Rutilius Claudius Namatianus

Rutilius Claudius Namatianus (fl. 5th century) was a Roman Imperial poet, notable as the author of a Latin poem, De Reditu Suo, in elegiac metre, describing a coastal voyage from Rome to Gaul in 416. The solid literary quality of the work, and the flashes of light it throws across a momentous but dark epoch of history, combine to give it exceptional importance among the relics of late Roman literature. The poem was in two books; the exordium of the first and the greater part of the second have been lost. What remains consists of about seven hundred lines.

Whether Rutilius had converted to Christianity, which was well established as the state church of the Roman Empire by his time, has been a matter of scholarly debate. In the early 21st century, editors of his work concluded that he had not, and Alan Cameron, a leading scholar of Late Antiquity, agrees that he "probably" remained unconverted from Rome's traditional religious practices, but that his hostility was not to Christianity as it was practiced by the vast majority of citizens of the Empire, but rather against the total renunciation of public life advocated by the ascetics.

The author is a native of southern Gaul (Toulouse or perhaps Poitiers), and belonged, like Sidonius Apollinaris, to one of the great governing families of the Gallic provinces. His father, whom he calls Lachanius, had held high offices in Italy and at the imperial court, had been governor of Tuscia (Etruria and Umbria), vicar of Britain, then imperial treasurer (comes sacrarum largitionum), imperial recorder (quaestor), and governor of the capital itself (praefectus urbi) in 414.

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