The dissemblance of the constructed landscape in Ausonius’ Mosella

Abstract

It seems that few poems of Late Antiquity have received the level of attention that has been heaped upon the Mosella of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Characterized (some might say stigmatized) as an hodoeporikon from at least the 1930s, the poem is commonly believed to describe Ausonius’ return to Trier with the emperor Valentinian I, following a campaign against encroaching Germanic warbands. The earliest commentators on Ausonius’ Mosella tended to concentrate on the structure of the poem itself, but, from the 1960s, there was a shift in academic focus towards an analysis of the specific language used in the poem and, in particular, its intertextuality. In 1984 Michael Roberts identified one of the dominant themes of the poem as the “violation of boundaries” and elucidated Ausonius’ “negative evaluation of the products of culture as opposed to nature”. It is in this vein that this paper will precede, but arguing also that we see in Ausonius the beginning of a Christian and late antique rejection of the man made.