Claudian, volume 1 (of 2) / With an English translation by Maurice Platnauer
Claudian, volume 1 collects the surviving works of Claudius Claudianus, often called the last great poet of classical Rome, here paired with Maurice Platnauer's English translation. Writing in Latin around 400 A.D., Claudian served as court poet to the emperor Honorius and his powerful general Stilicho. This first volume gathers panegyrics, invectives, and occasional verse responding to the turbulent age in which he lived: the wars against Alaric's Visigoths, the rebellion of Gildo in Africa that threatened Rome's grain supply, and the savage attacks on the eastern ministers Rufinus and Eutropius.
The poems matter as both art and history, offering a near-contemporary witness to an empire sliding toward the sack of 410. Claudian revives the grand epic and rhetorical traditions of earlier Rome, blending mythological grandeur with sharp political propaganda and venomous satire. His verse illuminates the figures, intrigues, and barbarian pressures of a crumbling West, making him an indispensable, vivid voice from antiquity's closing chapter.
How it begins
Claudius Claudianus may be called the last poet of classical Rome. He was born about the year 370 A.D. and died within a decade of the sack of the city by Alaric in 410. The thirty to forty odd years which comprised his life were some of the most momentous in the history of Rome. Valentinian and Valens were emperors respectively of the West and the East when he was born, and while the former was engaged in constant warfare with the northern tribes of Alamanni, Quadi and Sarmatians, whose advances the skill of his general, Theodosius, had managed to check, the latter was being reserved for unsuccessful battle with an enemy still more deadly. It is about the year 370 that we begin to hear of the Huns. The first people to fall a victim to their eastward aggression were the Alans, next came the Ostrogoths, whose king, Hermanric, was driven to suicide; and by 375 the Visigoths were threatened with a similar fate. Hemmed in by the advancing flood of Huns and the stationary power of Rome this people, after a vain attempt to ally itself with the latter, was forced into arms against her.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.