| | With their tales of gods, heroes, and monsters, epic poems constituted the most important and prestigious literary form in ancient literature. This module explores how Virgil and Ovid transformed this Greek genre into a form that explored contemporary Roman issues through mythological subject matter: Virgil’s Aeneid follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas on his mission to found a new homeland for his people in Italy, while Ovid’s Metamorphoses weaves together tales of transformation from the beginning of the cosmos down to his own time. We will examine how these texts navigated the political climate in which they were written, under the principate of Augustus, but also how they relate to other aspects of their social, cultural, and literary context. Over the course of the semester, the module will trace the thread of the Roman epic tradition to explore how writers challenged, reread, and emulated earlier works. |
LOVE, WAR AND POWER IN ROMAN EPIC 
