Excerpt from Claudian: As an Historical Authority; The Thirwall Prize, 1906 He has achieved successes in the Panegyric, the Epic style, the Satire, not to speak of the Elegiac form and the Epithalamion. His position as a poet and a client inevitably prevented his attitude from approximating to that strict impartiality, or at least fairness and moderation, which we rightly demand in the professed historian. And after whatever deduction we please has been made for bias, and for considerations of artistic expediency, his works remain inestimably valuable as the last great expression of the Roman spirit in literature, and also as an exposition of the point of view taken by Stilicho with regard to contemporary events. Seeing that Stilicho is, on the Roman side, the one great figure of the epoch, we may congratulate ourselves that through the fortunate accident Of his friendship with Claudian, we may form so vivid a picture of Rome's last great man. Indeed what perhaps has detracted most from the historical value of Claudian is not a partiality, for which we can make due allow ance, but the troubled circumstances of the age, and the dissensions between East and West, which, as Eunapius almost at the time pointed out, made a historian's task so difficult. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.