This volume offers a modern, accurate, and accessible translation of Claudian’s work, published in English for the first time since 1922, and accompanied by detailed notes and a comprehensive glossary. Claudian (active 395–404 CE) was the last of the great classical Latin poets. His best-known work, The Rape of Proserpina, continues to inspire numerous retellings and adaptations. Claudian also wrote poems in praise of rulers, including the emperor Honorius and the regent Flavius Stilicho, which are essential sources for reconstructing politics and society in the late Roman empire. These poems and others are translated here, alongside an introduction offering an overview of Claudian’s career, the wider historical and political context of the period, and the poetic traditions in which Claudian wrote: mythological epic, panegyric, invective, and epithalamium. The translations, with explanatory notes, include: The Rape of Proserpina, Panegyric on Olybrius and Probinus’s Consulship, Panegyrics on Honorius’s Third, Fourth, and Sixth Consulships, Invective Against Rufinus, Fescennines and Epithalamium for Honorius and Maria, The War With Gildo, Panegyric on Manlius Theodorus’s Consulship, Invective Against Eutropius, Stilicho’s Consulship, The Gothic War, and shorter poems. The Complete Works of Claudian is a vital resource for students and scholars working on late antique literature, particularly Claudian’s work, as well as those studying the history and culture of the western Roman Empire in this period. This accessible volume is also suitable for the general reader interested in the works of Claudian and this period more broadly.

The historical importance of Claudian as writer of panegyric and propaganda for the court of Honorius is well established but his poetry has been comparatively neglected: only recently has his work been the subject of modern literary criticism. Taking as its starting point Claudian's claim to be the heir to Virgil, this book examines his poetry as part of the Roman epic tradition. Discussing first what we understand by epic and its relevance for late antiquity, Catherine Ware argues that, like Virgil and later Roman epic poets, Claudian analyses his contemporary world in terms of classical epic. Engaging intertextually with his literary predecessors, Claudian updates concepts such as furor and concordia, redefining Romanitas to exclude the increasingly hostile east, depicting enemies of the west as new Giants and showing how the government of Honorius and his chief minister, Stilicho, have brought about a true golden age for the west.

This study is the first up-to-date comprehensive analysis of Continental Saxon identity in antiquity and the early middle ages. Building on recent scholarship on barbarian ethnicity, this study emphasises not just the constructed and open-ended nature of Saxon identity, but also the crucial role played by texts as instruments and resources of identity-formation. This book traces this process of identity-formation over the course of eight centuries, from its earliest beginnings in Roman ethnography to its reinvention in the monasteries and bishoprics of ninth-century Saxony. Though the Saxons were mentioned as early as AD 150, they left no written evidence of their own before c. 840. Thus, for the first seven centuries, we can only look at the Saxons through the eyes of their Roman enemies, Merovingian neighbours and Carolingian conquerors. Such external perspectives do not yield objective descriptions of a people, but rather reflect an ongoing discourse on Saxon identity, in which outside authors described who they imagined, wanted or feared the Saxons to be: dangerous pirates, noble savages, bestial pagans or faithful subjects. Significantly, these outside views deeply influenced how ninth-century Saxons eventually came to think about themselves, using Roman and Frankish texts to reinvent the Saxons as a noble and Christian people.

This comprehensive reassessment of the carmina maiora of the fourth-century poet Claudian contributes to the growing trend to recognize that Late Antique poets should be approached as just that: poets. Its methodology is developed from that of Michael Roberts' seminal The Jeweled Style. It analyzes Claudian's poetics and use of story telling to argue that the creation of a story world in which Stilicho, his patron, becomes an epic hero, and the barbarians are giants threatening both the borders of Rome and the order of the very universe is designed to convince his audience of a world-view in which it is only the Roman general who stands between them and cosmic chaos. The book also argues that Claudian uses the same techniques to promote the message that Honorius, young hero though he may seem, is not yet fit to rule, and that Stilicho's rightful position remains as his regent.

The 13 essays presented here shed new light on the role of panegyric in the western and eastern Roman Empire in the late antique world. Introductory chapters give an overview of panegyrical theory and practice, followed by studies of major writers of the early empire and the anonymous Panegyrici latini. The core of the volume deals with prose and verse panegyric under the Christian Roman Empire (4th-7th century): key themes addressed are social and political context, the 'hidden agenda', and the impact of Christianity on the pagan tradition of the panegyric, including the portrayal of patriarchs and holy men.

Ben Jonson has often been accused of needless erudition and of a morose refusal to join in the festive spirit. Further aggravation has come from the application of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, especially in its posthumous form as a political allegory portraying the clash of high and low cultures. In an attempt to turn the tables on this tradition, Jonson Versus Bakhtin goes back to the sources, arguing that Jonson’s theatre allows for an original interpretation of the grotesque as a formal culture of antithesis and opposition that includes carnival. A robust observer of popular myths of festive liberation by way of a uniquely compendious adaptation of his sources, Jonson’s grotesque uncannily delves deep into the Renaissance theory of the coincidence of opposites as a way of envisaging virtue and other concepts of the mind, rather than serving up a pompous application of moral precepts or offering a political arena for ritual transgression. While richly based on an appropriate repertory of underlying sources, Jonson Versus Bakhtin steers away from any tiresome reference hunting mania, appealing to a broader audience interested in re-appraising Ben Jonson’s genius for richly contrastive imagery, as well as re-considering the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and to the Renaissance culture of the grotesque.

An integrated collection of essays by leading scholars, Two Romes explores the changing roles and perceptions of Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity. This important examination of the "two Romes" in comparative perspective illuminates our understanding not just of both cities but of the whole late Roman world.

"As he illuminates the relationship between the imperial government and the empire's provinces, Ando deepens our understanding of one of the most striking phenomena in the history of government."--BOOK JACKET.