Claudian. Huh?

Claudian. Yeah ... translation is pretty creaky. He seems to have almost been some sort of political cartoonist for the tottering Empire. I find myself wondering what his tone is like in the Latin & if the verse has, well, beauties.

Certainly not dreadful fare but I will be eager to be through the two volumes and on to something more ... um ... something (I apologize: it's around 3am and I am barely awake).

Slight revision to my earlier: "Against Eutropius" is positively scabrous. Enough so to be really entertaining. :)

Um, it's Latin verse, so yeah, there's beauties. Okay, I may be a bit biased, but still. *grins*

So there's no Latin McGonagall?

Amber, would it be accurate to say that Latin is more "compressed" than English?

This is pretty subjective, but when I look at the Latin - English facing pages in the Loeb, and when I try to match up the English with the Latin, there appear to be far more words in English (than in Latin) to say the same thing.

>4 tungsten_peerts: Well, believe it or not, Cicero, for all of his amazing oratorical and philosophical skills, was rubbish as a poet. True story.

>5 tungsten_peerts: In general, yes, that's fairly true. The Romans generally valued conciseness in their language and the language itself is sort of built that way to begin with. For instance, since it's an inflected language (the endings on words tell you what grammatical function they perform in a sentence), there's no need in many cases for separate prepositions, and they don't have articles, either. They would also leave out any word that they thought one could reasonably be expected to know was needed, too.

Whatever one thinks of Claudian's poetic talents ... reading him is an interesting experience simply because he refers to contemporary events, people, etc. I know very little Roman history ... and NOTHING about this very late period. I'd never heard of Stilicho before -- and here Wikipedia says he was for a time the most powerful person in the Western Roman Empire.

One never knows ...