Claudian (c.370–c.404 CE,) fully Claudius Claudiānus, was the last great classical Latin poet. He was the court poet to Emperor Honorius in Rome.
Born in the Greek-speaking Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria, Claudian came to Italy before 395. Although a native Greek speaker, he turned to compose in Latin and became immediately successful as a court poet under Honorius.
Claudian’s work shows the influence both of late-Antique Greek rhetoric and Latin poets and of Virgil. Claudian’s major poems divide between three books of an unfinished mythological epic, De raptu Proserpine (The Rape of Proserpine), and historical or political poems. The Rape of Proserpina was translated in 1617 by Leonard Digges; it influenced Edmund Spenser’s account of the garden of Proserpina in The Faerie Queene.
Although no complete English translation of his poems existed until 1817, Claudian’s political poems are influential as aesthetic documents and major historical sources.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Claudian
What profits us, that we from heaven derive a soul immortal, and with looks erect survey the stars, if, like the brutal kind, we follow where our passions lead the way?
—Claudian
Topics: Passion
Mercifulness makes us equal to the gods.
—Claudian
Topics: Mercy
He is next to the gods whom reason and not passion impels.
—Claudian
Topics: Reason
Luxury, that alluring pest with fair forehead, which, yielding always to the will of the body, throws a deadening influence over the senses, and weakens the limbs more than the drugs of Circe’s cup.
—Claudian
Topics: Luxury
The people are fashioned according to the example of their king; and edicts are of less power than the model which his life exhibits.
—Claudian
Topics: Kings
The covetous man is always poor.
—Claudian
Topics: Appreciation, Blessings, Gratitude
He who strikes terror in others is himself continually in fear.
—Claudian
Topics: Fear
What boundary ever set limits to the service of mankind?
—Claudian
Topics: Kindness, Service, Giving
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