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.
Chaos in Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Neronian Influence*
Like so much else in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the concept of chaos that opens the poem is inherited rather than invented. The notion of a primordial chaos of some kind is at least as old as Hesiod, and Ovid probably had a Hellenistic precedent for using chaos as the starting point of a collective poem, 1 but among literary descriptions of this state, Ovid’s account both is the most detailed and has been the most broadly influential. Its influence on Latin poets of late antiquity is one theme of Michael Roberts’s article elsewhere in this volume. At a much later time and in a different medium, Ovid’s description almost certainly lies behind the astonishing “Representation of Chaos” (“Vorstellung des Chaos”) that serves as the prelude to Haydn’s Creation. The title of this paper reflects its twofold aims. The first is to argue that chaos in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is not limited to the poem’s opening episode but has a pervasive presence in the poem, both in the physical world and, more significantly, in the moral lives of human beings. My second * Some of the material in this paper has been presented to audiences in Princeton, Palermo, Lexington, Virginia, and New York. I am grateful to my listeners on those occasions for many helpful comments and suggestions. 1 Both the song of Silenus in Virgil Ecl. 6.31ff. and the song of Clymene in G. 4.345–47 combine a number of mythological episodes with an opening section on chaos (this seems the natural import of G. 4.347: “aque chao densos diuum numerabat amores,” “she was relating the numerous loves of the gods from chaos onward”), and it seems likely that these references reflect the structure and content of a lost Hellenistic or neoteric poem or poems.
Recovering the frontier state : war, ethnicity, and state in Afghanistan
Chapter 1 Table of Contents Chapter 2 1 Introduction Chapter 3 2 Ethnicity, Political Power, and Fragmentation Chapter 4 3 Rise of the Taliban and Civil War Chapter 5 4 The United States and War on Terrorism Chapter 6 5 Restructuring the Afghan State Chapter 7 6 Political Economy of Drugs and Warlordism Chapter 8 7 Afghanistan and Neighboring States Chapter 9 8 Conclusion Chapter 10 Bibliography