Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › De Reditu Suo (Fragments)
Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, a Gallic aristocrat who had served as prefect of the city of Rome, described his journey home to Gaul in the elegiac poem De Reditu Suo, whose second book breaks off after a few lines in the main manuscript. These two fragments of its lost continuation were discovered in 1973 by Mirella Ferrari in a manuscript from Bobbio. Damaged and incomplete, they describe the coast of Liguria, the granaries of Genoa and an inn where the travellers are lodged.
The discovery of the fragments was a notable event in Latin studies, extending by some lines one of the last great poems of classical Rome. They confirm that Rutilius’ voyage continued along the Ligurian coast and preserve the poem’s attention to the places, people and economy of the regions he passed.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: V. Tandoi, 1975), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.