The Poetics of Horror in Lucan's Bellum Civile and Statius' Thebaid

Abstract

Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Statius’ Thebaid have been traditionally critiqued as excessively and

grotesquely violent poems. More recently, scholars have reevaluated these epics by emphasizing

the thematic concerns to which such violence contributes. I contend that neither of these works

can be properly appreciated if we downplay their nuanced and indeed graphic interest in bodily

harm or subsume it under more palatable lines of criticism. This project presents a framework

that allows proper analysis of Lucan and Statius’ violent grotesquerie by arguing that both poems

can be profitably re-understood more specifically as cohesive narratives of horror. The project’s

conceptual framework of horror is derived from the philosophy of aesthetics and the emotions

and is bolstered by contributions from film and affect theory. I examine five areas within which

Lucan and Statius explore the potential of horrific imagery: an emphasis on horror as intensively

visual and rooted in complicit spectacle; the opening up, taking apart, and transformation of the

human body; the demand for humans to consume foul or taboo materials; pessimistic

cosmological frameworks; and the potential for the natural world to act as both a subject and

object of horror. Through theoretically grounded close readings, I demonstrate the distinctions

that can and should be drawn in what is often considered a single phenomenon and offer a new

lens through which to read the very distinct and innovative priorities of the Bellum Civile and

Thebaid.