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The Mosella of Ausonius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

E. J. Kenney
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Extract

‘A prodigious memory, a facile talent for versification, a cheerful and kindly optimism, and an avoidance of all that was serious or profound or disquieting’ – so Professor Robert Browning not unjustly sums up the poetic character of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. He was a professor of Latin, and it shows in his work. That is not surprising, since it was on his professional and professorial skill as teacher and rhetorician that his whole career was founded. It was by displaying proficiency in Latin Prose and Verse Composition that he rose to provincial governorships and to the consulate, and to the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian. It is to this last circumstance that we owe his best poem, the Mosella, a celebration of the beauties of the river Moselle. In A.d. 367 the Imperial court had been established at Trier in Gaul; and Ausonius was required to accompany the Emperor Valentinian, with his pupil, on his German campaigns. These, continuing a policy inaugurated by Valentinian's predecessors, were directed towards the consolidation of a Roman presence on the German bank of the Rhine, with the ultimate object of incorporating the Germans in the Empire and setting up a bulwark against further barbarian encroachments. It is against this political and military background that the Mosella must be read. It was clearly intended as propaganda. ‘The purpose of the poem was to inspire the Gauls with confidence in the renewed peace and security.’ They stood in need of such reassurance, for the recent past in Gaul had been far from secure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , October 1984 , pp. 190 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1984

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References

Notes

1. The Cambridge History of Classical Literature II (1982), p. 701Google Scholar = The later principate (1983), p. 19.

2. Chadwick, Nora K., Poetry and letters in early Christian Gaul (1955), p. 51Google Scholar.

3. Browning ibid.

4. Chadwick (n. 2), p. 62.

5. Symmachus, , Epistulae 1.14 (p. 143 Peiper)Google Scholar.

6. Apart from a dubious instance in Livy, these are the only occurrences of subterlabor in Latin literature. Cf. Gorier, W., Hermes 97 (1969), 94–114, esp. 109, 113Google Scholar.

7. The baths at Pliny's villa, as was remarked to me by the late Hugh Plommer, commanded a view of the sea (Epp. 2.17.11).

8. Wightman, Edith M., Roman Trier and the Treveri (1970), p. 165Google Scholar: ‘the baths at Wasserlich opposite Igel would smoke by the water's edge as described’; cf. ibid. pp. 152, 165 on an elaborate house on the riverbank at Wittlich (already noted by Hosius). On large and important houses in general in the region see ibid. pp. 66–7.

9. Pavlovskis, Zoja, Man in an artificial landscape. The marvels of civilization in Imperial Roman literature (Mnemosyne Suppl. 25, 1973)Google Scholar.

10. Ibid. pp. 42, 44–5.

11. Ibid. pp. 39, 38.

12. Browning (n. 1) ibid.

13. See Tränkle, , MH 31 (1974), 159–60Google Scholar; Fuchs, ibid. 32 (1975), 175.

14. Perhaps, as suggested to me by Professor D. A. West, ‘drenches the Moselle in the mountains’ (cf. Blakeney's ‘Shall steep Moselle with the greenery of the hills’) rather than ‘o'erspreads Moselle with the green of the reflected height’ (Evelyn White, Loeb).

15. In spite of umbras at line 192 I should take umbrarum here as ‘reflection’, as it is in the Statian model, and render: ‘where the water joins [sc. with itself, sibi] the edges of the reflection’. Professor West would prefer to take confinia as the common boundary of reflection and reality, i.e. the water's edge, paraphrasing ‘and the river, sc. river's edge, joins the common boundary of the two umbrae (1) the opacus collis (ring composition) (2) the reflection’. This seems to me to strain qua; the words ‘per medium, qua’ seem to stress that the phenomenon, whatever exactly it is, is best observed in midstream. The threefold repetition of the prefix con- in ‘confundit…confinia consent’ – an unexpectedly Lucretian touch – imparts great emphasis.

16. J. W. Mackail, Introd. to E. H. Blakeney's edition (1933), p. vii.