The War with God

The War with God
Author: Pramit Chaudhuri
Publisher:
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199993386

By examining literary accounts of theomachy (literally "god-fight"), The War With God provides a new perspective on the canonical literary traditions of epic and tragedy, and will be of great interest to scholars in Classics as well as those working on the European epic and tragic traditions. The struggle between human and god has always held a prominent place in classical literature, especially in the closely related genres of epic and tragedy, ranging from the physical confrontation of Achilles with the river-god Scamander in Iliad 21 to Pentheus' more figurative challenge to Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae. Yet perhaps the most intense engagement with theomachy occurs in Latin literature of the 1st century AD, which included not only the overreachers of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hannibal's assault on Capitoline Jupiter in Silius Italicus' Punica, but also, in the richest and most extended treatments of the theme, the transgressive figures of Hercules in Seneca's Hercules Furens and Capaneus and Hippomedon in Statius' Thebaid. This book, therefore, explores the presence of theomachy in Roman imperial poetry, focusing on Seneca and Statius, and sets it within a tradition going back through the Augustan age all the way to archaic Greece. The central argument of the book is that theomachy symbolizes various conflicts of authority: the poets' attempts to outdo their literary predecessors, the contentions of rival philosophical views, and the violent assertions of power that characterized both autocratic authority and its opposition. By drawing on evidence from literature, politics, religion, and philosophy, this project reveals the various influences that shaped the intellectual and cultural significance of theomachy: from Stoic and Epicurean debates about the gods to the divinization of the emperor, from poetic competition with Vergil and Homer to tyranny and revolution under the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties.

Author:
Publisher: Kitabghar Prakashan
Total Pages: 342
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9788189859497

God, Man, & Epic Poetry

God, Man, & Epic Poetry
Author: Harold Victor Routh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1968
Genre: Comparative literature
ISBN:

Nation

Nation
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 864
Release: 1927
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN: