Download or read book Reading Lucan s Civil War written by Paul Roche and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 39 C.E., the Roman poet Lucan lived during the turbulent reign of the emperor Nero. Prior to his death in 65 C.E., Lucan wrote prolifically, yet beyond some fragments, only his epic poem, the Civil War, has survived. Acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest literary achievements of the Roman Empire, the Civil War is a stirring account of the war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the republican senate led by Pompey the Great. Reading Lucan’s Civil War is the first comprehensive guide to this important poem. Accessible to all readers, it is especially well suited for students encountering the work for the first time. As the editor, Paul Roche, explains in his introduction, the Civil War (alternatively known in Latin as Bellum Civile, De Bello Civili, or Pharsalia) is most likely an unfinished work. Roche places the poem in historical and literary contexts that will be helpful to first-time readers. The volume presents, chapter-by-chapter, essays that cover each of the Civil War’s ten extant books. Five further chapters address topics and issues pertaining to the entire work, including religion and ritual, philosophy, gender dynamics, and Lucan’s relationships to Vergil and Julius Caesar. The contributors to this volume are all expert scholars who have published widely on Lucan’s work and Roman imperial literature. Their essays provide readers with a detailed understanding of and appreciation for the poem’s unique features. The contributors take special care to include translations of all original Latin passages and explain unfamiliar Latin and Greek terms. The volume is enhanced by a map of Lucan’s Roman world and a glossary of key terms.

Download or read book Lucan written by Matthew Leigh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pharsalia, Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey, is a document of fundamental importance for students of the history and literature of Rome in the early imperial period. For historians concerned with the defence of Republican traditions under the emperors as much as for literary critics mapping the transformation of epic in the wake of Vergil, it is impossible to ignore this poem.

Download or read book Ideology in Cold Blood written by Shadi BARTSCH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Lucan's brilliant and grotesque epic Civil War an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that despairingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers a startlingly new answer to this split debate on the Roman poet's magnum opus. Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49 B.C., Lucan (writing during the grim tyranny of Nero's Rome) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of a tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than heroic and tragic. And Lucan is oddly fascinated by the graphic destruction of lives, the violation of human bodies--an interest paralleled in his deviant syntax and fragmented poetry. In an analysis that draws on contemporary political thought ranging from Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty to the poetry of Vietnam veterans, as well as on literary theory and ancient sources, Bartsch finds in the paradoxes of Lucan's poetry both a political irony that responds to the universally perceived need for, yet suspicion of, ideology, and a recourse to the redemptive power of storytelling. This shrewd and lively book contributes substantially to our understanding of Roman civilization and of poetry as a means of political expression. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction The Subject under Siege Paradox, Doubling, and Despair Pompey as Pivot The Will to Believe History without Banisters Notes Bibliography Index Reviews of this book: The problem of Lucan's stance is notorious, and it is the focus of Bartsch's book...She makes her own gripping contribution to the dossier of Lucanian despair in her first two chapters; but she believes that ultimately such interpretations sell the poet short, as an artist and a person. Her Lucan, both inside and outside his poem, is a Sartrean existentialist or a Rortyan moral ironist, who accepts the evanescence of traditional moral and political verities but who behaves as if his ideology matters anyhow and makes his choice regardless. Hence the "ideology in cold blood" of her title: Lucan knows, and spellbindingly demonstrates, that Liberty is a cipher, but he commits himself to it none the less. Bartsch has put her finger on a key issue, and her passionate book is a useful check to the establishment of a new orthodoxy on Lucan. --Denis Feeney, Times Literary Supplement Reviews of this book: This could be that elusive creature, an Important Book. --Gideon Nisbet, Bryn Mawr Classical Review Reviews of this book: This is a stimulating work, which I find has provoked many questions about Lucan's poem, about liberal irony, and about history...The strengths of this book lie in its brevity, in its integration of detailed analyses with broader theoretical issues, and in its accessibility. It addresses a question which is of relevance to not only Lucanians, or Latinists, or classicists, but anyone who thinks about the politics of literature. --Ellen O'Gorman, Classical World Reviews of this book: Bartsch goes far beyond the boundaries of Lucan's Civil War itself. Readers interested in Latin literature in general, in the civil wars that ended the Republic, in the political context of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E., in questions of human response to political repression long after Lucan, and those interested in Lucan himself as poet and conspirator, will want to read Ideology in Cold Blood. Bartsch has taken two prevailing camps of criticism--Lucan as "nihilist" and Lucan as "partisan"--and proposed an elegantly argued third alternative: Lucan as "political ironist." --Choice Reviews of this book: Ideology in Cold Blood provides a strikingly dissident approach to Lucan in that it aims to weld together a text-oriented focus, a political reading of the Civil War and a discussion of Lucan's political activities, i.e. his involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy. Bartsch's decision to include a biographical approach in her analysis should not be taken for bland naivety coming at a time when influential scholars on Lucan have come to reject this approach for the blatant fallacies that it entails. Bartsch offers something completely novel in this area, for it is entirely obvious that her sympathies do not lie with forms of historical reconstructionism in which the biographical data are simply made to correlate with the presumed political message of the poem...[Bartsch's book] will surely be ranked among the best works on the poet and I strongly recommend it to scholars interested in the literature of the Principate and in the role of Roman political epic. --Marc Kleijwegt, Scholia

Download or read book Amor Belli written by Giulio Celotto and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2022-03-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compelled by the emperor Nero to commit suicide at age 25 after writing uncomplimentary poems, Latin poet Lucan nevertheless left behind a significant body of work, including the Bellum Civile (Civil War). Sometimes also called the Pharsalia, this epic describes the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.Author Giulio Celotto provides an interpretation of this civil war based on the examination of an aspect completely neglected by previous scholarship: Lucan’s literary adaptation of the cosmological dialectic of Love and Strife. According to a reading that has found favor over the last three decades, the poem is an unconventional epic that does not conform to Aristotelian norms: Lucan composes a poem characterized by fragmentation and disorder, lacking a conventional teleology, and whose narrative flow is constantly delayed. Celotto’s study challenges this interpretation by illustrating how Lucan invokes imagery of cosmic dissolution, but without altogether obliterating epic norms. The poem transforms them from within, condemning the establishment of the Principate and the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Download or read book Poetry and Civil War in Lucan s Bellum Civile written by Jamie Masters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-03-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucan is the wild maverick among Latin epic poets. Sneered at for over a century for failing to conform to humanist canons of taste and propriety, in recent years his work has been gaining in reputation. This 1992 book is founded on a genuine admiration for Lucan's unique, perverse, and spellbinding masterpiece. Above all, Dr Masters argues, the poem is obsessed with civil war, not only as the subject of the story it tells, but as a metaphor which determines the way that story is told. In these pages, he discusses in detail a number of selected episodes from the poem which illustrate this principle, and on this basis offers challenging perspective on most of the important issues in Lucanian studies such as Lucan's political stance, his attitude to Caesar, his iconoclastic relation to Virgil and the epic tradition and his distortion of history and geography. This book is a major re-evaluation, provocative and persuasive, of a central figure in the history of Latin epic.

Download or read book Lucan s Civil War written by Lucan and published by . This book was released on 1988-09-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " . . . eminently readable, supple, and coherent . . . essential . . . " —Choice " . . . translated into English verse with great force and precision . . . " —History "There is . . . a very real need for a new poetic version, and Mr. Widdows has carried out the difficult task most creditably. . . . his translation is both accurate and readable, and in our age, so much kinder to baroque art than the ages that preceded it, he should have many readers." —New York Review of Books "On all counts this translation of the Pharsalia is a resounding success and will, one predicts, stand as the definitive English version. Readers . . . will welcome this verse edition by Widdows with its readability, accuracy, and, above all, its poetic sensibility. . . . Widdows' translation deserves acclaim, and both classicist and student of epic poetry in general will want this edition on their bookshelves . . . " —Classical World Told in a series of gripping, dramatic episodes, Widdows' powerful verse translation of Lucan's unfinished epic of the Roman civil war starts with the crossing of the Rubicon and ends with Caesar narrowly escaping death at the hands of the Egyptian army.

Download or read book Lord Lucan written by William Coles and published by Legend Press Ltd. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Lord who became a legendary fugitive tells his story of murder and escape in this fictionalized account of the infamous scandal. On November 7th, 1974, a murder plot goes disastrously wrong. John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, had intended to do away with his wife. Instead, it is their nanny, Sandra Rivett, who lies dead in the basement of their London home. The following day, Lord Lucan disappeared. And despite a global hunt, he was never seen again. Bingham had once been the most charismatic members of the British peerage. A frequent gambler, he was known as Lucky Lord Lucan—even though his losses often exceeded his winnings. Since his disappearance, he has become a legend of a very different sort. Here, in his own hand, is Lord Lucan’s confession to his grizzly crimes, and the story of his mysterious life. It is a strange tale of an Old Etonian Earl on the run; of how a man became a murderer; and how a life-long friendship soured into an enduring hate. Here, for the first time, is the full monstrous account of the life of Lord Lucan.

Download or read book The Civil War written by Lucan and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only surviving work of the Roman poet Lucan and 1 of the supreme achievements of Augustan verse. Lucan was a Roman poet of Spanish origin, the nephew of Seneca. The only 1 of his works to have survived is a sweeping historical epic about the civil wars between Pompey and Caesar, written in 10 books, which both Shelley and Macauley admired.

Download or read book A Different Class of Murder written by Laura Thompson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Sensational. The most minutely researched and brilliantly told account ever' MAIL ON SUNDAY. Laura Thompson re-examines the truths behind one of post-war Britain's most notorious murders: the bludgeoning to death of nanny Sandra Rivett in a Belgravia basement on 7 November 1974. Lord Lucan, found guilty of the murder, was only granted a death certificate in 2016. His wife Veronica – last surviving participant in this dark episode – died in September 2017. In this revised edition, Laura Thompson sheds new light on the volatile mental state of Veronica Lucan, and on the theories surrounding the murder, to which she adds a new, extraordinary and shocking possibility.

Download or read book Lucan Steele Protectors 6 written by Carole Mortimer and published by Carole Mortimer. This book was released on 2020-03-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LUCAN (Steele Protectors 6) is the last book in USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestselling Author, Carole Mortimer’s, ALL Amazon #1 Bestselling Contemporary Romantic Suspense series, Steele Protectors. Author’s Note: Beware of the very sexy & very alpha Steele brothers. These books are HOT! Eight years ago Rachel Ford was put into the Witness Protection programme after her parents were killed and her sister later died in a car crash. Her name isn’t her own. England isn’t her birthplace. The only people she has in her life even remotely close to calling family is the couple, friends of her mother, who fostered her until she was eighteen. At least, that’s what Rachel has always believed… When Lucan Steele is tasked with protecting Rachel Ford, an art historian working in a London museum, he decides the best way to do that is to take her to a safe house until the danger has passed. Turns out Rachel isn’t the staid historian Lucan had been expecting. Instead she’s beautiful, fiery and sensual, and exactly the sort of unpredictable woman Lucan doesn’t need in his life after his years in the military left him scarred, both inside and out. So much so that Lucan doesn’t believe any woman could ever accept the things he did in his past. But as Lucan quickly discovers, Rachel isn’t like other women, and the heated attraction between the two of them becomes too intense for either of them to deny any longer. But Lucan’s past, whether or not the two of them could ever have a future together, might not matter when Rachel learns what really happened eight years ago…

Download or read book Caesar and the Storm written by Monica Matthews and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This commentary on a part of book 5 of Lucan's 'historical epic' poem De Bello Civili aims to provide the reader with as thorough an analysis as possible of literary and historical points of interest within the text and so to facilitate a fuller understanding and appreciation of one of the most important episodes in the poem, Julius Caesar's failed attempt to cross the Adriatic in the midst of a great storm. It examines how the episode contributes to the long tradition of epic storm narratives dating back to Homer and also how it contributes to the wider themes of the poem as a whole, in particular to Lucan's portrayal of Caesar. A line-by-line commentary is combined with longer notes summarizing issues of particular importance. Such issues include: the influence of Roman love-poetry in the depiction of the relationship between Caesar and his men, Lucan's use of Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus episode, and the tradition of theoxeny narratives lying behind the scene at the home of the fisherman Amyclas which allows us to view Caesar as 'playing the part' of a traditional god or hero. Throughout, Lucan's engagement with the works of Homer, Virgil (particularly the Aeneid but also the Georgics), Ovid and Seneca, and the ways in which the lack of a traditional divine machinery in his poem is compensated for are considered.

Download or read book Lucan De Bello Ciuili Book VII written by Paul Roche and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book VII of Lucan's De Bello Ciuili recounts the decisive victory of Julius Caesar over Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus on 9 August 48 BCE. Uniquely within Lucan's epic, the entire book is devoted to one event, as the narrator struggles to convey the full horror and significance of Romans fighting against Romans and of the republican defeat. Book VII shows both De Bello Ciuili and its impassioned, partisan narrator at their idiosyncratic best. Lucan's account of Pharsalus well illustrates his poem's macabre aesthetic, his commitment to paradox and hyperbole, and his highly rhetorical presentation of events. This is the first English commentary on this important book for more than half a century. It provides extensive help with Lucan's Latin, and seeks to orientate students and scholars to the most important issues, themes and aspects of this brilliant poem.

Download or read book Thomas May Lucan s Pharsalia 1627 written by Emma Buckley and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauded after his death as ‘champion of the English Commonwealth’, but also derided as a ‘most servile wit, and mercenary pen’, the poet, dramatist and historian Thomas May (c.1595–1650) produced the first full translation into English of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile shortly before a ruinous civil war engulfed his own country. Lucan, whose epic had lamented the Roman Republic’s doomed struggle to preserve liberty and inevitable enslavement to the Caesars, and who was forced to commit suicide at the behest of the emperor Nero, was a figure of fascination in early modern Europe. May’s accomplished rendition of his challenging poem marked an important moment in the history of its English reception. This is a modernized edition of the first complete (1627) edition of the translation. It includes prefatory materials, dedications and May’s own historical notes on the text. Besides an introduction contextualising May’s life and work and the key features of his translation, it offers a full commentary to the text highlighting how May responded to contemporary editions and commentaries on Lucan, and explaining points of literary, political, philosophical interest. There is also a detailed glossary and bibliography, and a set of textual notes enumerating the chief differences between the 1627 edition and the others produced in May’s lifetime. This volume aims not just to provide an accessible path into the dense, sometimes provocative poem May shapes from Lucan, but also a broader appreciation of the translator’s literary merits and the role his work plays in the history of the English reception of Roman literature and culture.

Download or read book Lucan s Bellum Civile written by Nicola Hömke and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Beiträge zur Altertumskunde enthalten Monographien, Sammelbände, Editionen, Übersetzungen und Kommentare zu Themen aus den Bereichen Klassische, Mittel- und Neulateinische Philologie, Alte Geschichte, Archäologie, Antike Philosophie sowie Nachwirken der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Dadurch leistet die Reihe einen umfassenden Beitrag zur Erschließung klassischer Literatur und zur Forschung im gesamten Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften.

Download or read book Civil War written by Lucan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the reign of Nero--the emperor against whom Lucan was implicated in a conspiracy and by whom he was compelled to commit suicide at the age of 25--the poet's dark, ambiguous, unfinished masterpiece focuses on the disintegration of the Roman body politic and the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey that ultimately lead to the end of the Roman republic. While aiming for a poem both as rugged as Lucan's--with its mix of history and fantasy, of high and low registers, of common and uncommon turns of phrase, of narrative and declamation--and as reader-friendly as possible, Brian Walters owns that he has "nowhere tried to simplify the rhetorical excesses that are the essence of Lucan's poem, the real meat and bone of the Civil War ." A brilliant Introduction by W. R. Johnson discusses the poem's relationship to Nero and monarchy; its invocations of both the gods and chaos; the real hero of the Civil War ; and the poem's end and narrative styles. Synopses of individual books; suggestions for further reading; a glossary of names, places, and Roman institutions; and a map are also included.

Download or read book Feeling History written by Francesca D'Alessandro Behr and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feeling History is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Through the narrator's direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucan's style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The book's chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca D'Alessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucan's retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole. An analysis of selected apostrophes from the Bellum Civile allows us to confront issues that are behind Lucan's disquieting imagery: how can we square the poet's Stoic perspectives with his poetically conveyed emotional urgency? Lucan's approach seems inspired by Aristotle, especially his Poetics, as much as by Stoic philosophy. In Lucan's aesthetic project, participation and alienation work as phases through which the narrator leads the reader to a desired understanding of his work of art. At the same time, the reader is confronted with the ends and limits of the aesthetic enterprise in general. Lucan's long-acknowledged political engagement must therefore be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic stance. In the same way that Lucan is unable to break free from the Virgilian model, neither can he develop a defense of morality outside of the Stoic mold. His philosophy is not a crystal ball to read the future or a numbing drug imposing acceptance. The philosophical vision that Lucan finds intellectually and aesthetically compelling does not insulate his characters (and readers) from suffering, nor does it excuse them from wrongdoing. Rather, it obligates them to confront the responsibilities and limits of acting morally in a chaotic world.

Download or read book Anatomizing Civil War written by Martin Dinter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Latin epic has seen a renaissance of scholarly interest. This book illuminates the work of the poet Lucan, a contemporary of the emperor Nero who as nephew of the imperial adviser Seneca moved in the upper echelons of Neronian society. This young and maverick poet, whom Nero commanded to commit suicide at the age of 26, left an epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that epitomizes the exuberance and stylistic experimentation of Neronian culture. This study focuses on Lucan's epic technique and traces his influence through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Martin T. Dinter's newest volume engages with Lucan's use of body imagery, sententiae, Fama (rumor), and open-endedness throughout his civil war epic. Although Lucan's Bellum Civile is frequently decried as a fragmented as well as fragmentary epic, this study demonstrates how Lucan uses devices other than teleology and cohesive narrative structure to bind together the many parts of his epic body. Anatomizing Civil War places at center stage characteristics of Lucan's work that have so far been interpreted as excessive, or as symptoms of an overly rhetorical culture indicating a lack of substance. By demonstrating that they all contribute to Lucan's poetic technique, Martin T. Dinter shows how they play a fundamental role in shaping and connecting the many episodes of the Bellum Civile that constitute Lucan's epic body. This important volume will be of interest to students of classics and comparative literature as well as literary scholars. All Greek and Latin passages have been translated.