After 69 CE - Writing Civil War in Flavian Rome

Description

The fall of Nero and the civil wars of 69 CE ushered in an era scarred by the recent conflicts; Flavian literature also inherited a rich tradition of narrating nefas from its predecessors who had confronted and commemorated the traumas of Pharsalus and Actium. Despite the present surge of scholarly interest in both Flavian literary studies and Roman civil war literature, however, the Flavian contribution to Rome’s literature of bellum ciuile remains understudied. This volume shines a spotlight on these neglected voices. In the wake of 69 CE, writing civil war became an inescapable project for Flavian Rome: from Statius’s fraternas acies and Silius’s suicidal Saguntines to the internecine narratives detailed in Josephus’s Bellum Iudaicum and woven into Frontinus’s exempla, Flavian authors’ preoccupation with civil war transcends genre and subject matter. This book provides an important new chapter in the study of Roman civil war literature by investigating the multi-faceted Flavian response to this persistent and prominent theme. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Lucanean Lenses Flavian Epic: Roman Ways of Metabolizing a Cultural Nightmare? Sparsis Mauors agitatus in oris: Lucan and Civil War in Punica 14 How It All Began: Civil War and Valerius’s Argonautica Part II: Narrating Nefas in Statius’s Thebaid Signs of Discord: Statius’s Style and the Traditions on Civil War Civil War and the Argonautic Program of Statius’s Thebaid Civil War on the Horizon: Seneca’s Thyestes and Phoenissae in Statius’s Thebaid 7 Part III: Leadership and Exemplarity Reading Civil War in Frontinus’s Strategemata: A Case-Study for Flavian Literary Studies Inuitas maculant cognato sanguine dextras: Civil War Themes in Silius’s Saguntum Episode Vespasian’s Rise from Civil War in Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum Embroidered Histories: Lemnos and Rome in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica Part IV: Family, Society, and Self Band of Brothers: Fraternal Instability and Civil Strife in Silius Italicus’s Punica Civil War, Parricide, and the Sword in Silius Italicus’s Punica Engendering Civil War in Flavian Epic A last act of love? Suicide and civil war as tropes in Silius Italicus’s Punica and Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum Part V: Ruination, Restoration, and Empire Domesticating Egypt in Pliny’s Natural History Valerius Flaccus’s Collapsible Universe: Patterns of Cosmic Disintegration in the Argonautica Instability and the Sublime in Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum Bibliography Notes on Contributors Thematic Index Index of Passages