The mythological verses of the late-antique professional court poet Claudian—an Alexandrian pagan with a mystical bent who died shortly before the Sack of Rome in 410—defiantly reimagined a golden age even as the Roman Empire stood on the brink of collapse. Both of his extant mythopoetic compositions, Gigantomachy and De raptu Proserpinae, survive only as fragments. The latter, a retelling of the myth of Proserpina’s abduction and marriage to Pluto, god of the Underworld, and of her mother Ceres’s campaign to find and recover her, is perhaps the more famous of the two, not least because it is also widely held to constitute the last surviving example of high imperial Roman epic poetry. Composed of some 1,100 hexameters, Claudian’s finely wrought descriptions of place and close examination of his characters, as well as his engagement with earlier epics, have drawn the admiration of some, despite wider criticism of his pagan conservatism and diminished status as a poet for hire. By tackling the epic form, Claudian was pursuing his ambition of raising his literary status at the imperial court and achieving some measure of fame. He seems to have achieved this in his own lifetime, for in 400, shortly before his death, the Roman Senate decreed that a statue be erected in the Forum in his honor.

Claudian’s literary refashioning of Rome’s mythological golden age—and through it the work of golden age poets—garnered considerable interest during the Renaissance and Baroque eras too, particularly through its influence on sculptors and visual artists. Indeed, no artistic representation of the popular theme of Proserpina’s abduction can be fully appreciated without reference to Claudian’s work, perhaps most notably Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s magnificent 1621–22 sculpture at the Borghese Palace in Rome and Peter Paul Ruben’s 1636–37 painting of the myth at the Prado Museum.

However, the 1511 Parisian edition of Claudian’s classic predates both those early seventeenth-century masterpieces by well over a century and is greatly augmented by the printed commentary of Aulo Giano Parrasio (1470–1522). A professor of Latin eloquence, avid book hunter, and indefatigable textual critic, Parrasio boldly enumerated hundreds of classical authors and texts among the works cited in his edition of Claudian. Since the appearance of its editio princeps (Milan, 1501; repr. 1505), entire pages of Parrasio’s deeply learned glosses engulf just a handful of lines of Claudian’s verses, providing the learned reader with rich rhetorical and historical matter while treating the poem as almost an encyclopedia of classical knowledge.

An accomplished humanist and, for a time, deeply involved in the book trade, Parrasio is best known for his commentaries on Horace, Cicero, and, most of all, Claudian’s epic. Although at times he was publicly embattled with his academic collaborators, Parrasio’s renown had nonetheless risen sufficiently high that he was able successfully to establish in his native Calabria, between 1511and 1512 (just as the present edition of his commentary on Claudian appeared in print), the Accademia Consentina, which would remain dedicated to the study of classical philology for centuries.