Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond

The Roman Tradition at the Heart of the Modern
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-316-51644-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Format (B × H): 236 mm x 160 mm, Gewicht: 696 g

Reihe: Classics after Antiquity

Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vinken, Barbara

Lowrie, Michèle

Lowrie, Michele

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Figures of discord; 2. Oriental empire: Vergil, Georgics; 3. Empire without end: Vergil, Aeneid and Lucan, De bello civili; 4. The eternal city: Augustine, De civitate Dei; 5. The republic to come: Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize; 6. The empire to come: Houellebecq, Soumission; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Vinken, Barbara
Barbara Vinken is chair of French and Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Her most recent books include Krieg als Opfer? Franz Marc illustriert Gustave Flauberts 'Legende des Heiligen Julian' (2021), Bel Ami. In diesem Babylon leben wir noch immer (2020) and Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out (2015).

Lowrie, Michèle
Michèle Lowrie is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the College, University of Chicago. She is the author of Horace's Narrative Odes (1997) and Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (2009) and had edited Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace's Odes and Epodes (2009), and co-edited Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (2015) and The Aesthetics of Empire and the Reception of Vergil (2006).