Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

POETRY
in Africa for some time on an extended honeymoon, but returned to Rome
in time to recite a panegyric on the sixth consulate of Honorius in January 404.
This is his last datable poem, and the probability is that he died in the course
of 404. Otherwise he would scarcely have failed to celebrate Stilicho's second
consulate in January 405.
This is virtually all we know of Claudian's life. Before going on to examine
his poetry, there is one general consideration which springs to the mind.
Claudian, who has often, and not unreasonably, been described as the last
classical poet of Rome, was a Greek. Intellectual contact between the Greek
east and the Latin west had been one of the casualties of the half-century of
anarchy in the mid third century. The political unification of the empire under
Constantine and his successors had done little to bridge the gap. It had been
subject to interruption in the reign of Valens and Valentinian, and with the
death of Theodosius in 395 the division of the empire became permanent. The
Italian senatorial class and those who aped its life-style had more and more
withdrawn from an imperial role — which involved some acquaintance with
the Greek half of the empire — and knowledge of the Greek language and
Greek thought had become rarer and more superficial in the west. By the time
Claudian came to Rome the two halves of the empire had to some extent been
going their separate ways in cultural matters for a century and a half. The
occasional migrant from east to west like Claudian or his older contemporary
the historian Ammianus Marcellinus brought to the Latin world a breath of the
very different, and often more invigorating, air of the Greek east. Their
problem was how to make an effective synthesis between the two cultural
traditions, and not to remain outsiders in the west. We know how Ammianus
acquired his knowledge of Latin and his understanding of Roman tradition;
it was by long years of service in the army, often in western provinces and
under western commanders, followed by private study in Rome. Claudian is
more of an enigma. The evidence of papyri suggests an upsurge in the study
of Latin language and literature in Egypt, as in other eastern provinces, in
response to the foundation of a new imperial capital in the middle of the Greek
world and the new career prospects which a knowledge of Latin offered. But
it is a long way from word-for-word cribs to Sallust and Virgil to the superb
command of literary Latin and the sympathy with traditional Roman ways
of thought shown by Claudian. Perhaps he belonged to a bilingual family
descended from a Roman official. Perhaps he had close associations with a
Latin-speaking milieu in Alexandria. Be that as it may, he seems to have
arrived in Rome already a more than ordinarily competent Latin poet.
But he brought more from Egypt in his baggage than a knowledge of Latin.
If the Muses had long been silent in the west they had been unusually vocal in
the Greek world, and in particular in Egypt, where the fourth and fifth
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