Minor Latin poets; with introductions and English translations

INTRODUCTION TOHis poem, in some ways the better for thosedigressions which make it more than a journal oftravel, exhibits Rutilius as a man with an eye for thescenery of the Italian coast, interested in the affairsof the places touched at during his voyage northwards,and stirred by warm affection for friends" noless than by frankly expressed dislike for Jews, Christianmonks and Stilicho. It is pleasant to note his joyat meeting friends and his regret at parting : it isan equally human trait that he is a good hater.His tender Stoic melancholy, coloured rather thanseared by the memory of Rome's recent captureby the Goths, does not prevent him from cherishingan optimistic confidence in her recovery, even as inlong-past history she had recovered after the Alliaand Cannae. And so in his encomium upon theimperial city, sincere enough in feeling and yet inphrasing more rhetorical than poetic, Rutilius hasuttered the swan-song of Rome.Nor is it a song unworthy of the classical tradition.His Latin has a prevailing lucidity which befits histheme ; and, despite the influence of Virgil andOvid, his work, thanks to concentration upon hisown experiences, which are narrated in a vivid andrealistic style, bears a definitely individual mark.But it is rare for this individual note of his to showitself in mere linguistic usage such as decessis (ifthat be the true reading at I. 313) or the archaisticpropudiosa (I. 388). As to metre, it is true thatamphitheatrum is not a Virgilian ending for a hexameter,nor sollicitudinibus an Ovidian ending for apentameter.^ It is true also that Rutilius is too free" See notes on the translation.* There are some sixteen exceptions in Rutilius to thedissyllabic close of a pentameter.758