Intrageneric Dialogues in Hellenistic and Imperial Epic

This contribution provides a new interpretation of a particularly difficult, yet little studied, passage from Aeneid 12, featuring Aeneas at war with a Theban hero. In explaining this passage, I will shed some new light on a problem of fundamental importance for the literary and political texture of the Aeneid: Virgil’s engagement with Theban myth.

The Posthomerica has been compared, not inaptly, to a Tarantino film (Hall). It is replete with carnage and slaughter of a graphic and sometimes grotesque variety. But though the epic’s violence is often noted, its precise nature, along with the character of its many battle scenes, has remained largely unstudied. In this paper, I aim to take a step toward characterizing the Posthomerica’s violence by focusing on one non-Iliadic feature of its battle narratives: their propensity to represent killing on a grand scale.

Nonnus in his 48-Book epic, the Dionysiaca, engages in a systematic criticism of the conventions and ethical assumptions of Homeric epic in order to express the superiority of his own approach to writing poetry. One of the dominant tactics that Nonnus employs is an attack on the heroic code of Homer and the primacy of Homeric heroes, particularly Achilles who appears throughout the poem as a symbol for Homeric authority and traditional poetics.

Long thought of as highly refined, densely allusive, and fiendishly obscure, Hellenistic poetry has hardly enjoyed a reputation for worldliness. As recent scholarship has amply shown, however, the poets of Ptolemaic Alexandria were in fact deeply engaged in the literary construction of a new Hellenistic world: a polycentric, heteronomous oikoumene extending from the Black Sea to the Western Mediterranean (Selden 1998, Bing 2005, Asper 2011, Thalmann 2011, e.g.).