7/28/2019 Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized. Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/rome-personified-rome-epitomized-representations-of-rome-in-the-poetry-of 1/34 Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century Author(s): Michael Roberts Source: The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 533-565 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561821 . Accessed: 21/04/2013 15:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Journal of Philology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 89.180.171.15 on Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:09:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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7/28/2019 Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized. Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century
Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early
Fifth CenturyAuthor(s): Michael RobertsSource: The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 533-565Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1561821 .
Accessed: 21/04/2013 15:09
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
American Journal of Philology.
http://www.jstor.org
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withdrew from public life to devote his poetic talents to the service of
God. Two works are especially relevant to the representation of Rome,
the Contra Symmachum, in two books, completed in 402 or early 403,
though book 1 may have been written earlier, and the Peristephanon, a
collection of poems on the martyrs, including the Roman martyrs
Lawrence (Perist. 2), Hippolytus (Perist. 11), Peter and Paul (Perist. 12),
and Agnes (Perist. 14). Peristephanon 9 and 11 refer to a journey the poet
took to Rome, generally dated to 401/402, but it is quite possible that this
was not his first trip to the capital.3
The third poet, Rutilius Namatianus, a traditionally minded pagan,
was praefectus urbi in 414. His poem, the De reditu suo, which does not
survive in its entirety, describes his return from Rome to his native Gaul
in 417.4 It is haunted by the destruction caused in northern Italy and
Gaul by the recent barbarian invasions, but it begins with an extended
paean of praise to Rome, the eternal city, which always grows stronger by
its reverses. Rutilius' patriotic devotion to the city and the idea of Rome
provides an optimistic counterpoint to the evidence of destruction and
desolation that runs as a leitmotif through the poem.
Rome figures in the three poets in two guises. It may appear per-
sonified as a woman, whose attributes index the power and status of the
city and empire as well as the contemporary circumstances of the Roman
state.5 As an alternative to this metaphorical representation of Rome, the
city may be encapsulated by certain, especially charged details of topog?
raphy, in an epitome of its urban geography that stands in a metonymic
(or synecdochic) relationship to the city as a whole. Thus, to take an
example from a later period, when Paulinus of Pella came at an ad-
vanced age to write his life story in the Eucharisticos, he mentions a trip
that he took to Rome in the company of his parents in a.d. 379. At the
time he was not yet three years old; he admits he recalled nothing of the
visit. Instead of personal recollection he fails back on the language of
3See Lana 1962, 23-32, and Palmer 1989, 29-30.
41 follow Cameron 1967 for the date of the journey.5In this article I am concerned to trace the poetics of Rome, how the city figures and
is figured in my chosen texts, and how such representations bear on the religious and
cultural issues at stake in the period and on the attitudes of the poets to the contemporarysituation and hopes for the future of Rome. (I owe my distinction between the metaphori?cal and the metonymic ultimately to Roman Jakobson's identification of these as the two
fundamental axes of discourse.) I do not primarily address the broader ideological
significance of Rome, its relation to the larger empire, or the ideals of imperial rule for
which the city can stand. These aspects of late Roman patriotism have been amply dis?
cussed by other scholars.
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36-37). The epithet inclita (Aen. 6. 781) and the line-ending moenia
Romae (Aen. 1.7) are both Virgilian. Rome is metonymically embodied
by a cluster of physical features, walls, and hills, given resonance by the
evocation of the great Roman epic. This combination of epitomizing
detail and Virgilian reminiscence is typical of the poets studied in this
article. Paulinus' only view of the city was in the irrecoverable past of
infancy, but he shares the techniques he uses to summon up that city with
poets who knew weil the real Rome.
ROME PERSONIFIED
Of the two strategies, personification-metaphor is the better studied, and
here I can be briefer. The goddess Roma appears as an agent in the
narrative in five of Claudian's poems: Panegyrcus dictus Probino et Olybrio
consulibus (Prob.) 75-173, De bello Gildonico 17-212, In Eutropium
1.371-513, De consulatu Stilichonis 2.223-407, De sexto consulatu Honorii
6.356-493. In the earliest of these poems, on the consulship of Probinusand Olybrius, she appears dressed in the manner of Minerva, but with
the exposed breast of an Amazon (Prob. 84-89), the so-called Mischtypus
of the goddess familiar from ancient art.6 Claudian's Roma shows the
pronounced influence of such artistic representations. The poet lingers
over the goddess's appearance?her bearing, dress, and the weapons she
carries?as the metonymic index of Rome's status. When, famine-stricken,
she appeals to Jupiter for aid against the African rebel, Gildo, her ap?
pearancefits her state: drawn
cheeks,wasted
limbs, ill-fitting helmet,broken-down shield, and rusty spear (Gild. 21-25). When Jupiter grants
her petition, her vigor is miraculously restored (Gild. 208-12). ThoughRoma had spoken of herself as grown old in military campaigns ("emeri-
tae ... senectae," 115), she now enjoys restored youth ("meliore iuventa,"
208). The topos of Roma as an old woman, corresponding to the antiq?
uity of the city and its empire, finds its fullest exposition in Ammianus,
though it goes back to the first century a.d. (14.6.3-6).7 The image, with
its ambiguous connotations of reverent status but also enfeeblement,
6Mellor 1981,1015-16. See, too, Cameron 1970,274-76 and 364-66, for parallels inthe art of late antiquity.Klein (1985,114-28) considers Claudian's representations of Roma
from a political and ideological perspective.7Cf. Luc. 1.188, Mart. 5.7.3, and Florus Pr. 4.
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poems and finds precedent in the similar stance of Roma in an early
fourth-century panegyric (Pan. Lat. 7.10.5). Claudian is careful to create
a narrative structure, bridging the divine and human, in which the god?
dess can act. Roma is imagined to reside in her temple in Rome. She
travels through the air to Theodosius, on the battlefield of the River
Frigidus (Prob. 100-12), to Stilicho and Honorius encamped north of the
Po (Eutr. 1.375-77), or to Stilicho alone in the palace of Milan (Cons. Stil.
2.270-74). Her arrival is accompanied by manifestations of her power:
when she appeared to Theodosius, "the rocks resounded three times in
consciousness of her presence and the dark grove trembled in awe at her
divinity" (Prob. 125-26); in Milan "the palace shimmered with her bril?
liant shield and the top of her helmet-crest reached to the panelled
ceiling" (Cons. Stil. 2.276-77). To Honorius, too, encamped beyond the
Po, she shows herself as superhumanly large, once she has thrown off the
mist that conceals her (Eutr. 1.390).9 The ideas, and often the language,
derive from the tradition of divine epiphanies in epic. But the employ-
ment of a divinity to elevate and lend superhuman status to human
action also serves an important panegyric purpose. The easy interchange
between divine and human and the promotion of terrestrial actions by a
god are reminiscent of the role of divinities in late Latin epithalamia,
from Statius on.10 In Claudian's own epithalamium for Honorius and
Maria, the daughter of Stilicho, for instance, the goddess travels by sea
and air to the imperial palace to urge Maria to wed her royal groom.
Roma, though a more august goddess than Venus, has functionally an
analogous role. While Venus flies in a chariot drawn by swans, Roma's
chariot is yoked by her attendants Attack and Fear (Impetus and Metus).
The divine machinery of epic shades into the celebratory function of the
mythological masque of other epideictic poetic genres.11
In Claudian's Roma, the rhetorical prosopopoeia, artistic traditions
of personification and the copresence of the divine and human in impe?
rial relief sculpture, and epic and epideictic poetics coincide.The goddess
9"Conscia ter sonuit rupes et inhorruit atrum / maiestate nemus" (Prob. 125-26);"tremit orbe corusco / iam domus et summae tangunt laquearia cristae" (Cons. Stil. 2.276-
77); "dimovit nebulam iuvenique apparuit ingens" (Eutr. 1.390).10Roberts 1989b. For the parallel with such epideictic forms see Dopp 1980, 32-39
(especially 36). In his epithalamium Statius, like Claudian in his panegyrical poetry, createsa narrative scenario that motivates and provides a context for the easy exchange betweendivine and human (in Statius' case between Venus and Violentilla).
11Compare, for instance, the role of nymphs and other minor deities in Statius'
Silvae and Ausonius' Mosella.
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is a literary creation, not the object of cult. As such, the personified
Rome, once shorn of her aspirations to divinity, easily accommodates
herself to the Christian poetry of Claudian's contemporary, the Hispano-
Roman patriot, Prudentius. In book 1 of the Contra Symmachum Pru-
dentius criticizes the cult of the goddess Roma (1.217-25): like other
forms of sacrifice and ceremonial it has served to perpetuate belief in
pagan divinities by its effects on the impressionable young. But this does
not prevent the Christian emperor Theodosius, fresh from his victory
against the usurpers Maximus and Eugenius, from framing his own speech
to personified Rome, addressed as "faithful parent" (flda parens, 416)
and "queen" (regina, 430). At his urging and through his edicts she
throws off past errors and her wrinkled face takes on, implicitly, new
lineaments (1.506-8).12 The poet objects to Roma as a divinity-receiving
cult, but as a literary personification she is unexceptionable.
In book 2 of the poem, Prudentius engages directly with the argu?
ments given by Symmachus in the Relatio of 384 for the restoration of
the Altar of Victory. Symmachus had introduced an aged Roma calling
for respect for her ancestral religious practices. The Christian poet re?
jects the argument but not the literary device. Indeed he adopts it for
himself. Symmachus, he says, adopted a persona to lend weight to his
falsehood, like a singer of a tragic myth putting on a mask. (The use of
the word persona shows that Prudentius thinks of the speech as a proso-
popoeia, for which one Latin translation was fictio personae, Quint. 9.2.29.)
In Prudentius' view the Roman empire had been the providential vehicle
for the coming and spread of Christianity.13 Theodosius' reforms repre-
sent the final triumphant stage in this process. He, therefore, rejects
Symmachus' representation of Rome as a debilitated figure who must
petition the emperors in demeaning fashion (2.640-48). Roma's counter-
speech, addressed to her two alumni (2.769), Arcadius and Honorius,
celebrates the conversion of the city and in particular the victory re?
cently won by Christian armies at the battle of Pollentia. It begins with
Prudentius' own version of the personified city. Like Claudian he em-
ploys visual imagery and metonymic detail to index the city's status. Her
gray hair has grown golden again, as she is reborn under Christian
emperors (2.656-58).14 She still wears a helmet, but it bears olive leaves
12"Talibus edictis urbs informata refugit / errores veteres et turbida ab ore vieto /
nubila discussit."Although the theme of rejuvenation is not explicit here, the implication of
physical change in informata contributes to the sense that Roma experiences a face-lift.13Charlet 1986, 41-42.14"Senium omne renascens/deposui vidique meam flavescere rursus / canitiem," C.
Symm. 2.656-58.
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and a wreath of green foliage covers her sword belt. Prudentius gives
these details of her armor an allegorical reading. She still carries arms for
external wars, but her weapons are swathed in greenery because they are
no longer used in the persecution of innocent Christians (2.661-68).15
Prudentius' use of such a figure is all the more surprising since
earlier in the book he had criticized another personification, of Victory,
as the foolish contrivance of poets and painters (2.31-60), who "fashion
beings lacking physical form with invented limbs" ("res incorporeas
simulatis fingere membris," 2.58).16 Military victory, he argues, comes not
from a goddess but from the warlike efforts of the Roman soldiers. In a
similar vein Prudentius identifies the city of Rome with its people (1.569-
71 and 2.443-44), and particularly with the senatorial class.17 But his
attitude is not consistent. The imaginative resonance for a Roman patriot
like Prudentius of the figure of Roma is too strong. She is not a goddess
nor is she an actor in the narrative, as she is in Claudian, who follows epic
and epideictic precedents. But as a mouthpiece for Prudentius' argu?
ments, personified Roma remains a powerful rhetorical instrument. In
reimagining her physical appearance in accordance with his Christian
argument, Prudentius avails himself of the semiotic convention whereby
the metonymic detail of Roma's bearing, dress, and armor is available for
a metaphorical and ideological reading.
For Rutilius, Roma is once more a goddess (1.79), the most beauti?
ful queen of the world (1.46). Although she does not speak, she is ad-
dressed in an extended hymn expressing an emotional devotion to the
goddess that far exceeds anything in Claudian. The emotional force
derives in part from the situation of the speaker: he is bidding a tearful
farewell to his beloved city. But the circumstances of the time must also
lend poignancy to this evocation of Rome's greatness. After the capture
of Rome by Alaric and the invasion of Rutilius' native Gaul, the ready
optimism of a Prudentius, writing in the first few years of the century, was
no longer available. Rome's greatness, represented by its founding leg?
ends (1.67-72), imperial achievements (1.71-92), buildings and monu-
ments (1.93-114), and the tribute of produce paid by personified rivers
15"Nunc, nunc iusta meis reverentia conpetit annis, / nunc merito dicor venerabilis
et caput orbis,/cum galeam sub fronde oleae cristasque rubentes / concutio viridi velansfera cingula serto/atque armata Deum sine crimine caedis adoro," C Symm. 2.661-65.
16On this passage see Gnilka 1991,16-33.17"Si persona aliqua est aut si status urbis, in his [sc. domibus nobilium] est, / si
formam patriae facit excellentior ordo, / hi faciunt,"C.Symm. 1.569-71; "Romam dico viros,
quos mentem credimus urbis, / non genium, cuius frustra simulatur imago," C. Symm.2.443-44.
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Raise up, Rome, your laurel headdress and color once more your aged
holy head with fresh and youthful hair. May a golden diadem shine bright
with tower-crowned peak and a golden shield continually flame forth its
brilliance. Forget your injury and wipe away your bitter suffering; by scorn-
ing your pain your wounds close and heal over.
Hair and armor again index Rome's status. In the first couplet, Rutilius
deliberately conflates the laurel appropriate to the victor with the full
and vigorous hair of youth: crinales lauros can mean either "laurel in the
hair" or "laurel hair" (i.e., hair consisting of laurel); virides . . . comas,
either "youthful hair" or "green foliage." (Ernst Doblhofer [1972-77,
2:73] cites the evidence for the metaphorical sense of viridis and its
cognates.) In so doing Rutilius associates Rome's rejuvenation specifi?cally with her renewed military supremacy, symbolized by the trium?
phant laurel wreath. Roma has attributes both of warrior and queen in
the next couplet: a mural crown and a shield.19 Their golden brilliance
18On the tension in Rutilius' poem between optimism and pessimism see Doblhofer
1970,14-15, and 21, n. 18, and Roberts 1988,186-87.
19The mural crown finds a literary parallel in Lucan 1.188. Otherwise, in poetry,Roma is represented wearing a helmet. Both forms of headgear are found in art, the mural
crown being associated particularly, though not exclusively, with city Tyches:Shelton 1979,30-35. By using the word cono, regularly used of the top of a helmet in Latin poetry,Rutilius again conflates two distinct attributes, the mural crown and the warrior's helmet.
Claudian (Cons. Stil. 2.21A) emphasizes the brilliance of Roma's shield. It reflects the Po as
she flies to Stilicho in Milan ("Eridanus clipei iam fulgurat umbra").
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When, in the mid-fifth century, Paulinus of Pella wanted to evoke the
topography of Rome he needed only to refer to two features, its walls
and its hills; they could stand for the city as a whole. The combination
goes back to Virgil, Georgics 2.534-35, "a single city surrounded its seven
hills with a wall" ("septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces"; cLAen.
6.783). It finds its most succinct formulation in the first century A.D. in
Statius' epithalamium for Stella and Violentilla, "the walls of seven-fold
Rome" ("septemgeminae . . . moenia Romae"), a city Venus there de?
scribes as "Latin head of the empire" ("imperii Latiale caput," Silv.
1.2.191-92).22 Paulinus is probably influenced also by his grandfather
Ausonius' phrase "superbae / moenia Romae" ("the walls of proud Rome,"
Prof. Burd. 6.15-16).23 In fact, in the poetry of the late fourth and early
fifth centuries, the metonymic use of moenia is rare, perhaps because the
feature was not distinctive of Rome; many cities in late antiquity were
walled. Although Claudian, for instance, praises in De sexto consulatu
Honorii Stilicho's rebuilding of the Aurelian walls, he otherwise typically
associates the walls with the founding or early history of the city.24
Prudentius only twice speaks of the walls of Rome: when Theodosius
looks down on the walls of the city in triumph (C. Symm. 1.410-11) and
in Peristephanon 11, when the persecutor, "not content continually to
dye with the blood of the just the walls of lofty Rome," takes Hippolytus
out of the city for martyrdom ("non contentus humum celsae intra
moenia Romae / tinguere iustorum caedibus adsiduis," Perist. 11.43-44).Prudentius represents the persecution as a derogation from Rome's high
standing. While the phrase "celsae intra moenia Romae" is in the tradi?
tion of laudes Romae, the juxtaposition of humum with celsae and the
demeaning periphrasis "humum ... tinguere" represent the persecutor's
22The height of hills and walls implicitly legitimates Rome's claim to the title of
"imperii... caput."23Paulinus of Nola (writing to Ausonius) has "superba ... moenia Romae" (Carm.
10.247).246 Cons. Hon. 531-36; for the association with the founding and early history of
Rome see Gild. 28 and 109. By associating Stilicho's rebuilding of the walls with Virgilian
language of the founding of Rome, Claudian represents the actions of his patron not onlyas a rejuvenation (iuvenescere) but as a refounding of the city.
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The roars of the people he has honoured rise into heaven and resound in
unison with the hollow valley and a single echo thunders the name Augustus
from all seven hills.
The two clauses that constitute the passage emphasize distinct elements
of the scene. The first is organized according to elevation, emphasized by
the clausula aethera vallis: the sound reaches from low to high; the
second stresses the unifying effect of the acclaim (the clausula unaque
totis). Virgil twice describes the founding of Rome as "a single city
surrounding the seven hills with a wall" ("septemque una sibi muro
circumdedit / circumdabit arces"). In Claudian "a single echo" thunders
the name of Augustus "from the seven hills." In this formulation late
Roman ceremony reenacts and derives its legitimacy from the founda-
tional act of the city's origins, as authoritatively formulated by Virgil.
Stilicho's adventus is to arouse similar enthusiasm. "How often,"
the poet asks, "will the Murcian valley [i.e., the Circus Maximus] carry to
heaven your name, echoing off the Aventine and Palatine hills?" ("ad
caelum quotiens vallis tibi Murcia ducet / nomen Aventino Pallanteoque
recussum!" Cons. Stil. 2.404-5). The ceremony imagined is the same, and
there is the same emphasis on the sound ascending to heaven from the
valley floor. The topographical specificity is new. By referring, for in?stance, to the Palatine and Aventine rather than to all seven hills, Claudian
sacrifices the idea of the occasion as unifying the whole of the city.
Instead he emphasizes the love the population feels for Stilicho and their
suspense as they await his arrival. Suspense finds expression in chrono-
logical, and hence topographical, extension: the Flaminian Way (397),
Pincian Heights ("Pincia culmina," 401), theater of Pompey ("Pompeiana
... proscaenia," 403), and finally the Murcian valley. The mini-itinerary of
Rome draws out the expectation and communicates the emotional in?vestment of the populace in the general's adventus.27
27See especially 398-99: "fallax o quotiens pulvis deludet amorem / suspensum,veniens omni dum crederis hora!" For the idea see Verg. Ecl. 8.108. Auson. Ep. 24.116-24,uses a similar mini-itinerary in a similar context to build up suspense, concluding with the
quotation from Virgil.
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quem sibi Roma facit, purior esse dies. (1.193-200)
Although Homer praises the signs of eddying smoke, when it rises to the
stars from a beloved household, no smoke indicated to me that placewhich holds the heights of empire and is the head of the world, but a more
38Decora alta trophaeis can refer to spoil-clad arches (cf. Claudian, Cons. Stil. 3.67and 6 Cons. Hon. 50-51)?so Doblhofer 1972-77,2:62. Alta, though, may hint at the seven
hills of Rome, while densis recalls the air thick (densum) with temples of 6 Cons. Hon. 47.
For the comparison with stars see Cons. Stil.3.134. Vagos,perhaps,corresponds to Claudian'strepidans. For the inability of the viewer to concentrate on a single object when distracted
by so many visual stimuli cf. Sidonius, Carm. 2.420-21. Fuchs (1943,51-58) associates thebrilliance of the light over Rome with passages that identify Roman imperial rule with a
bright heaven or more benign climate (Pliny, HN 3.5.39, Florus 2.30).39See Doblhofer (1972-77, 2:73^1), who cites the Prudentian parallel. For the pos?
sible influence of Prudentius on Rutilius see also Helm 1931,16-20.
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Jerome, writing in A.D. 400 to the Christian aristocrat Laeta, pre?
sents a starkly differentiated account of the new Christian Rome:
Auratum squalet Capitolium, fuligine et aranearum telis omnia Romae
templa cooperta sunt; movetur urbs sedibus suis, et inundans populus ante
delubra semiruta currit ad martyrum tumulos. (Ep. 107.1)
The golden Capitoline decays, all Rome's temples are covered with soot
and spiders' webs; the city has changed its orientation, and a flood of
people hurries past the half-ruined shrines to the tombs of the martyrs.
Jerome exaggerates, but it is significant that he speaks of the conversion
of the inhabitants as a reorientation of urban geography.50The city is now
oriented toward the surrounding martyr shrines rather than the pagan
temples of its monumental centre. Prudentius, roughly contemporaneously,
presents a similar picture in the first book of the Contra Symmachum:
Iamque ruit paucis Tarpeia in rupe relictis
ad sincera virum penetralia Nazareorum
atque ad apostolicos Evandria curia fontes. (C Symm. 1.547^9)
Now, leaving only a few behind on the Tarpeian rock, the senate house of
Evander hurries to the holy precincts of the Nazareans and the apostolic
springs.
Earlier in the poem Prudentius had shown himself sensitive to the indoc-
trinating effect that exposure to pagan cult and the religious ceremonies
of the city?especially the worship of Venus and Roma?had on the im-
pressionable young (1.199-244).51 Now the focus of worship has changed.
With the exception of a few holdouts, still wedded to the religion of the
Capitoline and the Tarpeian rock, Rome's senatorial aristocracy hurries
50Lim (1999,265-66) emphasizes that Jerome's account here of the reorientation of
civic life, as well as the similar passages in Prudentius, is not to be taken at face value. The
reality is that the games in particular continued to provide a primary focus of Roman civic
identity well into the fifth century.At stake in the texts discussed in this paper are imagina-tive structures and signifying practices that are in an uncertain relationship with the reality
of urban life in late antique Rome. It is striking, though, that both Jerome and Prudentiusemphasize not just new buildings and monuments, but the movement of people and theceremonial activities associated with those monuments. The validation of Christian sacred
topography depended to a significant extent on its enactment in movement and procession,if it was to take a hold on the imagination of the plebs Christiana (cf. Carruthers 1998,54-
57).51On this passage see Gnilka 1994.
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eagerly (ruit) to the Christian churches and basilicas of the apostles.
Metonymy?curia, the building, for its occupants, the senate?anchors
the confessional reorientation of its inhabitants in the topography of the
city. Under the influence of curia, fontes evokes not just the waters of
baptism, associated with the apostle Peter in Peristephanon 12, and the
sources of apostolic teaching to which the Roman converts now turn, but
also the physical embodiment of the apostles' presence in the city, the
basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Word order reflects sense: the
apostolici fontes now embrace the Evandrian curia. Curia, like rostra,
regularly serves as a metonymy for Roman public life;52 the epithet
Evandria links Prudentius' passage with Virgil's prestigious account of
the prehistory of Rome. While celebrating a fundamental change in con?
fessional status, the Christian poet is eager to use the secular traditions of
the imperial city as triangulation points for mapping the new Christian
Rome.
Prudentius, in his Rome poetry, frequently returns to the Hieronym-
ian image of the plebs Christiana thronging to Christian basilicas: the
Vatican tomb of Peter and the Lateran (C. Symm. 1.583-86), martyr
shrines generally and especially that of Lawrence (Perist. 2.512-28), the
catacomb of Hippolytus (Perist. 11.189-94 and 199-202).53 At Hippolytus'
festival even the impressive church built to accommodate devotees of
the saint has difficulty taking in the "flood" of worshipers ("undas,"
Perist. 11.227; cf. Jerome, Ep. 107.1 "inundans populus"). The basilica
enfolds its foster-children (i.e., the devotees of the saint) in its maternal
and nurturing embrace ("maternum pandens gremium quo condat
alumnos / ac foveat fetos adcumulata sinus," 229-30). The metaphor
recalls the traditional characterization of Rome as mater (first in Livy
5.54.2). In De consulatu Stilichonis 3 (150-52), in a passage of Rome
panegyric, Claudian speaks of the city as "alone receiv[ing] into her
embrace ("in gremium . . . recepit") the conquered, and nurtur[ing]
("fovit") the human race with a common name in the manner of a
mother, not mistress" ("matris, non dominae ritu"). Prudentius employs
and elaborates the same metaphor; saints or their shrines regularly pro-
52Curia:Stat., Silv. 1.4.41 and 5.2.27;Pan. Lat. 2.47.3 and 4.35.2; Claud., 4 Cons. Hon.10 and 6 Cons. Hon. 52; cf. Prudent., C Symm. 1.599. Rostra:Pan. Lat. 2.47.3; Claud., Cons.
Stil. 2.390,3.106, 201; Get. 82; 6 Cons. Hon. 42,587, 644 ; Prudent., Perist. 11.45.53Prudentius here alludes to Virgil's account of the morning salutatio, a regular part
of the urban rituals of social life in Augustan Rome. In Christian Rome attendance on the
martyrs at their shrines takes the place of the, to Virgil, offensive social obligations of the
pre-Christian period. See Roberts 1993,165-66.
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vide parental protection and nurturing for the Christian community in
the Peristephanon.54 In so doing they replicate on a smaller scale the
ideal relation of city and empire in Claudian's poem. At the end of
Peristephanon 11, troops of worshipers from throughout Italy and from
all social classes congregate for the festival of the saint, where they enact
annually a ritual of community in the maternal embrace of the martyr's
Roman basilica.
It is characteristic of Prudentius' Rome poetry to combine descrip-
tions of buildings with accounts of individual worship or group ceremo-
nial. In his poem for Lawrence (Perist. 2) he celebrates the recent conver?
sion of the Roman aristocracy:
Quidquid Quiritum sueverat
orare simpuvium Numae,
Christi frequentans atria
hymnis resultat martyrem.
Ipsa et senatus lumina,
quondam luperci aut flamines,
apostolorum et martyrum
exosculantur limina. (Perist. 2.513-20)
All the citizens who had been accustomed to pray to Numa's holy ladle
throng the halls of Christ and celebrate the martyr in hymns. The brightest
lights of the senate, once priests of the Lupercal or other rites, lovingly kiss
the thresholds of apostles and martyrs.
The first stanza (513-16) describes a communal ceremony of worship,
with the singing of hymns in praise of the martyr; the second (517-20),
acts of individual devotion to the apostles and martyrs. In both cases
Prudentius includes language (atria and limina) that reminds readers of
the material structures where worship takes place. Atria is used of church
buildings elsewhere in the Peristephanon, and that is its primary meaning
here. But the word also can refer to domestic space. Prudentius imagines
the throngs of devotees in the halls of Christ as the equivalent of the
throngs of clients in the reception hall of an influential Roman at the
morning salutatio. This comparison is also made in Peristephanon 11
54See also Perist. 2.569-72, 4.94-96, 7.5; Roberts 1993, 22-24. Prudentius typicallycombines the language of maternal nurturing with paternal protection. In elaboratingClaudian's metaphor Prudentius emphasizes the maternal embrace and the relation of
offspring to mother. For mater of Roma see Gernentz 1918,127-28.
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64This article is based on a talk given at Brown University, 24 February 2000. Mythanks go to my hosts on that occasion and to the audience for the valuable questions and
discussion that followed the paper.
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