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Madness Triumphant: A Reading of Lucan’s Pharsalia offers the most detailed and comprehensive analysis of Lucan’s epic poem of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey to have appeared in English. In the manner of his previous books on Virgil and Ovid, Professor Fratantuono considers the Pharsalia as an epic investigation of the nature of fury and madness in Rome, this time during the increasing insanity of Nero’s reign.
Neronian representations of magic, a practice prevalent in the everyday life of the period and a central topic in its literary production, are characterized by unprecedented accuracy and detail. The similarities of witchcraft depictions in Seneca’s Medea, Lucan’s book 6, and Petronius’ Satyrica with spells of the PGM, the defixiones, as well as with Pliny’s quasi-magical recipes underscore realism as the distinctive trait of Neronian magic scenes which has often been considered the authors’ means to differentiate themselves from their Augustan predecessors. However, such high-degree realism is not merely an ornamental feature but transforms into a tool that influences the reader’s response toward magic, according to each author’s worldview and aims. The cross-generic examination of the motif of magic in the major Neronian authors shows how realism forms a link between reader, contemporary experience, and text that encourages more active participation on the part of the reader. At the same time, images of destruction, the horrific, and the ridiculous further enhance the negative view of magic as an ineffective (Lucan-Petronius) or destructive force (Seneca), simultaneously eliciting the reader’s critical response.
Well-known as a brilliant general and politician, Caesar also played a fundamental role in the formation of the Latin literary language and history of Latin Literature. This volume provides both a clear introduction to Caesar as a man of letters and a fresh re-assessment of his literary achievements.
Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.
Book XVI of Tacitus' Annals is the last of the surviving books of the great Roman historian's monumental account of the reigns of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero. The unfinished book offers a stunning portrait of Nero in his last years, a man now free of the restraining influences of his mother Agrippina and tutor Seneca. Annals XVI presents such unforgettable scenes as the spectacle of Petronius' suicide, and the mad quest of Nero to find the gold of the Carthaginian queen Dido. This edition provides a commentary to the entire book, with notes carefully aimed at first-time readers of Tacitus as well as more advanced students. An introduction provides a guide to what we know of Tacitus' life and work, as well as to the reign of Nero and Tacitus' depiction of an empire in transition, of a Rome teetering on the verge of chaos and collapse. A full vocabulary at the end of the volume is a vital resource for students preparing this text for class work or assessment.
This exploration of the Judean priesthood’s role in agricultural cultivation demonstrates that the institutional reach of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE–70 CE) went far beyond the confines of its houses of worship, while exposing an unfamiliar aspect of sacred place-making in the ancient Jewish experience. Temples of the ancient world regularly held assets in land, often naming a patron deity as landowner and affording the land sanctity protections. Such arrangements can provide essential background to the Hebrew Bible’s assertion that God is the owner of the land of Israel. They can also shed light on references in early Jewish literature to the sacred landholdings of the priesthood or the temple.
This volume considers how Greco-Roman authorities manipulated water on the practical, technological, and political levels. Water was controlled and harnessed with legal oversight and civic infrastructure (e.g., aqueducts). Waterways were 'improved' and made accessible by harbors, canals, and lighthouses. The Mediterranean Sea and Outer Ocean (and numerous rivers) were mastered by navigation for warfare, exploration, settlement, maritime trade, and the exploitation of marine resources (such as fishing). These waterways were also a robust source of propaganda on coins, public monuments, and poetic encomia as governments vied to establish, maintain, or spread their identities and predominance. This first complete study of the ancient scientific and public engagement with water makes a major contribution to classics, geography, hydrology and the history of science alike. In the ancient Mediterranean Basin, water was a powerful tool of human endeavor, employed for industry, trade, hunting and fishing, and as an element in luxurious aesthetic installations (public and private fountains). The relationship was complex and pervasive, touching on every aspect of human life, from mundane acts of collecting water for the household, to private and public issues of comfort and health (latrines, sewers, baths), to the identity of the state writ large.
This book explores Lucan's highly original deployment of contradictory Greco-Roman stereotypes about Egypt (utopian vs. xenophobic) as a means of reflecting on the violent tensions within his own society (conservatism vs. Caesarism). Lucan shows the two distinct facets of first-century BC Egypt, namely its ancient Pharaonic heritage and its latter-day Hellenistic culture under the Ptolemies, not only in spiritual conflict with one another (via the opposed characters of Acoreus, priest of old Memphis, and the Alexandrian courtier Pothinus) but also inextricably entangled with the corresponding factions of the Roman civil war and of Nero's Rome. Dr Tracy also connects Lucan's portrayal of Egypt and the Nile to his critical engagement with Greco-Roman discourse on natural science, particularly the Naturales Quaestiones of his uncle Seneca the Younger. Lastly, he examines Lucan's attitude toward the value of cultural diversity within the increasingly monocultural environment of the Roman Mediterranean.
The epics of ancient Greece and Rome are unique in that many went unfinished, or if they were finished, remained open to further narration that was beyond the power, interest, or sometimes the life-span of the poet. Such incompleteness inaugurated a tradition of continuance and closure in their reception. Brill’s Companion to Prequels, Sequels, and Retellings of Classical Epic explores this long tradition of continuing epics through sequels, prequels, retellings and spin-offs. This collection of essays brings together several noted scholars working in a variety of fields to trace the persistence of this literary effort from their earliest instantiations in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer to the contemporary novels of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.