Roman writers of the late Roman Republic and early Empire developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the destabilization of the body politic. This volume examines how they used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery.

Frontmatter List of Illustrations 0: Introduction PART 1: Tabula Rasa: A New Kind of Plague Narrative 1: Roman Pestilence: Tenor and Vehicle 1.1: Experiencing and observing epidemic disease in ancient Rome 1.2: Theorizing fictions of the end 1.3: Caveat: on the dangers of invoking plague discourse 2: Livy, Pestilentia, and the Pathologies of Class Strife 2.1: Plague and seditio of the fifth century 2.2: Pestilence and the lectisternium of 399 BCE 2.3: Plague and Rome's ludi scaenici PART 2: Experiments in Apocalyptic Thinking 3: Human and Civic Corpora in Lucretius' Treatment of the Athenian Plague 3.1: Transgressing the threshold of death 3.2: Repetition, accumulation, and iterative mortality 3.3: Contending for "one's own": familial devotion and civic discord 3.4: Terminating the interminable: saecular and literary evolutions 4: Plague, Civil War, and Epochal Evolution in Vergil's Georgics 4.1: Plague and the (post-) apocalypse: inverting the ages in Vergil's Noricum 4.2: Bees and the body politic 4.3: Coda: the Cretan plague of Aeneid 3 5: That Other Dream of Plague: Augustus' Novus Ordo and Ovid's Origin of the Myrmidons 5.1: Noricum in Aegina: Ovid's Georgic plague 5.2: The ties that bind: familial bonds and the Aeginetan Plague 5.3: The old pietas of Aegina and the Augustan Principate 5.4: Toward a new kind of pietas 5.5: Ants as citizens: anticipating another dream of plague 5.6: No one wants a plague, of course: a chance to begin again 5.7: Coda: Metamorphoses 15 PART 3: Transmitting Roman Plague 6: Imperial Receptions: Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus 6.1: Lucan and the rabies of civil war 6.2: Quasi-plague and failed closure in Bellum Civile 6.3: Seneca's Oedipus 6.4: Refractions of a new order 6.5: Pro misera pietas! 6.6: Plague, individualism, and exemplary behavior in Silius Italicus' Punica 7: Relapse: Transmitting Roman Plague in the West 7.1: Endelechius and Paulus: Christian visions of a New Jerusalem 7.2: Visions of chaos, manifestations of order: plague iconography in the Italian Renaissance and beyond 7.3: A new order for homo sapiens? From biopolitics to bioengineering in Anglo-American fiction 7.4: Epilogue Endmatter Bibliography Index

...this outstanding work has already changed our knowledge of the late Republican imagery of the pestilence in the political culture and discourses. It is now a must-read for any future research on the plague metaphor(s) applied to the body politic beyond the Latin literature.

Presents the first book-length study in English focusing entirely on plague discourse in Latin literature Offers a comprehensive study of Latin authors - including Livy, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca - and their unique contributions to plague narratives Interprets the resurgence of plague narratives during the late Roman Republic and early Empire as a response to prolonged civil war, demonstrating an integral relationship between those narratives and the social and political contexts in which they are embedded Examines the reception of tropes developed in Roman plague narratives in a wide range of post-classical media, from early Christian poetry to early twenty-first-century films and novels

Hunter H. Gardner is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Greek, Latin, and the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. She is the author of Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (OUP, 2013) and co-editor of Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (with Sheila Murnaghan; Ohio State University Press, 2014).

Presents the first book-length study in English focusing entirely on plague discourse in Latin literature Offers a comprehensive study of Latin authors - including Livy, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca - and their unique contributions to plague narratives Interprets the resurgence of plague narratives during the late Roman Republic and early Empire as a response to prolonged civil war, demonstrating an integral relationship between those narratives and the social and political contexts in which they are embedded Examines the reception of tropes developed in Roman plague narratives in a wide range of post-classical media, from early Christian poetry to early twenty-first-century films and novels