5th century) was a Roman Imperial poet, best known for his Latin poem, De reditu suo, in elegiac metre, describing a coastal voyage from Rome to Gaul in 417.
Whether Rutilius had converted to Christianity (the state church of the Roman Empire during his time) has been a matter of scholarly debate, but in the early 21st century, editors of his work concluded that he had not.
During this period he was witness to the career of Stilicho as de facto emperor of the West; the hosts of Radagaisus rolled back from Italy, only to sweep over Gaul and Spain; the defeats and triumphs of Alaric I; the three sieges and final sack of Rome; the dissipation of Heraclianus's vast armament; and the fall of seven pretenders to the Western throne.
He himself indicates that he was intimately acquainted with the circle of the great orator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, who scouted Stilicho's compact with the Goths, and who led the Roman senate to support the pretenders Eugenius and Attalus, in the hope of reinstating the gods whom Emperor Julian had failed to save.
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.
Some ecclesiastical historians have fondly imagined that after the sack of Rome the bishop Innocent returned to a position of predominance, but no one who accepts Rutilius' observations can entertain this idea.
Although some Christian historians even asserted that Stilicho (a staunch Arian) intended to restore paganism, Rutilius depicts him as its most uncompromising foe, as evidenced by his destruction of the Sibylline books.
This alone is sufficient, in the eyes of Rutilius, to account for the disasters that afterwards befell the city, just as Flavius Merobaudes, a generation or two later, traced the miseries of his own day to the overthrow of the ancient rites of Vesta.
Rutilius begins his poem with an almost dithyrambic address to the goddess Roma, "whose glory has ever shone the brighter for disaster, and who will rise once more in her might and confound her barbarian foes".
Next, he refers to the destruction of roads and property wrought by the Goths, to the state of the havens at the mouths of the Tiber, and the general decay of nearly all the old commercial ports on the coast.
This manuscript has not been seen since comte Claude Alexandre de Bonneval, a general in the service of the Austrian commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy, removed it from the monastery in 1706.
[8] The fragment, which had apparently been reused before the discovery of the damaged manuscript by Galbiato in 1493, was written in the 7th or 8th century; it preserves the ends of 39 lines from an otherwise lost portion of book 2.