Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database

7468

Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.81

nan Abide not long the mightiest lords of earth; Beneath too heavy a burden great the fall. Thus Rome o'ergrew her strength. So when that hour, The last in all the centuries, shall sound The world's disruption, all things shall revert To that primaeval chaos, stars on stars Shall crash; and fiery meteors from the sky Plunge in the ocean. Earth shall then no more Front with her bulwark the encroaching sea: The moon, indignant at her path oblique

Intertexts (texts cited often on the same page as the searched text):

8 results
1. Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.33-1.66, 1.68-1.80, 1.82-1.84, 1.195-1.196, 2.14-2.15, 3.394, 7.209-7.211, 7.419, 8.72-8.85, 9.890-9.891 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
2. Martial, Epigrams, 3.21 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
3. Martial, Epigrams, 3.21 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
4. Pliny The Younger, Letters, 1.12 (2nd cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE) 1.12. To Calestrius Tiro. I have suffered a most grievous loss, if loss is a word that can be applied to my being bereft of so distinguished a man. Corellius Rufus is dead, and what makes my grief the more poigt is that he died by his own act. Such a death is always most lamentable, since neither natural causes nor Fate can be held responsible for it. When people die of disease there is a great consolation in the thought that no one could have prevented it; when they lay violent hands on themselves we feel a pang which nothing can assuage in the thought that they might have lived longer. Corellius, it is true, felt driven to take his own life by Reason - and Reason is always tantamount to Necessity with philosophers - and yet there were abundant inducements for him to live. His conscience was stainless, his reputation beyond reproach; he stood high in men's esteem. Moreover, he had a daughter, a wife, a grandson, and sisters, and, besides all these relations, many genuine friends. But his battle against ill-health had been so long and hopeless that all these splendid rewards of living were outweighed by the reasons that urged him to die. I have heard him say that he was first attacked by gout in the feet when he was thirty-three years of age. He had inherited the complaint, for it often happens that a tendency to disease is handed down like other qualities in a sort of succession. While he was in the prime of life he overcame his malady and kept it well in check by abstemious and pure living, and when it became sharper in its attacks as he grew old he bore up against it with great fortitude of mind. Even when he suffered incredible torture and the most horrible agony - for the pain was no longer confined, as before, to the feet, but had begun to spread over all his limbs - I went to see him in the time of Domitian when he was staying at his country house. His attendants withdrew from his chamber, as they always did whenever one of his more intimate friends entered the room. Even his wife, a lady who might have been trusted to keep any secret, also used to retire. Looking round the room, he said His malady had become worse, though he tried to moderate it by his careful diet, and then, as it still continued to grow, he escaped from it by a fixed resolve. Two, three, four days passed and he refused all food. Then his wife Hispulla sent our mutual friend Caius Geminius to tell me the sad news that Corellius had determined to die, that he was not moved by the entreaties of his wife and daughter, and that I was the only one left who might possibly recall him to life. I rushed to see him, and had almost reached the house when Hispulla sent me another message by Julius Atticus, saying that now even I could do nothing, for his resolve had become more and more fixed. When the doctor offered him nourishment he said, "My mind is made up" {Κέκρικα}, and the word has awakened within me not only a sense of loss, but of admiration. I keep thinking what a friend, what a manly friend is now lost to me. He was at the end of his seventy-sixth year, an age long enough even for the stoutest of us. True. He has escaped a lifelong illness; he has died leaving children to survive him, and knowing that the State, which was dearer to him than anything else, was prospering well. Yes, yes, I know all this. And yet I grieve at his death as I should at the death of a young man in the full vigour of life; I grieve - you may think me weak for so doing - on my own account too. For I have lost, lost for ever, the guide, philosopher, and friend of my life. In short, I will say again what I said to my friend Calvisius, when my grief was fresh
5. Pliny The Younger, Letters, 1.12 (2nd cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE) 1.12. To Calestrius Tiro. I have suffered a most grievous loss, if loss is a word that can be applied to my being bereft of so distinguished a man. Corellius Rufus is dead, and what makes my grief the more poigt is that he died by his own act. Such a death is always most lamentable, since neither natural causes nor Fate can be held responsible for it. When people die of disease there is a great consolation in the thought that no one could have prevented it; when they lay violent hands on themselves we feel a pang which nothing can assuage in the thought that they might have lived longer. Corellius, it is true, felt driven to take his own life by Reason - and Reason is always tantamount to Necessity with philosophers - and yet there were abundant inducements for him to live. His conscience was stainless, his reputation beyond reproach; he stood high in men's esteem. Moreover, he had a daughter, a wife, a grandson, and sisters, and, besides all these relations, many genuine friends. But his battle against ill-health had been so long and hopeless that all these splendid rewards of living were outweighed by the reasons that urged him to die. I have heard him say that he was first attacked by gout in the feet when he was thirty-three years of age. He had inherited the complaint, for it often happens that a tendency to disease is handed down like other qualities in a sort of succession. While he was in the prime of life he overcame his malady and kept it well in check by abstemious and pure living, and when it became sharper in its attacks as he grew old he bore up against it with great fortitude of mind. Even when he suffered incredible torture and the most horrible agony - for the pain was no longer confined, as before, to the feet, but had begun to spread over all his limbs - I went to see him in the time of Domitian when he was staying at his country house. His attendants withdrew from his chamber, as they always did whenever one of his more intimate friends entered the room. Even his wife, a lady who might have been trusted to keep any secret, also used to retire. Looking round the room, he said His malady had become worse, though he tried to moderate it by his careful diet, and then, as it still continued to grow, he escaped from it by a fixed resolve. Two, three, four days passed and he refused all food. Then his wife Hispulla sent our mutual friend Caius Geminius to tell me the sad news that Corellius had determined to die, that he was not moved by the entreaties of his wife and daughter, and that I was the only one left who might possibly recall him to life. I rushed to see him, and had almost reached the house when Hispulla sent me another message by Julius Atticus, saying that now even I could do nothing, for his resolve had become more and more fixed. When the doctor offered him nourishment he said, "My mind is made up" {Κέκρικα}, and the word has awakened within me not only a sense of loss, but of admiration. I keep thinking what a friend, what a manly friend is now lost to me. He was at the end of his seventy-sixth year, an age long enough even for the stoutest of us. True. He has escaped a lifelong illness; he has died leaving children to survive him, and knowing that the State, which was dearer to him than anything else, was prospering well. Yes, yes, I know all this. And yet I grieve at his death as I should at the death of a young man in the full vigour of life; I grieve - you may think me weak for so doing - on my own account too. For I have lost, lost for ever, the guide, philosopher, and friend of my life. In short, I will say again what I said to my friend Calvisius, when my grief was fresh
6. Origen, Against Celsus, 1.37 (3rd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE) 1.37. I think, then, that it has been pretty well established not only that our Saviour was to be born of a virgin, but also that there were prophets among the Jews who uttered not merely general predictions about the future - as, e.g., regarding Christ and the kingdoms of the world, and the events that were to happen to Israel, and those nations which were to believe in the Saviour, and many other things concerning Him - but also prophecies respecting particular events; as, for instance, how the asses of Kish, which were lost, were to be discovered, and regarding the sickness which had fallen upon the son of the king of Israel, and any other recorded circumstance of a similar kind. But as a further answer to the Greeks, who do not believe in the birth of Jesus from a virgin, we have to say that the Creator has shown, by the generation of several kinds of animals, that what He has done in the instance of one animal, He could do, if it pleased Him, in that of others, and also of man himself. For it is ascertained that there is a certain female animal which has no intercourse with the male (as writers on animals say is the case with vultures), and that this animal, without sexual intercourse, preserves the succession of race. What incredibility, therefore, is there in supposing that, if God wished to send a divine teacher to the human race, He caused Him to be born in some manner different from the common! Nay, according to the Greeks themselves, all men were not born of a man and woman. For if the world has been created, as many even of the Greeks are pleased to admit, then the first men must have been produced not from sexual intercourse, but from the earth, in which spermatic elements existed; which, however, I consider more incredible than that Jesus was born like other men, so far as regards the half of his birth. And there is no absurdity in employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks, with the view of showing that we are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind. For some have thought fit, not in regard to ancient and heroic narratives, but in regard to events of very recent occurrence, to relate as a possible thing that Plato was the son of Amphictione, Ariston being prevented from having marital intercourse with his wife until she had given birth to him with whom she was pregt by Apollo. And yet these are veritable fables, which have led to the invention of such stories concerning a man whom they regarded as possessing greater wisdom and power than the multitude, and as having received the beginning of his corporeal substance from better and diviner elements than others, because they thought that this was appropriate to persons who were too great to be human beings. And since Celsus has introduced the Jew disputing with Jesus, and tearing in pieces, as he imagines, the fiction of His birth from a virgin, comparing the Greek fables about Danaë, and Melanippe, and Auge, and Antiope, our answer is, that such language becomes a buffoon, and not one who is writing in a serious tone.
7. Stoic School, Stoicor. Veter. Fragm., 2.1027
8. Valerius Flaccus Gaius, Argonautica, 1.509, 1.557, 4.479-4.481

Subjects of this text:

subject	book bibliographic info
aetius	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
allusion,clouds of	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
argonauts	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
athenagoras	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
chaos	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
colchis	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
cosmogony	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
domitian	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351
empedocles	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
fate	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
fear,and hope ( spes )	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
homer,lucans use of	Joseph (2022), Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic, 259
homer,model / anti-model for lucan	Joseph (2022), Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic, 259
homer,praise in	Joseph (2022), Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic, 259
johnson,w. r.	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
juno,arg.	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
jupiter,arg.	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
law	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
literary interactions,diachronic	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351
literary interactions,dialogic	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
literary interactions,indirect	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351
literary interactions,multiple	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
lucan,fear and hope	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
lucan	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
lucretius	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
martial,and pliny	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
martial	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
nero	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
nominalism	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
phineus	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
pliny (the younger)	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
pohlenz,m.	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
pompey,his greatness'	Joseph (2022), Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic, 259
pompey	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
posidonius	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
providence	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
regulus,m. aquilius	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
seeds	Del Lucchese (2019), Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture, 175
self-fashioning	König and Whitton (2018), Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, AD 96–138 351, 357
sol	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
stoicism,fate	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
venus,aen.	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98
vespasian	Agri (2022), Reading Fear in Flavian Epic: Emotion, Power, and Stoicism, 98