De Raptu Proserpinae

An unfinished mythological epic in three books recounting Pluto's abduction of Proserpina and Ceres's grief-stricken search for her missing daughter, composed by Claudian, an Egyptian-born Greek who became the last major poet to write large-scale classical epic in Latin and who served, unusually for a pagan writer, as the leading court poet under the Christian regime of the western general Stilicho. Written in dense, self-consciously Virgilian hexameters, the poem revives full mythological epic machinery, gods, prophecy, cosmic geography, at a moment when most serious Latin literary energy had shifted decisively toward Christian subject matter, making Claudian something of an anachronism even in his own time. Left unfinished, likely because of Claudian's sudden death around 404, the poem is generally regarded as the last substantial classical-style epic produced in Latin antiquity, closing out a tradition that began with Ennius and Virgil roughly six centuries earlier.