The Pharsalia | Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War
Author Shadi Bartsch discusses the importance of Lucan's major themes in this excerpt.
The previous two chapters have presented the grounds for a grippingly negative interpretation of the Civil War. This reading has had a powerful pull for recent readers of the epic; indeed, the present critical climate has rendered it one of the most compelling positions on the poem. The collapse of the autonomous individual amid the wreck of linguistic systems and subject-object relations, the hopelessness of meaningful narrative in a meaningless world, the impossibility of representing the trauma of Romans killing Romans—"Shun this part of the war, O mind, and leave it in...
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