Abstract: This paper analyses the topic of Rome's old age and her capacity to regenerate as an Eternal City, which is recurrent in late antique literature, and which would become an important subject of controversy between pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity. I focus on the analysis of some early uses of this polemical theme, at a critical moment for the perception of Rome's eternity, in the years between the defeat at Adrianople (a. 378) and the sack of Rome by Alaric (a. 410). Rome's personification in Symmachus' Relatio 3, where she speaks in person about her old age, and Rome's prosopopoeia in Ambrose's Epistula 18 and Prudentius's Contra Symmachum 2, with the prospect of a renewal (regeneratio) through conversion, illustrate the versatility of the rhetorical techniques used in late antique religious debate, shared to a great extent by pagans and Christians alike.

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