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Drawing on a variety of contexts--politics, religion, philosophy, and aesthetics--Pramit Chaudhuri argues for the fundamental importance of battles between humans and gods in representing the Roman world. A cast of tyrants, emperors, rebels, iconoclasts, philosophers, and ambitious poets brings to life some of the most extraordinary artistic products of classical antiquity. Based on close readings of the major extant epics and selected tragedies, the book replaces a traditionally Virgiliocentric view of imperial epic with a richer dialogue between Greek and Roman texts, contemporary authors, and diverse genres. The renewed sense of a tradition reveals how the conflicts these works represent constitute a distinctive theology informed by other discourses yet peculiar to epic and tragedy. Beginning with the Greek background and ending by looking ahead to developments in the Renaissance, this book charts the history of a theme that would find its richest expression in a time when men became gods and impiety threatened the very order of the world. Cover -- The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Texts and Abbreviations -- Chronology of Poets and Emperors -- Introduction -- The Terminology of Theomachy -- Reading Theomachy in the Early Empire -- 1: Theomachy in Greek Epic and Tragedy -- Theomachy in the Iliad -- Diomedes: Divine Impulsion and the Legitimacy of Theomachy -- Patroclus: Overreaching and the Wall -- Achilles: Mortality and Divinisation -- Fathers and Sons: Generational Competition and Metapoetics -- The Tower of Babel: Monumentality and Fame -- Theomachy in Greek Tragedy: Didacticism and Politics -- Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes : Impiety and Independence I -- Sophocles' Ajax : Impiety and Independence II -- Euripides' Bacchae : The Struggle for Authority -- 2: The Origins of Roman Theomachy Lucretius and Vergil -- The Revaluation of Theomachy in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura -- Epicureanism, Fiction, and Fama in Aeneid 4 -- The Theomach Manqué -- Piety and Princeps -- 3: Theomachy as Test in Ovid's Metamorphoses -- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Lycaon -- Seeing and Knowing: Semele and Pentheus -- Art and Morality: The Pierides and Arachne -- A Material Girl in a Material World: Niobe -- How to Be a God: Achelous and Hercules -- Rulers, Gods, and the Poet: The Romanisation of Theomachy -- 4: Deification and Theomachy in Seneca's Hercules Furens -- Juno -- Deification and Tyranny -- Madness and the Sublime -- Virtus, Equanimity, and the Gods -- 5: Theomachy in Historical Epic: Disenchantment and Remystification in Lucan's Bellum Civile -- Massilia: Disenchantment and Desire -- Pharsalus: Gods Old and New -- The Eclipse -- The Semantics of Gigantomachy -- The Power of the Gods -- Caesar the God -- Versions of the Sublime: More Gods, More Theomachy -- Cato, Caesar, and the Hercules Oetaeus.
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