Includes bibliographical references (pages 186-209) and indexes.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Introduction -- 1. The swift and the slow: Caesar's art of characterization -- 2. The great contest: constantia, innocentia, pudor, and virtus -- 3. Redefining loyalty -- 4. The limits and risks of Caesar's leniency -- 5. The barbarization of the enemy -- 6. Two army-communities and their effect on the Roman people -- 7. Shaping the future of Rome -- Appendix 1. Chronology of the Civil War (pre-Julian calendar) and narrative structure of the BC -- Appendix 2. Composition, publication and genre of the BC -- Appendix 3. The manuscript tradition of the BC: opening, end, and book division.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"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 for self-advertisement. A comprehensive approach, such as has been productively applied to Augustus' program, locates the Bellum Civile at the interplay between literature, images and politics"--
PERSONAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Caesar, Julius., De bello civili.
TITLE USED AS SUBJECT
De bello civili (Caesar, Julius)
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Historiography.
GEOGRAPHICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Rome, History, Civil War, 49-45 B.C., Historiography.