In the year 404 Claudian seems to have married some protégée of Serena’s. Of the two poems addressed to her the “Laus Serenae” is clearly the earlier, and we may take the other, the “Epistola ad Serenam,” to be the last poem Claudian ever wrote. It is a poem which seems to have been written on his honeymoon, during the course of which he died.[23] * * * * * It is not easy to arrive at any just estimate of Claudian as a writer, partly because of an inevitable tendency to confuse relative with absolute standards, and partly (and it is saying much the same thing in other words) because it is so hard to separate Claudian the poet from Claudian the manipulator of the Latin language. If we compare his latinity with that of his contemporaries (with the possible exception of Rutilius) or with that of such a poet as Sidonius Apollinaris, who came not much more than half a century after him, it is hard to withhold our admiration from a writer who could, at least as far as his language is concerned, challenge comparison with poets such as Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius--poets who flourished about three centuries before him.[24] I doubt whether, subject matter set aside, Claudian might not deceive the very elect into thinking him a contemporary of Statius, with whose _Silvae_ his own shorter poems have much in common. Even as a poet Claudian is not always despicable. His descriptions are often clever, _e.g._ the Aponus, and many passages in the “De raptu.”[25] His treatment of somewhat commonplace and often threadbare themes is not seldom successful--for example, the poem on the Phoenix and a four-line description of the horses of the dawn in the Panegyric on Honorius’ fourth consulship[26]--and he has a happy knack of phrase-making which often relieves a tedious page: ille vel aerata Danaën in turre latentem eliceret[27] he says of the pander Eutropius. But perhaps Claudian’s forte is invective. The panegyrics (with the doubtful exception of that on Manlius, which is certainly brighter than the others) are uniformly dull, but the poems on Rufinus and Eutropius are, though doubtless in the worst of taste, at least in parts amusing.