The Pharsalia | Ethical Contradiction and the Fractured Community in Lucan's Bellum Civile
In this essay, the author examines the uses of divided communities in Lucan's Bellum Civile.
Lucan's Bellum Civile is riven with ethical contradictions. It is not simply that different voices within the poem disagree about the proper moral evaluation of particular actions and patterns of behavior: such disagreement is widely present in ancient epic. Rather, these voices, including the narrative voice itself, are collectively enmeshed in a web of competing ethical discourses and modes of valuation that are more or less equally authoritative yet irreconcilable. Thus actions can be evaluated in more than one ethical frameworkânot only by different voices embracing...
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