Rettig-Murray Lecture Series

2024 Rettig-Murray Lecture

Dr. Timothy Joseph - Doomscrolling with Lucan: The Ancient Roman Poet on Ecopolitical Catastrophe, Then and Now

 

The Roman poet Lucan’s (39-65 CE) sprawling and frequently ghastly epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of Julius Caesar’s victory in Rome’s civil wars and the resulting emergence of the authoritarian rule of the Caesars. Lucan includes among the horrors of the civil wars numerous images of ecological destruction – inviting the reader to see how political and ecological catastrophe often move in lockstep with one another.

In this talk Timothy Joseph, author of Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic (Oxford, 2022), will draw parallels between Lucan’s “doom-scrolling” and our own, here in the climate catastrophe of the twenty-first century. He will also consider how the Pharsalia, however doom-filled, shows a path towards transformation and progress in its persistently bold and even radical poetic approach.

Timothy Joseph is a Professor of Classics and the director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the College of the Holy Cross. He earned a B.A. in Classics from Holy Cross and a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard. Before his graduate work at Harvard he taught Latin, including the AP Latin Virgil syllabus, at Cresskill High School in New Jersey. Tim has been on the Holy Cross faculty since 2006; there he teaches Latin and Greek courses at all levels, including a recent seminar on the theme of "nation and individual" in Virgil's poetry. He is the author of two books on Latin literature, Tacitus the Epic Successor (2012) and Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic (2022), and he recently co-edited, with Caroline Johnson Hodge and Benny Liew, the volume Divided Worlds? Interdisciplinary and Contemporary Challenges in Classics and New Testament Studies (2023). At Holy Cross he teaches courses on Latin and Greek literature, on the reception of the Classics in the U.S., and -- for the first time this semester -- on ecology in the ancient world.