Arms and the Many: Multiplicity in Lucan’s Bellum Civile

Taking at its centre Lucan’s violent and subversive military epic on the Roman Civil War, this volume responds to an emergent interest in approaching ancient war narratives with critical theory and modern war studies.

Hannah-Marie Chidwick makes the case for the literary-critical suitability of using multiplicity to frame war narratives, a connection already made in philosophy, politics and critical war studies but markedly absent from the study of Roman war literature. She demonstrates how new perspectives can be gained by using diverse theoretical approaches to ancient texts.

Lucan’s Bellum Civile exemplarily portrays its characters and contents, above all the fighting body, as being simultaneously one-and-many. In the context of civil conflict the boundaries between soldier and civilian, violence and peace, war and diplomacy, are devastatingly distorted. Arms and the Many pioneers multiplicity as a reading practice: approaching a text informed by the ideas latent in multiplicity can reveal how Lucan’s poetry exposes the fragility and ferocity of the human body in conflict.

Hannah-Marie Chidwick is Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She is editor ofThe Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean (Bloomsbury, 2022)