David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "literature"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "literature".
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: 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 ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Dissolution of the Body at Massilia
One of the most frequently discussed motifs in Civil War is how Lucan pays very little respect to the integrity and unity of the human body. Partly this is because a good chunk of the poem ...
Lucan’s Civil War: Fortune, Fate, and Caesar
Down to the real business of the poem. Nicole made a great post about fate and fortune, and Lucan misses no opportunity to tell us how Fortune is the supreme god at work here, having ...
Lucan’s Civil War: About That Dedication to Nero
Nicole talked about the opening of Civil War and the peculiar dedication to Nero. Lucan apparently wrote the first three books of his epic before he fell out of favor with Nero, and so there’s been ...