Neronian Literature

The literary culture of Neronian Rome is indeed remarkable. This course covers some of its most distinctive products across a range of genres: epic, tragedy, the novel, satire, philosophical prose, and pastoral. The literature of this period is markedly free from decorum and charm, and its hallmark is grotesque violence of thought and action, profound pessimism, and an often desolate hilarity. The Annaei are the most important literary circle in this period and students will engage with the works of the philosopher and tragedian Seneca as well as with those of his nephew, the epic poet Lucan. Stoicism is another dominant influence whether it be in Seneca's prose letters and dialogues or in the dysfunctional Stoic universe of the same writer's tragedies and Lucan's epic of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Other highlights include the mockery of the dead Claudius in Seneca's Menippean satire, the Apocolocyntosis; the wandering littérateurs who populate Petronius' Satyricon; and the explosive assault on literary declamation in the first satire of Persius. For those convinced that there must be something else in Latin beyond the canonical texts of the Golden Age, this is it.

O. P. Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford, 2000), chaps. 14-16.

Teaching: University classes.