Analysis

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Lucan was an audacious author. In touch with an imperial court, he dared to write his long poem Pharsalia glorifying the opposition to the founder of imperial power in Rome. Lucan must have been sufficiently aware of the arbitrary tyranny of Nero to recognize that in writing such an epic he played a game involving the highest of stakes. Conscious of his genius, independent in spirit, and impetuous in his youth, he was perhaps fascinated by a hazard with double danger. It was dangerous enough to challenge Nero in literary competition, but it was even more perilous to celebrate the defenders of the ancient Republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause, yet Lucan makes idols of Pompey and Cato and so implicitly challenges Caesarism. There were several justifications for this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish seat of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey, and Lucan’s own youthful imagination dreamed up rosy visions of a Republican past. His readings of Livy, the great propagandist for the Republic, confirmed his attitude. Nero’s unfairness in trying to silence him drove him to detest the Caesarean dynasty.

Lucan’s independent spirit affected not only the subject of his epic but also its composition. He broke away from epic tradition by resolutely rejecting mythology. Lucan’s originality lay not so much in the choice of a Roman historical theme—there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the treatment of his theme without the conventional introduction of the gods. The way in which Lucan introduced mythology as an appendix to geography only served to measure his contempt for it. When he described a region which had a legend, he told the legend with the proviso that it was not true. For Lucan, the strongest motive for relating a legend was that it was an incredible explanation of facts for which no credible explanation was forthcoming. Aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme, therefore, he broke away from Vergilian precedent and for legendary glamour substituted interest in a human conflict of a comparatively recent time.

Pharsalia

Pharsalia is the only work by Lucan extant, and only ten books survive. This epic treats the war between Caesar and Pompey that erupted in 49 b.c.e. The title Pharsalia is borrowed from book 9, verse 985 of the poem. It consists of more than eight thousand hexameters but still does not complete the poet’s design; the tenth book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.

Modern critics have tended to condemn Lucan as tasteless and uninspired, and his Pharsalia is frequently (as has been said about John Milton’s Paradise Lost of 1667) more talked about than read. In the Middle Ages, however, few classical authors were more widely read or praised than Lucan. In eighteenth century England, the Pharsalia not only was popular but also was considered to be the work of a poet even greater than Vergil. Lucan must be given credit for picturesque and striking language, but above all for his attempt to reinfuse a somewhat wilted Roman literature with the spirit of life. As Vergil had correctly seen, historical themes were not well suited to epic treatment. Nevertheless, Lucan was right in perceiving that Roman literature could not go on forever dealing with mythological fantasy, with ancient never-never lands and legendary history. If literature was to have any real meaning, it had to bring itself back to reality.

Lucan’s attempt to make philosophy and science...

(This entire section contains 2641 words.)

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serve as the divine and mythological machinery had once served, however, is less than successful. The philosophical portions of the poem seem pompous, forced, and insincere, and require entirely too much argument. The scientific and pseudoscientific episodes are too long and detailed and clog the narrative. Lucan also failed to notice that if he was to write about real men and real history, he must write about them in “real” language and not in the high-flown, artificial style of the rhetorical schools.

The conflict between character and circumstance, each always victorious on its own ground, is the subject which gives interest and dignity to the Pharsalia. The poem opens with a delay of the action as Lucan describes the emperor Nero as a god and addresses him as sufficient inspiration for a poet. Lucan anticipates Nero’s apotheosis and acknowledges that civil war was not a heavy price to pay for the blessings of Nero’s reign. This opening probably owes something to Seneca, and certainly the poet is not at first so violently opposed to Caesar as he later becomes. Lucan is able to recognize that the war was a result of Pompey’s inability to endure an equal and Caesar’s inability to endure a master. It is a solitary gleam of insight. Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent battle experience, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age. In his fifty-seventh year, he was only four years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds his readers, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death made the breach between them more probable. The poet, although sincerely embracing Pompey’s cause, perceives him as a man overconfident because of previous battles and too trusting in the power of his name. The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn forcefully although not sympathetically. He is a character who relies much on the sword and who enjoys creating havoc.

The strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage across the Alps, bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon. (The adjectival antithesis is Lucan’s.) Caesar is confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance. The Rubicon is crossed; Arminium is taken; Caesar is met by his supporters. A summons for troops from Gaul presents an opportunity for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides, and Druids; then, a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of omens and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amid presages of disaster. Lucan, while he removes from his historical epic the conventional gods of epic poetry, puts in their place the supernatural, represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophecy of both an astrologer and a clairvoyant matron who has a vision of Pompey already lying dead.

Philosophy hesitantly opens book 2. The philosophical foundation of the Pharsalia is popular Stoicism, and the Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed to know future unhappiness through omens? He ends his philosophical discussion with a prayer that there might be hope amid fear and that the human mind be unaware of the coming doom. Mourning falls on Rome, and men pray for a foreign attack in preference to civil war. The passage is rhetorical in its earlier portion and argumentative at its close. The chief incidents of the book are: first, the remarriage of Cato to his former wife Marcia; second, the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius, pointedly introduced because he was an ancestor of Nero; and, finally, the retreat of Pompey to Brundisium and overseas. Padding consists of digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The introduction of Cato here is significant for book 9, where he plays a commanding part. For Lucan, Cato is the incarnation of virtue, never before guilty of shedding his country’s blood, but now drawn by force into the struggle. Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly describes his Stoic ability to combine self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims.

Book 3, mainly concerned with Caesar’s activities on his return to Rome and his siege of Massilia, is ruined by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and the account of an interminable series of ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the soldiers. Among the compensating passages, however, are descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos, and the latter, describing the grave of the Druids, is a somber study touched with the spirit of Celtic romance. The reader is placed in a haunted wood at twilight, a place polluted by inhuman rites, shunned by birds, beasts, and forest deities. The leaves of the trees quiver, although there is no wind, and the whole forest is awesome with decay and nameless terrors.

Three episodes constitute most of the action of book 4: Caesar’s Spanish operations; the failure of one of three Caesarean rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the arrival of a Caesarean general, Curio, in Africa, where he is defeated by Iuba and meets his death. The thirst suffered by the Pompeians in Spain prompts one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury, while the advice of the Caesarean commander to his men trapped on the raft to commit “mutual” suicide rather than surrender is argued in the strained style of a course in rhetoric. When the crew carries out their mutual slaughter, characteristic realism is employed to describe the crawling, bleeding, writhing agony of the lacerated men. This mass suicide closes with a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan: Death is a ready way to elude tyranny. It is the Stoic speaking, recognizing the theoretical obligation of suicide and admitting that it was in certain circumstances defensible.

Book 5 opens with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia to Lesbos for safety. Nevertheless, Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers and crosses the Adriatic in a small boat on a stormy night to bring Antony. Caesar’s willpower is dramatized in his defiant braving of the storm despite a fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune as his sole attendant in crossing the sea, but the storm is irresistibly tempting for Lucan. He exhausts his use of contending winds and then turns to hyperbole; mountains, having struggled in vain, crumble into the sea, as the waves roll portentously. Still full of hyperbole, but much more human, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part.

Overloaded with digressions, details of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachum, and hyperbolical praise of the repulse of Pompey, book 6 is not on the whole successful. The action concentrates on one outstanding Caesarean who offers the resistance of an African elephant, tearing out and stamping on his own eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it. This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary setback of Caesar, who retreats to Thessaly and is followed there by Pompey. The mention of Thessaly offers the opportunity for digressions on geography and magic. There is a catalog of Thessalian spells for love, weather, rivers, mountains, and laws of the universe. The witches of Thessaly are more convincing in the work of Apuleius; yet Lucan does achieve a gruesome effect through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but from necromancy. He makes his way to the sorceress Erichtho and holds a midnight séance with her. Agreeing to his request, she selects a dead warrior, who is brought back to life by loathsome ingredients in order to foretell the future. The revelation is that the shades of the dead await both Sextus’s father and his house. With that ominous response, Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.

Although book 7 is not free from extravagance, it is the greatest book of the poem. It describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalus, as well as their fortunes in the battle. Pompey’s men shout for battle and criticize their leader’s caution. In a historically inaccurate scene, Cicero, who was not actually present, is introduced as urging Pompey to give battle. Pompey consents under protest. His men have their way, but many presage death in their pale coloring. The harangues to each side by the respective commanders are vigorous, full of bravado, and very readable. Despite Pompey’s claim that his is the better cause, tyranny—in Lucan’s view—is triumphant at Pharsalus. Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey, looking back upon lost greatness, with Caesar, whose adversary from this point on is not Pompey but freedom and who, to discerning eyes, might be an object of pity: It was worse to win. The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was the leader of the guilty side, callously surveyed the dead, withheld rotting corpses from cremation, and was hunted, Orestes-like, by avenging Furies.

The main interest of book 8 lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land. It is broken by reflections and apostrophes on both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, the defeated warrior escapes in a small boat to Lesbos, where he tries to console his grief-stricken wife. He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his conversation with the pilot about astronomy. He holds a council of his supporters on his destination, suggesting they land in Parthia. His advisers consider this action dishonorable and persuade him to try Egypt, whose king, Ptolemy, owes his throne indirectly to Pompey. Thus does Pompey sail to meet death. Overmastering fate arranges that Pompey is enticed into a small boat where, in view of his wife and son, he is stabbed by a traitor. Pompey’s head is cut off and carried to the boy-king Ptolemy. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his obstructive passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Vergil’s dignity in the face of sorrow, or beauty of simile, there are repulsive details of the still-gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid crosswise to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins to be cut; there are bones to break. Such realism is rendered unnecessary by the moving description of Pompey that follows. The headless body is retrieved from the sea by one of Pompey’s Roman attendants and, after an incomplete cremation, is hastily buried. The book ends with imprecations and wild rhetoric on Egypt.

Pompey’s apotheosis begins book 9. The lamentations of Cornelia, the threats of vengeance by Pompey’s son, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminaries to the central theme of the book: the heroism of Cato. He marches with his men to Africa and gives many demonstrations of his endurance and courage. Cato’s inspiring bravery is, however, almost smothered by a mass of irrelevant details about the origin of serpents in Africa and by catalogs of various species of serpents and various sorts of deaths from snakebite.

Book 10, on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on mighty Julius than into the Pharsalia, yet it has energy in spite of a digression on Alexander the Great. The principal events are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his affair with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation with Ptolemy, and the plot to kill Caesar. The tenth book is incomplete, and there are many indications of an unfinished scheme. There is, for example, a reference to the postponement of a fated penalty, which implies that the poem was designed to continue up to Caesar’s assassination in 44 b.c.e.