Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement

by Matthew Leigh

Overview

The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. Leigh shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid: where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198150671
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/15/1997
Series:	Oxford Classical Monographs
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	8.81(w) x 5.63(h) x 1.02(d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)

About the Author

University of Exeter

Editorial Reviews

"[A] lively, energetic, and...engaging study....Lucan's project is welcome."—James J. O'Hara, Wesleyan University

"A brilliant (and convincing) demonstration of how Lucan's profound ideological commitment to republican virtues was expressed in epic conventions to produce an erudite counterpoise to Virgil."—Choice

From the Publisher