Assistant Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner recently published an article titled “Re-Membering the Palatine in Lucan’s Bellum Civile” in Lucan’s Imperial World: The Bellum Civile in its Contemporary Contexts. Edited by Laura Zientek and Mark Thorne of Brigham Young University, the volume was published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Weiner’s essay examines how Lucan, a Roman poet of the first century CE, uses his portrayal of monuments to reflect upon history, the project of empire, and social memory in his Bellum Civile (The Civil War). The epic poem is about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey that led to the end of the Roman Republic.
After first discussing the ways Lucan’s literary predecessors wrote about everlasting monuments as metonymy for an eternal Rome, Weiner focuses on Lucan’s depiction of the Palatine Temple of Apollo, written into the Bellum Civile’s historical narrative two decades before the construction of the temple on Rome’s Palatine Hill.
Weiner said that “the temple’s presence in the poem marks a clear instance of temporal disjuncture.” He argues that, in addition to reconfiguring Rome’s cityscape, “Lucan attempts to rewrite history, to reorganize Roman collective memory, and, perhaps, to offer subtle critique of his present emperor, Nero.”