War with God

Epic and tragedy, from Homer''s Achilles and Euripides'' Pentheus to Marlowe''s Tamburlaine and Milton''s Satan, are filled with characters challenging and warring against the gods. Nowhere is the theme of theomachy more frequently and powerfully represented, however, than in the poetry of early imperial Rome, from Ovid''s Metamorphoses at the beginning of the first century AD to Statius'' Thebaid...