The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile: Literature, Ideology, and Community

Product Description


Traditional approaches have reduced Caesar's Bellum Civile to a tool for teaching Latin or to one-dimensional propaganda, thereby underestimating its artistic properties and ideological complexity. Reading strategies typical of scholarship on Latin poetry, like intertextuality, narratology, semantic, rhetorical and structural analysis, cast a new light on the Bellum Civile: Ciceronian language advances Caesar's claim to represent Rome; technical vocabulary reinforces the ethical division between 'us' and the 'barbarian' enemy; switches of focalization guide our perception of the narrative; invective and characterization exclude the Pompeians from the Roman community, according to the mechanisms of rhetoric; and the very structure of the work promotes Caesar's cause. As a piece of literature interacting with its cultural and socio-political world, the Bellum Civile participates in Caesar's multimedia campaign of self-fashioning. A comprehensive approach, such as has been productively applied to Augustus' program, locates the Bellum Civile at the interplay between literature, images and politics.


Review


:The Art of Caesar's 'Bellum Civile' is a perfect book for a college level Caesar class and an excellent book for those teaching Caesar at any level. --BMCR


Book Description


Participating in a new wave of Caesar studies, this book examines the Bellum Civile as a piece of literature written by a recognized intellectual and not simply a successful politician and general. Focusing on the peculiarities of Caesar's art, this reading explores the work's style, rhetoric, ideology and architecture.


About the Author


Luca Grillo is Assistant Professor of Classics at Amherst College, Massachusetts and has written on subjects as diverse as Vergil's women; narratology in Caesar; Augustine and the destruction of the temple of Caelestis in Carthage; and Nobilior's temple of Hercules Musarum. Current and future projects include a monograph on Fortuna and a commentary on Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus.