Mar Marcos - Rome's Senility: A Topic in the Polemic between Pagans and Christians at the End of Antiquity

This paper is part of a Workshop on “Late Antique Rome as a Cultural Icon” aimed at studying the transformations of the city of Rome in Late Antiquity, and contemporary perceptions on it. In this framework, the specific purpose of this paper is to analyse the topic of Rome’s senility and her capacity to regenerate as an Eternal City, which is recurrent in late antique literature (Ammianus Marcellinus, Ausonius, Claudianus, Rutilius Namatianus, Sidonius Apollinaris), and which would become an important subject of controversy between pagans and Christians in the fifth century. I will focus on the analysis of some early uses of this polemical theme, in the years between the defeat at Adrianople (a. 378) and the sack of Rome by Alaric (a. 410). Rome’s personification in Symmachus’ Relatio 3, where she speaks in person about her senility, and Rome’s debate with Faith in Prudentius’s Contra Symmachum 2, with the prospect of a regeneratio through conversion, illustrate the versatility of the rhetorical techniques used in late antique religious debate, shared to a great extent by pagans and Christians alike.