Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination

·
· Oxford University Press
Ebook
352
Pages
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape exercised great influence over the Roman cultural imagination. A hub of activity outside the city of Rome, the Bay of Naples was a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity, and yet also a place of danger: the looming Vesuvius inspired both fear and awe in the region's inhabitants, while the Phlegraean Fields evoked the story of the gigantomachy and sulphurous lakes invited entry to the Underworld. For Flavian writers in particular, Campania became a locus for literary activity and geographical disaster when in 79 CE, the eruption of the volcano annihilated a great expanse of the region, burying under a mass of ash and lava the surrounding cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. In the aftermath of such tragedy the writers examined in this volume - Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus - continued to live, work, and write about Campania, which emerges from their work as an alluring region held in the balance of luxury and peril.

About the author

Antony Augoustakis is Professor and Head of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Statius, Thebaid 8 (Oxford, 2016), Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic (Oxford, 2010), and Plautus' Mercator (Bryn Mawr, 2009), and has also edited and co-edited several volumes on Flavian epic, Roman comedy, and late antiquity. He is currently completing a commentary on Silius Italicus' Punica 3 with R. Joy Littlewood and serves as editor of The Classical Journal. R. Joy Littlewood is an independent scholar based in Oxford. She has published commentaries on Ovid's Fasti 6 (Oxford, 2006), Silius Italicus' Punica 7 (Oxford, 2011), and Silius Italicus' Punica 10 (Oxford, 2017). Her current research projects include the completion of the fourth volume of J. C. McKeown's commentary on Ovid's Amores and a commentary on Silius Italicus' Punica 3 with Antony Augoustakis.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.