Her hoary locks, and drags a rusty spear.[137]
Even the poet who sang of Rome’s victories could portray her in such terms as these. Namatianus. Yet the tradition of Roman greatness still survived. In the year 416, Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, a Gaul who had risen to the position of præfectus urbi at Rome, was obliged to return to Gaul to attend to his property, which had been laid waste by the Goths. The journey was the occasion of a poem in two books, most of which is preserved. It is written in elegiacs, with much still and feeling. Many episodes and descriptions are inserted in the narrative, but no passage is so striking as that in which the traveller, passing out from the Ostian gate, addresses the imperial city:
Wide as the ambient ocean is thy sway,
And broad thy empire as the realms of day;
Still on thy bounds the sun’s great march attends,
With thee his course begins, with thee it ends.
Thy strong advance nor Afric’s burning sand,
Nor frozen horrors of the Pole withstand;
Thy valor, far as kindly Nature’s bound
Is fixed for man, its dauntless way has found.