Chapter 5 locates the Younger Seneca and Lucan in a shared conversation about the long-term ramifications of sole rule. It opens with a reading of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is the first text to theorize the metaphors of the healer and head of state. Using both to construct a persuasive ideal of imperial interdependence, Seneca described a body politic whose health vacillates in proportion to the virtue of its princeps. The sick heads and overzealous surgeons that crop up in his other works, however, confirm the risks of such an arrangement. Lucan took this idea as his point of departure in the Bellum Civile, which responds to the imagistic framework of De Clementia through the characters of Sulla and Pompey. Portraying the former as a surgeon who makes excessive use of the scalpel and the latter as a head who suffers the mutiny of his limbs, he portrayed a body politic that was harmed but yet unable to survive without its rulers. He thereby conveyed the futility of politics in a society doomed to civil war.

The section on Thomas Becket includes a letter from Becket to the Empress Matilda (daughter of king Henry I) who was based in Rouen at the time, and one from the Empress in response, reprimanding Becket for his behaviour towards her son, Henry II. The second part contains two parallel excerpts from the accounts, by Edward Grim and William Fitzstephen, of the murder of Becket in Canterbury cathedral in 1170.

Birinus, who was to become bishop of Dorchester and a missionary in southern England, came from Rome in the seventh century. An anonymous writer of the late eleventh-century wrote a distinctive Latin biography of Birinus, with a highly rhetorical style. Here the account of Birinus’ crossing of the English Channel, involving a miracle, is included, both in the Anonymous version and in a verse version of the thirteenth century by the prolific Latin poet Henry of Avranches.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.

The chapter analyses a series of puns throughout Lucan’s Bellum Civile on the insubstantiality and ephemerality of the reputation of Pompey the Great, showing how his former military glory is a thing of the past, and arguing that Pompey only achieves true and lasting fame in his death.

The word ‘hero’ in ancient terminology does not refer to the ’hero’ of a poem or play, and ancient epics do not require a central hero to unify the action. This understanding of the role of the leading figures in epic is still current for John Milton in Paradise Lost.

From Homer on, the first similes in epic are strongly paradigmatic and symbolic; they emblematise an order on the human or cosmic scale, showing a contest between order and chaos. This pattern is analysed from Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Lucan up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first similes show a deep understanding of this ancient template.

The ability of ancient biofiction to become actively political comes to the surface in this chapter. It focuses on biofictional receptions of Lucan’s Bellum ciuile (sometimes called Pharsalia), an epic written under Nero about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, in and around periods of revolutionary politics, and in particular in early modern England in the period leading up to and following the English revolution and in peri-revolutionary France. At the centre of the ancient and Renaissance biographical tradition about Lucan was the story of how the poet was forced to commit suicide by Nero crudelis (Martial 7.21.3) following his involvement in a plot to assassinate the emperor. For readers working through ideas of republicanism, reading Lucan’s text through the lens of the Life transformed the poet’s death into a function of his own epic, inscribed in the textual discourse of the Bellum ciuile itself.

This chapter explores the idea of the gift found in the classical writers and philosophers most widely read in central medieval Europe. It explores the explicit philosophical and moral treatments of generosity found in Seneca’s De beneficiis and Cicero’s De officiis, as well as the role played by gifts in literature, from Virgil’s Aeneid to the poems of Ovid. The chapter concludes by looking at how classical ideas about generosity were taken up by early Christian writers.

Chapter 2 is a detailed examination of three scenes that target the most brutal form of epic mistreatment: decapitation and further abuses aimed at the severed head. The first section analyses the death and abuse of Pompey in Lucan’s BC 8. It turns next to abuses in the second half of Statius’ Thebaid: first Tydeus’ cannibalizing of Melanippus’ head in book 8, and second the Thebans’ abuse of Tydeus’ own corpse in book 9. The last section treats the decapitation of the Carthaginian general’s ally Asbyte by Theron in Silius’ Punica 2, and Hannibal’s subsequent abuse of Theron’s corpse in retaliation for Theron’s slaying of Asbyte. These scenes are all built explicitly upon model scenes in the Iliad and Aeneid which the later epicists have infused with post mortem abuse and grotesquery either ignored or only insinuated in the earlier poems. Through consideration of the ways in which Lucan, Statius, and Silius expand upon their models, this chapter offers a vivid glimpse into the evolution of the motif of corpse mistreatment from the ‘classic’ texts of Homer and Virgil, who had sought (in unique ways) to set a limit on the level of violence congruent with the world of epic.

Chapter 3 focuses on funeral denial and perversion in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile. The first section details the elderly survivor’s recollection of the civil war between Marius and Sulla in BC 2. This flashback is crucial for Lucan’s handling of the issues of funeral rites as it anticipates the horrors to come, particularly the warped funeral for Pompey in book 8. Lucan expands Pompey’s death, abuse, and funeral rites over the final three books. The disparate scenes create a patchwork of repeated but slightly altered funeral rites, none of which function as a legitimate ‘whole’. The next section considers Caesar’s position vis-à-vis funeral rites by exploring four scenes that demonstrate his rejection of or lack of interest in what happens to the human body after death (including his own body). The chapter ends with the witch Erichtho’s ‘zombie’ prophetic corpse-soldier, his quasi-prophecy predictive of further death, and Erichtho’s paradoxical, almost loving funeral for the corpse-soldier in book 6. The chapter argues briefly in closing that Lucan lingers on issues of death-in-life, and life-in-death, as a means of highlighting his perception of Neronian Rome as a slavish ‘death-world’.