Whatever Happened to Claudian Claudianus?

David T. Fletcher (Elon University)

The 4^th-5^th century Egyptian poet Claudian Claudianus worked for the Roman emperor Honorius and his chief military commander Stilicho in Italy as a panegyrist and polemicist until approximately January of 404 CE, but thereafter disappeared from the historical record. This has led numerous scholars to offer speculative theories concerning his fate, ranging from retirement or self-imposed exile to his possible death in 404. No current consensus exists on this issue. Claudian’s writings on Stilicho in particular are nearly unique among the other extant works of the fifth century, as Claudian energetically supported the general and defended his policies, whereas most other writers of the period condemned Stilicho. Only one other author, also an Egyptian poet, later decided to defend Stilicho in an official work (this time meant for the court of Constantinople). This writer was Olympiodorus of Thebes, who wrote a history of western events from c.407-425 and dedicated the work to Theodosius II sometime between 426 and 439 CE. Though the suggestion has previously been casually offered that Claudian and Olympiodorus were similar enough in some respects that we might wonder if they were in fact the same person, no one to date has ever seriously followed this line of investigation to considered conclusions. This paper presents a comparison of the two authors’ extant works and biographies, a detailed investigation of the hypothesis that Claudian Claudianus vanished from Italy in 404 to become Olympiodorus of Thebes in c.412, and a discussion of the questions that this investigation raises in regard to the topic of verifying identity in the pre-modern world. Suggestions are also offered for using this sort of investigation as a pedagogical exercise to train students in the academic skills of research, assessment of secondary theories by specialist scholars, critical analysis and evaluation of primary sources and their contexts, and the exercise of balanced judgment in historical exposition and argumentation.