Rutilius Namatianus, Aelius Aristide et les chrétiens

Abstract

Without any doubt, Rutilius Namatianus, when writing his De reditu suo in 417, was personally acquainted with Aelius Aristides’ oration In praise of Rome. Nevertheless it still remains unobserved how fundamentally different can be, in terms of signification, the eulogy to Roman universalism from a Greek living in the second century and from a Roman living in the fifth. Here is an attempt to demonstrate that the political context in which this pseudo-travel narrative was written in fact shows signs of the climate of intellectual contest between pagans and chritians and, indeed, the De reditu stands at the very hearth of a lobbying network woven by the partisans of the old religion among whom are equally to be found the Symmachi, Servius and Macrobius. The demonstration proceeds according to three stages: the first one reminds us of all that the praise of goddess Roma in the poem owes to the Augustean ideology transmitted by Virgilius, in order to bring out, in the second stage, the differences of signification between this anthological piece and Aristides’ interpretatio graeca of Roman imperialism and then, eventually, to outline the extended intellectual circle on which De reditu’s author drew his inspiration devoted to his antichristian convictions, sometimes expessed in a polemical tone.

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