A companion to the Neronian age
Introduction: The Neronian (Literary) "Renaissance" / Martin T. Dinter -- Part I. Nero -- The Performing Prince / Elaine Fantham -- Biographies of Nero / Donna W. Hurley -- Nero the Imperial Misfit : Philhellenism in a Rich Man's World / Sigrid Mratschek -- Part II. The Empire -- The empire in the age of Nero / Myles Lavan -- Apollo in arms : Nero at the frontier / David Braund -- Domus Neroniana : The Imperial Household in the Age of Nero / Michael J. Mordine -- Religion / Darja Eterbenc Erker -- Neronian Philosophy / Jenny Bryan -- Part III. Literature, Art and Architecture -- Seneca, Apocolocyntosis / Christopher L. Whitton -- The Carmina Einsidlensia and Calpurnius Siculus' Eclogues / John Henderson -- Seneca's Philosophical Writings : Naturales Quaestiones, Dialogi, Epistulae Morales / Jonathan Mannering -- Senecan Tragedy / Emma Buckley -- Lucan's Bellum Ciuile / Philip Hardie -- Petronius' Satyrica / Tom Murgatroyd -- Persius / Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols -- Columella, De Re Rustica / Christiane Reitz -- Literature of the World : Seneca's Natural Questions and Pliny's Natural History / Aude Doody -- Greek Literature Under Nero / Dirk Uwe Hansen -- Buildings of an Emperor : how Nero transformed Rome / Heinz-Jurgen Beste and Henner von Hesberg -- Portraits of an Emperor : Nero and the Sun / Marianne Bergmann -- Neronian Wall-Painting : A Matter of Perspective / Katharina Lorenz -- Part IV. Reception -- Nero in Jewish and Christian Tradition from the First Century to the Reformation / Harry O. Maier -- Haec monstra edidit : Translating Lucan in the early seventeenth century / Yanick Maes -- Haunted by Horror : The Ghost of Seneca in Renaissance Drama / Susanna Braund -- "Fantasies so varied and bizarre" : The Domus Aurea, the Renaissance, and the "grotesque" / Michael Squire -- Epilogue -- Nachwort: Nero from Zero to Hero / Miriam Griffin.
Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War
Is Lucan's epic "Civil War" an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that desparingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers an answer to this split debate on the Roman poet's magnum opus. Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman Republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49BC, Lucan (writing during the reign of Nero) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than heroic and tragic. Lucan is oddly fascinated by the graphic destruction of lives, the violation of human bodies - an interest paralleled in his deviant syntax and fragmented poetry. In an analysis that draws on contemporary political thought ranging from Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty to the poetry of Vietnam veternas, as well as on literary theory and ancient sources, Bartsch finds in the paradoxes of Lucan's poetry both a political irony that responds to the universally perceived need for, yet suspicion of, ideology, and a recourse to the redemptive power of storytelling.
Law in a law-governed union (Recht in einer Rechtsunion) : the Court of Justice of the European Union and the free law doctrine
The Court of Justice of the European Union characterizes the Union as a Rechtsunion: a law-governed union. The conception of “the law” in Article 19 paragraph 1 of the Treaty on European Union transcends the Treaties, according to the Vice-President of the Court of Justice, Koen Lenaerts. This thesis demonstrates with reference to the work of Georg Jellinek that the Union is a non-sovereign state and, with reference to the work of Eugen Ehrlich in particular, that the state-based perception of law is a misperception. Not all production of law is reserved to the state and not all law is state-recognized law. There is extra-state law. It has been alleged that the Court of Justice of the European Union has had “a free law attitude”. The author discusses the free law doctrine developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and has made literal translations of writings in German, French and Italian by the main representatives of the free law movement. The free law doctrine provides a descriptive framework for the case-law of courts. The author describes the creation by the Court of Justice of four constitutional principles of Union law through its case-law. He concludes that every court is, to quote Hermann Kantorowicz, praeter legem law-creatively active and has, in that sense, a free law attitude. The decisions of judges are often volitional decisions. How the law will be applied should be predictable but volitional decisions, because they are unpredictable, are inconsistent with the principle of legal certainty. In the Union and its member states the judiciary and not the statute or “the law” is pre-eminent. The author suggests how the concept of law should be defined in a material Rechtsunion. He argues that societal legal norms could be provided with an appropriate position consistent with the principle of legal certainty by making the validity of a societal legal norm contingent on its material lawfulness.