Description
The beauty and drama of Sicily's landscape inspired a rich Greek literary heritage as the myths of the Cyclopes, Arethusa's fountain, and Persephone's abduction often appear in Homeric epic, lyric, hymnic and pastoral poetry. Conflict between Rome and Carthage for hegemony over the lands and commerce in the Mediterranean erupted in the First and Second Punic Wars, culminating in the siege and recuperation of Syracuse by M. Claudius Marcellus in 212 BCE. As Rome's first overseas possession, Sicily merged with the culture of Roman Italy endowing Roman literature with Sicilian myth, Greek science, and Hellenistic pastoral. Sicily in the Flavian Literary Imagination provides fascinating analyses of the way aspects of Sicily's history and culture inspired a variety of authors from the late first century CE. The volume is divided into three major sections. The first section includes essays on the representation of Sicily, its people, its geography, and its mythical inhabitants in Flavian poetry and prose, whether historically accurate or imaginatively reconstructed. The chapters of this section explore Sicily's ideological and geographical space and place depicted in texts such as Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Statius' Silvae, and Theocritus' pastoral poetry. The middle section explores the Second Punic War through the narrative of the fourteenth book of Silius Italicus' Punica, with particular focus on Sicily's representation in terms of genre, intertextuality, and imperial politics. The third section on monsters and gods looks at prominent figures such as Proserpina and Aeolus, long associated with the island, as well as its monstrous inhabitants - the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens. The volume presents a cohesive and intellectually ambitious examination of Sicily's role in Flavian literature by providing unique insights based on linking poetry with prose. The chapters skillfully combine close reading with broader cultural interpretation and will be of particular interest to scholars of Flavian literature, Roman provincial identity, and intertextuality.