Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/987

Rh RUTILIUS CLAUDIUS NAMATIANUS, Roman poet, flourished at the beginning of the 5th century  He was the author of a Latin poem, De Redita Suo, in elegiac metre, describing a coast voyage from Rome to Gaul in  416. The literary excellence of the work, and the flashes of light which it throws across a momentous but dark epoch of history, combine to give it exceptional importance among the relics of late Roman literature. The poem was in two books; the exordium of the first and the greater part of the second have been lost. What remains consists of about seven hundred lines.

The author is a native of S. Gaul (Toulouse or perhaps Poitiers), and belonged, like Sidonius, to one of the great governing families of the Gaulish provinces. His father, whom he calls Lachanius, had held high offices in Italy and at the imperial court, had been governor of Tuscia (Etruria and Umbria), then imperial treasurer (comes sacrarum largitionum), imperial recorder (quaestor), and governor of the capital itself (praefectus urbi). Rutilius boasts his career to have been no less distinguished than his father’s, and particularly indicates that he had been secretary of state (magister officiorum) and governor of the capital (i. 157, 427, 467, 561). After reaching manhood, he passed through the tempestuous period between the death of Theodosius (395) and the fall of the usurper Attalus, which occurred near the date when his poem was written. He witnessed the chequered career of Stilicho as actual, though not titular, emperor of the West; he saw the hosts of Radagaisus rolled back from Italy, only to sweep over Gaul and Spain; the defeats and triumphs of Alaric; the three sieges and final sack of Rome, followed by the marvellous recovery of the city; Heraclian’s vast armament dissipated; and the fall of seven pretenders to the Western diadem. Undoubtedly the sympathies of Rutilius were with those who during this period dissented from and, when they could, opposed the general tendencies of the imperial policy. We know from himself that he was the intimate of those who belonged to the circle of the great orator Symmachus—men who scouted Stilicho’s compact with the Goths, and led the Roman senate to support the pretenders Eugenius and Attalus in the vain hope of reinstating the gods whom Julian had failed to save.