New Entrants: 388-395

Orosius biased me toward reading through to the death of Theodosius in early 395, because he moved quickly from the restoration of Valentinian II to that monarch's death in 392. In the interim was the usurpation of Eugenius, who ruled in the West from 392 to 394. This is what I read to learn about this period of history:

• Primary narrative histories: Orosius (Book 7, Chapter 35), C. D. Gordon's Age of Attila (to page 8, p. 16-18), and Zosimus (Book 4, p. 88-94)
  
• Chronicles and foreign histories: Chronicon Paschale (years 390-394), John of Nikiu (Chapter 83, Section 37-65), al-Tabari (p. 69-70), Jordanes (Chapter 28, Section 145), and Gregory of Tours (Book 1, Chapter 44-47) [Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have nothing to report]
  
• Ecclesiastical histories: Socrates (Book 5, Chapter 15-26), Sozomen (Book 7, Chapter 15-29), Theodoret (Book 5, Chapter 16-25), and Philostorgius (Book 10, Chapter 9-Book 11, Chapter 2)
  
• Private views: Libanius' Autobiography (Section 275-285), Letters (154-193), and Orations (47-49); Jerome (Letters 52 & 54); Augustine (Book 10-11); and Claudian's Panegyric on the Consuls Probinus and Olybrius
  
• Modern histories: Montesquieu (Chapter 19) and Gibbon (Chapter 26-28)
  

I have added two new works for this segment. C. D. Gordon is a twentieth-century history. His book is of value, however, because he translates verbatim the literary fragments of the major historians of the fifth century: Olympiodorus, Candidus, Priscus, and Malchus. He also makes use of the later Byzantine historian Joannes Antiochenus. Like Philostorgius, these excerpts are preserved by Photius, in large part, and other compilers of medieval Constantinople. Because these works are not fully extent, Gordon provides his own narrative to connect the fragments. The book was originally published by University of Michigan Press, republished by Barnes & Noble.

The other new work is of a much different flavor. Claudius Claudianus was an Egyptian-born Latin poet. Much of his work is political, with subject matter not all that different from Libanius'. Similarly, he was a pagan, although he did more to try to blend in with Christians than Libanius did. His first long poem is very flowery and of little substance as the brothers Probinus and Olybrius became the consuls for whom the year would be named at the beginning of 395. Theodosius died only a couple weeks later, but I assume that the poem was written while he was still alive; line 113 in the translation names Theodosius, but he is absent from the Latin. Since Claudian's career only lasted about a decade, I don't think this will be much of an issue going forward, but because the poems are backward looking, I may have missed out on some other pieces of useful information from the poetry he wrote after Theodosius' death—Gibbon references two such later poems in Chapter 27. In the introduction, his quality of language is compared with Silver Age (late first century CE) poets like Statius, even as his content is criticized. The introduction begins by saying he "may be called the last poet of classical Rome" (vii); there are a lot of lasts in this time period (although I remember Tacitus was considered a "last" almost 300 years earlier), and it is kind of sad—it may be easier to relate to the end of a literary period, whose work still exists, than a civilization, which does not. I am reading Maurice Platnauer's translation for the Loeb Classical Library.

Platnauer's translation is available online at LacusCurtius.