The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile

The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 235
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781139503211
ISBN-13 : 1139503219
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile by : Luca Grillo

Download or read book The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile written by Luca Grillo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile Related Books