Classical World

Whereas the deployment of gigantomachic motifs in Roman poetry has received a great deal of attention over the last thirty years, theomachy—gigantomachy’s thematic “cousin”—has until now been relatively neglected. Chaudhuri’s book has put theomachy, a battle waged by a human against the gods, squarely on the map; it will be the new starting point for this and many other aspects of Roman imperial poetry. In Chaudhuri’s capable hands, theomachy offers a unique portal through which to investigate a wide range of issues pertinent to Roman poetry of the early Empire (and beyond): philosophy, poetics, politics, and aesthetics are here refreshingly brought into contact with each other. Given the book’s wide range, anyone interested in nearly any aspect of the epic and tragic poetry of the first century ce will benefit greatly from Chaudhuri’s work.

After a brief introduction outlining the book’s aims, the study is arranged into nine chapters. Chaudhuri begins in Greece, offering a helpful discussion of theomachy in Homer and Attic tragedy that enables the distinctly Roman elaborations of the theme in the early Empire to stand out in starker relief. Chapters 2 through 8 offer a diachronic examination of theomachic gestures in Lucretius, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s Hercules Furens, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, Silius’ Punica, and Statius’ Thebaid. The ninth chapter provides a sustained discussion of the politics of theomachy, which is not to say that political issues have been neglected in earlier portions of the book. An epilogue that alerts us to the great staying power of Roman theomachic motifs by glancing at their reception in Renaissance and early modern literature rounds things out. A brief review such as this cannot hope to convey the many riches that await the reader in each chapter, but they are filled with nuanced, original, lucid, and persuasive readings of a very wide range of texts over a long and heterogeneous period of Roman history. Chaudhuri’s range, his sensitivity to each text’s [End Page 141] sociopolitical contexts, and his mastery of scholarship on a whole host of issues are truly impressive.

In general, then, the book delivers much more than its title suggests. And yet there are some puzzling omissions. Although Chaudhuri examines “warring with god” in Homeric epic and Attic tragedy in order to highlight how Roman theomachy differs from these texts, there is no discussion of how—if at all—Hellenistic poetry influenced Roman authors with regard to theomachy. The blurring of distinctions between men and gods, a process that Chaudhuri brilliantly analyzes in the Roman poetry of the first century ce, also characterizes Hellenistic ruler cult. Did Roman poets look to their Hellenistic predecessors for ways of handling the pressures and anxieties that obtain when the ruler is considered a god? An even more noticeable gap, given the book’s primary focus on Silver Latin Epic, is a discussion of Valerius’ Argonautica. Chaudhuri explains the omission of Argonautic subject matter by suggesting that it “engage[s] theomachy far more infrequently and indirectly” than other kinds of material (6). Even if this is true of Apollonius, whose Idas Chaudhuri rightly recognizes as a theomach (218–20, 263), the same cannot be said of Valerius’ Argonautica, which is implicated deeply in the issues at the heart of Chaudhuri’s study. Not only does Valerius foreground poetic immortality and imperial apotheosis in his dedication to Vespasian (1.1–21), but the narrative’s primary theme, the voyage of the first ship Argo, can be read as a theomachic venture. The wind god Boreas certainly sees it this way: when he appeals to Aeolus to unleash a storm in order to wreck Argo, thereby preserving the sacrosanctity of the sea, he implores him to “suppress the threats from mankind” (hominum conpesce minas, 1.606). None of this has a parallel in Apollonius’ version. It thus seems that Chaudhuri has missed an opportunity to...