The structure and purpose of Virgil’s parade of heroes

The parade of heroes at Aeneid 6.756ff. has attracted a huge bibliography but little attention has been paid elsewhere to its elaborate and elusive network of themes and links which the poet draws between the heroes portrayed and the Golden Age of Augustus. This is a detailed and scholarly examination of the parallels and possible links and of the purpose of the parade, both for Aeneas and for the contemporary Roman reader. Virgil must be considered as having the disturbances of 23 BC in mind, with his veiled warning to Caesar and Pompey against civil discord.

Remembrance

This chapter examines the commemoration of victims of the Terror. It focuses on the transformation of mass graves into expiatory monuments. This process began in the immediate aftermath of the Terror and continued into the Bourbon Restoration. The chapter shows how the struggle of the families to get closure by providing proper burial to their loved ones clashed with the desire of post-revolutionary regimes to keep at bay memories that threatened to reignite civil discord.

Plague, Civil War, and Epochal Evolution in Vergil’s Georgics

Vergil’s Noric cattle plague in Georgics 3 develops a more direct correlation between contagious disease and civil discord. In Vergil’s account, the initially conflicting symptoms of the disease (e.g. excessive heat and cold) collapse bodies into liquefied homogeneity, indicating plague’s power to create uniformity among a population and ultimately offer a clean slate upon which to rewrite the body politic. But in that process, the eradication of individual identities—expressed through Vergil’s anthropomorphized cattle—and the open-ended spread of the disease that concludes Book 3 suggest the poet’s ambivalence toward prospects of recovery from contagion as civil war. Through heaps of undistinguishable cadavera and Golden-Age imagery that neutralizes old enmities, as well as through verbal echoes of passages indicting fraternal strife elsewhere in the Georgics, the poet acknowledges the excesses of individual ambition. But he qualifies Lucretian polemic against desire and ambition as markers of personal identity: when pestilence strikes Aristaeus’ beehive in Book 4, its remedy—a violent ritual (the bougonia) that produces homogenous, loyal offspring—fails to offer an adequate model for human existence. The final section of the chapter looks to the failed attempt at settling Crete in the Aeneid as a coda to disease in the Georgics: the episode recalls depictions of epidemic disease in Georgics 3 and 4, clarifying the meaning of Aristaeus’ new hive as a caveat for Aeneas’ attempt to restore the Trojan race.

Livy, Pestilentia, and the Pathologies of Class Strife

Accounts of pestilence in the historical record help us understand those assumptions about the effects of disease that inform both the creation of the plague narrative and its reception among Roman audiences. Chapter 2 examines Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita in order to suggest that the historical experience and representation of plague in Rome was infused with resonance of civil strife by the Augustan period. Livy refines his source material to address a body politic in need of healing and thus sharpens the correlation between contagium and civil discord (discordia), especially in early episodes recounting the struggle of the orders. The historian’s narratives of contagion draw partly from the language of medical writers, but equally from a historiographic tradition that correlated a diseased body with a diseased body politic. Accounts of plague allow Livy to reflect on distinctions among members of different orders, especially the patres/patricii (highest class of citizens) and plebs (lowest class of citizens). The remedies enacted to combat plague, in forms of both cultural and political innovations, prove alternatingly salubrious and detrimental to the body politic. Livy recognizes, however, that, as a challenge to the people equivalent to strife within and war abroad, pestilentia could have a positive impact on the development of Roman hegemony and prompt coalescence among a divided citizenry.

Wordsworth after Peterloo: The Persistence of War in The River Duddon … and other Poems

This chapter discusses William Wordsworth's The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets, published in April 1820, just prior to the poet's visit to the site of the Peterloo Massacre. As the Duddon sonnets and their accompanying poems reveal, aspects of civil discord are manifest throughout the volume, consuming not merely the city but also nature. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2015), the chapter argues that Wordsworth's engagement with Horace and Virgil evokes classical anxieties about the politicization of nature and the impossibility of establishing a society that is not always already at war with itself.

‘What dire effects from civil discord flow’:1 party management and legitimacy breakdown in the Labour Party

All large parties face the question of how to strike a balance between diversity and tolerance on the one hand and unity and firm leadership on the other. Striking this balance is the task of party management. This chapter consists of three main sections. The first discusses the function, forms and bases of party management. It identifies ideological integration, governance legitimation and normative integration as crucial shock absorbers which enable party cohesion to survive management. The second section analyses party management under New Labour. It shows how skilful, adept and ruthless party managers achieved a high measure of cohesion and control but ultimately the managerial regime they established sowed the seeds of its own dissolution. The third and longest section uses the concept of rival managerial strategies - majoritarian centralism and pluralism - to explore party management under Corbyn. It argues that the (general) preference for the former contributed to a veritable crisis of managerial authority, one which abated after Labour’s unexpectedly strong electoral performance in June 2017 but has by no means been fully resolved.

Embarkations

This chapter discusses how the sea continued to furnish the imagery for staging a broad variety of conflicts, from interstate war and civil discord to interpersonal strife and individual emotional disruption. The political and social crises and emergencies that repeatedly punctuated fourteenth-century Europe thus had recourse to the land–sea dichotomy in order to articulate both hope and fear: security's potential victory over fear as well as the possible triumph of fear. As a site of insecurity and uncertainty, the nautical experience has consistently provided the terms for difficult questions in moral philosophy, for limit cases that test the validity of one's judgment. Cases where individual lives are threatened at sea furnish problems linked to the issue of urgency and the “state of exception” where conventional rules and ordinary values may be suspended. Such casuistical arguments classically reach toward conditions for moral laxity and especially thrive on the extreme example of shipwreck, an emergency situation that reevaluates interpersonal behavior and thereby questions the grounds for social relations.

Civil War and Civil Discord: Theatrical Representation of the Common Will and the Single Heart in the Terrible Century

The goal of this series of articles is to examine the nature of twentieth-century civil war and civil discord in theatrical representations and the conditions of performance by listening to the words of playwrights, scholars, performers, politicians and theatre historians in America, Africa, and Europe.

The Troublesome Reign of King Oedipus: Civic Discourse and Civil Discord in Greek Tragedy

Greek tragedy was created under a unique and very unusual set of circumstances. What we today call Greek tragedy was not really ‘Greek’ but specifically Athenian. It articulated Athenian values, celebrated Athenian institutions, debated Athenian problems. Despite the undisputed artistic achievements of the great tragedians, the primary motives behind the creation and production of classical Greek tragedy were not artistic or literary, but social and political. Greek tragedies were contemporary and topical civic spectacles, and a central component of Athenian civic life and political discourse. Aristotle identified this ‘political’ aspect of classic Greek tragedy as its distinguishing feature by noting that ‘the earlier poets [Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides] made their characters talk “politically” [politikos], the present-day poets rhetorically’.