The Pharsalia | The Necessary Murder: Myth, Ritual, and Civil War in Lucan Book III
The author, C.M. C. Green, portrays the necessity of the murder in Lucan's Book III.
Lucan created the relationship between Pompey and Caesar, it has been argued, on the pattern of the relationship of Agamemnon and Achilles. Thus it is through an acknowledgment of his Greek literary ancestry that Lucan constructs the opening of his epic. The rivalry between the great leader and the young warrior provides the explosive, psychological beginnings (hae ducibus causae ... ) of the action of the Bellum Civile, shaping the conflict as one which, while between individuals, remains even less personal than that between Agamemnon and Achilles. Yet, though Achilles...
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