The papers published in this volume were first delivered at a colloquium
entitled 'Lucain et Claudien face a face. Une poesie politique entre
epopee, histoire et panegyrique', which took place at the Fondation
Hardt, in Vandoeuvres, near Geneva, in November 2012. The contributors,
an international team of scholars, take the reader from broader
considerations of both poets in relation to politics and ideology,
generic positioning, construction of individual characters and
strategies of panegyric, to a stronger focus on investigating precise
examples of intertextual dialogue between Claudian and Lucan. In
general, the collected studies are implicated in, or have implications
for, other topics, such as Latin poetic style, history and the uses of
mythology, the Roman epic tradition, and the whole question of the
development of literary cultures and how they are received.