Nearby Falesia checks our weary course, although
Phoebus had scarcely
reached his halfway point.[i]
By chance, the happy peasants at the country crossroads
were easing weary
hearts with festive rites:
it was the day Osiris, now returned at last, 375
excites the happy
seeds to make new fruits.[ii]
We land, and seek an inn, and wander in the woods.
delicious pools
delight with shallow basins:
The wider water of the stream, enclosed, allows
the frisky fish to frolic
in the ponds.[iii]
380
A landlord harsher than Antiphates[iv]
extorts
a heavy price for
this delightful inn,
for a whining Jew was managing the place--
an animal, cut off
from human food,[v]
who charges us for breaking shrubs and hitting seaweed, 385
and begrudges us the
water we have drunk!
We pay him back with all the scorn that’s owed a filthy
and disgraceful race
that circumcises.[vi]
but their hearts are
colder than their creed. 390
Every seventh day is damned to lazy sloth,
a feeble image of
its tired god![ix]
Even a child, I think, would not believe the other
insane lies that
come from auctioned slaves. [x]
If only the Jewish state had never been subdued 395
by Pompey’s wars and
Titus’s command!
The sickness of this plague, though cauterized, spread far;
a conquered nation
rules its conquerors.[xi]
[i]
Most manuscripts read ‘Faleria,’ but see Gelsomino 1973, Fo 1992. 96 and 139,
and Wolff 2007. 78-79 n. 153 for arguments in favor of reading ‘Falesia.’
[ii]
Osiris was originally an Egyptian god of the dead, and of regeneration and
rebirth. There are many versions of the
myth of Osiris; in most of them, he is unfairly murdered and his body is dismembered
and scattered across the land. His wife,
Isis, tracks down the missing body parts and brings him back to life. The cult of Isis was widespread in Rome from
the late republic, and for Rutilius, it would represent an ancient cult
celebrating the cycle of birth and renewal.
[iii]
Fishponds were widely used in the Roman world, and were markers of wealth and
status. See Higginbotham 1996.
[iv]
Antiphates was the name of the king of the Laestrygonians, a cannibal tribe, in
Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus and his men landed on their
shores seeking hospitality, the Laestrygonians caught some of them and ate
them. Antiphates is thus the very
opposite of a good host, and the allusion associates the Jewish inn-keeper with
cannibalism.
[v]
“cut off from human food:” The Greeks and Romans believed that diet is a marker
of human civilization. Pork was an
important and prized part of the Roman diet.
R takes the Jewish dietary law against eating pork as an indication that
Jews are inhuman animals.
[vi]
R’s diatribe reveals a good deal about Roman prejudice against Jews. The Romans
believed that circumcision was performed to enhance sexual performance, and
Jews were believed to be especially prone to sexual excess. Thus R links together the “filthy and
disgraceful” nature of the Jewish race with circumcision.
[vii] “Radix stultitiae,” a phrase much
discussed by scholars. Many have argued that R intended this attack on Jews as
a veiled attack on Christianity.
However, the evidence from the fragments that Rutilius was strongly in
favor of the Christian Flavius Constantius suggests that a more nuanced
approach should be taken. Cameron 2010
argues against taking the attack on the Jewish innkeeper as an attack on
Christians:
At i. 389 Rutilius
applies the much-discussed phrase radix
stultitiae to Judaism, and many have been tempted to identify stultitia as Christianity (see now the
note in Wolf [sic], Lancel, and Soler 2007). But the nine following lines are
exclusively devoted to Judaism, and given Christianity’s emphatic rejection of
Judaism, this would be an improbably antiquarian way for a pagan to attack
Christianity as late as the fifth century. Cameron 2010. 878.
[viii]
‘Chilly’ because observant Jews did not light fires on the Sabbath.
[ix]
The vocabulary R uses here has negative sexual overtones: mollis
(“feeble”) connotes effeminacy, and lassatus
(“tired”) is from lasso, a verb often
used to suggest exhaustion from sexual intercourse.
[x]
Literally, “the other ravings of the lying auction block,” mendacis
catastae. The catasta
was the platform upon which slaves were stood at auctions. Jews, and perhaps Christians, are here
equated with slaves. My translation
‘Even a child,’ follows Wolff, pueros omnes (VB); Duff conjectures puerum
in somnis.
[xi]
Wolff notes that a fragment of Seneca’s De
Superstitione, quoted by Augustine (City
of God 6.11) says essentially the same thing about the Jews: the conquered have given laws to their
conquerors, victi victoribus leges
dederunt. Augustine, R, and Seneca
are undoubtedly thinking of Horace Ep.
2.1.156, where it is the captive Greeks who conquer their captors.
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