After Virgil: The Poetry, Politics and Perversion of Roman Epic (Bristol Phoenix Press - Greece and Rome Live)

What constitutes an epic? Are epics all about kings and battles and glorifying the victors? And why do women so rarely appear in epics? These are questions that Virgil’s successors explored in their poetry in the 120 years after the Aeneid achieved its status as a classic and set the standard for Roman epic. In After Virgil—the first general introduction in English devoted to the post-Virgilian epic—Robert Cowan surveys the works of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus, among others, investigating how these poets employed both myth and history to explore the relationships between the gods and mortals, tyranny, civil war, issues of gender, and, above all, what it meant to be Roman under the emperors. Cowan dedicates each chapter to a single theme and explains how these later poets imitated, interpreted, reacted against, and even perverted those standards laid down by the Aeneid.