Martin Dinter

Anatomizing Civil War: Studies in Lucan's Epic Technique

Imperial Latin epic has seen a renaissance of scholarly interest. This book illuminates the work of the poet Lucan, a contemporary of the emperor Nero. This maverick but socially prominent poet, whom Nero commanded to commit suicide at the age of 26, left an epic poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey that epitomizes the exuberance and stylistic experimentation of Neronian culture. This study focuses on Lucans epic technique and traces his influence through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Martin Dinters newest volume engages with Lucans use of body imagery, sententiae, Fama (rumor), and open-endedness throughout his civil war epic. Although Lucans Bellum Civile is frequently decried as a fragmented as well as fragmentary epic, this study demonstrates how Lucan uses devices other than teleology and cohesive narrative structure to bind together the many parts of his epic body. Anatomizing Civil War places at center stage characteristics of Lucans work that have so far been interpreted as excessive, or as symptoms of an overly rhetorical culture indicating a lack of substance. By demonstrating that they all contribute to Lucans poetic technique, Martin Dinter shows how they play a fundamental role in shaping and connecting the many episodes of the Bellum Civile that constitute Lucans epic body. This important volume will be of interest to students of classics and comparative literature as well as literary scholars. All Greek and Latin passages have been translated.

The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit Chaudhuri (review)

Even when she qualifies her arguments with the conditional, Mayor presses her argument well beyond the available evidence. The following statement, from her discussion of the “battle for Athens” (279, italics hers), is typical of her strategies of argumentation: “Ancient graves of real armed females contemporary with the Greeks are scattered across Ukraine and eastern Thrace. It was not an irrational notion that some female warriors, allied with Scythian forces could have made incursions into northern Greece from Thrace, and the myth of the invasion of Athens could have coalesced around these grains of plausibility.” This is not to deny the fascination of the archaeological evidence Mayor has assembled, or the drama of the mythic traditions of warrior women from classical antiquity to twentieth-century Asian oral epics she relates. Her discussion of Katherine Hepburn’s starring role as an Amazon in the 1932 Broadway hit The Warrior’s Husband (267–68) is another gem in this treasure trove of research on the Amazons. But it well exemplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of this uneven book. The Amazons is rich in research but weak in the accepted methods of scholarship.