CLAUDIANUS, CLAUDIUS (Anglicized, CLAUDIAN), Latin epic poet during the reign of Arcadius and Honorius. He was an Egyptian by birth, probably an Alexandrian. In A.D. 395 he appears to have come to Rome, and made his debut as a Latin poet by a panegyric on the consulship of Olybrius and Probinus. (In Birt's edition a complete chronological list of Claudian's poems is given, and also in J. B. Bury's edition of Gibbon (iii. app. i. P. 485), where the dates given differ slightly from those in the present article.) In 396 appeared the encomium on the third consulship of the emperor Honorius, and the epic on the downfall of Rufinus, the unworthy minister of Arcadius at Constantinople, which was engineered by Stilicho. Claudian's poem appears to have ob tained his patronage, or perhaps that of his wife Serena (Epist. 2) . In 398 appeared his panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius, his epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho's daughter, and his poem on the Gildonic War, celebrating the repression of a revolt in Africa. To these succeeded his piece on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399), the unfinished in vective against the Byzantine prime minister Eutropius in the same year, the epics on Stilicho's first consulship and on his repulse of Alaric (40o 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 Stilicho's 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 he speaks of his disuse of poetry. From Augustine's allusion to him in the De civitate Dei, it may be inferred that he was no longer living at the date of the com position 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 Giganto machia, a fragment of an unfinished Greek epic, may also be men tioned. Several poems expressing Christian sentiments are spurious. It is probable that he was nominally a Christian, like his patrons Stilicho and Ausonius, although at heart attached to the old religion. He was honoured by a bronze statue in the forum, and Pomponius Laetus discovered in the 15th century an in scription (C.I.L. vi. 171o) on the pedestal, which, formerly con sidered spurious, is now generally regarded as genuine.
The revival of Latin poetry at so late a date, and by a poet of foreign birth is remarkable, and it is no less surprising that Claudian should have won fame by official panegyrics. As re marked by Gibbon, "he was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics." This gift is especially displayed in his poem on the downfall of Rufinus. In his cele bration of Stilicho's victories Claudian found a subject more worthy of his powers, and some passages, such as the description of the flight of Alaric, and of Stilicho's arrival at Rome, rank among the brightest ornaments of Latin poetry. Yet on the whole he lacks creative power, and his talent is rather that of the rhetorician than the poet.