The mists of ancient history : representations of fog in Latin literature

This thesis explores the representations of fog in Latin literature. It consists of three chapters. Chapter One focuses on natural philosophy, looking at fog’s representation in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones as well as Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Chapter Two focuses on historiography and uses Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita as a case study. Chapter Three focuses on epic, beginning with a brief survey of Greek epic before looking a range of Latin texts. In consideration of their novel developments of fog’s usage, the chapter predominantly examines Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Statius’ Thebaid, prefaced by briefer analyses of Virgil’s Aeneid and Manilius’ Astronomica. From the analysis of these texts, this thesis suggests that fog holds manifold meanings as indicative of its significance to Roman thought. Fog’s ability to destabilise its surroundings, transform the landscape, and overwhelm the senses lends itself to numerous interpretations and uses. Because of its disruptive effects, fog commonly appears as a form of chaos. Such a presentation manifests in the ‘fog of war’, in Latin literature a literal meteorological phenomenon which blurs the landscape and indicates the sensory and emotional chaos of battle. Often, fog is also a liminal space, situated on the threshold between real and mythical space, or blurring divine beings from mortal sight. Fog can also appear metaphorically to represent confusion or forgetfulness in a similar way to our ‘mind fog,’ and metaphysically, to represent the muddled state of being in which humans flounder. In this way, the Romans used fog to conceptualise numerous aspects of existence.