Ausonius, Fortunatus, and the ruins of the Moselle

Abstract

Beginning with an analysis of the constructed landscape of the Moselle valley as presented by the sixth-century Christian poet Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop compares that description with Ausonius's testimony of the same locale in the fourth century. Both poems are contextualised within the political history of the region in Late Antiquity. The landscapes of poetry, however, exist only partly within a phenomenal world, and so in the second part of this chapter Bishop analyses the role of the idealised landscape in the ontology of these two poets, and discusses the ways in which we might see, or cannot see, ideological transformation as well.