Lucan S Bellum Civile

Examines Lucan's literary adaptation of the cosmological dialectic of Love and Strife

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.

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.

A magnificent new translation of the enduring epic about the sundering of the Roman Republic. Lucan lived from 39-65 AD at a time of great turbulence in Rome. His "Civil War" portrays two of the most colorful and powerful figures of the age-Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, enemies in a vicious struggle for power that severed bloodlines and began the transformation of Roman civilization. With Right locked in combat with Might, law and order broke down and the anarchic violence that resulted left its mark on the Roman people forever, paving the way for the imperial monarchy. Accessible and modern yet loyal to the rhetorical brilliance of the original, this will be the definitive "Civil War" of our times.

Lucan, grandson of Seneca the Rhetorician, and nephew of Seneca the Philosopher, was a remarkable and precocious product of the stimulating literary climate promoted by Nero. His epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, unfinished at the time of his death, stands beside the poems of Virgil and Ovid in the first rank of Latin epic. The work is a powerful condemnation of civil war, and Lucan emphasizes the stark, dark horror of the catastrophes which the Roman state inflicted upon itself. This new translation in free verse conveys the full force of Lucan's writing and his grimly realistic view of the subject. The Introduction sets the scene for the reader unfamiliar with Lucan, and explores his relationship with earlier writers of Latin epic, and his interest in the sensational.

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.

The first full study of corpse mistreatment and funeral violation in Greco-Roman epic poetry, illuminating many major texts.