on his repulse of Alaric (400 and 403), and the panegyric on the sixth
consulship of Honorius (404). From this time all trace of Claudian is
lost, and he is generally supposed to have perished with his patron
Stilicho in 408. It may be conjectured that he must have died in 404, as
he could hardly otherwise have omitted to celebrate the greatest of
Stilicho's achievements, the destruction of the barbarian host led by
Radagaisus in the following year. On the other hand, he may have
survived Stilicho, as in the dedication to the second book of his epic
on the _Rape of Proserpine_ (which Birt, however, assigns to 395-397),
he speaks of his disuse of poetry in terms hardly reconcilable with the
fertility which he displayed during his patron's lifetime. From the
manner in which Augustine alludes to him in his _De civitate Dei_, it
may be inferred that he was no longer living at the date of the
composition of that work, between 415 and 428.

Besides Claudian's chief poems, his lively Fescennines on the emperor's
marriage, his panegyric on Serena, and the _Gigantomachia_, a fragment
of an unfinished Greek epic, may also be mentioned. Several poems
expressing Christian sentiments are undoubtedly spurious. Claudian's
paganism, however, neither prevented his celebrating Christian rulers
and magistrates nor his enjoying the distinction of a court laureate. It
is probable that he was nominally a Christian, like his patron Stilicho
and Ausonius, although at heart attached to the old religion. The very
decided statements of Orosius and Augustine as to his heathenism may be
explained by the pagan style of Claudian's political poems. We have his
own authority for his having been honoured by a bronze statue in the
forum, and Pomponius Laetus discovered in the 15th century an
inscription (_C.I.L._ vi. 1710) on the pedestal, which, formerly
considered spurious, is now generally regarded as genuine.

The position of Claudian--the last of the Roman poets--is unique in
literature. It is sufficiently remarkable that, after nearly three
centuries of torpor, the Latin muse should have experienced any revival
in the age of Honorius, nothing less than amazing that this revival
should have been the work of a foreigner, most surprising of all that a
just and enduring celebrity should have been gained by official
panegyrics on the generally uninteresting transactions of an inglorious
epoch. The first of these particulars bespeaks Claudian's taste, r