Roman Poetry: Society and Politics

The Tree of Faunus (Aen. 12.766-790) may be modeled after the olive stump that is the recognition token between Odysseus and Penelope (Villalba). The Trojans cut down the intertextual tree (Thomas; Hinds) upon which sailors dedicated garments in thanks for divine protection. Yet why is Faunus associated with the sea (Tarrant)? Detecting allusion to Horace's "Pyrrha Ode", Ferenczi asks, "Why . . .

Martial uses pulvis (dust) and its cognates throughout his corpus to describe several situations, including travel (3.5, 12.5, 10.14), bathing (5.65, 11.84, 12.50, 12.82), and even the passage of time (1.82, 8.3). Two epigrams stand out: 8.65 and 10.6 describe the emperors Domitian and Trajan heroically dusty from military campaigns. The common military theme in these epigrams uses typical panegyric language (Schöffel), however, the dust imagery unites the emperors in a way that invites comparison and reflection on the changing political landscape of Rome.

Throughout his Bellum Civile, Lucan deploys imagery of violence against the self and against kin to convey the horror of civil war. From the opening lines, hands (manus/dextrae) that participate in this violence become a focal point for assigning or assessing guilt (1.3, 1.14, 1.23, 1.32). My analysis of the structured relationship between hand imagery and guilt in Lucan contributes to the debate on whether Lucan's narrator actively supports either party in civil war. (Ahl 1976, Masters 1992, Leigh 1992, Roller 1996, Bartsch 1997, Narducci 2002).

The epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis wrote, according to common consensus, either nine or ten poems to his lifelong friend and confidante Julius Martialis.