This post is from Sam:

Purely on a grammatical level, I was surprised (after being merely confused) by the lack of grammatical connection between clauses. For instance, I expected some kind of et or -que to link the posse of the second line with the mirabere of the first. Is this a feature of Rutilius' style, Late Antique Latin, or both? On a more substantial level, I noticed a fair amount of intertextuality with Classical Latin poets--line 65 seems to be a reminiscence of Vergil's "parcere subjectis" etc. On the one hand this could be evidence that Rutilius perceived himself as--or indeed was, from the viewpoint of later critics--a kind of latecomer, echoing the achievements of the Augustans without actually being able to rival them. But Ovid already engages in a similar game of verbal shuffling with Horace and Vergil, so it probably makes more sense to attribute this to the highly intertextuality character of Latin poetry in general. On a purely aesthetic level, the lines describing Rutilius' reasons for returning to Gaul were among my favorites, for their music (Gallica rura vocant), their vision of rural devastation, and their thoughtfulness about what a thoroughly Romanized provincial owes to his less glamorous home. Finally, I'm curious to know at what point Roma started being venerated as a goddess. On one level it felt more like a literary convention than a really-existing cultus--it seems odd to address a really-existing city as divine. But these lines also have a certain ring of pious sincerity (helped by the music "Te canimusque" etc).