian Peninsula once more – this time toward Gaul.

In late 411, then, the major crises faced by the western empire, for the moment, had all converged in Gaul. The Alans, Vandals, and Suebi, who had crossed in the early winter of 407 were still there. Yet another usurper emperor harnessed their support, but in an unlikely alliance, the new Visigothic king Athaulf partnered the Emperor Honorius, and Athaulf’s forces defeated the latest usurper emperor and his brother in 413. The unlikely alliance proceeded into early 414, when Athaulf married Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia. The marriage, however, didn’t last long or cement a Visigothic-Theodosian royal lineage. Honorius’ new general, Constantius III, soured on Athaulf, beginning maneuvers along the Mediterranean coast of modern day France. Athaulf, his people, and his wife withdrew temporarily to Hispania. The one son that the couple had died in infancy, and Athaulf himself was murdered – likely by a fellow Goth from a rival Gothic tribe – in 418 or 419.

At this point, Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia seems to have taken on an important role in Roman-Visigothic relations. The Goths were in a shaky position by 418, having secured a foothold in southwestern France, but harried by Honorius’ powerful general Constantinus III, and rocked by a succession dispute. Galla Placidia, following the death of her Visigothic husband Athawulf, was compelled by her brother Honorius to marry his general Constantius III. To flash forward for a moment, Constantius III would later briefly rule as western emperor following Honorius’ death in 421, but the son of Galla Placidia and Constantius III, Valentinian III, would rule for over 29 years, being the last western Empire to rule for any significant length of time. Anyway, to return to that crucial year of 418, it was at this juncture that the Visigoths finally got what they’d been seeking since they’d crossed the Thracian Danube over 40 years prior – a ratified internal kingdom within the Roman Empire.

We don’t know exactly how this happened. The Visigoths were fighting the Vandals around this time, and two other barbarian tribes, the Franks and Burgundians, were active in the center and north of Gaul. The Roman provincial landowners and powerbrokers of Gaul had now seen 15 years of catastrophic instability due to barbarian migrations and civil wars, and so perhaps a critical mass of them had simply abandoned their claims on their former estates. However it happened, in 418, the province of Gallia Aquitania was formally ceded to the Visigoths, a territory that’s roughly the lower southwestern quarter of modern day France, one of its administrative centers being the city of Toulouse in the southeastern region of Gallia Aquitania itself. Although Gallia Aquitania would fall to the forces of the Frankish Merovingian founder Clovis in 507, Visigothic forces would later hold increasingly large swathes of the Iberian Peninsula up into the Umayyad invasion of Hispania in 711. The Visigothic kingdom seated in Aquitaine, then, wasn’t so much important because it was the beginning of a long-lived Visigothic dynasty in modern day France, but instead because it heralded what was to come in European history.

What was to come, first of all, obviously, was the further dissolution of the western empire. But the Visigothic kingdom was also a glimpse of what was to come in medieval European history – Christian hereditary monarchies, seeded with bishoprics, terraced with bits of Roman law, and plagued with the occasional theological factionalism – a decentralized world of smaller governments, more court and administrative languages, and satellite ecclesiastical authorities that sometimes pursued their own power politics or religious agendas. Our author for today, Rutilius Namatianus, saw all of this happening. He would have seen displaced refugee populations, opportunistic generals, and roving bands of raiders as he made his way back home from Rome to Gaul in about 417 – the very moment when a whole generation of Romans realized that a large portion of their homeland was gone, and that barbarian immigrants were there to stay. [music]

The Poet: Rutilius Namatianus in 417 CE

So, with all of that history covered upfront, I think we’re more than ready to read Rutilius’ De Reditu Suo, or “On His Return Home.” Unfortunately this poem doesn’t survive in its entirety – 644 verses in elegiac couplets have been preserved from Book 1, and 68 from Book 2, but plenty has survived to give us a sense of Rutilius’ perspective on the events of the early fifth century. The entire poem, by the way, likely only had two books, and so we have a fair amount of it. Scholars debate whether Rutilius’ journey took place in the fall of 417 or early winter of 418, and the exact circumstances of the voyage, and we can get into detail about that a little later. We’ve just covered a pretty wide breadth of history, so let’s zoom into Rutilius’ life during the five or so years up to the time he wrote his famous poem. In the year 412, Rutilius served as a top imperial aid to the Emperor Honorius in a post called the magister officiorum – a post that helped manage diplomats, police, and espionage activities. Two years later, in 414, Rutilius served as praefectus urbi, or loosely, mayor, of Rome. As scholar Martha Malamud summarizes,

As praefectus urbi in Rome, [Rutilius Namatianus] held significant judicial powers and was responsible for overseeing the major guilds and corporations, administering the city’s all-important grain supply, and managing the drainage of the Tiber and the sewage and water systems – the last a job that seems to have appealed to his own interests, for he dwells at surprising length in such a short poem on aqueducts, baths, fishponds, hot springs, salt pans, and sluice gates. One can easily imagine Rutilius as a loyal bureaucrat, inclined to engineering, who would love to improve Rome’s infrastructure.⁸

The speaker who emerges from the lines of De Reditu Suo is thus not some foppish court bard or provincial partisan – Rutilius is a veteran of many things Roman – both the upper echelons of Roman politics as well as the legal, commercial, and physical machinery of the late Roman world.

The poem we’re about to read is an episodic travel narrative – one that takes us along the northwestern Italian coast and that of southern France. From time to time in Literature and History, we’ve encountered something called ekphrasis, or detailed literary descriptions of works of art – Homer’s protracted description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad is probably the most famous example of this. While Late Antique writers like Rutilius were fond of ekphrasis, one of the things they sought to achieve was a related quality called enargeia, or vivid realism – particularly visual realism. Rutilius, then, in the poem we’re about to read, engages in a literary tradition that placed high value in very detailed scene painting, as though landscapes, weather, and coastal settlements are works of art to be replicated in lucid and intense poetic language. Because of the emphasis on detail in De Reditu Suo, the poem is a useful documentary source of information about some of the regions through which Rutilius sailed on his way home. As the poet travels home by ship in the poem, in segments of 30-40 miles or so per day, he records what he sees as he travels, very specific observations of local settlements often segueing into poetic ruminations on contemporary Roman history.

With all of that said, let’s get into the main course of this episode – the 750 or so lines of this beautiful late Latin poem, which two earlier editors proclaimed “the swan-song of Rome.”⁹ Unless otherwise noted, I’m quoting from Martha Malamud’s terrific 2016 edition, published by Routledge in a series called Later Latin Poetry, the same series that published our main edition on Ausonius last time. [music]

De Reditu Suo‘s Opening: The Poet Sets Out

Rutilius’ De Reditu Suo begins nearly in midsentence – it seems the first couple of lines are missing. Rutilius seems to have been asked why he’s taken so long to return to his home in Gaul after a long residence in Rome, and the poet replies that this isn’t the right question – the correct question would be why “I’m so quick to leave behind Rome’s charms. . .The fertile seeds of virtue sent from heaven could not / have been entrusted to a better place.”¹⁰ Rome, the poet emphasizes, is a place he’s always loved – a place where some were lucky enough to be born into wealthy families, but also where those born abroad could come and be welcomed into senatorial rank, if they had enough merit, the ruling system of Rome not unlike the divine counsel of the Olympian deities.

In some beautiful and enigmatic lines, Rutilius then explains the circumstances of his homecoming:

Fate snatches me away from these beloved shores –
  the fields of Gaul are calling for their son.
Those fields, as lovely once as now they’re pitiful,
  are ravaged and deformed by these long wars. . .
Great fires have ravaged proud plantations. Now it’s time
  to start from scratch, rebuilding humble huts.
And if my native springs themselves could utter words,
  and if the trees themselves could speak aloud,
they’d pick me up and scold me, fill my sails, and end
  my homesickness by sending me back home. (1.19-22, 29-34)

We don’t know exactly why Rutilius left Rome to return to Gaul in what was probably the autumn of 417. He may have done so in order to check on his family property, or perhaps salvage what he could from what he anticipated would be a ruined family estate. Another theory is that the return journey was taken in order to attend a provincial assembly in Arles, where the Rhône empties into the Mediterranean, a summit meeting between multiple Gallic provinces in crisis after the future Emperor Constantius III established firm control over some of the Gallic Mediterranean coast.¹¹ This is an important point we’ll come back to later – in other words, whether Rutilius’ journey was undertaken in a spirit of resignation and damage control, or in a spirit of optimism for the restoration of Roman Gaul. For now, let’s move forward in the poem.

Whatever the circumstances of his departure, the opening of De Reditu Suo certainly has no sense of triumph or looming victory. Rutilius describes Rome’s control over the world as a loosening embrace, how waterways have spilled over Rome’s road system, and how the coastal route to Gaul, with its once sturdy bridges and safe forest turnpikes, is not safe any more. Rutilius says he offered his farewell to Rome by kissing the city’s gates goodbye, and his poem includes a formal praise of the city upon the moment of his departure. This long speech begins with the following lines, in the 1934 Loeb Duffy prose translation:

Listen, O fairest queen of [your] world, Rome, welcomed amid the starry skies, listen, [you] mother of men and mother of gods, thanks to [your] temples we are not far from heaven : [to you] do we chant, and shall, while destiny allows, for ever chant. None can be safe if forgetful of [you]. Sooner shall guilty oblivion [over]whelm the sun than the honour due to [you] quit my heart; for [your] benefits extend as far as the sun’s rays, where the circling Ocean-flood bounds the world. For [you] the very Sun-God who [holds] all together. . .revolve[s] : his steeds that rise in [your] domains he puts in [your] domains to rest. . . .Africa [has] not [stopped you] with scorching sands, nor [has] the [north], armed with its native cold, repulsed [you]. As far as living nature [has] stretched towards the poles, so far [has] earth opened a path for [your] valour. For nations far apart [you have] made a single fatherland ; under [your] dominion captivity [has] meant profit even for those who knew not justice : and by offering to the vanquished a share in [your] own justice, [you have] made a city of what was [formerly] a world.¹²

Rutilius’ praises to Rome continue, as he rehearses some of the standard legends of Rome – its founding by Aeneas, its reverence toward the deities Mars, Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, and Asclepius. Rome, Rutilius writes, is a lawmaker and uniter in a disparate world. A bit rosy-eyed, Rutilus compares the Roman Empire to former historical empires – those of the Assyrians, Medes, Achaemenids, and Macedonians, emphasizing that unlike all of these other imperial civilizations, Rome furnishes its citizens with freedom, rather than domination. Rome’s wars, he concludes, were fought for peace and order.

The glories of the city, Rutilius emphasizes, are endless – statues and prizes as uncountable as the stars, temples whose sheen stun the city’s newcomers, glimmering water flowing through high aqueducts, baths, fields and gardens. Rutilius pictures Rome’s atriums and aviaries, and writes that Rome’s seasons are mild and verdant. His adulations toward Rome are not merely celebratory – we should recall that Rome was besieged and sacked multiple times during the decade of this poem’s authorship, and so Rutilius also emphasizes that Rome will return to its onetime glory, telling Rome to revive her laurel crown’s leaves to a richer green, to have her crown blaze with golden glory – to push on through her injuries, as even the moon waxes and wanes. Recollecting how Rome bounced back after earlier disasters, and also how Rome is now 1,169 years old, Rutilius says Rome’s future is still limitless.

The praises to Rome that begin De Reditu Suo conclude with expectations of Rome retaliating against its assailants. Those who have invaded Gaul, Rutilius writes, will die, and barbarians will soon be ground under heel, paying taxes to Rome, rather than looting the city. The Rhine, the Nile, north Africa, and even the Tiber, the poet declares, will lend their bounty to Rome’s cause. In the closing lines of the encomia, Rutilius tells the city of Rome, “Whether it’s my lot to end my life at home / or see you once again with my own eyes, / I will be happier than I hoped to be, / and blest, of only you remember me” (161-4). [music]

Rutilius Makes His Way Northwest

From what we’ve heard so far, we’ve acquired a pretty decent sense of Rutilius Namatianus’ perspective. He is definitely a partisan of the Roman aristocracy – one who doesn’t shy away from his Gallic roots, but has no illusions about where the cultural center of the empire is. He views the sovereignty and historical conquests of Rome as fundamentally just – as things that have brought law and order to a fractious world, and holds that Rome’s wars were fought for the sake of peace and the greater good. It’s easy to disparage this sentimental partisanship and hard to believe how genuinely anyone could have written such an encomium toward Rome in the wake of multiple centuries of ugly civil wars. But in any case, Rutilius had seen Rome wounded and kicked when it was down, and had completed his tenure as urban prefect of Rome trying to restore the economy and utilities there, and it appears from his poem that he must have poured himself into this difficult job with sincerity and hope that were largely genuine.

Following Rutilius’ words of praise toward Rome’s capital city and civilization, he set out on his journey, bidding farewell to his friend Rufius at length. Traveling down the Tiber toward the ocean, Rutilius made note of where Aeneas had once landed when he’d arrived from faraway Troy, and this detail and others in the poem thus far work to communicate a sense of Rome’s immense history – a history with mythical beginnings. Upon reaching the seaport, Rutilius and the ship’s crew were edgy about disembarking immediately. Details in the poem about the Pleiades star cluster setting tell us that it was early November when the poet set out – a stormy and unconventional time for seaborne travel in the ancient Roman world. Rutilius, halted at the harbor, looked back into the dark trees and hills of Italy, and though the voyage ahead was perilous, he imagined he could see a pure light emanating from the nearby Seven Hills of Rome, and hear audience clamor from the circus and the city’s theaters. Rutilius and his companions lingered at the docks for two weeks to await better weather, until finally, after Rutilius said his farewells to a last beloved companion, the ship cast out to sea.

They departed in the dim light of dawn, going northward along the coast past suburban villas, and came close to the coast where an ancient fertility god statue stood next to a timeworn gate. It was a place of minor repute, near where in ages past, the god Pan had settled after departing from Greece. Continuing on to the north, they made landfall that night in a safe harbor in a settlement called Centumcellae once the seas grew too stormy to navigate. Centumcellae, during the first night of the voyage, proved comfortable, being furnished with natural baths, and Rutilius discusses the mythological origins of these baths – a great bull had supposedly once struck his horns on the earth, puncturing it to create the hot springs that flowed into the bath. The next morning, the crew set out early. To give you an idea of Rutilius’ lovely and vivid style, here’s his description of the events of the second morning of the journey, again in the Routledge Malamud translation:

In dewy half-light, daybreak gleamed in the violet sky:
  we spread our canvas sails in oblique curves,
avoiding sandbars made by [the] slender [river] Munio,
  which shivers as it enters dangerous seas.
From here we see Graviscae’s widely scattered roofs;
  a swampy stench sits over it in the summer,
and forests clothe the neighborhood with thickset groves;
  the water’s edge reflects the pine tree’s shadow. (1.277-84)

The ship passed the ruins of an ancient city called Cosa, occasioning Rutilius to tell a farcical story about the city being abandoned due to a rodent infestation, and the second day’s journey concluded at a settlement called Portus Herculis.

The arrival at Portus Heraculis prompted Rutilus and his companions to discuss an ancient Roman family clan called the Lepidi. As far as Rutilius was concerned, the Lepidi were turncoats. The first famous scion of the Lepidi, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, had been consul way back in 78 BCE, and was most remembered for collaborating with the dictator Sulla, and then preparing to start a civil war a few years later after feuding with his fellow consul. This Lepidus had a more famous son, also, because Romans had an incomprehensible lust for confusing dynastic names, also named Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, this second Lepidus being the third member of the late Republic’s second triumvirate – or, Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. And the third Lepidus – just for variety’s sake, also called Marcus Aemilius Lepidus like his father and grandfather, became embroiled in a plot to kill the Emperor Augustus, and died for it. There were more Lepiduses after this – the fourth, an in-law of Caligula, was executed on the suspicion that this later Lepidus had slept with Caligula’s sisters. There seems to have been a fifth prominent Lepidus who lived much, much later – one called Claudius Postumus Dardanus, whom our poet Rutilius may have perceived to have collaborated with barbarian tribes.¹³ Alluding to the deeds of this ancient family rather quickly, Rutilius concludes, “Whichever, Latin annals show a stunning pattern: / an evil Lepidus for every age!” (1.311-12).

And following the second night of the voyage, Rutilius and his crew disembarked from Portus Heraculis, home of the Lepidi family, and continued northward along the coast. During the early dawn, the water appeared turquoise, and a rugged promontory called Mount Argentarius rose up ahead. Blustery winds pushed the ship in all different directions as they made their way around the knot of land, and when they came to the other side, the forested islands of Etruria were in sight. The region, Rutilius notes – and we’re about 100 miles northwest of Rome as the crow flies and around the middle of the third day – the region had been a critical one during recent Visigothic activity on the peninsula. They passed the spot where the River Umbro empties into the Mediterranean, a place Rutilius says he’d have been happy to stop for the evening. But daylight enabled more forward progress, and the ship and its crew continued to the evening of the third day, setting up that evening in a grove of myrtle trees, making tents and camping on the beach.

The morning of the fourth day brought them no favorable winds, and so rowers had to power the ship northward. Rutilius writes that the ship appeared not to be moving until one looked over at the shore and saw it gliding slowly by. They came near the island of Elba, whose iron mines, Rutilius remarks, gave greater gifts than the gold mines of far off Hispania. As he listened to the calls of the rowers, Rutilius considered how gold was the fountain of human sin, and a powerful agent of corruption, whereas iron ploughed fields and altered the course of military history.

Halfway through the fourth day, they paused. The ship and crew had noticed some peasants, engaged in a festival honoring Osiris, having reached the end stages of the festival, celebrating the Egyptian god’s reconstitution and resurrection. Pausing to watch this celebration of rebirth, Rutilius sought out an inn for the night. He and his companions enjoyed a woodland walk to take a break from the sea voyage, but did not enjoy having to pay exorbitant prices to their Jewish innkeeper for a night’s lodging. The expensiveness of his accommodations prompts Rutilius to make a harsh aside about Jewish culture, which he criticizes on the basis of their dietary restrictions, circumcision, and wasting a day a week with the Sabbath. Rutilius’s prejudicial remarks about Jews are accompanied by a more original and memorable statement a few lines later – that he wished Jews had never been conquered and subdued during the late republican and early imperial periods, because, in Rutilius’ words, “a conquered nation rules its conquerors” (1.398). The meaning intended is likely that a religion from the Jewish homeland – Christianity – held sovereignty over Rome’s ruling class by the early 400s, and thus that Rome had conquered Judea, but Judean ideology had conquered Rome. It’s a poetic line also intended to be reminiscent of what’s probably the most famous statement ever made about Greek culture in Rome. The poet Horace, back in the 30s BCE, had written that “Captive Greece took her captor captive,” another moment in Roman history at which a poet recorded a population, though militarily subdued, having overtaken Roman culture with its culture and ideology.¹⁴

To return to Rutilius’ journey, on the morning of the fifth day, they set out once more, but harsh northern winds thwarted their efforts, and were only able to soldier ten miles to the north, unlike the 40 or so of each of their previous days thus far. In a spot called Populonia, Rutilius caught a glimpse of a ruined fort, where only ancient Roman battlements rose up from ruined roofs. Surveying the ruins leads Rutilius to remark, “Let’s not be angry, then, that mortal frames dissolve: / examples teach us even towns can die” (1.413-4). [music]

Rutilius Continues Up the Coast

Following his gloomy ruminations on the decayed fortifications of Populonia, Rutilius received some heartening news. He learned that a friend of his named Rufius had been appointed to the prefect of Rome – Rutilius had been praefectus urbi of the city a couple of years prior, and Rutilius proclaims that Rufius warranted the position even more than he did. This good news brightened the mood of the curtailed fifth day of sailing, and on the sixth day, they set out early once more, the far off mountains of Corsica visible to the west, and he recounted an old Italian legend of cows swimming from Italy to Corsica.

They came near an island called Capraia, where there lived a population of Christian monks. In one of the more famous moments of Rutilius’ De Reditu Suo, the poet rails against the practices of monasticism. Let’s hear what Rutilius says about these monks at length – this is from the older Duff prose translation:

As we advance at sea, [Capraia] now rears itself – an ill-kept isle full of men who shun the light. Their own name for themselves is a Greek one, “monachoi” (monks), because they wish to dwell alone with none to see. They fear Fortune’s boons, as they dread her outrages: would anyone, to escape misery, live of his own choice in misery? What silly fanaticism of a distorted brain is it to be unable to endure even blessings because of your terror of ills? Whether they are like prisoners who demand the appropriate penalties for their deeds, or whether their melancholy hearts are swollen with black bile. (1.439-48)

These are harsh statements about Christian monasticism, and together with Rutilius’ earlier remarks about Jewish culture having overtaken Rome, the poem up to this point has not had very positive things to say about the religious developments of the later empire.

Following Capraia, Rutilius’ ship pressed northward through a tricky section of ocean, and to make matters worse, the weather turned foul again, with a storm blowing in from the northwest. He sought shelter in the home of a young man whom he knew called Albinus, and with this young man, he took a walk through briny lagoons that, in the summer, were let out so that their salt crust hardened like ice. While the afternoon of their sixth day out was thus harsh and stormy, Rutilius was still able to spend it in the company of an amiable acquaintance. This acquaintance was a man named Victorinus. Victorinus, like Rutilius, was a Gallic aristocrat, but recent invasions and conquests in the Gallic provinces had led Victorinus to abandon his estates and make his home in Etruria. Though thwarted temporarily by harsh weather, Rutilius tells us, spending an afternoon with his fellow Gallic aristocrat Victorinus was a bit like already being home, and so Rutilius’ sixth day out was not without its charms.

The crew continued onward and caught sight of a small island called Gorgona. Gorgona prompts Rutilius to remark on more recent local history – in this case, an aristocratic youth who has embraced a monastic hermitage on the island. Rutilius writes that the nobleman, who was married and well provided for, lost his mind. Rutilius remarks that “This wretch believes divinity can feed on filth. / He does himself more harm than the gods he spurned” (1.524). The isolated Christian extremist, Rutilius emphasizes, is even worse than the prisoners trapped on Circe’s island in Homer’s Odyssey. Circe might have changed Odysseus’ men to pigs, Rutilius says, but Christian monks had their minds destroyed, rather than their bodies.

The voyage along the coast continued, and on the crew’s seventh day out they managed to reach a harbor a couple of miles to the southwest of the city of Pisa. It was an unusual harbor, in that it had no breakwaters and was thus exposed to the blustery autumn sea, and in a strange phenomenon, a plentitude of seaweed there helped thwart storm surges from crashing into the harbor.

Rutilius reflected on how he’d have liked to have seen an acquaintance named Protadius, but that instead, he took the coastal road into the city of Pisa. A student of Virgil’s Aeneid and very ancient Italian history, Rutilius remarks on Pisa’s ancient vintage – the city was in ancient times a Greek colony, and one associated with Aeneas’ Italian bride Lavinia. Also in Pisa, Rutilius had the heartening sight of a statue to his father Lachanius, a statue that filled him with melancholy memories. Among the many governmental posts that his father had held was a governorship of Tuscany, hence the prominent statue in Pisa. Remarks on his father’s tenure as governor of Tuscany lead Rutilius into a paternal eulogy. After explaining that his father Lachanius loved his post as governor of Tuscany most all, Rutilius tells us in the Duff translation that,

old [Tuscan] men who can remember him make know to their sons how firm of purpose he was and at the same time how kindly. They are glad that I myself have not fallen off from my parent’s honours, and eagerly give me a warm welcome for his sake and for my own. Often as I traversed the lands near the Flaminian Way I have found the same proof of my father’s renown; the whole of Lydia worships Lachanius’ fame like some divinity among the natives of her soil. (1.589-98)

The lines are pretty obviously self-aggrandizing in a backhanded manner, but it’s also hard to fault a poet for saying nice things about his father, a pillar of the old Roman way of life, when that way of life was being so existentially threatened by the press of history.

After his heartening communion with his father’s statue in Pisa, Rutilius headed back along the coastal path to his ship and crew. But just as he reached them, the weather turned sour again, a thunderstorm throwing mist and rain out over the northern ocean, and so he and his companion decided they’d go hunting. Someone or other loaned them some dogs and hunting gear, and it wasn’t long before Rutilius and company had brought down a boar – a boar that, the poet brags, would frighten even the strongest mythical hunters. Rainy weather kept them shore-bound even after the hunt, however, and the first book of Rutilius Namatianus’ De Reditu Suo closes with the image of a stormy sea rising and falling and rising, to the extent that its geysers of crashing water rose as high as the stars. [music]

Rutilius’ Remarks against Stilicho

Rutilius begins the second book of his poem by explaining why he broke it into two sections – very long looking scrolls, he says, sometimes dissuade readers from even beginning them, and so he’s subdivided his story. As to the journey, Rutilius writes that they set out from Pisa again, aiming out to sea, and as they did so, new glimpses of the western Apennines became visible. The sight of the mountains prompted Rutilius to make some general observations about Italian geography. Italy, he emphasizes, was well designed for Roman civilization to flourish – the Apennines once protected the earliest Romans, just as later, the Alps protected the Po Valley. The discussion of mountains being bulwarks that guard Italy from invasion leads Rutilius on to an assessment of the life and deeds of the general Stilicho.

Stilicho, as we learned earlier, was the half-Vandal general who’d served as young Honorius’ steward from 395 until Honorius had him executed in 408, being for a critical period of time one of the most powerful people in the Empire. From the various historical sources we have, Stilicho remains a mysterious figure, as important as he was – the protector of Rome for a critical decade or so, but also one whose allegiances and ambitions might have ranged far beyond what was appropriate for a loyal Roman general. We heard a historical overview of the famous military man’s life and deeds earlier in this program, so let’s hear what Rutilius has to say about him.

Rutilius is fiercely critical of Stilicho. Stilicho, he says, let the Goths into the empire – as Rutilius puts it, “he sent barbarian arms for [Rome’s] death / and plunged an armed foe into her naked vitals – / an even bolder trick that brought disaster” (2.46-8). It was, Rutilius writes, a horrific betrayal – an insider’s betrayal that made it such that Rome was helpless before the city could even defend itself. The poet concludes that Stilicho is far worse than Nero, for while Nero murdered his mother, Stilicho murdered Rome, mother to the whole world.

I’ll pause for just a moment and say that Rutilius’ remarks on the subject of Stilicho are penned with sudden and somewhat unexpected vehemence. Up to this point Rutilius’ travel narrative has sailed along in a fairly orderly manner, with generous remarks to the poet’s various friends and his father, flashes of melancholy here and there, and the occasional jab at what he perceives to be religious extremism. However, the aside on Stilicho doesn’t seem prompted by anything in particular. It is a valuable piece of primary historical evidence of how the general was being remembered a decade after his death, but of course, we should also keep in mind its source. Rutilius was one of the Emperor Honorius’ governmental appointees, an aristocrat enmeshed in a system that closed ranks around imperial decisions, like the execution of Stilicho in 408. Just as pertinently, Rutilius had only a couple of years past in 414 served as the urban prefect of the city of Rome, and the old capital must have still been devastated by Visigothic plundering, however controlled such plundering had been in the scheme of such things. Rutilius, then, would have had personal and professional reasons to vilify and scapegoat Stilicho.

And one more note about Rutilius’ savage criticism of the half-vandal general Stilicho. The earlier Roman historians Livy and Plutarch had once written of another turncoat Roman general – a very ancient one. This was the fifth century BCE Roman general Coriolanus. A war hero in ancient campaigns against Volscians, Coriolanus later lost his standing with the city of Rome due anti-populist positions he held. Furious, the spurned general Coriolanus went north and joined the Volscians, and then led an army to besiege Rome, only relenting due to the intervention of his mother and wife. It’s a great story – there’s a reason Shakespeare plucked it out of Plutarch and wrote a play about Coriolanus. To the ancient republic, the story, whatever facts it was based on, offered a consolation. Rome had been besieged and brought to its knees in the early 480s BCE, sure – but it had been besieged and brought to its knees only because a Roman was doing the besieging. If we look closely at Rutilius’ interpretation of Alaric’s sack of Rome, we see something similar happening – Rutilius writes, “Rome herself, exposed to skin-clad troops, / Was captive even before she could be captured” (2.49-50). To Rutilius, Rome lost because it had been betrayed by Roman forces.

Anyway, let’s get back in the boat and finish Rutilius’ journey with him – again most of the second half of the poem is lost, and so unfortunately there isn’t much of a journey left. The ship and crew continued northward until they came to the city of Luna, named, Rutilius writes, after the sister of the sun. And in what are now the closing lines of this poem, Rutilius leaves us with the image of the region around Luna, telling us in the Duff translation that “In the colour of its native rocks it surpasses smiling lilies, and the stone flashes bedecked in polished radiance. Rich in marble, it is a land which, reveling in its white light, challenges the virgin snows” (2.65-8). And unless more of this late Latin poem is discovered on down the line at some point, that’s the end. [music]

The Subtle Melancholy of De Reditu Suo

In many ways, I think Rutilius’ De Reditu Suo is a quintessential work of Late Antiquity. It captures a bygone anachronism – a Roman of the old stamp, born too late, shrill in his pride and optimism but tragic in his partisanship for lost causes. Like the tale of Alaric and his people’s search for a home, De Reditu Suo is the story of a generation – a Roman generation seeking not to find a home, but to hold onto the homes they already had. Some of it, for whatever reason, was not seen as fit for preservation, and was lost to history, but still, it survives – a fraught outcry, a short nostos story like Homer’s Odyssey, only one in which the speaker’s Ithaca is irrecoverably lost.

Some of the poem is ludicrous in its Roman nationalism. “O Goddess,” Rutilius writes near the beginning of the poem, “Romans worship you across the globe, / beneath your peaceful yoke their necks are free” (1.79-80). Reading these lines, we know they ridiculously misrepresent what Rome was and had always been – a plutocracy whose commercial and military innovations ultimately served a tiny aristocratic minority, and whose yokes on the necks of commoners and subjugated provincial populations were far from benign – a slave society in which at least a quarter of all human beings were owned by others. But while Rutilius can sound the old trumpet of blue blooded Roman jingoism, at other times the poem’s spirited flag waving falters, and he writes lines that are hauntingly conscious of Rome’s fragile future. At an incidental moment in Book 1, he tells us, “Both wind and daylight leave me as I rush along: / We can’t move forward nor can we go back” (1.343-4). A moment later, he records how “Day came. When leaning on our oars we seem at rest, / and yet the distant land reveals our motion” (1.349-50). These are rich lines, and they reveal a speaker who, however nostalgic he is about the past, understands that we are all locked into time, even when, in the space of conscious experience, it feels as though we’re holding still.

Rutilius’ poem, on the surface, blazons a message of patriotic optimism, telling us that the city of Rome is still the great bastion it once was, that Goths wear skins and are unwelcome aliens on the Italian peninsula, and that Stilicho was a treasonous conspirator. These were all sentiments in step with the imperial court in Ravenna. But while Rutilius can tow the party line in so many verses of De Reditu Suo, a raw uncertainty creeps into the poem at unexpected moments. Looking ashore at one juncture toward the end of Book 1, Rutilius recollects, in the Duff translation, how

We saw the sea yellowing with the disturbance of the sands and pastures covered with the scum it has belched forth, even as the Ocean pours into the midst of fields, when under errant brine it [soaks] the lands from which it must ebb; whether the truth be that black-flowing from [the moon], it dashes against this world of ours, or that with its own waters it feeds the twinkling stars. (1.639-44)

What’s depicted there is a chaotic image – breakers choked with sand and muck, shoreline farm fields splattered with saltwater – a sludgy mire of ocean and land. With limited knowledge of tidal swells, Rutilius leaves us with a poetic image of crashing waves hurling seawater up to the stars, but more than beauty, these lines leave us with a sense of bedlam and contamination. How can Rome, even with its brawn and ancient vintage, survive if even its seashores are everywhere overrun with the surging autumn ocean?

Well, I don’t want to get too lost in what we English majors call close reading. I just want to emphasize that when we read Rutilius’ poem, its brave Roman optimism is from time to time undercut with images of decay and subtle admissions of uncertainty – admissions that Rome may have been an eternal city, but its eternity is coming to an end. Other late Latin poetry also fixates on the themes of time and preservation. And if you’ll allow me to take you on a brief, but lovely little side trip, I want to read you some lines of Rutilius Namatianus’ contemporary Claudius Claudianus, usually just called Claudian. Claudian should probably have his own Literature and History episode, but our voyage, like Rutilius’ can’t stop at every single spot along the coastline. Anyway, these are lines from a collection by Claudian called the Carmina Minora – or “shorter songs,” and in this particular poem, Claudian writes about a miracle of winter – a fragment of ice in which there is a pocket of unfrozen water. Rutilius’ contemporary Claudian, roughly around the year 400, described how

This piece of ice still shows traces of its original nature: part of it has become stone, part resisted by the cold. It is a freak of winter’s more precious by reason of its incomplete crystallization, for that the jewel contains within itself living water. [You] waters, who confine waters in a prison akin to them, [you] that are liquid still and [you] that were so, what wit has united you? By what trick of freezing is the marvelous stone at once hard and wet? What [contained] heat has protected those enclosed waters? what warm wind melted that heart of ice? How comes it that the jewel in whose heart the water ebbs and flows was either made solid or liquid by frost? Alpine ice was becoming so hard that the sun could not melt it, and this excess of cold was like to make it precious as a diamond. But it could not imitate that stone in its entirety for at its heart lay a drop of water which betrayed its nature. . .This hidden water fears not any blast of [the north wind] nor winter’s chill but runs this way and that. It is not frozen by December’s cold, nor dried up by July’s sun, nor wasted away by all-consuming time.¹⁵

These lines may well record nothing more than a poet’s fascination with water trapped in a chunk of ice, and perhaps we shouldn’t draw out any historical inference from them. But like Rutilius’ frequent meditations on eternity and time, this description of everlasting water, insulated from the seasons was written in a decade in which Rome’s most permanent institutions, and even the city itself, were showing abrupt signs of terminal decline.

Let’s set aside literary analysis of late Roman imperial poetry, though, and turn to some slightly firmer historical ground. One of the main subjects that has traditionally interested scholars studying De Reditu Suo has been its position on Christianity. Saint Ambrose of Milan, the most powerful Christian churchman in history up to that point, had died in 397 – two decades before Rutilus’ journey. Augustine had begun his Confessions the very same year. The fourth century had marked Christianity’s ascension in the Roman Empire. It was the century in which orthodoxy came of age and hardened – first at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and afterward in manifold clashes between Nicaean Catholics and Arians. And more obviously, in spite of Ambrose’s passing in 397, it was the century in which Rome’s emperors had become Christian. So let’s talk, in the closing minutes of this program, about Rutilius’ stance on the faith, and clergy that had seized ideological hegemony in the late Empire. [music]

Rutilius and Christianity

As we’ve learned throughout our programs on Late Antiquity, it’s simplistic to divide the religious vantages of the late Roman Empire into either Christian or pagan. There were, first of all, many types of Christians and many types of pagans. And there were those who would have checked “None of the Above” if given a religious questionnaire. While today we view religion as a matter of personal volition and conviction, embraced by individuals, in Late Antiquity religion was also an identity category assumed from without. To give an example, the Visigoths were nominally Arian Christians. We have no idea whether Alaric was a particularly religious person – historians have often associated his clemency during the sack of Rome with his being Christian. But to some Romans, the Visigoths’ Arianism was perhaps the most threatening part of their otherness – they were not only barbarians, but also barbarians whose unorthodox faith was a threat to a vocal and zealous Nicene Christian core of Roman senate, and a scary bugbear to a religious populace who had heard Arianism criticized by Nicene priests and bishops.¹⁶ The point is that in the year 390, and 400, and 410, religion was certainly a matter of individual belief, but it was also a marker of caste and clan. In Rutilius’ De Reditu Suo, the peasants whom the poet sees honoring an autumnal ritual for the god Osiris are scarcely remarked on, whereas the young Roman aristocrat who has devoted his life to Christian asceticism on the scrubby island of Gorgona, in contrast, earns the poet’s condemnation. Rome’s rural peasantry could have their parades and festivals, as far as Rutilius was concerned, but a Roman aristocrat embracing a Christian asceticism – this heralded something sinister.

There has been a lot of speculation about Rutilius’ stance on the religious history of the Roman Empire at the cusp between the fourth and fifth centuries. In the non-Christian written record, we have a spectrum of positions on Christianity, ranging from amicable to indifferent to hostile. Since Rutilius pretty clearly isn’t a Christian, considering his fierce condemnations of the monks of Capraia and the fanatic young nobleman on Gorgona, one area of interest in De Reditu Suo has been trying to determine what sort of pagan Rutilius was. Scholarly readers have noted that a number of Rutilius’ friends mentioned in the poem were connected with a prominent Roman named Quintus Aurelius Symmachus. Symmachus was a committed pagan, and a leader of the conservative resistance movement against Christianity over the course of the Valentinian dynasty. In the previous program, we heard the famous story of the Altar of Victory – one of the watershed moments of Late Antiquity. To retell it pretty quickly, a storied statue of the goddess of victory, Nike, was removed from the Roman senate house in 382 by the Emperor Gratian. To Symmachus and surely many other conservative Romans, this removal was a gesture that went too far, and although Symmachus petitioned both Gratian, and later the Emperor Valentinian II, to restore the Altar of Victory, he was unsuccessful. The Altar of Victory was briefly returned to the senate house during the rule of the usurper emperor Eugenius, but after Theodosius beat Eugenius’ forces at the Battle of the River Frigidus in 394, the altar was removed for good. These events, to some ancient historians, marked the official ouster of paganism from the upper echelons of the Roman world – both the removal of the Altar of Victory, and Theodosius’ victory over Eugenius in 394, a symbolic victory of a Nicene Christian emperor over a last gasp of paganism. And while surely a few high profile historical occurrences don’t tell us the full story, the world of Rutilius Namatianus was one in which ambitious bishops – especially Saint Ambrose – were using their exalted positions to influence Roman politics, and the old guard of the Roman aristocracy weren’t keen on the theological-political doublet rapidly snatching away their power in the 380s, 390s, and after.

There is, then, decent evidence that Rutilius Namatianus had a negative view of Christianity and saw it as part of the degeneration of the period of Roman history in which he lived. But we should also second guess this conclusion, which sounds a bit like Edward Gibbon’s eighteenth-century assessment that the Romans all became a bunch of pansies because they converted to Christianity. What Rutilius actually condemns in De Reditu Suo isn’t Christianity, but instead monasticism, asceticism, and isolationism. He doesn’t say a thing about the Christianity practiced on the isolated islands of Capraia and Gorgona – merely that those who have moved to these islands have sworn off social life and abandoned the prerogatives and responsibilities of Roman citizens. A negative attitude toward monasticism, obviously, doesn’t amount to a negative attitude toward Christianity, and indeed we have Christian disparagements of monasticism on the written record of Late Antiquity as well. In the two main saint’s lives we’ve read in our podcast so far – Athanasius’ Life of Saint Antony and then Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, we’ve already seen an evolution of idealized Christian figures – the earlier, a hermit eating bread and water in the desert; the latter, an industrious bishop throwing himself into the grind of converting a stubborn populace and occasionally speaking up in matters of state. The second of these two biographies was written about a Gallic bishop who lived in Rutilus’ home turf of western Gaul, and so it’s possible that Rutilius’ scorn for isolated monastic movements was part of a greater turn – both in Christian and pagan circles – away from idealized religious isolationism and toward more activist and politically engaged religious leaders, whatever their religion happened to be. And to consider the religious elements of Rutilus’ poem with an even wider perspective, isolated purist sects, from the Pythagoreans in the 500s BCE, to the Essenes in the first century CE, to the Ebionites in the second, and the Manichaeans in the third – isolated purist sects are pretty easy targets for popular scorn, living as they do on the fringes of society in poverty, half hobos, half elitists, and altogether just a little bit vexing to those neck deep in the rough and tumble of civilized life. Rutilius, then, might have derogated the monks and hermits just offshore of modern day Italy for many different reasons, not all of them having to do with the Christianity that they practiced.

The point of all of this isn’t that Rutilius’ religiosity is tremendously important, but merely that even by 417 CE, countless gradients existed between pagan, Christian, and none of the above. Rutilius would have worked with the Emperor Honorius, a Nicene Christian, not to mention a variety of Late Antique Romans with all sorts of ideological backgrounds, and like any professional of any era, he would have known how to navigate their belief systems.

To zoom out a little further still, we should think for a moment about the enormity of what happened in August of 410, and the various written reactions we have about the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths. This was an event that many wrote about during Late Antiquity – an obvious turning point in history that no one could deny. Rutilius Namatianus, who served as the praefectus urbi of the old capital in 414, was optimistic just three years later. We have on record his opening encomium on the city of Rome in the poem that we just read, along with, in his closing lines, his attempt to rationalize what happened. To Rutilius, Rome had been breached and looted due to a betrayal by Stilicho – an imperial steward who’d succumbed to his Vandal half and his ultimate allegiances to other barbarians from the north. Whether or not Rutilius’ impressions of the sack are accurate, they likely do represent the old, conservative Roman side of the story – that Rome was wounded by a backstabbing, rather than a frontal assault.

And while Rutilius’ reaction is straightforward, contemporary Christian reactions to the sack of Rome are equally so. Saint Jerome, in a commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, wrote about the refugees pouring into Palestine following the turbulence in Italy between 402 and 410, exclaiming,

Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, has collapsed, that the mother of nations had become also their tomb. . .Who could boast when the flight of the people of the West, and the holy places, crowded as they are with penniless fugitives, naked and wounded, plainly reveal the ravages of the Barbarians? We cannot see what has occurred, without tears and moans. Who would have believed that mighty Rome, with its careless security of wealth, would be reduced to such extremities as to need shelter, food, and clothing?¹⁷

There is no smug triumphalism in this passage from Jerome, as we saw a number of episodes ago in a sermon Gregory the Great gave a century and a half later. Jerome sees refugees pouring in, and though as a writer he is certainly not without his fierce Christian partisanship, at the sight of homeless Romans emigrating to the provinces, Jerome’s response is only incredulity and compassion. The incredulity was certainly expressed on the basis of a seemingly invincible capital being looted, but also on something else. Seemingly on the eve that Rome had embraced Christianity, with the good Nicene emperor Theodosius bequeathing the empire to his good Nicene heirs Honorius and Arcadius, down went the western empire to a foreign, non-Nicene people. While many Christian theologians tried to make sense of this, Saint Augustine’s take is by far the most famous. In the thousand-plus page City of God, completed in the same decade that Rutilius sailed home to Gaul, Augustine wrote that earthly political institutions were fine and well, but that Christians ought to value the celestial city of the deity over any earthly cities or political institutions.

And while Augustine’s take on what happened in the year 410 is by far the most well known, his student Paulus Orosius wrote a much more detailed account of what happened at the outset of the western Empire’s final century. Though a Christian by all means, Orosius didn’t interpret the sack of Rome as a punishment or a reward, or an apocalypse or judgment day, but instead an unfolding of a number of causally complex forces. It is from Orosius that we get the impression that the Visigoth-led sack was no bloody free-for-all, but instead a tactical looting, and I think we should let Osorius have the final word about the events of August 24, 410. Orosius tells us, in the Liverpool University Press A.T. Fear translation, that

As the barbarians rampaged through the City, it happened that in a certain convent one of the Goths, a powerful, Christian man, came across an elderly virgin, who had dedicated her life to God. When he asked her, politely, for gold and silver, steadfast in her faith, she promised him that she had a great deal and would soon bring it forth, and brought it forth. When she saw that the barbarian was astounded by the size, weight, and beauty of what she had brought out, but had no idea of the nature of the vessels, Christ’s virgin said to him, ‘These are the sacred vessels of the Apostle Peter, take them, if you dare, and you will be judged by your act. I dare not keep them, as I cannot protect them.’ The barbarian was moved to religious awe through his fear of God and the virgin’s faith, and sent a messenger to tell Alaric about these matters. He immediately ordered that all the vessels should be taken back, just as they had been found, to the basilica of the Apostle and that the virgin and any other Christians who might join her be taken there with the same degree of protection. They say that her convent was in the other half of the City, far away from the holy sites, and so each piece was given to a different individual, and they all carried the gold and silver vessels openly above their heads [back to the sacred basilica], providing a great spectacle for all to see. This pious parade was protected by drawn swords on every side, and Romans and barbarians joined together in singing openly a hymn of praise to God.¹⁸

Orosius’ story there is probably a well-intentioned fable, written to envision a rainbow of pan-Christian solidarity following the storm of the past few years of Gothic invasions. It’s hard to actually imagine Visigothic warriors singing hymns with old guard Roman aristocrats who’d opposed them at every turn and led ethnic purges of barbarian families following the execution of Stilicho in 408. Still, though, even if Visigothic Arians and Roman Niceans weren’t holding hands and praising Jesus as city guards bled to death following the wall breach, both groups must have been equally conscious of one very specific shared experience. And this was that Ravenna, and Constantinople, and the Roman emperors seated in both capitals had left them all to fend for themselves.¹⁹ For Rutilius, as we saw today, what was needed afterward in the way of recovery was a rallying of Rome’s former glories. For Augustine, as we’ll see in a couple of episodes, what was needed was the old Pythagorean and Platonic song and dance about not placing stock in earthly things, but instead investing one’s hopes in a world to come. But for everyone on the ground in Italy between 402 and 410, something was becoming increasingly clear, and this was that the ship of history was on the move, and that it could flatten an eternal city as easily as it could break through to tiny, unfrozen pockets of water encased in ice. [music]

Moving onto Nonnus

It’s a little bit difficult to write about the western Empire’s last poets without a tinge of melancholy, with Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, Paulinus of Pella, and other late Latin authors having lived and worked in such challenging times. But out of all of the great literary authors of Late Antiquity, for me, the most astounding, and perhaps the most obscure, is Nonnus, the subject of our next two programs. Nonnus, in a word, puts the “Late” into Late Antiquity. At some point in the 400s, Nonnus wrote an epic to end all epics – a 48-book Greek poem in Homeric hexameter, not uncoincidentally, the 48 books being precisely the combined number of the books in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. We have read a number of Greco-Roman epics in our podcast – the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Argonautica, the Aeneid, and the Thebaid, but Nonnus’ Dionysiaca is a 20,000-line goliath of a text that dwarfs all of them in size and scope. A native of the central Egyptian Nile in the years when the Byzantine Empire was becoming ever more Greek and Byzantine, Nonnus’ epic poem is the story of the Greek god Dionysus’ journey east to India, encyclopedic in its literary knowledge and expansive in its awareness of Late Antique geography.

Epics are always marquee works to enjoy reading, but what makes Nonnus’ especially interesting is that Nonnus seems also to have written a long and learned paraphrase of the Gospel of John. With his left hand in ancient pagan literature, then, and his right in the annals of Jewish and Christian history, Nonnus is a unique figure from antiquity, his long, dense works almost never given a second of attention beyond the halls of Classics and Late Antiquity departments. And while his poetry can indeed be dense, density is what we do best in Literature and History. Fortified as we are with backgrounds equally in Greco-Roman as well as Jewish and Christian history, we’re quite well equipped to read and understand the works of Nonnus as texts that challenge everything we’re ever told about this understudied historical period. With I started this show, as with Menander, as with Statius, and as with like other upcoming figures who aren’t very often read outside of specialty circles, I thought about Nonnus, the fifth-century Greco-Egyptian literary superhero, and said to myself, “I’m definitely doing some shows on that dude.” So in the next program, bring your wine skins and your walking sandals, because we’re going to learn all about Nonnus, and hear the story of the last Greco-Roman epic that survives in full, the Dionysiaca, or saga of Dionysus. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. There’s a quiz on this program in your podcast app’s episode notes if you want to review. For you Patreon supporters, in the spirit of Halloween month and a whole different Gothic tradition, I’ve recorded a horror story – Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” published in 1838 and one of his most celebrated tales – a nice additional 45 minutes of pure literature for you. And for everyone there’s a song coming up – hit stop to skip it, and otherwise, stay tuned.

Still here? Well I got to thinking about old Alaric the Visigoth, and all the bad press he got. Just three years after the sack of Rome, Saint Augustine was describing the “fierce and savage minds” of Alaric’s people, along with their “frenzy of butchery. . .their monstrous passion for violence.”²⁰ Not to beat the revisionist hobby horse too much, but there’s a lot more to say about Alaric and his people than this. So for this Literature and History comedy tune, I decided I’d let Alaric tell his own story. This one’s called “The Real Alaric.” Hope you like it, and I’ll see you next time.

[“The Real Alaric” Song]

References

---