Ratiatum
RATIA´TUM (πατίατον,), a town of the Pictones (Ptol. 2.7.6). Ptolemy mentions it before Limonum, and places it north of Limonum, and further west. Some editions of Ptolemy place Ratiatum in the territory of the Lemovices, but this is a mistake. In the records of a council held at Orléans in A.D. 511, the bishop of the Pictavi signs himself de civitate Ratiatica.T he name was preserved in that of the Pagus Ratiatensis, from which comes the modern name of Pays de Retz. Gregory of Tours speaks of Ratiatum as infra terminum Pictavorum qui adjacet civitati Namneticae.T he district of Retz was taken from the diocese of Poitiers and attached to the diocese of Nantes in the time of Charles the Bald. Belley (Mém. de l'Acad. des Inscript. tom. 19. p. 729) fixes Ratiatum at the site of the two churches of St. Pierre and St. Opportune de Retz, which are near Machecoul and on the Tenu, a small river in the department of La Vendée. The Tenu enters the sea near Bourgneuf, opposite to the Isle Noirmoutier (D'Anville, Notice, &c.; Ukert, Gallien, p. 393).
[G.L]The site, first identified in the 18th c., lies on the left bank of the Loire at the E end of the estuary, facing the modern city of Nantes. Occupied from the reign of Augustus on, the city of Ratiatum had many monuments of which little remains today except in the writings of local scholars of the last century: in 1853 a great colonnaded portico was found near the W portal of the present-day church.
Recent excavations at Rezé have uncovered a large quantity of material both from occupation strata and from funerary pits, which are particularly plentiful in the Saint-Lupien quarter. Many objects found at Rezé are in the Nantes museum.
BIBLIOGRAPHYL. Maitre, “Rezé, La ville romaine et les ruines païennes,” Annales de Bretagne (1895); P. Merlat, “Fouilles et sondages à Rezé,” ibid. 64, 1 (1957); A. Plouhinec, “Les fouilles du quartier Saint-Lupien de Rezé,” ibid. 71, 1 (1964).
M. PETIT