This thesis represents the first full-scale, English commentary on the opening book of Lucan�s epic poem, De Bello Ciuili, in sixty-five years. Its fundamental purpose is to explain the language and content of the Latin text of the book. The subject matter of the thesis beyond the introduction is naturally dependent upon the content of each individual line under consideration, but the following questions may help establish some of the larger issues I have prioritised throughout my response to the Latin text of book one. These questions may be variously relevant to an episode within book one of De Bello Ciuili, or else a sentence, a line, a word, a metrical issue, or a combination of these. How does it help locate the text within the genre of epic? What does it contribute to the overall meaning of the poem? What does it contribute to our understanding of epic narrative technique? What does it contribute to our understanding of Lucan�s poetic usage and technique? How does it interact with the rest of the poem (i.e. what are the structural or intratextual markers advertised and what do they contribute to the meaning of the passage under consideration or the structure of the book or poem as a whole)? How does it interact with its (especially epic) models (i.e. what intertextual markers are at work and how does the invocation of earlier models affect the meaning of the passage under consideration)? How does it behave in relation to what we know of the norms espoused by Classical literary criticism? What are the programmatic issues, themes, and images explored or established by book one?

This thesis represents the first full-scale, English commentary on the opening book of Lucan�s epic poem, De Bello Ciuili, in sixty-five years. Its fundamental purpose is to explain the language and content of the Latin text of the book. The subject matter of the thesis beyond the introduction is naturally dependent upon the content of each individual line under consideration, but the following questions may help establish some of the larger issues I have prioritised throughout my response to the Latin text of book one. These questions may be variously relevant to an episode within book one of De Bello Ciuili, or else a sentence, a line, a word, a metrical issue, or a combination of these. How does it help locate the text within the genre of epic? What does it contribute to the overall meaning of the poem? What does it contribute to our understanding of epic narrative technique? What does it contribute to our understanding of Lucan�s poetic usage and technique? How does it interact with the rest of the poem (i.e. what are the structural or intratextual markers advertised and what do they contribute to the meaning of the passage under consideration or the structure of the book or poem as a whole)? How does it interact with its (especially epic) models (i.e. what intertextual markers are at work and how does the invocation of earlier models affect the meaning of the passage under consideration)? How does it behave in relation to what we know of the norms espoused by Classical literary criticism? What are the programmatic issues, themes, and images explored or established by book one?

In this doctoral dissertation I seek to reassess the innovativeness of the young Corduban poet Lucan’s masterpiece, the Civil War. Faced with the abrupt closure of Lucan’s poem 546 lines into Book 10, I adopt the view propounded by Haffter, Masters and Tracy, that what most have taken as incompletion brought on by the poet’s premature death in 65 CE is in fact a deliberate artistic decision. I then argue back from this view and reread several key features of the poem as manifestations of the same deliberate bodily incompleteness, the same sudden mutilation of a voice that the ending of the poem as we have it presents. My dissertation consists of two macro-sections, one on the structural and thematic characteristics of Lucan’s Civil War, and one on the characterization of the two antagonists most actively involved in the conflict: Julius Caesar, himself the author of an incomplete prose account of the very civil war that Lucan chooses to focus on; and Pompey the Great, a broken man whose mangled body reproduces at the microcosmic level the lack of finish exhibited by the textual body of the poem itself.

Texte remanié de : Thèse de doctorat : Lettres : Heidelberg : 1983. / Bibliogr. p. 243-252.

Texte remanié de : Ph. D. / Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.).

By combining literary criticism, philology, and contemporary psychoanalysis, this dissertation offers an innovative interpretation of Neronian court literature (Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius). I argue that the works of these three authors thematize and embody a problematic relation between the human subject and language. Language is not conceived or represented as an inert tool that can be easily appropriated by the speaking subject, but rather as a powerful entity that may, and often does, take control of the human subject, directing it from without. Besides analyzing how Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius portray the relation between the human subject and language in the internal plots and characters of their works, I also explore the relation between these three authors themselves and language. My conclusion is that this relation is defined by unresolved ambiguities and neurotic tensions, and I suggest that this might be a consequence of the traumatizing circumstances that the three examined authors endured at Nero’s court.

Édition de : Thèse 3e cycle : Etudes latines : Paris 4 : 1986. / Bibliogr. p. [225]-228 Notes bibliogr. Index.

Landscape in Roman literature is manifest with symbolic potential: in particular, Vergil and Ovid respond to ideologically loaded representations of abundance in nature that signal the dawn of the Augustan golden age. Vergil's Eclogues foreground a locus amoenus landscape which articulates both the hopes of the new age as well as the political upheaval that accompanied the new political regime; Ovid uses the same topography in order to suggest the arbitrary and capricious use of power within a deceptively idyllic landscape. Moreover, for Latin poets, depictions of landscape are themselves sites for poetic reflection as evidenced by the discussion of landscape ecphrases in Horace's Ars Poetica. My thesis focuses upon the depiction and refiguration of the locus amoenus landscape in the post-Augustan epics of the first century AD: Lucan's Bellum Civile, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Statius' Thebaid and Silius Italicus' Punica. Landscape in these poems retains the moral, political and metapoetic force evident in the Augustan archetypes. However, I suggest that Lucan's Neronian Bellum Civile fundamentally refigures the landscapes of Latin epic poetry, inscribing the locus amoenus with the nefas of civil war in such a manner that it redefines the perception of landscape in the succeeding Flavian poets. Lucan perverts the landscape, making the locus horridus, a landscape of horror, fear and disgust, the predominant landscape of Latin epic; consequently, the poems of Valerius, Statius and Silius engage with Lucan's refiguration of landscape as a means of expressing the horror of civil war. In the first part of my thesis I examine archetypal landscapes, including those of the Augustan poets and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Taking an approach which engages with literary reception theory and the concept of the â horizon of expectationâ as a framework within which literary topographies can be understood as articulating a response to the thematics of civil war, in the second part of my thesis I demonstrate the manner in which landscapes represent a coherent and paradigmatic response to Lucan's imposition of his civil war narrative within the literary landscape of Roman literature.