Lucan's Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre
This thesis demonstrates that Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile takes epic to a new level, testing the generic paradigm, because Rome’s civil war is a new subject for epic poetry. Lucan’s epic presents civil war as the self-destruction of republican Rome, and close reading reveals the poem’s intricate relationship with Homeric, Virgilian and Ovidian epic. We see that it changes and exaggerates characteristic tropes of the genre, by techniques such as delay, digression and frequent intervention by a complex narrator / persona, whose dramatic intrusions are like the speeches of characters in a tragedy. Such a politically risky subject, a type of impious war where Romans fight against and kill Romans, necessitates a long preamble and an insistent narrator’s voice to justify poetic commemoration of such a crime. 
Unlike earlier epic where civil war is rare or treated only as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to peace, Lucan’s poem is wholly taken up with this type of internecine war, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It also includes the civil wars of Marius and Sulla, introduced as a mise en abyme to intensify this subject, which suggests the predictability of recurring civil war and ideas of persistent political instability. Lucan’s poem offers a detailed portrayal of the sea-battle at Massilia, and paradoxically, this inventive battle is the most ‘epic’ of its civil war battles, because many conventions of epic land battles are applied to this conflict on ships. Lucan’s sea-battle re-presents and revitalises epic topoi by their new location, the sea. 
The episode concerning Hercules and Antaeus is also an example of a mise en abyme, reflecting the focus of Lucan’s poem, the idea that civil war degrades both sides equally. It argues that the wrestling match between Hercules and Antaeus illustrates how participants in combat become similar and assume corresponding characteristics. This episode shows how the poem interacts with its own past battle narrative, relates to accounts of conflict in earlier epic, and reflects Roman gladiatorial spectacle. Lucan’s paradoxical poem presents the battle at Pharsalus more symbolically than a typical epic battle narrative. Rhetorical praeteritio of the unspeakable wounds, weapons and forms of death in civil war draws a parallel between the human body and the state of Rome. 
Lucan’s epic stretches the limits of the genre to overcome the difficulty of recounting Romans fighting against fellow Romans in civil war and demonstrates that there is more to this type of war than blood and guts and gruesome mutilation. Lucan’s poem is evidence for how much has been and how much more can be articulated through the language and tropes of epic.
Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius
This is a book that needed to be written in answer to a deep gap in our resources on Latin literature...we owe Fantham much gratitude for having the energy and wisdom to undertake this demanding and original project. Every Latinist should study her book. The book remains thoroughly absorbing from the account of late republican literary culture through the imperial, and especially the Neronian, periods, and continues to instruct and delight concerning cultural decline in the age of the Antonines.
A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700
It is a historical commonplace that Renaissance historians studied and modelled their works on the histories of the great historians of Greece and Rome. But these ancient historians were not equally popular in this period, nor with the same people, nor for the same reasons. It is with these variations that this survey is concerned. It attempts to chart the variations in their popularity, by counting their editions and classifying them by countries and phases; to work out the varying reasons for their popularity, by means of the analysis of their reputations; and to take some steps toward the discovery of the audience of these ancient historians. The period for which these attempts will be made is 1450 to 1700: between the invention of printing, when edition analysis becomes possible, and the victory of the "moderns" in the "Battle of the Books," when the ancients cease to be considered as greater than any modern historians. This study is, then, a small contribution to the study of the diffusion or "reception" of the classical historians, and also an attempt to find some quantitative evidence for statements about changing tastes in history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Editions of twenty-one works of seventeen historians were analyzed (Sallust, Tacitus, Josephus, and Xenophon each being represented by two works, the others by one). The figures here, as elsewhere in this note, are taken from a single source: F. L. A. Schweiger, Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie, three volumes (Leipzig, 1830-4). This source is not complete; it can be shown to lack a considerable number of Spanish translations, for example. However, I have used it because it would take many years' work to produce a complete list, and because I hope that the relationships expressed in the figures I have drawn from it are generally valid, even if the precise figures are not. If it is biased in any way, it is likely to be in over-representing German editions and translations, as Schweiger gleaned most carefully in that field.