PERINATAL IMAGERY IN CLAUDIAN

R.F. NEWBOLD DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

One would have to be naive indeed to believe that so great a cataclysm (birth) would not leave its mark. Its traces are everywhere; on the skin ... in all our human folly, in our madness, our tortures, our prisons, in legends, epics and in myths. (F. Leboyer)1 Claudian was born c.370 AD in Egypt. A Greek speaker originally, he learned Latin, and travelled around the empire, offering his services as a poet and panegyrist until he found employment in the court of the western Roman emperor . The last emperor to rule over a united empire, died in 395, leaving the eastern and western halves to his sons, and Honorius, aged eighteen and ten respectively. As regent for the boy Honorius, Theodosius left his army commander . Stilicho claimed that his regency extended to the eastern empire too. Claudian, in becoming Stilicho's spokesman and propagandist, became deeply involved in the politics of the day and in the bitter quarrels with the eastern government, which rejected Stilicho's claim. Theodosius had increasingly recruited barbarian 'federates' to man the Roman army. They were to prove a source of unreliability and indiscipline for Stilicho, particularly in his efforts to deal with Alaric's Goths. Exploiting the divisions between east and west, Alaric for several years after 395 plundered substantial areas of the empire as he sought an enclave for his migrant people to settle. Although the main propaganda medium of the time, the coins, confidently and optimistically proclaimed in traditional fashion, Victory, Safety of the State, Fortunate City of Rome, Strength of the Army, Glory of the Romans, and Imperial Harmony, the laws of 395 to 405 concede the critical nature of the times: there were laws (often simply repeated because largely ignored) against wearing barbarian clothing in the city of Rome, against incestuous polluters, heretics and scapegoats, and against deserters, draft dodgers and tax-avoiders. Claudian died in c.404, before the collapse of the Rhine frontier in 406, the assassination of Stilicho in 408, and the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410. Apart from fifty-six minor poems, he wrote twelve longer poems totalling c.7,800 lines, often involving more than one book, and consisting of four panegyrics celebrating Honorius and

1 Hirth Without Violence (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977 <. 29. 8 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY Stilicho, two other panegyrics on contemporary consuls, two panegyric-cum-epics further celebrating Stilicho's achievements, two savage invectives against eastern ministers and foes of Stilicho, Rufinus and , an unfinished mythical epic on the rape of Proserpine, and an epithalamium to celebrate the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho's daughter.2 Claudian's efforts to boost the image and morale of the western government were appreciated. He was given the posts of tribune and notary, a statue in the Forum of Trajan, and the hand of a protegee of Serena, Stilicho's wife and Theodosius' favourite niece and adopted daughter. Writing in 1948, Jack Lindsay noted Claudian's romantic overtones of 'yearning for escape in the pure fullness of things' and the importance of the idea of the phoenix in the fourth-century Roman imagination. 3 Claudian was sufficiently attracted to this subject to write a 110-line poem upon it (see below, pp. 13-14). While Clau­ dian's versification is pure and polished, and his language highly elaborated, his imagery has an unusually free-floating quality and the arrangements of scenes within the longer poems is loose and juxtapo- sitional rather than tightly integrated and hierarchically organized. His poetry displays the typical features of a romantic rather than classical poet, such as fluidity, disorder and escape rather than structure, calm and the here and now.4 A preference for metaphor over simile taps levels of fantasy characterized by indifference to logic and rationality. In short, Claudian regresses to and then expresses intelligently the imagery of primary process cognition. Whereas secondary cognition is mature, logical, analytical, pro- positional and reality-oriented, primary cognition is archaic, typical of the child, primitive, myth, dream or any regressed state. It is more appositional, concrete, emotional, subjective, exaggerated and less reality-oriented. It is governed by drives and sensations rather than rationalization and abstract ideas. There is less distinction between self and other, symbol and thing. High states of arousal, such as those caused by anxiety and pain, stimulate deeper regression and generate imaginary material, such as a descent into the underworld that, in turn, symbolizes the descent into the unconscious. 5 The deepest

2 The Minor Poems were written over at least ten years. The major poems are as follows: Panegyric on Probinus and Olybrius (395); Panegyric on the Third Consulship of Honorius (396); Against Rufinus 1, 2 (396-97); War Against Gildo (398); Panegyric on the Fourth Consulship of Honorius (398); Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria (398); Panegyrc on the Consulship ofManlius Theodorus (399); Against Eutropius 1, 2 (399); The Rape of Proserpine, 1, 2, 3 (396-C.402); On Stilicho's Consulship 1, 2, 3 (400); The Gothic War (402); Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius (404). For detailed discussion of Claudian's career, output and role in the propaganda effort of the western government, see A. Cameron, Claudian, Poetry and Propaganda at the Cowl of Honorius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). 3 Song of a Falling World (London: Dakers, 1948), 120-4. The quotation below is from 120. 4 C. Martindale, The Romantic Progression (New York: Wiley, 1975), 20-2, 69-71. 5 C. Martindale, The Night Journey: Trends in the Content of Narratives Symbolizing Alteration of Consciousness', Journal of Altered States of Consciousness, 4 (1979), 321-43.