James Smith Reid

“ Far different is the picture of political life impressed upon us by Rutilius. His voice is assuredly not that of a partisan of a discredited and overborne faction. We see by the aid of his poem a senate at Rome composed of past office-holders, the majority of whom were certainly pagan still. We discern a Christian section whose Christianity was political rather than religious, who were Romans first and Christians afterwards, whom a new breeze in politics might easily have wafted back to the old religion. Between these two sections the broad old Roman toleration reigns. ”

“ The attitude of the writer towards paganism is remarkable The whole poem is intensely pagan, and is penetrated by the feeling that the world of literature and culture is and must remain pagan; that outside paganism lies a realm of barbarism. The poet wears an air of exalted superiority over the religious innovators of his day, and entertains a buoyant confidence that the future of the ancient gods of Rome will not belie their glorious past. ”

“ This crime of Stilicho alone is sufficient in the eyes of Rutilius to account for the disasters that afterwards befell the city, just as Merobaudes, a generation or two later, traced the miseries of his own day to the overthrow of the ancient rites of Vesta. With regard to the form of the poem, Rutilius handles the elegiac couplet with great metrical purity and freedom, and betrays many signs of long study in the elegiac poetry of the Augustan era. The Latin is unusually clean for the times, and is generally fairly classical both in vocabulary and construction. ”