Thesiss

This dissertation is an analysis of the role of landscape and the natural world in Lucan's Bellum Civile. I investigate digressions and excurses on mountains, rivers, and certain myths associated aetiologically with the land, and demonstrate how Stoic physics and cosmology - in …

Landscape in Roman literature is manifest with symbolic potential: in particular, Vergil and Ovid respond to ideologically loaded representations of abundance in nature that signal the dawn of the Augustan golden age. Vergil's Eclogues foreground a locus amoenus landscape which …

This dissertation seeks to demonstrate Lucan's profound engagement and conflict with two ancient intellectual and literary traditions that can both be regarded as escapist, that is, as promising or postulating a sanctuary (whether physical or spiritual) from the world's troubles…