The papers published in this volume were first delivered at a colloquium entitled 'Lucain et Claudien face à face. Une poésie politique entre épopée, histoire et panégyrique', which took place at the Fondation Hardt, in Vandoeuvres, near Geneva, in November 2012. The contributors, an international team of scholars, take the reader from broader considerations of both poets in relation to politics and ideology, generic positioning, construction of individual characters and strategies of panegyric, to a stronger focus on investigating precise examples of intertextual dialogue between Claudian and Lucan. In general, the collected studies are implicated in, or have implications for, other topics, such as Latin poetic style, history and the uses of mythology, the Roman epic tradition, and the whole question of the development of literary cultures and how they are received.