In spite of a subsequent victory over Alaric near Elis in the year 397, Stilicho’s success can have been but a partial one, for we find the Visigoth general occupying the post of Master of the Soldiery in Illyricum, the withholding of which office had been the main cause of his defection. Possibly, too, the revolt of Gildo in Africa had something to do with the unsatisfactory termination of the Visigothic war. It is interesting to observe the dependence of Italy on African corn, a dependence of which in the first century of the Christian era Vespasian, and right at the end of the second the pretender Pescennius Niger, threatened to make use. If we can credit the details of Claudian’s poem on the war (No. xv.), Rome was very shortly reduced to a state of semi-starvation by Gildo’s holding up of the corn fleet, and, but for Stilicho’s prompt action in sending Gildo’s own brother, Mascezel, to put down the rebellion, the situation might have become even more critical. The poet, it may be remarked, was in an awkward position with regard to the war for, though the real credit of victory was clearly due to Mascezel (_cf._ xv. 380 _et sqq._), he nevertheless wished to attribute it to his hero Stilicho, and, as Stilicho had Mascezel executed[3] later in that same year (Gildo had been defeated at Tabraca July 31, 398), he prudently did not write, or perhaps suppressed, Book II. Stilicho, who had married Serena, niece and adoptive daughter of Theodosius, still further secured his position by giving his daughter, Maria, in marriage to the young Emperor Honorius in the year 398. This “father-in-law and son-in-law of an emperor,” as Claudian is never wearied of calling him, did the country of his adoption a signal service by the defeat at Pollentia on Easter Day (April 6), 402, of Alaric, who, for reasons of which we really know nothing, had again proved unfaithful to Rome and had invaded and laid waste Italy in the winter of 401-402. The battle of Pollentia was the last important event in Claudian’s lifetime. He seems to have died in 404, four years before the murder of Stilicho by the jealous Honorius and six before the sack of Rome by Alaric--a disaster which Stilicho[4] alone, perhaps, might have averted. * * * * *