The Emperor Honorius became consul for the third time on January 3, 396, and on this occasion Claudian read his Panegyric in the emperor’s presence.[15] Some five weeks before this event another of greater importance had occurred in the East. This was the murder of Rufinus, the praetorian prefect, amid the circumstances that have been related above. The date of the composition of Claudian’s two poems “In Rufinum” is certainly to be placed within the years 395-397, and the mention of a “tenuem moram”[16] makes it probable that Book II. was written considerably later than Book I.; the references, moreover, in the Preface to Book II. to a victory of Stilicho clearly point to that general’s defeat of the Goths near Elis in 397. To the year 398 belong the Panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius and the poems celebrating the marriage of the emperor to Stilicho’s daughter, Maria. We have already seen that the Gildo episode and Claudian’s poem on that subject are to be attributed to this same year. The consuls for the year 399 were both, in different ways, considered worthy of the poet’s pen. Perhaps the most savage of all his poems was directed against Eutropius, the eunuch chamberlain, whose claim to the consulship the West never recognized,[17] while a Panegyric on Flavius Manlius Theodorus made amends for an abusive epigram which the usually more politic Claudian had previously levelled at him.[18] At the end of 399, or possibly at the beginning of 400, Claudian returned to Rome[19] where, probably in February,[20] he recited his poem on the consulship of Stilicho; and we have no reason for supposing that the poet left the capital from this time on until his departure for his ill-starred journey four years later. In the year 402,[21] as has already been mentioned, Stilicho defeated Alaric at Pollentia, and Claudian recited his poem on the Gothic war sometime during the summer of the same year. The scene of the recitation seems to have been the Bibliotheca Templi Apollinis.[22] It was in this year, too, that the poet reached the summit of his greatness in the dedication of the statue which, as we have seen, was accorded to him by the wishes of the emperor and at the demand of the senate. The last of Claudian’s datable public poems is that on the sixth consulship of Honorius. It was composed probably towards the end of 403 and recited in Rome on (or after) the occasion of the emperor’s triumphant entry into the city. The emperor had just returned after inflicting a defeat on the Goths at Verona in the summer of 403. It is reasonable to suppose that this triumphant entry (to which the poem refers in some detail, ll. 331-639) took place on the day on which the emperor assumed the consular office, viz. January 3, 404.