David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "classics"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "classics".
Lucan’s Civil War: Cato Hates Snakes
With Pompey dead, Book IX of Civil War, the action moves to Egypt, where Caesar will ally with Cleopatra. But most of Book IX is taken up by Cato and his army. Cato was a ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Pompey’s Death and Some Graverobbing
Like Caesar himself, who suddenly turns vulnerable and human in the wake of his victory, Civil War deflates after the climactic battle of Pharsalia. The waning of conflict results in the waning of tension, even ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Pharsalia’s Winner and Loser
Caesar became a leviathan, a monster, a deity during the battle of Pharsalia. But Caesar’s apotheosis is momentary. Lucan takes the time to flash forward to his future death, in order to remind us of ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Lucan’s Latin
J.C. Bramble has a 30-page section on Lucan in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (edited by E.J. Kenney). Bramble makes some great remarks on Lucan’s Latin, and since I haven’t been able to comment ...
Lucan’s Civil War: The Battle of Pharsalia and Caesar’s Chthonic Apotheosis
In Book VII Lucan reaches Pharsalia, the decisive battle between Caesar and Pompey’s forces, and the indisputable climax of Civil War. (Indeed, the poem is often called Pharsalia.) Though it is clear that the fortune-favored Caesar ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Erictho the Witch, the Necromancer, etc.
Oh Erictho, where do I even begin? Driven seemingly by a desire to top what had gone before, Lucan continues to astonish as the poem goes on, and Erictho is his trump card. Erictho is ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Rhetoric and Power, Murder and Suicide
The Civil War is an epic steeped in rhetoric, or more precisely, birthed from the font of rhetoric. Rhetoric and rhetorical training was crucially important to writers of Lucan’s era in particular, but the entire classical world had ...