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.
Pliny's panegyric to Trajan (100 C.E.) expresses the hope that his words will encourage good emperors and show bad emperors what they should do. The kingship orations of Dio Chyrostom had a similar motivation. Three centuries later, the poet Claudian would summarise key points of Pliny's oration and Dio's discourses and present them in the form of a lesson to the young emperor Honorius from his father Theodosius. Unlike Pliny and Dio, however, Claudian's intention was not to instruct the emperor in rulership but, paradoxically, to encourage him to remain a pupil forever, leaving power in the hands of his regent Stilicho.
Praise of an emperor’s virtues was the core of a panegyric. The range of qualities that could function as imperial virtues under particular circumstances allowed for a complex vocabulary of praise and could provide a highly nuanced portrait of the emperor. This paper examines firstly how virtues are used to establish and develop the character of the emperor Constantine in the panegyrics of 307 and 310 CE (Pan. Lat. 7(6) and 6(7)), and secondly how the description of Constantine’s harshness on campaign (Pan. Lat. 6(7)) draws on the rhetorical tradition of didactic and exemplary writing to demonstrate that an emperor must be capable of displaying severitas rather than clementia when it is in the public interest.
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