So much for the historical background of the life of the poet. Of the details of his career we are not well informed. Something, indeed, we can gather from the pages of the poet himself, though it is not much, but besides this we have to guide us only Hesychius of Miletus’ short article in Suidas’ lexicon, a brief mention in the Chronicle of 395, and (a curious survival) the inscription[5] under the statue which, as he himself tells us,[6] emperor and senate had made in his honour and set up in the Forum of Trajan. We are ignorant even of the date of his birth and can only conjecture that it was about the year 370. Of the place of his birth we are equally uninformed by contemporary and credible testimony, but there can be little doubt that he came from Egypt,[7] probably from Alexandria itself. We have, for what it is worth, the word of Suidas and the lines of Sidonius Apollinaris,[8] which clearly refer to Claudian and which give Canopus as the place of his birth. (Canopus is almost certainly to be taken as synonymous with Egypt.) But besides these two statements we have only to look at his interest in things Egyptian, _e.g._ his poems on the Nile, the Phoenix, etc., at such passages as his account of the rites at Memphis,[9] at such phrases as “nostro cognite Nilo,”[10] to see that the poet is an Egyptian himself. It is probable that, whether or not he spent all his early life in Egypt, Claudian did not visit Rome until 394. We know from his own statement[11] that his first essays in literature were all of them written in Greek and that it was not until the year 395 that he started to write Latin. It is not unlikely, therefore, that his change of country and of literary language were more or less contemporaneous, and it is highly probable that he was in Rome before January 3, 395, on which day his friends the Anicii (Probinus and Olybrius) entered upon their consulship. Speaking, moreover, of Stilicho’s consulship in 400 Claudian mentions a five years’ _absence_.[12] Not long after January 3, 395, Claudian seems to have betaken himself to the court at Milan, and it is from there that he sends letters to Probinus and Olybrius.[13] Here the poet seems to have stayed for five years, and here he seems to have won for himself a position of some importance. As we see from the inscription quoted above, he became _vir clarissimus_, _tribunus et notarius_, and, as he does not continue further along the road of honours (does not, for instance, become a _vir spectabilis_) we must suppose that he served in some capacity on Stilicho’s private staff. No doubt he became a sort of poet laureate. It is probable that the “De raptu” was written during the first two years of his sojourn at the court of Milan. The poem is dedicated, or addressed, to Florentinus,[14] who was _praefectus urbi_ from August 395 to the end of 397 when he fell into disgrace with Stilicho. It is to this circumstance that we are to attribute the unfinished state of Claudian’s poem.