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 and Civil War written by Eva Matthews Sanford and published by . This book was released on with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lucan s Imperial World written by Laura Zientek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These new essays comprise the first collective study of Lucan and his epic poem that focuses specifically on points of contact between his text and the cultural, literary, and historical environments in which he lived and wrote. The Bellum Civile, Lucan's poetic narrative of the monumental civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, explores the violent foundations of the Roman principate and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The poem, composed more than a century later during the reign of Nero, thus recalls the past while being very much a product of its time. This volume offers innovative readings that seek to interpret Lucan's epic in terms of the contemporary politics, philosophy, literature, rhetoric, geography, and cultural memory of the author's lifetime. In doing so, these studies illuminate how approaching Lucan and his text in light of their contemporary environments enriches our understanding of author, text, and context individually and in conversation with each other.

Download or read book Fifty Key Classical Authors written by Alison Sharrock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronological guide to influential Greek and Roman writers, Fifty Key Classical Authors is an invaluable introduction to the literature, philosophy and history of the ancient world. Including essays on Sappho, Polybius and Lucan, as well as on major figures such as Homer, Plato, Catullus and Cicero, this book is a vital tool for all students of classical civilization.

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 The Conquest of Ruins written by Julia Hell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

Download or read book Civil War written by Lucan and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 I Cried to the Lord written by Kenneth Atkinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the date of composition, the social setting, the provenance, and the religious affiliation of the eighteen Greek poems known as the Psalms of Solomon, a Palestinian Jewish pseudepigraphon from the first century B.C.E. The book is divided into two major historical units: Pompeian and pre-Pompeian era Psalms of Solomon. A separate chapter examines the remaining Psalms of which the precise historical backgrounds are uncertain. All chapters include a translation of the psalm under examination, textual notes, and a discussion of all the characters mentioned in the text. The book explores the Psalms of Solomon’s use of poetry to document Pompey’s 63 B.C.E. conquest of Jerusalem through a comparison with contemporary classical texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, and archaeology.

Download or read book The Civil War written by Army Library (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero written by Shadi Bartsch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-09 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible guide to the rich literary, philosophical and artistic achievements of the notorious age of Nero.

Download or read book A Commentary on Lucan De bello civili IV written by Paolo Asso and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-03-26 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book 4 of Lucan’s epic contrasts Europe with Africa. At the battle of Lerida (Spain), a violent storm causes the local rivers to flood the plain between the two hills where the opposing armies are camped. Asso’s commentary traces Lucan’s reminiscences of early Greek tales of creation, when Chaos held the elements in indistinct confusion. This primordial broth sets the tone for the whole book. After the battle, the scene switches to the Adriatic shore of Illyricum (Albania), and finally to Africa, where the proto-mythical water of the beginning of the book cedes to the dryness of the desert. The narrative unfolds against the background of the War of the Elements. The Spanish deluge is replaced by the desiccated desolation of Africa. The commentary contrasts the representations of Rome with Africa and explores the significance of Africa as a space contaminated by evil, but which remains an integral part of Rome. Along with Lucan’s other geographic and natural-scientific discussions, Africa’s position as a part of the Roman world is painstakingly supported by astronomic and geographic erudition in Lucan’s blending of scientific and mythological discourse. The poet is a visionary who supports his truth claims by means of scientific discourse.

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 Madness Triumphant written by Lee Fratantuono and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madness Triumphant: A Reading of Lucan’s Pharsalia offers the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of Lucan’s epic poem of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey to have appeared in English. In the manner of his previous books on Virgil and Ovid, Professor Fratantuono considers the Pharsalia as an epic investigation of the nature of fury and madness in Rome, this time during the increasing insanity of Nero’s reign.

Download or read book Exemplary Traits written by J. Mira Seo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Roman poets create character? The mythological figures that dot the landscape of Roman poetry entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: the idea of a gentle, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless and weak Achilles. For Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is strikingly different from a first person narrator to an addressee. With Exemplary Traits, Mira Seo addresses this often overlooked question. Her study offers an examination of how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. Close readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca, and Statius offer a more nuanced discussion of the expectations of both authors and audiences in the Roman world than those currently available in scholarly debate. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie the function of characterization, Exemplary Traits allows for a timely reconsideration of it as a fruitful literary technique.

Download or read book De Bello Civili written by Lucan and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a full-scale edition (the first in nearly 70 years) of the first book of Lucan's De Bello Civili, an important and influential epic poem written in the 60s AD, which recounts the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey in the years 49-45 BC. The volume includes an introduction, text with apparatus criticus, and commentary. The introduction provides the reader with a number of the most important contexts for understanding Lucan's subject matter and his approach to this material. The commentary pays particular attention to interpretative, linguistic, literary, historical, social, and philosophical issues arising from the narrative of Book 1.

Download or read book War Liberty and Caesar written by Edward Paleit and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In War, Liberty, and Caesar, Edward Paleit discusses how readers and writers of the English Renaissance read and understood Lucan's (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, c. AD 39 - 65) epic poem on the Roman civil wars. It argues that the period between 1580 and 1650 in England, during which his text was much read, edited, discussed, imitated, translated, and quarreled over, can arguably be termed as the 'age of Lucan'. Looking at engagements with Lucan across a wide variety of literary forms, including poetry, drama, translations, and prose treatises, Paleit questions what made this Latin author so relevant during this period. Are there common features to the way readers responded to him? In what ways did Lucan help readers to structure and come to terms with their political experiences? Among major English authors discussed are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Philip Massinger, and Thomas May. As well as examining the factors that shaped Lucan for early modern readers - for example London literary communities, or the reading practices instilled by humanist pedagogy - Paleit examines Lucan's impact on debates over the English constitution and the nature of freedom, his use as a war poet by militaristically inclined readers, and the perverse thrill many readers experienced on encountering his blood-curdling descriptions of the horrific and unnatural.