In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit ChaudhuriMartin T. DinterPramit Chaudhuri. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 386 pp. Cloth, $74.We are all fighting our own demons, but some of us—so Chaudhuri tells us—are even fighting our own gods. Accordingly, a wide range of theomachs and their representation in classical literature fills the ranks (...) of this excellent book that will certainly elbow its way onto Mt. Olympus to sit comfortably next to divine Feeney (1991 and 1998) and sublime Hardie (1986 and 1993). Indeed, Chaudhuri transcends the scope of Feeney (1991) by including not only Senecan (and Attic) tragedy but also texts and contexts ranging from panegyric to philosophy and from lyric to historiography.Chaudhuri’s book falls into three parts. Its first three chapters cover theomachy in Greek poetry (Homer and Attic tragedy), as well as the development of theomachy in Augustan epic, with chapters on Lucretius and Vergil and Ovid. Here, Chaudhuri introduces some of the main patterns and contexts that will be developed in later imperial poetry. Chaudhuri also states clearly what will not be covered here at length: the voyage myths of the Odyssey and the Argonauts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and the (pseudo-) Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Part 2 covers Neronian literature with Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Lucan, while Part 3 focuses on the Flavian era, with Silius and Statius. Statius’ Capaneus forms a highpoint amongst the theomachs and thus deservedly receives extra attention. Chaudhuri rounds off the Flavian section with a chapter on the politics [End Page 177] of theomachy, in which he samples theomachy as a trope for the confrontation between subject and ruler, ruler and god, rival emperors and the confrontation of dynasties. After all, the Flavian poets had witnessed the principate develop over time, the struggles for the throne, and the rise and fall of dynasties. This is followed by a titillating epilogue showcasing how the themes developed in the previous chapters that breach the divide between mortal and immortal (such as fame, equanimity, skepticism, and poetic and imperial apotheosis) echo through the centuries. Rarely, however, do we find simple didactic moralism. Instead, “the theomach is instrumental in generating a dialogue on the broader symbolism of fighting the gods, its stakes and implications” (323). Chaudhuri can but hint at the rich afterlife of the theomach across Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a subject that would fill a second volume. He nevertheless whets the reader’s appetite by pointing to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Dante’s Inferno, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as a host of epigraphs to each chapter, and concludes with a glance at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Richard Dawkins versus God, and modern physicists’ search for a God particle.Chaudhuri sets the volume off by contrasting theomachy with gigantomachy. While the feats of the Giants “remain far distant in time from the activities of humankind … the theomach speaks the language of humanity … offering a richer context for his radical aspirations and … inviting the audience to adopt an alternative view on the theological status quo” (5). He also places theomachy in its cultural context when he follows Momigliano’s (1984) suggestion that under Augustus poetry replaced antiquarianism and philosophy as the primary genre in which to think about the gods. The figure of the contemptor divum (despiser of the gods) thus comes to embody the contrast between piety and impiety which itself is grounded in the empirical basis of Roman religion. But rather than testing methods of communication with the divine, as the Romans so often did with divinatory practices and ritual protocols, the contemptor divum tackles the question of whether it is possible to know the divine at all and whether the gods even exist. “By placing these conflicts at the heart of their works, the epic poets expanded the cultural conversation to include the testing of the divine in the Romans’ attempts to make sense of the epistemological, theological, and political concerns pertaining... (shrink)