Land und Meer : la 'Praefatio' al 'De raptu Proserpinae' di Claudiano

We are accustomed to reading ancient texts as complex aesthetic constructions resulting from the interaction of the author with a specific cultural-historical context on the one hand and a literary tradition on the other. We often place questions of literary genre at the center of our discussion and we identify complicated intertextual references. In the interpretation of late antique texts in particular, these process lead to sometimes paradoxical results: we often lose sight of the uniqueness of the very text in front of us, not only in its specific materiality but for what it represents. The mysterious poem serving as praefatio to Claudian’s late 4thcentury epic De raptu Proserpinae has long been interpreted as an allegory for the author’s poetic career: as the sailor travels away from the mainland in order to set sail for the open sea, just so Claudian travels away from the ‘minor’ literary genres in which he has written until now, in order to dedicate himself to epic poetry. The poem itself, however, describes a landscape of land and sea, and the movement of a sailor from one to the other. In this essay I focus on the shoreline in particular, arguing that it gives concrete form to the liminal quality of this movement, and on its spatial and ecopoetic meanings