1616 Rare Latin Vellum Book - C.L. Claudiani quae extant - Claudian's Latin poetry of late antiquity.
(description)
Author: Claudian (C. L. Claudiani).
Title: C.L. Claudiani quae exstant, ex emendatione virorum doctorum.
Language: Text in Latin.
Publisher : Lutetiae Parisiorum : apud Gulielmum Lebé, 1616.
Size : small 4.5 " X 3 ".
Pages: 264 pages.
Binding: Good full vellum binding (hinges tight but small chip on the upper front hinge - as shown, overall slightly worn and scuffed - as shown) under a removable protective mylar cover.
Content: Good content (bright and tight, some foxing and staining - mainly on preliminary pages -as shown, some light pencil annotations).
The book: Rare and nice early 17th-century edition of Claudian's Poetry. Although a native speaker of Greek, Claudian is one of the best Latin poetry stylists of late antiquity. He is not usually ranked among the top tier of Latin poets, but his writing is elegant, he tells a story well, and his polemical passages occasionally attain an unmatchable level of entertaining vitriol. The literature of his time is generally characterized by a quality modern critics find specious, of which Claudian's work is not free, and some find him cold and unfeeling.
Claudian's poetry is a valuable historical source, though distorted by the conventions of panegyric.
The author: Claudius Claudianus, usually known in English as Claudian (c. 370 – c. 404 AD), was a Latin poet associated with the court of the emperor Honorius at Mediolanum (Milan), and particularly with the general Stilicho. His work, written almost entirely in hexameters or elegiac couplets, falls into three main categories: poems for Honorius, poems for Stilicho, and mythological epic.