The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry
By Pramit Chaudhuri
Abstract: This book is the first large-scale study of conflict between humans and gods (‘theomachy’) in Latin epic and tragic poetry. Theomachy informs some of the most influential works in the European literary tradition from Homer and Euripides to Marlowe and Milton. Nowhere is the theme more frequently and powerfully represented, however, than in the Latin poetry of early imperial Rome, from Ovid at the beginning of the first century AD to Statius at its end. This book asks why that theme was so important to Roman poets of the time and how this period of literary history developed and influenced the larger literary tradition. It argues that theomachy symbolises various conflicts of authority. These struggles fall within familiar critical paradigms, such as poetic competition, yet also underscore the presence of both philosophy and political thought as vehicles for epic expression. The book focuses on the impious figure of the theomach (the human antagonist of the gods) and explores the symbolic and intellectual energies such heroes marshal and deploy. The nine chapters proceed in chronological order, offering numerous close readings of major extant epics and selected tragedies. Their topics include, e.g., metapoetics and the sublime; madness and imperial apotheosis; divination, Epicureanism, and their competing claims to knowledge of the gods. The epilogue glances ahead to the reception of the theme in the European Renaissance and beyond.
Published in 2014 by Oxford University Press