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The Pharsalia | Introduction

The Pharsalia has been described by Ahl as "a political act as well as a political poem." Written when Nero's true nature could no longer be denied, it is a harrowing portrait of the disintegration of Rome, civil war, and the triumph of a single will. Lucan's unfinished epic was a subject of criticism even as he wrote it. In Petronius's Satyricon, a bitterly satiric novel written by another victim of Nero, a character complains that it is not a true epic, but a history, because it did not incorporate divine motivation. Even more important to later readings of the poem was the historian Tacitus's negative portrait of the poet in the Annales. From that day to this, Lucan has suffered from Tacitus's portrait and confusion about his approach.

Lucan's ability to paint the terrifying and the unearthly and to produce a pithy quotable line has not endeared him to all critics, but he has never lacked readers. The only copy of a secular poem copied between 550-750 A.D. that survives is a fragment entitled Pharsalia. His partisan portraits of Cato, Brutus, and Marcia made them models for medieval clerics and eighteenth-century revolutionaries. His treatment of the witch Erictho and her necromancy made a fundamental impression on the western mind. Lucan's influence surfaces in the narratives of witch trials as well as in horror literature. Despite Lucan's references to fate, his use of human will as the source of action and events, rather than divine, is more immediately understandable to modern readers. His vision of dismembered bodies and fractured boundaries holds a mirror up to a century that has descended more than once into horror and chaos.

The Pharsalia Summary

Overview
The unfinished Pharsalia narrates the Roman Civil War's first phase, which ended almost thirty years later in the victory of Caesar's grandnephew Octavius (Augustus), over the forces of Mark Anthony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra at the naval battle of Actium. It breaks off with Caesar trapped in Alexandria by the Egyptians.

Book One
Lucan begins his epic with themes and images that will run through his work, 'of legality conferred on crime,' images of self-slaughter and self-induced ruin brought on by Rome's own power and her citizens' corruption by wealth and greed. Peace was maintained as long as Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, and Julia, daughter of Caesar and wife of Pompey, lived to hold Caesar and Pompey apart. Their deaths left them unencumbered rivals. Caesar, despite a vision of Rome begging him to turn back, defies the senate and crosses the Rubicon, the river of Italy. He takes Ariminum. Curio comes to urge him to take up arms against Pompey and the Senate. Caeser addresses his troops looking for their support. They are wavering when the senior centurion Laelius speaks, pledging absolute loyalty to Caesar even if it means turning his sword on brother, father, or pregnant wife. They swear their allegiance to Caesar. Fear runs before his army; citizens and senators flee Rome. Portents appear. The senior Etruscan augur sees in the entrails of a sacrificed bull the full horror of the republic's collapse. The astrologer Figulus sees it in the stars. The book ends with a Roman matron filled with the spirit of prophecy running frantically through the streets of Rome prophesying the civil war.

Book Two
Mothers and wives besiege the altars with prayer. The men prepare for war. An old man who had lived through their horrors recalls the civil war between Marius and Sulla. His picture of the butchery in Rome will be matched by the horrors of the sea fight at Massila (Marseille). Brutus goes to Cato for advice. Cato tells him he intends to join Pompey's side to protect the republic.... ยป Complete The Pharsalia Summary