Nordic Research

Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed

Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed,Antiquities Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Uppsala Universit gave her lecture on Wednesday 15 March 2017.

Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus

Biography

Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed is Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities Research Fellow in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University. In her current research, she explores modern receptions of late antique literary culture. She has worked on cento poetry and is the author of Proba the Prophet (Brill 2015). Content

Abstract

In “Rome Post Mortem: The Many Returns of Rutilius Namatianus,” Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed retraces the steps of the early fifth-century Gallo-Roman poet Rutilius Namatianus – from the pen of Edward Gibbon, who saw in Rutilius an archetypal image of the crumbling Empire, to French post revolutionary intellectuals who perceived him as a romantic hero. Rutilius’ experiences were acutely relevant in the disasters that followed the Napoleonic Wars, but it was in the Italian nationalist and decadentist movements that his poem had its greatest political impact. Once integrated into the fascist movement, he became the voice of the lost Roman Empire that would now come alive again. More recently, he has become a poet of crisis and shock. No wonder that post-9/11 filmmakers or scholars have identified with Rutilius Namatianus and his reluctant journey away from the crumbling monuments of Rome after Alaric’s sack. The very lexicon of western civilization and its fear of “falling” because of non-western “barbarian” aggression originates from the narrative of the Late Antique decline and fall of the Roman Empire.