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This chapter describes the new collection of papers on Virgil and characterises Gian Biagio Conte's scholarly output as a whole and its development over the years. In much of the collection, Conte makes a crucial argument that the exceptional status of the Aeneid in Latin literature derives from its remarkably complex and ambiguous poetic texture. This book shows Conte's characteristic powers of focused analysis and critical exploitation of detailed verbal style in Latin literature, his enviable knowledge of scholarship on Virgil's poetry and its varied intellectual contexts, and his capacity to apply appropriate elements of literary theory with penetrating effect to the task of interpretation. In his scholarly work since the 1960s, while focusing especially on Latin epic, Conte has ranged across Latin literature from Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus through Ovid to Pliny the Elder, and Petronius, and has shown his encyclopaedic interests in his best-selling history of Latin literature.

This chapter discusses the thematic significance of omens and portents in Statius’ Thebaid. It also provides an overview of and considers its intertextual relationship with other Latin epics with respect to augury and other signs from the gods, and how human characters react to them. By comparing the different instances of augury and portents and filtering them through the lens of Roman religion, the signs given and the consequences of human responses to the signs provide clues to the disposition of the gods and the role of human will in each narrative. The main focus of this chapter is upon the Argive augury and portents, and the implications for the nature of the divine machinery, Fate, and the relationship between humans and gods. Statius’ unique approach to supernatural signs has thematic consequences for the poem as a whole.

This chapter argues that theatricality plays an important part in exploring the authority and authenticity of prophecy in Latin epic. Confrontations between prophets and rulers allow an exploration of both power and prophecy. The chapter looks at the double prophecies of Mopsus and Idmon in Valerius Flaccus, Tiresias’ necromancy and pyromancy and the confrontation between Amphiaraus and Capaneus in Statius, and two episodes in Silius: the argument between Flaminius and Corvinus and the competing interpretations of Liger and Bogus. Ultimately, Flavian epic suggests that apparent rationality can be another layer of performance, and that the spectacles of prophecy are just one more manifestation of the empty over–coherence of epic causation.

The seventh chapter of this project examines the transmission of Roman plague in literary and visual arts, beginning with the early Christian period and proceeding up through the present day. Such a survey is necessarily selective and meant to indicate the range of interpretive possibilities available for readers who are sensitive to the conventions developed in the hexameter treatments of Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. The chapter focuses on three areas of reception: early Christian poetry and prose (Endelechius’ Carmen de Mortibus Boum; Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum), visual arts of the Italian Renaissance (e.g. Raphael’s Vergilian Plague of Phrygia [1520’s]) and Anglo-American novels (e.g. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy). The visual and literary arts discussed here crystallize the interplay between civil strife, familial discord, and epochal evolution evident in the pestilence narratives examined throughout this project. Roman conventions of representing pestilence help us understand how narratives of contagious disease up to the present day have dramatized a tension between ideals of autonomy and distinction and those that foster group cohesion and collectivity.

This chapter considers the intersection between epic and erotic supplication in the poetry of Francis Petrarch. It begins with Dante’s effort in the Vita Nuova and Commedia to remove the discursive pattern of plea and response from vernacular love poetry. Petrarch responds to Dante’s pressing poetic authority by reintroducing supplicatory speech into Trecento Italian lyric, fusing the fin amor conventions of the suppliant lover and exalted lady with classical episodes of military clemency. In contrast with skeptical readings that emphasize the disingenuousness of the lover’s suppliant pose, the chapter argues that in his Latin epic Africa Petrarch turns the friction between classical and fin amor frameworks into a productive way of figuring the inward experience of love. Feeding this insight into his vernacular lyric cycle, Petrarch develops the supplicatory paradigm into a crucial poetic resource for telling the story of the multiple self in the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta.

The Introduction offers an overview of the book’s contents as well as a statement of the book’s general thesis: representations of plague in Latin epic play critical roles in diagnosing and rehabilitating a civic body wracked by discordia. They do so partly by staging a conflict between the concerns of the individual and the interests of the collective res publica. Lucretius, Ovid, and Vergil innovate within the tradition of plague writing by introducing new symptoms and social effects of contagious disease, and by emphasizing the expurgating properties of plague. Such properties allow these poets to weigh the possibility of an entirely new order against the likelihood that any civic body will bear traces of old pathologies.