Jan 2, 2010

The Pharsalia | What Do I Read Next?

Virgil's Aeneid, written between 27-17 B.C., is the essential Latin epic. Like Lucan's Pharsalia, it was unfinished at its author's death. It quickly became a school text. Lucan would have studied the poem in great detail. His own epic has been compared, usually unfavorably, to Virgil's since his own lifetime.

Caesar's own De bello civili offers his view of the Roman civil war. Like his account of his campaigns in Gaul (modern day France and the Rhineland), it is written in the third person, and while understandably self-serving, is disarmingly direct and...