SOURCE: “Stance and Purpose,” in Claudian's “In Eutropium”: Or, How, When, and Why to Slander a Eunuch, The University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 221-62.

In the following excerpt, Long analyzes Claudian's attitude towards the relations between the western and eastern Roman empires, particularly as advanced in In Eutropium.

Books 1 and 2 of In Eutropium are set apart by their different dynamic structures as formal invective and epic. They respond to different circumstances. This chapter explores the apparent aims of the responses. Book 1's systematic stepwise progress through argument, while exploiting various irrational prejudices, pursues the essentially rational end of persuasion. As Ellul noted, rational and irrational elements operate most effectively in concert. Book 2's epic momentum is better suited to agitation.

Both books evoke Roman social myth. A crystallized image of Roman tradition belonged to the cultural self-consciousness of any Roman, but modern scholars have always judged that...