Claudian

Claudius Claudianus, called Claudian, has been named the last poet of classical Rome. He was born about 370, very probably in Alexandria, and wrote his first verses in Greek; he came to Rome around 394 and began to write in Latin in 395.

He then lived at the court of Milan as a kind of poet laureate to the general Stilicho, for whom he wrote panegyrics for the consuls and the emperor Honorius, invectives against the ministers Rufinus and Eutropius, epithalamia, and the unfinished mythological epic The Rape of Proserpine. He seems to have died in 404. The English prose here is Maurice Platnauer’s Loeb translation (1922).