Political Thought in Latin Literature

While much has been said about the political stance of Senecan tragedies in terms of their existence as written texts, Senecan scholarship has yet to consider the political implications of these texts as potentially performed (or at least imagined as performed).

At the very beginning of Seneca’s Oedipus, the protagonist announces that he “fell into ruling” (in regnum incidi, Oed. 14). From Oedipus’ point of view, ascent to the throne was a matter of contingency, in that he could not foresee it or account for it himself (Wootton 2007). My paper examines the politics of contingency and the limits of knowledge in Seneca’s Oedipus.

The late Republic witnessed a cultural and identity crisis in the Roman state as political, social, and military tensions produced increasing pressures on its republican form of government. Zarecki (2014), Atkins (2013), and others (e.g., Baraz. 2012) have demonstrated that Cicero used his philosophical works to address current political issues in the Roman state.

Political analogies abound in Roman discussions of natural philosophy, arguably the most

famous of which are found in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, which portrays atomic

compounds forming assemblies (concilia, coetus) and compacts (foedera) in the manner of

Republican Roman citizens. Numerous scholars since Fowler (1989) have noted the

‘republicanism’ of Lucretius’s social metaphors, and the poet’s frequent conflation of political

This paper argues that Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War can be read as an explication of Roman attitudes toward imperialism and international relations. Caesar has often been read as self-serving, tendentious, and propagandistic, and cynical readers assume that his text is little more than all about him. But Caesar's political shrewdness, literary sophistication, and rhetorical clarity – all highlighted in recent scholarship (Riggsby 2006, Grillo 2012, Grillo and Krebs 2018) – suggest that his texts are more than crude propaganda.