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Damien Nelis

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Papers by Damien Nelis

Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry, 2004

A considerable body of recent scholarship has been devoted to investigating the ways in which soc... more A considerable body of recent scholarship has been devoted to investigating the ways in which societies remember, studying not only what they construct as memorable but also why and how they do so. Adopting a narrower focus, this volume examines the ways in which different aspects and images of the Roman Republic are created and exploited by the Augustan poets. Our subject immediately suggests two obvious strategies:on the one hand, emphasis on a strictly historical project; on the other, concentration on versions of literary history. The latter has been more popular and influential in recent Latin scholarship, but the former has not been without its adherents, as the lively debate in recent historical research has fought over the value of ancient literary sources for reconstructing the early history of Rome and, crucially, for the origins of the Republic and the struggle of the orders. Simultaneously, recent work on Livy has provided strong support for a pre-Actian dating for the b...

The papers published in this volume were first delivered at a colloquium entitled ‘Lucain et Clau... more The papers published in this volume were first delivered at a colloquium entitled ‘Lucain et Claudien face à face. Une poésie politique entre épopée, histoire et panégyrique’, which took place at the Fondation Hardt, in Vandoeuvres, near Geneva, in November 2012. The contributors, an international team of scholars, take the reader from broader considerations of both poets in relation to politics and ideology, generic positioning, construction of individual characters and strategies of panegyric, to a stronger focus on investigating precise examples of intertextual dialogue between Claudian and Lucan. In general, these essays are implicated in, or have implications for, other topics, such as Latin poetic style, history and the uses of mythology, the Roman epic tradition, and the whole question of the development of literary cultures and how they are received.