Proserpina’s Tapestry, Strabo’s Cloak

This chapter studies the De raptu Proserpinae (Rape of Persephone) by the fourth-century CE poet Claudian, in particular its image of world order, the Tapestry of Proserpina at DRP 1.246–72. The tapestry is an ekphrasis (description of a work of art) set within a narrative that recalls Aeneas’ katabasis or descent to the underworld in Virgil, Aeneid 6. Within this context, Claudian’s world icon embeds two different spatial problems. These are (1) a lack of clarity as to whether what we are seeing is the oikoumene (the inhabited world, a flat geometric shape inscribed on the earth’s sphere) or the globe-as-a-whole, and (2) the coexistence of two apparently different ways of seeing the world-as-a-whole: as a sphere or as a stack of strata with the underworld at the bottom. Claudian allows these various representations to coexist in Properpina’s tapestry.