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Hello everyone, and welcome to the new books network podcast. I'm Benjamin Phillips, I'll be your host today. Joining me is, well, a baby asleep on my chest, who hopefully you will not hear throughout the recording. But who you will hear from is Dr.
Kyle Jervais, Dr. Randy Bogorjowski, and a PhD candidate, Sarah Gremchenesi, who have joined us today to discuss their new work in the Brill series on Luke and Inflavian Epic. Welcome to the show. Thank you.
Thanks. Good to be here, Ben. Thank you. It's good to have you guys.
Good to read your book and this bracing introduction to these poems and to the scholarships around them over the last coming on 100 years now since kind of CS Lewis first heralding. Hey, you should actually read these guys back in the day. Tell us about this project and how we got started. If you could.
I hope you want to start us off. I will start us off because I think I started this off actually this some I was asked to write this book in the grand tradition of academia, someone more senior to me was asked to write it first and didn't have time for it and said, but maybe Kyle will do it. And I said, actually, that does sound like a really cool project, but I don't want to do it on my own because Luke and Inflavian Epic is a large topic and my specialty is stage just in particular, but Randy Park was healthy down the whole way for me at Western has some brilliant thoughts on on the project. And so we kind of started on the project together and then a little way in a former PhD, and my student of ours, now PhD Sarah, we brought her on board first as a research assistant and then she was doing such good work on the larynx in particular that we said, hey, do you want to be a co author?
And that's kind of how the gang all got together and the project got going. Yeah, very good. Congratulations on getting a co author title before the doctor. That's a dream for jumping into job market.
Thank you. Yeah, it's definitely an amazing opportunity and working with Kyle and Randy is always a great time. Yeah, very good. So, this grouping of poets, the successor poets after all of it.
Why you mentioned in the beginning, they're not usually all grouped together or the subject of common study. Why have you guys chosen to lump these four? Randy, you probably have some smart things to say with us. I don't know about smart things, but I have things to say about this kind of issue.
I mean, there are, I think, a couple of reasons why we are interested in this particular grouping. Some of them we talk about a little bit in the introduction to the book. And that is that, you know, when you think about the sort of the big time scale of Latin epic, there's a very tight grouping of these four epic poets who's work survives to us. Luke and and Valerius, Laka, since Stacius and Silious Etalicus.
And there's a bit of space before Luke and between Albin and Luke and there's quite a lot of space after Silious Etalicus and then the next Latin epic poet who's work comes down to us. And so the first reason I think to group these together is that sort of that just chronological set that they are close together. I think it's also true that they have this common thread in their reception histories where Roman epic from the imperial period post Augustine Roman epic that is these five poems or four epic poets have a sort of shared history of being admired in antiquity and then at some point losing that admiration and being denigrated for a long time. And then in the late 20th and early 21st centuries being redeemed to be, you know, good poets.
And so that common thread is something that encourages grouping the study of these poets and these poems together. It is also just a practical issue that you know Kyle mentioned that we got started on this project when someone from Brill approached him to work on the project, which means that as a practical consideration, we have the series of research perspectives and classical poetry to consider. And this was a sort of a space in that series where there was room for a book to sort of complete the coverage or fill out the coverage that that series works on so there's a sort of practical consideration of what's needed for the series as well as a more academic or intellectual consideration of the tight chronological grouping and the common reception histories of these poems. Yeah, very good.
So speaking of these poems, we hear the New York's network as we discussed, we kind of have two potential audiences, one of people who are invested in these poems already looking to look for the next scholar. And some people, I imagine who are clicking on this because they see epic, they've read the India, maybe they have all of it on their shelves and they want to hear about the rest. So if you guys could just quickly introduce us who these poets are and what their poems are, this beginning with Luke and being the first in time, Dr. Korgie Jowski.
Sure. Yeah. So as Kyle mentioned, I wrote the first draft of our chapter on Luke and I do want to emphasize that the whole book was a collaborative project and you know we have all worked on every part but it is true that I think Kyle brought me on to the project in part because I have some expertise in the project. And I have some expertise and I've done some work before on historical epic.
That is, Luke and and Silious Attalicus in this period of Roman epic poetry so it makes sense for me to talk a little bit about Luke and he was a poet of the Neuronian period. He was a nephew of Seneca, Seneca the younger, and he was sort of in the high circles of power when Seneca was an advisor to Nero. He was raised very near the court with Nero and was very similar and aged in Nero they were friends and they were in the same sort of writing group together. At some point, the biographical tradition tells us that that relationship went sour but for a long time, Luke and was the sort of, you know, friend and and port poet of the the Neuronian period.
He was extraordinarily prolific he wrote all kinds of stuff we only have his his epic poem that survives his poem that sometimes called farcalia sometimes called the Bellum Qile or a poem on the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey. And it's, it's a poem that is both in the tradition of Roman historical epic that is it's an epic poem that's not on a mythological topic but a poem about historical events. So, I think one of the great sort of themes in scholarship on Luke and poem is that it is a response to Virgil's and it is very much post Virgilian. Some scholars have called it an anti and he did so if the need is a poem that is largely about the Augustine project and has lots to say it is if the need is is overtly positive and possibly covertly negative about the Augustine project.
And so it's kind of the other way. It is, it is a poem that casts Caesar as a tyrant and a villain and is in many ways overtly negative about Caesarism. And yet there are ways in which the poem is also subtly very positive about about Caesar and the sort of the big charisma and power that he had. So, Luke and was extraordinarily prolific and wrote lots of poetry.
When things went wrong with his relationship with Nero they went very wrong. He was implicated in the so called Pezonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero and was was made to commit suicide. And so, you know, he died quite young but he left us this poem that is exuberant and and sort of carries us away with its its energy in the same way as the character Caesar sort of carries away the Roman world with his energy. And so I could keep going forever but I think maybe there are other authors who could use a little time as well.
There are including a much less well known one in in Valerius wakus. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have nowhere near the amount of say as I said on that mostly because we just don't have it so very little remains of various black is his biography we just really don't know that much about who he was or who he was friends with. I'm going to tell you in the 90s after Valerius dies says we've recently lost much in Valerius wakus so he offers a little bit too very so we know that he had influence among influential Roman authors but we don't have a lot more than that.
And he pretty much disappears after the best in terms of overt references that we have a lot of work on but his ethics which is the only remaining texts that we have because I think the arcanada is a retelling of I believe this is our God is the story of Jason. And the Argonauts as they go on their journey to the jungle for the Golden Police and that epic is it has a lot more modeled on Virgil than it kind of follows in Virgil's but that's a bit more. And it is often divided into a two pronged epic structure where the first the first half is a more positive and heroic. And the second half is seen as a little bit more pessimistic or tragic almost and that is reflected in both the structure of the narrative as well as Jason's own characterization.
So yeah, sorry not terribly unlike the two divisions of the Indian times can be cast as a right. Yeah. And then the other valerius was lost right until until the Renaissance stations stayed along for a long time and some people might have met him in Dante already before this but why don't you talk about that Dr. Cut.
Yeah, exactly if you know if you're from outside of classics and you know a epic poet after it might be in my few stations you know especially thanks to his cameo for fairly long cameo in Dante. Yeah, he was kicking around right from the beginning. I personally think he's got the most fun stories. He's the by is about the sons of edifice edifice who accidentally killed his father and areas of mother and then things just keep going bad.
His son end up fighting to the death for their father's throne and be the by is the long story about that disastrous civil war at thieves and then the accolade much shorter poem and the fragmentary poem because it probably was cut off by stations with death is about the early days of Achilles life in particular the episode of him cross pressing on the island of Skyrose his mother hides him there from the Trojan war and he cross dresses there and and and falls in love with the king's daughter and then he's eventually found out by Ulysses and diabetes. We're doing biographies right so stations, Julius by Pena Stacious, but until for the Middle Ages until 1417 you knew him as perpinnias Stacious, circular who was a teacher of rhetoric from to lose. One of our themes in this book is the reception histories of these authors and they almost all of them have sort of a moment in the Renaissance with Valerius and Silious if they're rediscovery with Stacious. It is the rediscovery of a third set of poems he wrote the Sylvae, which are a lot of them are autobiographical and that was when the modern or the post classical world learned that he was in fact not a French teacher rhetoric but a a a courtier of division and a professional poet who spent a lot of time sucking up to the people in the church and that was the beginning of the decline of Stacious is represented reputation because we we are suspicious of people who fawn over emperors and we are for even less good reasons.
So people who come from the south and east so there's an interesting there's an interesting sort of story about Stacious reception based on that in terms of the abacus themselves. I mean, I think people come for the myths because they're quite interesting and they say at least for my money for the for the intertext rally. So I think of all of these four poets and I'm very biased I love Stacious, but of all of these four poets he makes most skillful use of his predecessors. Certainly people like Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, which is why it's exciting that we can do this book with these authors together.
But a whole range of Greek authors, other Latin authors and one of the really exciting things about all of these authors is most of the models that they are working with still survive, largely intact. And so we can see in detail sort of the skilled way they work with their models and change them and appropriate them and twist them and things like that. So that's kind of not shell, I guess, what Stacious is and his epics. Oh, and you are muted then Benjamin.
Oops, thank you. The vibe if I'm not mistaken is the only one of these epics that survives in its entirety, right? It is it is resolutely complete. Like the orbit of metamorphoses, it ends with a it ends with an epilogue declaring that I have completed this poem declaring sort of worryingly that the emperor has read it and loved it.
And the emperor in question is the mission who like Nero is one of the bad emperors. But yeah, it is a rarity among ancient epics for being complete. And that's another interesting thing with this project, right? We're also dealing with very incomplete epics, Lucan, Valerius, flakus and the accolade, which breaks off in the middle of the book.
So you have to see sort of different different modes of writing, I guess. Yeah, I can interrupt for a second. Sally's is also apparently complete. It is complete.
And it's also the longest, right? It is. It is quite long. And I suppose I can take over and start talking about Sally's.
Some people like to say serious, but you know, I prefer to anglicize it as as Sally is the the epic that we have written by Sally's Italian, so it's the punica. It's a historical epic on the the second unit war, the war against Hannibal. And it is quite long. I'm.
It is what 17 books. Yeah, so and that 17 is an odd number and we've just been talking about the complete state of poems. And you might think, well, if it's 17 books surely, you know, he was planning on writing some more and that's probably incomplete. And, you know, when you have 17 books, you can struggle to divide up on as we often divide epics into sort of groupings of three books or four books, or even to divide it in half between, you know, a first half and a second half that we've already talked about the need being divided into two halves and and and Valerius's Argonautica sort of potentially being a sort of to have a poem of two halves, I think.
One interesting point that has been made about 17 books is that it is the total number of books that Virgil wrote that survived so if you add up the 12 books of the Indian and the four books of Georgics and the the the echologues you get 17 books and Sally's Italian was reportedly a huge fan of Virgil we can see that in his poetry and also in the biographical tradition that he was was devoted to Virgil so it's conceivable that that that's a reason for 17 books. But, you know, it doesn't show any obvious signs of incompletion comes to a satisfying conclusion the final book is about the same length as the others so it's, I think, a complete poem. Right so we have been talking a little about biography of these authors, Sally Sitalikis was a Roman senator he was in fact a consular so he had been a consular his political career was largely under Nero, and this didn't stop him from, you know, being a reasonable success in the fladian period and and writing this enormously long epic poem on the second unit war. Like all of our other authors, Sally S makes good use of his predecessors and I think this is a point that I want to emphasize something that Kyle brought up that these are poems for whom a lot of models and predecessors are still excellent for us to see the point has been made in the past that this period the the Iranian and fladian periods are the the periods in which the Augustine period became classical in which poets made use of the Augustine poets as real models.
So, unlike lots of other classical poetry, we can see exactly how the these, the Iranian and fladian poets are making use of their predecessors and receiving the the work of earlier poets and I think that's really interesting and it's something that that's Silious does a lot. He had a reputation in antiquity for for writing very elusive poetry. I think however that you know at least for me, the Silious's poetry is is sort of a pleasure to read partly because despite the fact that it is really elusive and makes good use of its predecessors, it is at least superficially really straightforward. It's kind of easy to understand what Sally is saying in a way that more mannerist poets and I would put Stacey's in this category are not super easy to understand.
So, you know, it's it's Silious is at least on the surface very accessible in a way that someone like Stacey's or Valerius Flocus for that matter is is not that accessible. Now, often in Latin poetry, that kind of accessibility is an illusion. So we see that kind of thing in Lucan. I think a particularly famous example is Catullus where it gives us the impression of being really open and spontaneous and everybody can understand exactly what's going on.
But when you dig a little deeper, you see that Catullus is actually very sort of deliberate and careful and detailed in the way that he writes poetry and there's a lot that you can dig into and I think the same thing is true for Sally's Italian. I think as a way of introducing Silious and talking about the sort of overall shape of the book that we've written on Lucan and Flavian Epic, it is worth pointing out that Silious is, I think, the purest example of the kind of reception history that we think links these these poems and poets. And so I think that the way that the poet was very, very, very famous was the poet who was relatively highly regarded in antiquity enough that his poetry survived, which was lost for a long time but you know did survive was denigrated for a very long time as the worst of all Roman epic poets. And you can see this even up through the late 20th century people talking about just how bad Silious's poetry is and then, you know, last of all in the last of all these poets in the 21st century, now we can see that people are saying no actually Silious is really good and we should appreciate the merits of Silious.
So it's an example of the the the the the reason why we wanted to sort of historicize and contextualize that history to try to understand what is it about these poems that made that sort of common story go along because I think, you know, for me at least it was my thinking about Silious and my sort of earlier readings that worked about Silious that helped me to see that this was an interesting area of focus for working on these poets. Well, you've set up the transition beautifully. So thank you for summarizing all these but explain there's this narrative of redemption, you know, as we mentioned earlier, I mentioned throughout the 30s, Lewis is saying read Luke and Stacey's you have your occasional oddball promoting them as well. But to tell us about how you get picked up and the age of the companion and everything, not another popular again.
So I might jump in on that. And I think, I mean, Luke was quote unquote redeemed first and it's kind of interesting that these have gone more or less in chronological order. Stacey is the one I always like to talk about. And actually one of the interesting things about working on this project with Randy in particular is he is very suspicious of these sort of redemption narratives and very interested in the reception as a reception as an object of study in itself.
I started working on Stacey's just kind of at the tail end of when scholars were really motivated by that narrative and my supervisor for instance Bill Dominic was one of the people in sort of really the first modern generation of redeeming Stacey's and a lot of their work was really motivated and animated by saying no Stacey's impact is not about Stacey's is a good author and Randy would therefore say, you know, kind of buying into that narrative which is which is a narrative and not necessarily a real thing. But for all of these authors I think as a function of being later than someone like Virgil and as a function of more than one of them sort of staying with false modesty that they are not as good as someone like Virgil and as a function of making obvious reuse of previous poetry that we have. All of this encouraged scholars to see them as coming late to the party and meeting they're not as good as their predecessors and just sort of shamelessly copying their predecessors. And then I think you're talking there Benjamin, but you muted.
Go ahead ahead. Sort of in the well really be like you know in the later part of the 20th century but certainly toward the end of the 20th century. We talk about a confluence of a few different events postmodern thinking which is suspicious of things like cannons and more open to things outside of, you know, maybe the Homeric for Jillian cannon. New technologies that especially databases that allow you to search for textual similarities between poems allowed scholars to dramatically open up the number of potential potential elusive links between authors and just appreciate how incredibly rich the engagement of these later authors are where someone like Virgil.
And two other things. Oh, a bunch more people getting PhDs in classics than there were in earlier times and therefore as you know, Virgilian studies or videos or American studies were getting crowded and people were sort of looking further field. What was the last thing Randy? Yeah, four things.
It was that critical mass on pressure to go to other posts but kind of frameworks for being able to do so. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, work on earlier more sort of poets more central to the canon gave and especially for authors like Valerius Blackus and Siley who did not have a reception history at all until the modern period. There were just no tools in the toolbox to understand them.
And so being able to borrow and adapt tools from scholarship on earlier authors, which is sort of a pleasant, pleasant parallel to the authors themselves boring and adapting from earlier authors. All of that suddenly gave the tools and impetus to start working on these poets more seriously and more deeply and Randy in particular I think would emphasize that we did not therefore suddenly discover that these poets are good. Just aesthetically, whereas we used to think they're bad incorrectly, but we sort of discovered complexities and richness in them that allowed us to appreciate them deeper and more subtle level. So you even say at one point in the introduction that they've kind they've become good because we need them to.
Can you unpack that for us a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I can jump in and talk about this a little bit. I think, you know, when Kyle was just talking now about how having a sort of theoretical model or approach that was developed for reading Virgil available to adapt to read someone like Siley Sautelikus who does not have the sort of history of people reading his poetry that Virgil does is really helpful and that reminds me of a story from when I was a graduate student when I was first learning about Siley Sautelikus and one of my classmates was saying, you know, I'm going to write a dissertation about Siley Sautelikus because I'm almost nobody writes on Siley Sautelikus. So I can, you know, it'll be easy to find something original to say, whereas if I was going to write about the Aeneid, there's a million people writing about Virgil and, you know, how can how can I come up with anything that hasn't already been said before?
You know, and the idea of being that it's sort of easier to write something that is impactful and original about an author that doesn't get a lot of attention. And so I think that's a very interesting reason someone might say, I want to write on Valerius Lothis's Argonautica rather than on Statius's, the buy, you know, that there's sort of space. And I understand that, but I think that can be really difficult to sometimes it's easier to write about the Aeneid as I wrote my dissertation about the Aeneid because there's a big conversation to jump into and because, you know, when you say something even slightly interesting about the Aeneid, other people are interested because the Aeneid is kind of at least in classical circles in these days, the Aeneid is a bigger deal than Siley Sautelikus's Punega. And so it can be really, it can be really challenging to try to find a foothold in authors like Siley Sautelikus or Valerius Lothis into a lesser extent, Luke and Nastatius.
It can be challenging to find a foothold and something to work on. And this is part of the reason why I can, sorry, go ahead. I was saying no footnotes to get angry at and write about. Yeah, yeah, no footnotes to get angry at, no sort of no arguments to stake a position in no nothing to to jump into.
And so I have always found it easier to write on the more covered and more talked about authors. And that I think is a demonstration, the point that reception studies as a field has made to us which is that works become more readable the more they are read. There's more to say about something when other people have had lots to say about it before. And so, you know, it becomes possible for us in the 21st century to write about these authors as more of us are writing about these authors.
And so, you know, it becomes easier and more interesting. It becomes easier to find publication venues. It becomes easier to have people think that something that you have to say about these authors is significant. It becomes easier to find interesting things to say about these authors because you can bounce off other people's ideas and you don't have to sort of come up with everything from from the beginning.
And so this is this is why I say that now in, you know, in this moment, it's not that we can suddenly appreciate that these poets are, you know, are good poets and these poems are good poems so much as the fact of us turning to them and reading them and having a discussion with each other about these poems is what makes them readable is what makes them interesting. It's what makes them good to work with. And I can't resist jumping in because I just love the parallel between the scholarship and the authors themselves. I mean, something that until the sort of redemption of all these authors, something that scholars were really fighting against is this impression that if you come into a crowded field as Luke and Anastasia and all these people did, there's nothing left to say.
And the point that Randy has been making is that in the scholarship, it's exactly the opposite, the more crowded the field, the richer the conversations you can have and modern studies on the intertextuality of these poems make exactly the same point. The fact that Stationson and Luke and all the others had so much coming before them allowed them to say so much more than if they had been writing in sort of a pristine state of writing it back here. We kind of stopped feeling the anxiety of influence for them. Exactly.
Right. So how has that C change like born out in the interpretation of these poems? Like, what are some of the new interpretive questions that these are, this is generated for these poems? Oh boy, this is where we're editing for the second.
Yeah. Well, I mean, so one question we're still, I still don't think we've seen the end of is the old question of that was borrowed from Brazilian scholarship of pro and anti imperial readings. And that animated a lot of early scholarship. I think all four of these authors.
And there are a number of scholars that will say that's a pretty tired debate now and let's open it up in different directions. One area that I find particularly exciting in all of the authors is the intersection between socio called socio political readings of the poems and literary readings of the poem. So some of the coolest interpretations I've seen are talking about things like how the Roman world had changed politically and culturally in the or the Flavian era compared to say the Augustine period and how all of these poets sort of explore those changes in part by exploring their relationship with earlier authors. So, you know, Stacey's might say that my the by is sort of different than the in the in the both in a literary sense and in a sense that it's being written in a different social political milieu.
So I've got others. I think Randy Sarah jumping. So, I think that's very interesting. Yeah, I definitely want to give space to Sarah to say something about questions about hilarious luck and lots of things about that.
I may say some things I, you know, despite the fact that that I feel like I feel tempted to talk forever about look and I actually think maybe talking about Siles is a little more interesting in this regard just because the new directions are newer in Siles so of course, you know, as Kyle says, one of the first things that people do when they try to tackle a Roman epic poet is the question whether the poet is, you know, supportive of the emperor or not but I think that that you know it is true that scholarship on all these poets has sort of moved beyond that question both in terms of more nuanced versions of political readings of the poem poems but also more sort of just ways to appreciate these ethics that are not explicitly political in that way. So one of the ways that the people have recently approached Siles is poem is to talk about the issue of exemplarity, which is to say that the poem offers us a lot of figures who are both positive and negative models. And so in this poem about the war against Hannibal, Hannibal is a sort of interesting model he is a kind of you know anti hero and sometimes Romans can be assimilated to Hannibal or divorced from Hannibal. There's a fight in the poem over the legacy of Hercules, Hannibal thinks that he is a new Hercules but also Scipio thinks that he is a new Hercules and the question of who gets to sort of to claim the inheritance of the past is a really interesting one for me so much of authority and power relations and politics in the present is about who gets to tell the story of the past and who gets to claim the authority of the past.
And one of the ways that Siles is poem does that is through these exemplary figures so one of the first monographs in a long time on Siles's Punica was Ben Tivings exemplary epic about exemplarity in the poem. And I think that's been that's been really nuanced in interesting ways. So we talk about sort of the way that Siles uses the Virginian model of the sort of dual inheritance or dual exemplarity where two figures take over or compete for a model or a later figure is sort of influenced in the titles and this happens in the in Siles all the time. Another I think really interesting thing that people have argued recently about Siles is that Siles and I associate this in particular with with what Bob Cowan has called side shadowing like foreshadowing but side shadowing but side Siles is he seems to be really interested in what we might call or what people these days call counterfactual history what would have happened if this hadn't been this way if it hadn't been for Hannibal would we have still had this war if it hadn't been for you know Scipio would things have come out the same way and sort of exploring those alternative historical paths in a way that allows him to think about whether it's people or larger historical forces I associate that sort of question with Tolstoy you know that if there hadn't been Napoleon with things have come out the same way in that war and Siles is interested in those questions too.
And I think that's a really interesting way to read the poem so that there are these sort of new directions that are coming out in ways that both adapt older models of reading like this question of exemplarity and also develop sort of new ways of reading Roman poetry of like this issue of counterfactual history or side shadowing and just one last point that I would make about this is that I think it's super interesting to think about the question of civil war in the the Punica because you know this is a book on Luke and in Flavian epic the title suggests that we are interested in the relationship between the Flavian epic poets and their predecessor Luke and we could characterize this these poets as the epic successors of Luke and so even though the second Punica war is very much not a civil war because you know it is against the Carthaginians the great enemies there are all kinds of ways in which the Punica characterizes that second Punica war as a civil war and uses it to explore the sort of civil wars that Rome had experienced both leading up to and in the Flavian period one of those is simply a program of allusions to Luke and one that's really interesting to me is thinking about what it must be like for a reader in the Flavian period where Carthage is a major Roman city and almost a sort of second Rome to read about a war between Roman Carthage as though Carthage were this great for an enemy and it very much isn't anymore if the if the Punica wars had been fought in the Flavian period they would have been civil wars and so reading this sort of foreign war as civil is something that I think is is another interesting new direction in ways to read the Punica war as civil war in ways to read the Punica. Fascinating. So I've gathered a whole grab bag of future directions but we've been threatening that Sarah is going to talk about it. The Rapping Age, yes.
I can talk about a couple of different directions that the Larian scholarship is going in. I think I mentioned we're talking about about because intertextuality is now so much more direction that is able to be taken a lot more study has been especially with new technology. So I think that the ability to use some searches to determine when the officers are using directly using hilarious it will increase the amount of work on intertextual reference in from hilarious. There's also a lot for a lot of the history of the scholarship of on hilarious flakis.
The focus was not on so much on socio political discussions it was more on trying to create a workable text that was valuable to study for a long for a long time just coming up with a manuscript that wasn't super practice was a focus. And so now that we kind of have a better a better we're kind of a little bit more past that textual criticism stage that was necessary to kind of cement the poet's voice in the first place. We're more able to look at what he was intending to do or what he ended up doing with that voice. And so there have been recently a lot more a lot more articles and discussions on whether or not it is a positive or negative engagement with the politics of the time.
And so there are there are there are evaluations like Stover, who talks about the positivity of the narrative, whereas we're seeing says that it's impossible to create a great positive interpretation of it. And then there are of course more balanced perspectives. And then I think that the most the direction that is going to be most beneficial, or at least that is seeing a lot more progress is the discussions of the lariest is over section. And so more more bold interpretation of the lariest is people seeing the lariest is influence elsewhere include Kyle who has identified in John Garland a reference to the lariest focus and stuff like that.
So more more reevaluation of previous text to stop reinforcing that same narrative that oh, hilarious just wasn't that important because his work wasn't studied that deeply reevaluating that notion is what I think we're headed for that. Kind of sound like there was throwing things over to me. Can we talk about this Benjamin or do we need to move on. Yeah, I mean, like we've been talking in broad stroke the brother reception as in sort of a bit of a theoretical register right you know what does it what does it mean for a poem to have a rich or or a non existing perception history what are the various sort of unexpected factors that might lead to a poem's quote unquote redemption can be suspicious of the narrative things like that.
For all of these poets, both of the one both the ones who we know were read and studied continuously Luke and and the one who sort of disappeared. Silious and hilarious, hilarious, there is a lot of just really basic work to be done on various moments of reception. And I think for Stacias, for instance, there was just a book length and incredibly rich article written purely on medieval commentaries on Stacias is the by the vast majority of which almost no scholar has looked at at all. And everyone of which would repay attention both from the perspective of medieval studies and from the perspective of the perception of Stacias same story is true of Luke and on the other hand for authors like Silious and Valerius.
I mean, we say they sort of disappeared. But all that means is as far as we know, they weren't really being read but there are sort of tantalizing moments where it looks like maybe a medieval author might be alluding to something and Valerius and and yes, Sarah mentioned so a book I wrote recently was on a 13th century poem about obvious matomorphies, which I am reasonably convinced contains an illusion of Valerius when Valerius, you know, quote unquote, had disappeared. But there is some evidence that there might have been a man in the script of Valerius kind of kicking around in the region at the time. And I think to some extent, these stories of non-existent reception can be self-reinforcing because you say, okay, Valerius didn't exist at the time, say it's highly, it's been a good time.
Let's not even look for evidence of there being read when if there is evidence, it would be by way of an illusion that you might not notice or something that's not somebody saying, hey, I've got a text of Charlie is in front of me that I'm alluding to. Right. So I think it's called getting a little bit more adventurous about looking both for the things that are clearly receptions of authors like Luke and on Stacias or possibly receptions. There's just a whole lot of unsteady material for across several disciplines from ancient studies to medieval studies to Renaissance studies to early modern studies.
So yeah, that's a wide open area, I think for sure. Yeah, I mean, I would just add that in general in classical studies, I think reception studies is a sort of huge growth area with, you know, an increasingly good reputation. There was a time when if you wrote about the reception of a classical author in some post classical period or some post classical author, it might be hard to find a publication venue. It might be hard to get people to take you seriously as a classicist.
But I think more and more, you know, classics departments are hiring people who are interested in reception studies, classical publications are publishing articles on the receptions of classical authors, you know, and so we've in this book talked a lot about the the receptions of these authors as Kyle says in sort of theoretical and very broad way but some of the really interesting work that is being done on any of these authors is a much more detailed and focused kind of reception studies about particular pairings or the reception of particular authors in particular periods. You know Kyle talked about about and Sarah mentioned briefly the reception of hilarious lock us in medieval literature, one of the really interesting books that I read in in working on on our book about luke and was I were pay lights book on on the reception of luke in 16th century England, which I thought was just fascinating and I'm going to do one more because as getting ready for this this chat I was reminding myself of when these poems are rediscovered and I remembered that Pudgyo Bracelyne in 1416 or 1417 was up north of the Alps at a big debate about who should be paying any spent some free time looking for manuscripts in old monasteries and he famously rediscovered Lucretius's poem. He left famously at exactly the same time discovered rediscovered hilarious lock us, we discovered Silicius, we discovered Stacius is still by and that is a moment in the reception of three of these four authors that are that it was massively important, both obviously for the rediscovery of two of them and the the audience in the opinion about Stacius and as far as I know nobody's really sat down and talked about what was that early Renaissance moment like for the for the for the field of the Flavian studies essentially. Yeah.
Well, it sounds like we have a lot more we could talk about but hopefully to the scholars listening that gives you plenty more ideas for new articles or books or venues of study. And if you are just a casual reader who's been enjoying this I will be putting recommendations of translations gathered from this book in the show notes. So feel free to pick yourself up a copy. And if it's interested you in the next week or two we'll be having Neil Bernstein on to talk about Claudia and his new translation of that poet and the next successor after these.
Thank you all for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Great.
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