"Mystic River: Ausonius' Mosella as an Epistemological Revelation", Ramus 45.2, 2016: 231-266. (original) (raw)

This paper aims to reinterpret Ausonius’ Mosella as a complex and many-layered depiction of a sui generis epiphanic experience, ultimately triggered by an unmediated encounter with nature. This sudden “revelation”, be it real or merely an artful literary device, did not only provide Ausonius with a deeper insight into the world around him, but also raised many epistemological issues on the limits of human knowledge and the (in)ability of language to convey reality. Both aspects —the poetical rendering of a non-discursive quasi-mystical experience and the epistemological and philosophical reflections it brings about— pervade the whole of the poem and are absolutely central to an in-depth understanding of it very raison d’être. To this end, the paper carefully analyses the metaphorical implications of the subject of the river, simultaneously conceived as a problematic imago Imperii (i.e., in its political dimension) and as speculum mundi (i.e., in its epistemological one). At the same time, it explores the poem’s hyper- and inter-textual construction, based on a sustained and substantial dialogue with a wide range of texts: the sixth book of the Aeneid, Plato’s myth of the Cave, Plotinus’ Enneads, the stories of Er, Narcissus and Ulysses (as transmitted by Plato, Ovid and Homer), the Pythagorean symbola and even the Pauline Epistles.