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Books by Timothy Joseph
Lucan's epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of the cataclysmic "end of Rome" through the victory ... more Lucan's epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of the cataclysmic "end of Rome" through the victory of Julius Caesar and Caesarism in the civil wars of 49-48 BCE. In Thunder and Lament, Timothy Joseph examines how Lucan's poetic agenda moves in lockstep with his narrative arc, as the poet fashions the Pharsalia to mark the momentous end of the epic genre. To accomplish the closure of the genre, Lucan engages pervasively and polemically with the very first works of Greek and Roman epic - inverting, collapsing, undoing, and completing tropes and themes introduced in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and in the foundational Latin epic poems by Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and most of all Ennius.
Thunder and Lament is the first book-length study of Lucan's engagement with the Homeric poems and the works of early Latin epic. By focusing on Lucan's effort to "surpass the poets of old" - a phrase the poet Statius would use of his achievement - this study deepens our appreciation of Lucan's poetic accomplishment and of the tensions between beginning and ending that lie at the heart of the epic genre. Statius also read Lucan as a poet who both "thunders" and "laments", and Joseph argues that Lucan closes off epic's beginnings through gestures of thundering poetic violence and also through a transformation and completion of the conventional epic mode of lament. Equipped with these two registers of closure, each engaging and taking aim at epic's primal texts, Lucan positions the Pharsalia as epic's final song.
Papers by Timothy Joseph
Lucan adopts the topos of the “day of doom” from epic predecessors such as Homer and Virgil and e... more Lucan adopts the topos of the “day of doom” from epic predecessors such as Homer and Virgil and employs it on a grand scale, across his poem, for the day of Pharsalia. Lucan makes Pharsalia an all-consuming and collective doomsday, with cosmic forebodings and repercussions. The appreciation of this motif in the poem illuminates our understanding of the disputed phrase Pharsalia nostra / uiuet (9.985–6), which acts as both a polemical gesture towards Julius Caesar’s radically different account of that day in Book 3 of his De Bello Civili and a commemorative gesture towards the imperial Roman readers who have suffered as a result of the day of Pharsalia.
of the Iliad is the same as the variant dialectal form in Theogony 126 and the reading of the pap... more of the Iliad is the same as the variant dialectal form in Theogony 126 and the reading of the papyrus of the Catalogue of Women. We might therefore suspect, and with good reason, that the neo-and hyper-Ionicisms that existed in the texts of Homer and Hesiod stem from copies produced by rhapsodes in an Ionian setting, and that ( ) , and all once appeared in Zenodotus' copy of Hesiod's poems. The methods by which Zenodotus' readings have passed into papyri of the Theogony and the Catalogue, medieval manuscripts of the Theogony and the Hesiodic scholia are opaque; yet taken together they point to the fact that ancient scholars who came after Zenodotus took an interest in preserving his readings and thoughts -if only to disagree with them. This theory about an Ionian rhapsodic copy of Hesiod in third-century Alexandria has the additional conclusion that Zenodotus' text of Hesiod contained both the Theogony and the Catalogue of Women. 17 This may serve as another reminder that ancient views on the authenticity of Hesiod's poems differ from our own.
Book Reviews by Timothy Joseph
![Research paper thumbnail of Review of William Sanders Scarborough’s First Lessons in Greek (2019 [1881])](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62915043/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](New England Classical Journal, 2019
Occasional pieces by Timothy Joseph
Lucan's epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of the cataclysmic "end of Rome" through the victory ... more Lucan's epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of the cataclysmic "end of Rome" through the victory of Julius Caesar and Caesarism in the civil wars of 49-48 BCE. In Thunder and Lament, Timothy Joseph examines how Lucan's poetic agenda moves in lockstep with his narrative arc, as the poet fashions the Pharsalia to mark the momentous end of the epic genre. To accomplish the closure of the genre, Lucan engages pervasively and polemically with the very first works of Greek and Roman epic - inverting, collapsing, undoing, and completing tropes and themes introduced in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and in the foundational Latin epic poems by Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and most of all Ennius.
Thunder and Lament is the first book-length study of Lucan's engagement with the Homeric poems and the works of early Latin epic. By focusing on Lucan's effort to "surpass the poets of old" - a phrase the poet Statius would use of his achievement - this study deepens our appreciation of Lucan's poetic accomplishment and of the tensions between beginning and ending that lie at the heart of the epic genre. Statius also read Lucan as a poet who both "thunders" and "laments", and Joseph argues that Lucan closes off epic's beginnings through gestures of thundering poetic violence and also through a transformation and completion of the conventional epic mode of lament. Equipped with these two registers of closure, each engaging and taking aim at epic's primal texts, Lucan positions the Pharsalia as epic's final song.
Lucan adopts the topos of the “day of doom” from epic predecessors such as Homer and Virgil and e... more Lucan adopts the topos of the “day of doom” from epic predecessors such as Homer and Virgil and employs it on a grand scale, across his poem, for the day of Pharsalia. Lucan makes Pharsalia an all-consuming and collective doomsday, with cosmic forebodings and repercussions. The appreciation of this motif in the poem illuminates our understanding of the disputed phrase Pharsalia nostra / uiuet (9.985–6), which acts as both a polemical gesture towards Julius Caesar’s radically different account of that day in Book 3 of his De Bello Civili and a commemorative gesture towards the imperial Roman readers who have suffered as a result of the day of Pharsalia.
of the Iliad is the same as the variant dialectal form in Theogony 126 and the reading of the pap... more of the Iliad is the same as the variant dialectal form in Theogony 126 and the reading of the papyrus of the Catalogue of Women. We might therefore suspect, and with good reason, that the neo-and hyper-Ionicisms that existed in the texts of Homer and Hesiod stem from copies produced by rhapsodes in an Ionian setting, and that ( ) , and all once appeared in Zenodotus' copy of Hesiod's poems. The methods by which Zenodotus' readings have passed into papyri of the Theogony and the Catalogue, medieval manuscripts of the Theogony and the Hesiodic scholia are opaque; yet taken together they point to the fact that ancient scholars who came after Zenodotus took an interest in preserving his readings and thoughts -if only to disagree with them. This theory about an Ionian rhapsodic copy of Hesiod in third-century Alexandria has the additional conclusion that Zenodotus' text of Hesiod contained both the Theogony and the Catalogue of Women. 17 This may serve as another reminder that ancient views on the authenticity of Hesiod's poems differ from our own.
New England Classical Journal, 2019