Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry

Phillip Mitsis, Ioannis Ziogas

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110475876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The political allegiances of major Roman poets have been notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because they often shift the onus of political interpretation from themselves to their readers. By the same token, it is often difficult to assess their authorial powerplays in the etymologies, puns, anagrams, telestichs, and acronyms that feature prominently in their poetry. It is the premise of this volume that the contexts of composition, performance, and reception play a critical role in constructing poetic voices as either politically favorable or dissenting, and however much the individual scholars in this volume disagree among themselves, their readings try to do justice collectively to poetry's power to shape political realities. The book is aimed not only at scholars of Roman poetry, politics, and philosophy, but also at those working in later literary and political traditions influenced by Rome's greatest poets.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics From Horace to Silius Italicus
• Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos … Secedendum est (Dialogus 9.6)?
• Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy, Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace, Odes 2.10
• Another Vergilian Signature in the Georgics?
• Mora in the Aeneid
• Dido and the Owl
• Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective: The Psycholinguistics of Guilt in Virgil’s Aeneid
• Virgil and the Achilles of Catullus
• Violent Retribution and Pietas: The Closure of the Aeneid Revisited
• Freedom of Speech in Virgil and Ovid
• Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507–10
• Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid
• Pythagoras and Numa in Ovid: Exile and Immortality at Rome
• Lucan’s Caesar and Laelius
• A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile
• From Pastoral to Panegyric in Calpurnius Siculus
• Speaking Names in Senecan Drama
• Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547–622: A Tropology
• Doubtful Certainties: The Politics of Reading in Seneca’s Oedipus
• Doubting Domitian’s Divinity: Statius Achilleid 1.1–2
• As if: Reflections on an Exemplary Wife
• Silius Italicus and Greek Epic: Imperial Culture Wars
• List of Contributors
• Publications by Frederick Ahl
• Index of passages discussed
• General Index