Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination
Antony Augoustakis and R. Joy Littlewood
Abstract
The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape was greatly influential on the Roman cultural imagination. The Bay of Naples was a centre outside the city of Rome, a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity. And yet this is also a place of danger: Vesuvius inspires the inhabitants with fear and awe and, in addition to the majestic presence of the mountain, the Phlegraean Fields evoke the story of the gigantomachy, whilst sulphurous lakes invite entry to the Underworld. For the Flavian writers, in particular, Campania becomes a locus for literary acti ... More
The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape was greatly influential on the Roman cultural imagination. The Bay of Naples was a centre outside the city of Rome, a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity. And yet this is also a place of danger: Vesuvius inspires the inhabitants with fear and awe and, in addition to the majestic presence of the mountain, the Phlegraean Fields evoke the story of the gigantomachy, whilst sulphurous lakes invite entry to the Underworld. For the Flavian writers, in particular, Campania becomes a locus for literary activity and geographical disaster. In 79 CE, the eruption of Vesuvius annihilates a great expanse of the region, burying under a mass of ash and lava the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. In the aftermath of such tragedy the writers examined in this volume, Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, continue to live, work, and write about Campania, an alluring region of luxury and peril.
Keywords:
Italy,
Campania,
Naples,
Martial,
Silius Italicus,
Statius,
Valerius Flaccus,
Vesuvius,
Flavian period
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198807742 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198807742.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Antony Augoustakis, editor
Professor and Head of Classics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
R. Joy Littlewood, editor
Independent scholar, based in Oxford
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