Interlude - Valerius Flaccus

Emperors of Rome

La Trobe University

Roman Emire, Rhiannon Evans, Biography, Emperor, La Trobe University, Roman History, Julius Caesar, Rome, Caesar, Ancient History, History, Caillan Davenport, Roman Emperors

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2016

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

Valerius Flaccus was a poet writing during the reign of Vespasian in the 1st century CE. Much of what he's written has been lost, save for an partially written epic 'The Argonautica', telling the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ahve, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.
0:11.5	I'm your host, Matt Smith Smith and with me today is Associate Professor Peter Davis.
0:16.3	He's a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide and an adjunct associate
0:20.7	professor in classics at the University of Tasmania.
0:23.7	I caught up with him recently at a conference and he spoke to me about the first century
0:27.8	Roman poet Valerius Flachus.
0:30.3	He's best known for his work, The Argonautica, which tells the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.
0:35.8	He is Peter Davis.
0:36.8	I'd like to talk today about Valerious Flaccus.
0:40.5	He's a poet who wrote an epic in eight books in the Flavian period.
0:46.0	We know very little about his life.
0:48.0	We know that he was dead before 96,
0:52.0	because Quintilian refers to him, Quintilian a critic of Roman literature,
0:57.7	Quintilian says that we lost something great just recently in Valerias Flus and so we know that he died sometime before 96.
1:06.8	We know that he was alive in Vespasian's time, he addresses Vespasian in his first book. We know that he was alive in the time of Titus because there are two similes which in which he refers to the eruption of Vesuvius and of course that happened in 79 and he may well have been alive during the time of the mission but we really don't know.
1:28.0	So but he's very much a Flavian character. We don't know when he was born but we do know when he was working.
1:35.0	So what do we have that has been written by him? I gather there's not quite a lot. We don't know much about him, but we've got some of his works,? We do. We have one poem. It's an epic poem. It's in
1:46.1	eight books. It's not quite complete, but it's generally thought for very good literary reasons the epic poem was meant to be only eight
1:55.8	books in length. So it's possible that we have lost the last couple of hundred lines,
2:02.1	you know, from antiquity through the Middle Ages to now,
2:05.1	or it's possible that he didn't finish it, and it's very hard to know which of those would be true.
2:11.5	So what is the poem? What have we left with? The poem that we have is generally
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