Caesar and Lucan

Undergraduate / Graduate

Selections from Caesar's and Lucan's treatment of similar episodes in their accounts of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar will let the class compare the differences between autobiography and historical distance, investment in the ideology of the moment and ideologies that recast earlier events, prose and poetic versions of civil war tropes, and perspectives on the Roman Republic before its collapse and a good eighty years later. Readings in English from the biographies of Plutarch and Suetonius will supplement the Latin readings from Caesar and Lucan, to be read in the original.