The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry

403 Pages·2014·1.78 MB·English

by  Pramit Chaudhuri

The War with God

The War with God
Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry
Pramit Chaudhuri
1
1
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Contents
Preface ix
Texts and Abbreviations xiii
Chronology of Poets and Emperors xv
Introduction 1
1 Theomachy in Greek Epic and Tragedy 15
2 The Origins of Roman Theomachy: Lucretius and Vergil 56
3 Theomachy as Test in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 82
4 Deification and Theomachy in Seneca’s Hercules Furens 116
5 Theomachy in Historical Epic: Disenchantment and
Remystification in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 156
6 Paradigms of Theomachy in Flavian Epic: Homer, Intertextuality,
and the Struggle for Identity 195
7 The War of the Worlds: Hannibal as Theomach in Silius
Italicus’ Punica 231
8 Theomachy and the Limits of Epic: Capaneus in
Statius’ Thebaid 256
9 The Politics of Theomachy 298
Epilogue 322
Bibliography 329
Index of Passages 357
General Index 375

Preface
The war with god (‘theomachy’) forms one of the foundational themes of
mythology and literature, including the Christian story of Lucifer’s rebellion,
Ravana’s domination of the Devas in the classical Hindu tradition, and the
Greco-Roman myth of the battle between huge, serpent-legged Giants and the
Olympian gods (‘Gigantomachy’).1 The result of these conflicts is almost always
the same: the gods, multiple or single, eventually emerge victorious and the
cosmic order is maintained. Within Greco-Roman mythology, the early his-
tory of the universe witnesses some exceptions to this pattern: Cronus’ usurpa-
tion of Uranus and Zeus’ subsequent usurpation of Cronus demonstrate the
possibility of successfully overturning the divine order in a way thoroughly
alien to the monotheist conception of an omnipotent and eternal God. In
practical terms, however, antagonism towards Zeus and his fellow Olympians
appears as futile and disastrous as Satan’s towards God.
Mortals, too, fight their own wars against the Olympian gods, but after the
defeat of the supernatural and immortal Titans and Giants, human antago-
nism to the divine appears especially hopeless. Greek and Roman literature is
filled with accounts of such human-divine clashes. Sometimes these battles are
martial, like Capaneus’ challenge to Jupiter and his consequent death by the
god’s thunderbolt (discussed in Chapter 8); at other times they are more figur-
ative, as when Niobe’s children are killed because she had boasted that her
fertility was greater than that of the goddess Latona (Chapter 3). What brings
these diverse conflicts together is a common threat to divine authority—a pre-
sumption on the part of the mortal ‘theomach’ to greater power than he or she
actually possesses and a concomitant dismissal of the power of the gods. Those
characters, and their representation in classical literature, are the broad subject
of this book.
At first glance, the act of fighting against the gods appears paradigmatically
impious and absurdly foolish: in opposing the divine, one rejects correct moral
authority and misunderstands the order of power in the world. Thus, literary
accounts of such conflicts have often been interpreted in a didactic vein, with
the punishment of the rebels seen as a warning against arrogance and trans-
gression and as an exhortation to religious piety. If the lesson against overreaching
1 The relative status of Ravana and the Devas is made more complex by Ravana’s godlike qualities
and his invulnerability to all beings except humans. He is eventually killed by Rama, a human avatar of
the god Vishnu. Hercules is a similarly ambiguous figure, both divine and human, who comes to the
aid of the Olympians against the Giants yet in other myths attacks various gods (see Chapter 4).