Ebook: Violence in narrative : Imperium and identity in Roman epic [thesis]

Civil war pervades the Roman epic tradition. In this study of Vergil, Lucan and Statius, I contend that these three poets engage the Roman historiographical tradition as they venture to understand the cause, or origin, of Roman civil strife. What is the meaning of civil war for Roman identity? Roman historians had long considered civil war as the culmination of a process of moral decline, a process initiated by Rome's imperial expansion into the East. According to this view, civil war was regarded as a product of Rome's "de-Romanization," its turn away from authentic "Romanness." At the same time, such a conception of decline highlights the ambivalence towards the imperial project itself among numerous Roman authors: imperium was both the privileged field for Roman virtus as well as a dangerous, infectious enterprise responsible for Rome's own fall. Roman epic exhibits a similar ambivalence towards Empire, I argue, but does so in the course of destabilizing the very notion of decline: epic re-writes civil war back into Roman identity, as an inherent problematic of imperial virtus itself. Vergil's Carthage and Lucan's Cato represent two complementary epic loci which undercut the idealization of the Roman past implied in the discourse of decline. Vergil's representation of Carthage blurs the boundaries between Roman and enemy, calling into question the possibility of licit (and generative) violence in a way which highlights Carthage's ambiguous position in the Roman historical imagination, suspended between Empire and Civil War. As he is assimilated into the suicidal frenzy of civil war, Lucan's Cato enacts the failure of the dream of a pure Romanitas, free from the Eastern, imperial taint marking Pompey. In Statius, narrative itself is called into question, as the origin of Theban fratricide, Rome's mythic stand-in, is subject to a systematic deferral which suggests the impossibility of mastering violence through narrative. Each of these poets confronts the reader with an image of non-differentiated violence, violence inherent within Roman identity.