Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae

Abstract This chapter sees the book’s study of Valerius’ influence on the epic tradition move beyond the Flavian era (69– 96 ce) and into the world of later Latin epic by examining Claudian’s allusive interactions with Valerius’ Argonautica in the De Raptu Proserpinae. In so doing the author contributes a new chapter to the reassessment of Claudian’s poetry which has been under way for the past three decades, while also offering the first sustained analysis of Claudian’s engagement with Valerius. This chapter demonstrates that Claudian too, like Valerius’ Flavian contemporaries, programmatically presents himself as an epigone of the Argonautica, before going on to elucidate how Claudian uses allusion to Valerius’ narrative to enrich his poem in various ways.