Berlincourt, V. (2025), “Between epic and epideictic: direct speech in Claudian’s political poems through a digital lens”, in: C. Forstall, B. Verhelst (eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to the representation of direct speech in Greek and Latin epic, Leiden–Boston.
Claudian’s political poems, which merge the codes and conventions of the epic and the epi-deictic traditions, devote a great deal of space to direct speech. While fulfilling functions usual in epic, the speeches also significantly contribute to the epideictic messages Claudian addresses to his audience. This chapter explores the extent to which some of the main non-textual features of the speeches (count and length, speakers and addressees, clustering, po-sitional and structural properties) follow or deviate from epic practice, and it shows that such deviations from the epic tradition are closely related to Claudian’s epideictic goals.