Claudius Claudianus, like many of the greatest Latin poets, came from the provinces of the empire. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt sometime around 370 ce, and died a young man, probably in 404. One of Claudian’s last works, a panegyric celebrating the sixth consulship of the emperor Honorius, is confidently dated to that year, and we possess nothing else that would give us reason to think that he survived much longer. He lived in an age of great social and political ferment. Throughout the third century the Roman empire was beset by a grinding succession of emperors with short reigns and short fuses, by debilitating outbreaks of plague, and by ceaseless troubles along its vast frontiers. The solution of the emperor Diocletian in 285 was to divide the realm into western and eastern halves, thus creating two political entities that would, in time, meet two separate fates. The eastern, predominantly Greek-speaking half would continue, in various shapes, for well over a millennium, its capital at Constantinople finally falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The western half, by contrast, succumbed early on to invasions by Germanic and other peoples, and in 476 the German general Odoacer deposed its young, feeble emperor, the ironically named Romulus Augustulus. The reign of Odoacer, who was proclaimed the king - not, significantly, the emperor - of Italy, still marks in the public consciousness the end of the Roman empire in the west.
Socially, the demographics of the empire had undergone near-revolutionary changes since the days of the Flavians in the late first century. Although the empire fought constantly to stem the tide of barbarian invasions on its borders, much of the imperial administrative corps was in fact already of barbarian stock, and the same can be said of the military. Stilicho, the most powerful man in the western empire between 395 and 408, was himself half-Vandal. In addition, a flourishing Christianity had reached the highest levels of imperial government and maintained an uneasy relationship with traditional religions throughout both halves of the empire. This tension required of the ambitious Roman citizen careful social and political navigation. In the West, for example, the city of Rome was still strongly pagan at the end of the fourth century, but the new capital at Milan was ‘‘the home of uncompromising Christian orthodoxy’’ (Cameron 1970: 228; see Matthews 1975: 183ff.). A successful politician would have to be competent in the religious and political languages of each city. There is some evidence, mainly a short Easter hymn
Entitled De Salvatore (‘‘On the Savior’’), that Claudian was at least nominally a Christian - the poem may have been just another commission - but he was characterized as a pagan by other ancient writers, including his contemporaries Augustine and Orosius. Augustine refers to Claudian as ‘‘a stranger to the name of Christ’’ (‘‘a Christi nomine alienus,’’ De civ. Dei 5.26), while the Christian apologist and historian Orosius, perhaps merely taking his cue from Augustine, describes him as ‘‘an exceptional poet, certainly, but an awfully stubborn pagan’’ (‘‘poeta quidem eximius sed paganus pervicacissimus,’’ Adv. Pag. 7.35.21). It is possible that both men were misinformed, and that Claudian was a quiet Christian, but the result is the same in either case: by no test can his poetry be called ‘‘Christian.’’ (See the full discussion in Cameron 1970: 189ff., who cites Fargues’s assertion (p. 195) that if we depended solely on Claudian’s poetry for our knowledge of the period, we would never guess that Christianity existed at the time.)
Sometime in his early twenties Claudian left Alexandria to make his fortune in the West. His brilliant debut on the western political and literary scene came on January 1 of 395, an important year in the political history of the Roman empire. The powerful Catholic emperor Theodosius I (‘‘the Great’’) died that same month, leaving the reins of power to his two young sons. The 18-year-old Arcadius now held the eastern throne at Constantinople, the 10-year-old Honorius the western seat at Milan. It is clear enough that Theodosius, while campaigning with his eastern armies in the West, had in the months before he died appointed Stilicho, a supremely ambitious and cunning general, to be the regent of young Honorius. Upon Theodosius’ death, however, Stilicho quickly made his power play, asserting that the emperor had secretly made him regent not only of Honorius in the West, but also of Arcadius in the East. To make good this improbable, legally dubious claim on Arcadius - and thus against a succession of Arcadius’ ministers, themselves not slow to grasp the political opportunities surrounding the rule of a young and, from all indications, dull-witted emperor - Stilicho needed not just his own military strength and political savvy, but a superb propagandist. To control the entire empire, he needed someone to do his talking for him, someone to make his claims, attack his enemies, and assert his influence as eloquently and as forcefully as the occasion demanded. Enter Claudian.
The Alexandrian poet’s first published work in Latin was a celebration of the incoming consuls for 395, two young and inexperienced members of the wealthy and influential Anicii clan, named Probinus and Olybrius. Delivered publicly at Rome, during a ceremony of high pomp and visibility, the Panegyricus dictus Olybrio et Probino consulibus (‘‘Panegyric for the Consuls Probinus and Olybrius’’) garnered immediate praise among the well-connected and well-educated at Rome for its liveliness, respect for tradition, and eloquence. Claudian’s performance must go down as one of the more remarkable events in the literary world of the fourth century; heretofore he had published nothing in Latin, and his success immediately set his star high in the literary constellation, where it would not wane during his brief but prolific career. Indeed, only a few years later, in 400 or so, the Roman Senate expressed its admiration for Claudian by setting up, under the auspices of the emperors, a bronze statue of the poet in the Forum of Trajan (Cl. Get. praef. 7-10), the inscription on which has come down to us (CIL 6.1710). Claudian’s meteoric rise, in its brevity and intensity, calls to mind the similar career of Lucan (on whom see Chapter 35, by Bartsch), who also moved in the highest imperial circles and who has likewise been condemned for his ‘‘rhetorical’’ style and for being less an epic poet than a historical one. Not for Claudian, however, Lucan’s barely disguised contempt for his powerful patron, much less any real-world involvement in political conspiracy. Claudian was nothing if not loyal to Stilicho.
The Panegyricus, then, won the admiration of certain aristocrats at Rome, who brought him in turn to the court at Milan. There he attracted the attention of Stilicho, and when one year later (January 396) Claudian delivered another important panegyric, it is clear that the poet had aligned himself with the general. In his celebration of Honorius’ third consulship (Panegyricus dictus honorio Augusto tertium consuli), Claudian goes out of his way to vouchsafe the arrangement that Stilicho claimed to have had with Theodosius (III Cons. 142-62). In the climax of the work, the dying Theodosius privately addresses Stilicho (151-53):
Ergo age, me quoniam caelestis regia poscit, tu curis succede meis, tu pignora solus nostra foue: geminos dextra tu protege fratres.
Therefore come, since the heavens demand me: you take up my charge; you alone watch over my children: let your right hand protect my two sons.
Here, barely a year after his public debut, Claudian is not only delivering the official speech inaugurating the consulship of the reigning western emperor, but, by buttressing Stilicho’s controversial claim to rule as regent over both emperors, he is also clearly indicating where his true allegiance lies. This will hardly be the last time Claudian redefines crucial events in Stilicho’s favor.
This allegiance would define his career. Most of the rest of Claudian’s major works are, in one way or another, vehicles to promote the achievements, claims, and political designs of his patron Stilicho. Even works that do not take Stilicho directly as their subject typically manage to reflect much of the glory of the occasion onto him: two other panegyrics celebrating Honorius’ fourth and sixth consulships (in 398 and 404), for example, feature lengthy tributes to Stilicho that rather obscure the emperor himself. The few exceptions are the poem celebrating the consulship of Manlius Theodorus in 399, the majority of Claudian’s sizable body of short poems and fragments, and the De raptu Proserpinae (‘‘The abduction of Proserpina’’), the mythological epic on which he seems to have worked intermittently for many years.
The panegyrics of 395 and 396 were followed in 397 by the two-book In Rufinum (‘‘Against Rufinus’’), a blistering postmortem of Flavius Rufinus, Stilicho’s rival for control of Arcadius and, owing to his own close connection to Theodosius, the onetime regent of the eastern empire. Rufinus had been killed by the returning eastern army in November of 395, but Claudian’s no-holds-barred attack on the memory of the dead man served a larger purpose of extolling Stilicho, presented throughout as the noble foil of a greedy, depraved Rufinus. Stilicho now found himself in need of such public propaganda, for he had lately been proclaimed a hostis publicus (‘‘public enemy’’) by Rufinus’ more dynamic and ambitious successor, the eunuch Eutropius. The charge was the result of Stilicho’s recent indecisive battle with the Visigothic potentate Alaric (one of four such clashes; see below). Stilicho’s precarious position was exacerbated by Eutropius’ intrigue in North Africa with a powerful native prince named Gildo, who, since his appointment in 386 by Theodosius, had overseen the western empire’s vital economic interests there, most importantly the grain supply on which Rome at this time was utterly dependent (Cl. Get. 17ff.; Cameron 1970: 93). Eutropius had induced Gildo to abandon the West and bring his wealthy territory under the control and protection of the East; thus would Eutropius augment his own power throughout the empire by crippling Rome with food shortages and economic stasis - and he would bleed Stilicho’s authority in the bargain.
Stilicho’s task was thus to get out of a potentially fatal political bind without embroiling himself personally in an open conflict with the other half of the empire. How to eliminate Gildo and wrest Africa and its grain away from the East and back to the West? His solution was Gildo’s exiled brother Mascezel, who had lately arrived at Milan. The brothers were embroiled in a bloody feud, and so Stilicho outfitted Mascezel, shipped him off to war against Gildo, and kept a low profile. Mascezel quickly destroyed his brother, and an open breach between the two imperial courts was averted. (Mascezel, afterwards no longer useful to Stilicho, was killed in Italy not long after; our sources are rightly suspicious of Stilicho’s role.) Claudian’s De bello Gildonico (‘‘The war against Gildo’’), composed and recited right on the heels of Gildo’s defeat, will be considered in detail in Section 3. For the moment it is enough to say that in the De bello Gildonico Claudian minimizes the obviously crucial role of Mascezel, playing up instead his status as victim of the cruel and lascivious Gildo, and foregrounds the timely decisiveness not, as usual, of Stilicho (here just the wise and loyal adviser) but of Honorius, since Stilicho had too much at stake to be portrayed as the prime mover against the East’s profitable new acquisition. In addition to this up-to-the-minute historical epic - a rara avis in extant Greco-Roman literature - Claudian in 398 also composed a panegyric in honor of Honorius’ fourth consulship and an epithalamium for the wedding of Honorius and Maria, Stilicho’s daughter. Both texts afford opportunities to depart from the main subject and praise Stilicho in suitably lavish fashion, thereby reminding the audience who really wields the power at court.
Stilicho’s root problem, the powerful Eutropius, remained. If anything, the eunuch’s power, despite the setback with Gildo, had only increased. For in 398 Eutropius personally led the army in a successful campaign against the Huns in Armenia, and was rewarded with no less than the consulship for the year 399. This promotion was met, at Stilicho’s bidding, by the savage (and savagely funny) invective of Claudian, who with the first book of his In Eutropium (‘‘Against Eutropius’’) elevates the depravity of Eutropius to world-historical proportions and makes a case for the title of the greatest polemicist in the Latin language. But external events in the East soon brought about the eunuch’s fall. In the summer of 399, before his consulship was over, Eutropius was deposed and exiled to Cyprus after the defeat of his troops by Gothic armies. Claudian celebrates Eutropius’ defeat - styled, naturally, as Stilicho’s victory - in a second book of In Eutropium. In addition to these two books of invective, Claudian in 399 also delivered, as an obvious counterpoint to Eutropius’ consulship in the East, a panegyric celebrating the consulship of the esteemed Manlius Theodorus in the West.
In 400 Stilicho finally achieved the consulship. Claudian celebrated his patron’s ascendancy with no less than three books of panegyric (De consulatu Stilichonis I, II, and III) that trace Stilicho’s accomplishments in war - among them a truncated account of the war against Gildo that now entirely omits Mascezel - and illuminate his many virtues, with a heavy emphasis, especially in the mythologically inflected third book, on his transcendence of natural limitations. It is the capstone of Claudian’s career as a panegyrist. Around this time Claudian married a bride handpicked by Serena, Stilicho’s wife, and vacationed in Libya.
The following year, Alaric led an army of his countrymen over the Alps into Italy, overrunning the underprepared Roman units that lay in his way on the other side. He besieged Milan in early 402, sowing fear and panic throughout the city, and prompting Honorius to make plans to flee to Gaul. The city was eventually relieved by Stilicho, who forced Alaric to move southwest. Nevertheless, the relative ease with which Milan had been attacked led to the immediate decision to move the western capital further down into the Italian peninsula, to Ravenna. On Easter Sunday of that year the armies of Stilicho and Alaric met at Pollentia. The battle itself was little more than a draw, but the end result - a Gothic retreat and the conclusion of a formal treaty - earned Stilicho the credit for a victory. Yet by no means was it a decisive one: Alaric escaped, his forces checked and harried but, for all their disorganization, still potent. (He would lead his army back to Italy and famously sack Rome in 410.) Nevertheless Claudian celebrated Stilicho’s achievement in the De bello Getico (‘‘The Gothic War’’), a masterpiece of epic propaganda delivered in Rome very soon after Pollentia, perhaps even in that very month.
Alaric’s knack for survival led to claims by later writers that Stilicho had made a traitorous pact with him. That this was the third time (a decisive Roman victory at Verona some months later would be the fourth) that Alaric had eluded Stilicho in battle was no doubt evidence enough, for some, of a conspiracy; but such a view, in addition to being the product of hindsight, takes Alaric, a resourceful and opportunistic leader, too lightly. In the end, it is true that Stilicho’s victory at Pollentia was partial and short-lived - so much so that, in light of the events of the next decade and despite the ringing claims of a thorough victory by Claudian and Prudentius, later writers, including Cassiodorus, could with little trouble portray it instead as a Gothic victory (Dewar 1996: xxxiv). The De bello Getico, then, affords us yet another opportunity to weigh the propagandist’s immediate response against the slower verdict of history.
The last securely datable work we possess is the Panegyricus dictus Honorio Augusto sextum consuli (‘‘Panegryic on the sixth consulship of the Emperor Honorius’’), delivered in Rome at the beginning of404. A healthy portion (127-330) of the poem is taken up by a narrative of the battles at Pollentia and, now, Verona, with its more advantageous outcome. Stilicho is in fact the dominant presence throughout the entire poem, and this presentation reflects the political reality in the western empire, where Stilicho’s power over a weak emperor had been complete for some time. Stilicho was elected consul again in 405, and since Claudian did not write a panegyric on this occasion, or on the occasion of Stilicho’s impressive victory at Faesulae in 406, we can only assume that he died sometime in 404. That Claudian left Stilicho as a result of the rapidly escalating political risks associated with his service is not out of the question; Stilicho had acquired a sizeable body of enemies over the years. Less likely is the theory that he fell out of favor with Stilicho and simply ceased production, for a poet of Claudian’s caliber would not have remained long without a patron, at least in the West. (His merciless attacks on the eastern court over the years would seem to preclude any favorable reception in the East.) Yet however uncertain the circumstances of Claudian’s fate, we do know that sometime before 408, and perhaps as early as 404-5, Stilicho gathered together Claudian’s major political works and published them in a posthumous edition that presumably doubled as an omnibus propaganda pamphlet. Coupled with the unfinished state of several of Claudian’s works - including an incomplete encomium of Serena - Stilicho’s deed argues for Claudian’s death, not his relocation.
Stilicho himself survived his propagandist by only a few years. His plan to control the eastern empire, by force where necessary, resulted in an alliance with Alaric that never yielded fruit. The combination of an invasion of Italy by the barbarian Radagaisus in 405, which occupied Stilicho for two years, and the challenge posed by the usurper Constantine III, declared emperor by the troops in Britain, proved too much for even this hardened political survivor to overcome. Other men caught Honorius’ ear, and Stilicho was brought down in a palace coup and beheaded in August of 408.
One more work remains to be mentioned. Throughout his career, Claudian labored on a mythological epic, the unfinished De raptu Proserpinae. Its date of publication is a matter of some controversy, and the difficulties surrounding it highlight the comparative ease with which his political poetry may be dated. It is likely enough that the three books of the De raptu were recited and circulated separately over a period of several years, but this period might have been 395-7 (Gruzelier 1993: xvii-xxi), making the poem a product of his youthful leisure, one abandoned as he became ever more burdened by the rapid-fire commissions dictated by Stilicho’s fortunes; or it may have been the pet work of a much longer time, from the summer of 397 to the end of his life, and so remaining unfinished for rather more natural reasons (Cameron 1970: 452-66). As it stands, the De raptu is three books long. Its subject is an old myth, familiar in its outlines from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (see Connor 1993): Pluto’s abduction of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, for his bride. Book 1 introduces the principals, Book 2 describes the abduction, and Book 3 presents the agricultural aetiology that underlies the myth and sees the beginning of Ceres’ search for Proserpina. It is Claudian’s most famous work.
The De raptu is both highly traditional, its timeworn subject adorned by allusions to a cornucopia of Claudian’s poetic forebears, and radically different fTom anything those earlier poets might have written. It is an extraordinarily visual poem, a testament to Claudian’s tremendous gift for ecphrasis and the elaboration of fine detail. Brightness and color are leitmotifs, and the highly polished pageantry of the poem make it eminently readable. In the company of this epic are the remains of a pair of Gigantomachies, one in Greek and one in Latin. The Greek version is an early piece, written before Claudian left the East for Rome in the early 390s, and exists only in fragments; the Latin one, clearly unfinished, may well have suffered the same fate as the De raptu and been interrupted by his death. Cameron (1970: 467-73) at least thinks so, and there are no serious obstacles to this view.
Claudian’s major works may be divided conveniently into four categories: (1) his panegyrics (eight in all: one for Probinus and Olybrius, three for Honorius, one for Manlius Theodorus, one for Stilicho, and the Fescennine verses and epithalamium for Honorius and Maria), (2) his invectives (In Rufinum and In Eutropium), (3) his epics (De bello Gildonico, De bello Getico, De raptu Proserpinae, and the two incomplete Gigantomachies), and (4) the so-called carmina minora, a body of shorter poems that range in scope from the political, including verses in honor of Stilicho’s wife, to the inquisitive and playful. Claudian the high-powered propagandist also wrote light, ornamental verse on the wonders of the magnet, the lobster, Gallic mules, the phoenix, and the electric ray, and on the plight of poor lovers.
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