SYMMACHUS (Q. Aurelius Symmachus). - Orator and politician, b. in Rome in 345, d. in 405, he was one of the most prominent figures of dying Roman paganism. Prefect of Rome in 384, consul in 391, the offices he held are listed in the inscription of CIL, VI, 1699. There survive from him the Panegyrics addressed to Valentinian I and to his son Gratian, 10 books of Letters composed with a literary intent but empty of content, and 49 Relationes addressed as praefectus urbi to the Emperor during the years 384-85.
The two great events of his time: triumphant Christianity and the barbarians looming over the Empire, seem not to interest him, to judge from his writings, wholly devoted as he is to the glories and memories of his pagan Rome, dear to him as to the old aristocratic families whose prestige was bound to those memories and those glories.
Of his Relations the third deserves to be highlighted, which he wrote and delivered concerning the altar (not the statue) of Victory; this was situated at the entrance of the curia, and every senator entering made an act of worship there; the statue of Victory, war booty taken from Taranto, stood instead at the back of the hall on a pedestal which the excavations for the rearrangement of the curia have brought back to light; Augustus himself had placed it in that spot (29 B.C.). Gratian, son of the tolerant Valentinian I, among other anti-pagan measures, had ordered the removal of the altar, renewing the measure already taken by Constantius and annulled by Julian, who had had the altar put back in its place.
The Senate, composed in the majority of pagans, sent S. in 382 to Milan to obtain the revocation of the order, but Gratian, forewarned, through St. Ambrose, by Pope Damasus, did not receive the orator. After Gratian was assassinated (383), S. renewed the attempt with Valentinian II, who had succeeded his brother; he was received, but with moving eloquence he pleaded the cause of the old pagan Rome by making the city itself speak. But the Emperor, persuaded by St. Ambrose his counselor, who in the meantime had drafted a counter-reply, denied permission for the restoration of the altar (384); the statue always remained in its place and was perhaps destroyed in the fire of Alaric (410).
The failed mission of S. offered the poet Prudentius the occasion to compose against him two poems (Contra Symmachium, I-II) in which, having described the nature of the pagan divinities and cult (I), he has Rome deplore the inopportune request of the senator sent by the counsel of the haruspices and not by his homeland, while the city asks «ne quis Romuleas daemon iam noverit arces, sed soli paci Domino mea serviat aula» (II, 767-68).
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Nicola Turchi
