Epics of Rome

Where did Roman epic poetry come from? In the third century BCE Latin literature emerged in the form of drama and epic. Ancient Greek literature was influential, and Rome’s first epic was a kind of Greek-Roman hybrid, appropriately by an author with a Latin and a Greek name; it was a Greek tale, but written in a native Italian form. This lecture will explore how Roman writers founded a distinctive style by infusing Greek epic with Roman material. We’ll also see how problematic early epic is, for it unfortunately survives only in fragments.

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The Aeneid and Metamorphoses have continued to be rediscovered and reinterpreted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The two world wars which defined the first half of the 20th century forced a reconsideration of all war poetry, particularly the Aeneid, which began to be recognised as a work of art which dealt with loss and lament just as much as glory and patriotism - a work which potentially questioned militarism and imperialism. Meanwhile Ovid's explorations of love, desire and identity chimed with the development of psychoanalysis, while his apparently chaotic epic became a major focus of interest later in the 20th century as post-modernism championed non-linear narratives and questioned the permanence of boundaries. Again, it was Ovid in particular who provided the springboard for many new texts, particularly the short story, which often resulted in dramatically diverse updates of the stories in the Metamorphoses.

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Virgil and Ovid were both incredibly influential upon later poetry and culture, and in this lecture we look at some of the texts which look back to their epics in the late antique period through to the Renaissance, in particular Claudian's Rape of Proserpina and Shakespeare's poetry and drama, as well as other creative arts. By looking at the reception of Roman epic we gain some perspective on these ancient works and can appreciate how they were read and interpreted by their European cultural inheritors.

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Ovid ends his work with a series of deifications: Julius Caesar becomes a god; Augustus will become a god. This most allusive and transformative of texts apparently ends with a pat celebration of the Julian family. However, this is not the end at all, for Ovid actually completes his work with his own immortality: he will live through his work and thus go beyond death and also beyond the holders of political power. It is a confident statement of the transcendence of poetry. Yet nothing is stable in Ovid's world, and the final book also contains a lengthy speech by the philosopher Pythagoras, whose beliefs include the perpetual rebirth of souls into new bodies. Is this an attempt to give a theoretical underpinning to the epic? Or does it once again snatch the rug from under the reader's feet?!

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In books 11-14 of the Metamorphoses Ovid takes on the stories of Troy's fall and Rome's origin - have we finally reached the point of 'real epic'? In fact, Ovid's approach is very different from Virgil's in the Aeneid, and tends to focus on characters tangential to the canonical Virgilian and Homeric versions. There are also long diversions as characters from the Trojan War narrate non-military tales, with the result that Troy's destruction and Rome's foundation are told in a non-linear fashion. This lecture will explore Ovid's narrative strategy in these later books, and investigate the political and poetic effect of this Callimachean alternative to Roman foundation myth.

Copyright 2014 Rhiannon Evans / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.