Post proelia concordia
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In other words, the narrator variously evinces (a) the view that the gods should prevent terrible things but haven’t, possibly because they are helpless to do so (b) the Stoic view that they do not care at all (c) the view that they impiously side with Julius Caesar and (d) the view that they do not exist in the first place.ģAs we might expect in such an epic, even the narrator’s inspiration does not rely on a divine source: it is Nero who gives him the strength to tell his Roman epic: “ tu satis ad uires Romana in carmina dandas.” Nero is in fact the only “god” who the narrator invokes without undercutting the facticity of his existence at some other point (cf. Finally, the narrator can suggest that the gods, while existent, are weaker than other unworldly forces, such as Erictho (6, 429ff.) 3 or that they only have the power to punish the weak, whom Fortune has already picked on (“Fortune guards many of the guilty, and the gods can only be angry at the weak / unlucky” (3, 447–9). 4, 110ff., in which he asks Jupiter and Neptune to flood the fields of Ilerda) or that they yet have the power to inspire the priestess at Delphi (“ magno exaestuat igne / iratum te, Phoebe, ferens”, 5, 173–4). “ o faciles dare summa deos eademque tueri difficiles !”, 1, 510–11), 2 others suggest they may yet intervene to prevent the outcome of the civil war (e.g. Some of his apostrophes assume the gods’ existence (e.g. Sometimes the narrator opines that “mortal affairs are of no concern to any god” (“ mortalia nulli / sunt curata deo”, 7, 454–5) – and then follow up such claims with complaints that they care nothing for mortal affairs at another time he will ask Jupiter why he grants foreknowledge to human beings via omens (“ cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi, / sollicitis uisum mortalibus addere curam, / noscant uenturas ut dira per omina clades?”, 2, 4–6), which suggests that the god might at least be listening to human complaints at yet another time he will put the gods squarely on the wrong side, as with his famous contrast of Cato’s moral judgment and the divine one: “ uictrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni” (1, 128 cf.
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Are they absent? Present, but uncaring? Unhelpful, but still listening to human prayer? We are not given to know. 3 As Bramble notes, “The deorum ministeria of previous epic are replaced by the sympathetic reaction (.)ĢAccordingly, while the deorum ministeria may not shape the narrative, they are very much present in another sense through the narrator’s focalizations.2 Apostrophe inherently animates and as such brings into presence what is absent.