This study focuses on ways in which Statius' epic Thebaid, a poem about the civil war between Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices, reflects the theme of internal discord in its narrative strategies. At the same time that Statius reworks the Homeric and Virgilian epic traditions, he engages with Hellenistic poetic ideals as exemplified by Callimachus and the Roman Callimachean poets, especially Ovid. The result is a tension between the impulse towards the generic expectations of warfare and the desire for delay and postponement of such conflict. Ultimately, Statius adheres to the mythic paradigm of the mutual fratricide, but he continues to employ competing strategies that call attention to the fictive nature of any project of closure and conciliation. In the process, the poem offers a new mode of epic closure that emphasises individual means of resolution.

Significant new reading of the epic which argues that its narrative strategies reflect the theme of internal discord.

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

This is the first book-length study of the reception of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica in the epic poems of Silius Italicus (Punica), Statius (Thebaid, Achilleid), and Claudian (De Raptu Proserpinae). It sheds new light on the importance of Valerius' poem and enhances our understanding of the intertextual richness of imperial Latin epic. The readings offered in this book provide new evidence to support the view that Valerius' Argonautica predates the Punica and Thebaid, thus helping to clarify the literary history of the Flavian period (69-96 CE). Stover shows how Silius, Statius, and Claudian use programmatic allusion to the Argonautica to present themselves as Valerius' epic successors. Silius, Statius, and Claudian rework Valerian material to achieve various effects; analysis of these effects is organized by the primary function of allusive interactions, such as 'reversal', 'enrichment', and 'contrast'. This study is essential for scholars of Latin epic poetry. Yet the Greek and Latin of its close readings are translated, making it accessible to all readers interested in intertextuality, comparative literature, and other related topics.

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

This book adopts a broad and multifaceted approach to that most preeminent of classical literature genres: the Epic. Set in the ancient world, from archaic Greece to imperial Rome, the scope of interest here extends, for comparative purposes, to Vedic and Sanskrit poetry, as well as the Medieval epic. This collection of papers by classicists from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, embraces key themes in recent scholarship, such as the character of the hero, defined in terms of the conflict of power central to the epos, the metapoetic function of the bard as a literary reflection of epic style, and the manipulation of epic myth to fulfil new functions, such as retelling contemporary history and conveying mystic symbology. Topics rooted in archaic poetry, such as the reutilisation of the ogre character embodied in the Cyclops and the journey into the Underworld, are also explored in great detail. In all these studies, the intertextual nature of ancient writing is consistently addressed through discussions of the revisiting of Homeric poetry by authors such as the Greek tragedians, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus. The analysis of the heroic narrative offered in this volume includes both literary phenomena and the language of the epic itself; the reader is thus afforded the widest possible view of current critical perspectives in classical literature and linguistics. Such a comprehensive treatment of the most important genre in the ancient world grants the reader powerful insights into the way in which ancient literature was composed. This collection of studies, while making a substantial contribution to scholarship in this field, will also appeal to a varied academic readership, including researchers in classical literature and linguistics, as well as students of literary theory.