Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry

How did Roman poets create character? Mythological figures entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: a soft, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless Achilles. For the Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is different from a first person narrator to an addressee. Exemplary Traits examines how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie characterization as a literary technique, this study illuminates an underestimated aspect of this poetic technique and its relation to a larger intellectual context. Covering a range of authors from Vergil to Statius, J. Mira Seo places the poetics of character in a Roman intellectual environment.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations and Texts Introduction 1. We'll Always Have Paris: Aeneas and the Roman Legacy 2. Lucan's Cato and the Poetics of Exemplarity 3. Seneca's Oedipus: Characterization and Decorum 4. Parthenopaeus and Mors immatura in Statius' Thebaid 5. Amphiaraus, Predestined Prophet, Didactic Vates Conclusions Appendix: Seneca's Hippolytus and Fatal Attraction Bibliography Passages Cited Index

About the Author :
J. Mira Seo is Associate Professor in the Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Review :
"In this theoretically informed study of Roman epic and tragedy, J. Mira Seo demonstrates how intertextuality both shapes and interrogates character. This is an important book whose compelling new readings of Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Statius' Thebaid, and Seneca's Oedipus and Phaedra invite reassessment of the Latin literary canon." --Carole E. Newlands, University of Colorado "In what ways, and by what techniques, is characterization constructed in Roman poetry? How might literary models influence character-construction through a process akin to intertextual allusivity? By exploring such questions, and through its detailed readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca and Statius, this study sheds important new light on a fascinating but understudied area of Roman poetic practice." --Gareth D. Williams, Columbia University "Seo's readings of five characters from Roman epic and tragedy are exemplary in the best sense." --CJ-Online, a service of The Classical Journal