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A Roman poet of the 4th century. He stood high in favor with the emperors Honorius and Arcadius, and was promoted to the highest honors of the State. He was the last of the non-Christian poets of Rome, and stands high above his contemporaries, though his style and matter have the faults and blemishes of that decadent period,-bombastic expression and flattery of the great. His greatest work is an epic, "The Rape of Proserpine". His "Epithalamium on the Marriage of Honorius" has appended to it some "Fescennine Verses": both, especially the latter, would seem to continue the true Roman poetic tradition for that kind of compositions. Such poems would not be tolerated at a marriage feast in our times. Besides the works named, we have a considerable number of other poems by Claudianus.