Abstract
While it is no secret that Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica explores civil-war themes at great length, the conflicts arising on the island of Peuce between the Colchians and the Argonauts and within the Argonautic party itself in the epic's final book (8.217–467) have been overlooked in critical studies of Valerian civil war. This article argues that Valerius presents the conflicts on Peuce as examples of civil war—emphasizing the bonds of kinship between the conflicting parties and illustrating effects of this discord using imagery of stasis and cosmic dissolution associated with civil war in the wider Latin literary tradition—and thus invites reflection on the development and manifestation of internecine strife within the Argonautica.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | The Classical Quarterly |
| Volume | FirstView |
| Early online date | 27 May 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 27 May 2022 |
Keywords
- Civil war
- Valerius Flaccus
- Peuce
- Kinship
- Stasis
- Dissolution
Access to Document
- Sanderson_2022_TCQ_Kin-conflicts_CC
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.