SOURCE: "Lucan and Civil War," Classical Philology, XXVIII, No. 2, April, 1933, pp. 121-27.

[In the following essay, Sanford contends that Lucan was not concerned with developing heroes in his writing but rather with illustrating the horrors of civil war.]

The old question whether Lucan was a historian or a poet has been largely superseded in these more subjective days by a milder controversy as to the identity of his hero. The popular solutions are familiar enough, but satisfactory chiefly to those who find failure in this essential point of epic consistent with their general conception of Lucan's second-rate quality. Duff argues that Caesar was, despite the poet's intention, the "practical hero of the poem," while Pompey was its "formal" and Cato its "spiritual hero." This is surely a triumvirate from which the Muse of Epic Unity would have averted her face in very shame.¹ Heitland disagrees in part; to him Caesar is again hero de facto, and Cato a secondary hero as a model of moral greatness, but Pompey is not a hero in any sense. His final estimate of the question expresses the feeling of numerous other critics:

It is very characteristic of Lucan that it should be necessary to search after the hero at length. And when we have found him, he is a hero not in virtue of the poet's efforts, but in spite of them. This is the Nemesis that follows on an attempt to misrepresent history. Lucan is borne on the stream of declamation without knowing whither it may bear him.²

Another solution approaches more closely to the theme of the present paper. Giraud some years ago called attention to the obsession of the public conscience during the early Empire, by the recollection of the great republicans, Cato and Cicero. Every writer had either to praise or to attack them, as one of the best-known anecdotes of the life of Augustus himself bears witness. Giraud points out that a literary tradition had been formed about the civil wars, which became rooted in Augustan and Julio-Claudian culture. The truth of this suggestion may easily be tested by examination of the list of known titles of lost works dealing with the subject, to some of which Lucan must have owed a debt no longer measurable.

Giraud thus recognized an essential if fairly obvious point, that epic unity does not demand a single hero, but a single theme, which may or may not be expressed in an individual person. Is Achilles the hero of the Iliad? To Giraud, Lucan's hero was the Roman Republic, and his hope "to express with a power hitherto unknown the great idea that for a century had haunted Roman imaginations, the loss of liberty."³

The solution suggested in the last sentence has been discussed more fully in Professor Nutting's recent study of the question, in which Libertas is proposed as heroine, contrasted with Caesar as villain.⁴ The present paper had been planned and partly written before this article appeared; the chief reason for supporting another solution than his is based on a different conception of what the epic meant to the poet himself. If the Pharsalia was conceived as a prolonged declamation, then "Libertas, as an academic theme," was certainly an effective subject, but some of the finest of Lucan's lines point to a theme more than academic, as vital to the Romans of the Empire as to those of the Republic.

A stanza composed shortly after the civil war came to an end, and prophesying foreign wars to come, may suggest something of the lost works that stirred Lucan's imagination:

audiet civis acuisse ferrum,
quo graves Persae melius ferirent,
audiet pugnas vitio parentum
 rara iuventus.⁵

The younger generation "reduced in numbers by their elders' fault"—the phrase brings the weakening effect of civil war into sharp contrast with the glories of a war by which Persians should be efficiently reduced for the profit of Rome. Gregory of Tours, centuries later, wrote in his history of a nation all too prone to internecine strife: "Scrutamini diligenter veterum scripta, et videbitis quid civilia bella parturiant."⁶ His reference was to Orosius, but Orosius would have referred the phrase to Lucan. Remembering the first line of the Iliad, and its contrast with Vergil's "arms and the man," consider Lucan's opening words:

Bella per Emathios plusquam civilia campos,
iusque datum sceleri canimus.…⁷

The repetition of the theme throughout lines 1 -7, so often censured, seems due to the poet's anxiety to make clear his theme. Mediaeval commentators, as has been pointed out elsewhere,⁸ explain the substance or materia of the epic as "the civil war and whatever arose therefrom," or as totus cesar et totus pompeius, interpreted by the civil strife between them. And its intentio is regularly stated as "to describe the civil war and to dissuade the Romans from civil wars by showing the misfortunes on both sides." Sometimes they suggest also that he sought to warn his contemporaries against the sedition even then brewing against Nero's tyranny.

It not frequently happens that the mediaeval commentator whose detailed notes on any author may be full of puerile-seeming errors, and a far more deadly tedium, prove their kinship with the classical tradition they so intimately knew and loved by a clear comprehension of the whole that offsets their purblind view of the parts. At any rate, their almost unanimous recognition of the civil war as the theme that gave unity and purpose to Lucan's epic seems to show more appreciation of the poem itself than the arguments about factual and spiritual heroes.

Not only was the Roman fate summed up in the civil wars, but, as Sidonius pointed out, the war between Caesar and Pompey, as Lucan told it, was made to seem a greater loss to Rome than all her former losses.⁹Bellum plusquam civile became enshrined as a regular category, and Isidore's definition with direct reference to Lucan was echoed not only by later encyclopedists, but by many diligent scribes in their glosses on the poem. The interpretation by Alain de Lille would have been as well applied to Roman as to sacred history:

Et notandum quod, sicut in auctoribus est
 multiplex bellum,
ita et in theologia secundum diversos
 diversorum afflictus.
Exterum, quod fit inter lerusalem et
 Babyloniam; intestinum,
quod fit inter proximum et proximum, quod
 dicitur civile; et
plusquam civile, quod fit inter corpus et
 animam.¹⁰

So the war between Caesar and Pompey was waged indeed between the body and soul of the Roman state, and to lovers of the Roman past it seemed that the body could recover more readily than the soul.

In the light of this general conception, the apparent inconsistencies in Lucan's "heroes" tend to disappear. Caesar is hated as the conspicuous aggressor in the war, as the champion of a new and non-republican era, but that is no occasion for belittling his energy and prowess. The picture of an essentially great man, capable of great deeds for the state, but turned from them by lust for war, who "rejoices at leaving no road unstained by bloodshed," suited the poet's purpose better than any spiteful belittling of his genius could have done. And Pompey's great deeds in civil life and in foreign wars (for his participation in earlier civil warfare came in his youthful days) leave him but the shadow of a name in the face of the new scourge of intestine wars worse than civil. That Cato's praises find less contradiction is due to his refusal to champion the cause either of Caesar or of Pompey in itself, or any save that of the Republic alone:

  tantone novorum
proventu scelerum quaerunt, uter imperet
  urbi?
vix tanti fuerat civilia bella movere,
ut neuter.¹¹

The causes of the war, and especially the great personal causes, Caesar and Pompey, were futile and trivial after all, compared with the war itself:

quemque suae rapiunt scelerata in proelia
 causae.¹²

No single quotation, or even any moderate number of lines selected for the purpose, can demonstrate the extent to which the theme of the horror of civil war underlies the poem. It is necessary to read it through, feeling significant lines in their context. Certain verses, however, may be chosen to suggest the general tenor of his thought. But there are two points to be emphasized first, in connection with popular criticism, not with any desire to claim for Lucan a sheer poetic genius that, save for some inspired moments, he lacked, but to defend the technique of which his age was undoubtedly a far more capable critic than ours. Had he conceived of Pompey or Cato, or even the Roman Senate, as the theme and hero of his epic, he was quite capable of using his sententiae clearly to that end. The frequency with which critics confuse the book they themselves would like to have written with that the author has produced does not validate their method, nor is any modern definition of epic unity properly retroactive. It is perhaps as well for Lucan's rather shaky reputation for historical accuracy that he did not try to set up a consistent hero for the events of the civil war. Many of those very inaccuracies which lay his work open to serious criticism from the historian's point of view become far less grave when the details are considered not as part of a historical narrative of the wars, but as part of the setting for a general study of the evils of civil war asexemplified by its latest and most ruinous example.

The major difficulty in the way of this thesis would seem to be the remoteness of Lucan's age from any real danger of civil war, unless we accept the idea that opposition to Nero was already increasing to such proportions that a "dissuasion from civil war" again seemed timely and necessary. The outbreak of rebellion so shortly after Lucan's death may well have increased the impression made by his poem, but his convictions seem too deeply rooted to be due to this alone.

He wrote nearly ninety years after the end of the civil wars, when the pax augusta had made the world safe for Roman imperialism, and a clear frontier had been established for the single empire that had been the aim of wars and diplomacy in the Mediterranean world for centuries, and was to remain the basis of Mediterranean civilization for centuries more. Why should he have grown up with so strong a sense of the ruin wrought by internal warfare?

maius ab hac acie quam quod sua saecula
 ferrent
volnus habent populi: plus est quam vita
  salusque
quod perit: in totum mundi prosternimur
 aevum.
vincitur his gladiis omnis quae serviet aetas.¹³

Much of this feeling of the endless consequences of the war may have come from reading contemporary and Augustan accounts, and picturing them with an imagination sharpened by the contrast of generations of internal peace and safely distant wars, which made the imminent peril of revolution the more to be averted, as it was the more inconceivable. Something must have been due to the tradition of senatorial hostility to the Julio-Claudian emperors, which served to keep the civil wars and the lost Republic before men's minds long after the war generations had died out, as Tacitus was later to testify. Whatever the origin of Lucan's obsession with the subject, the civil war that broke out three years after his death was to justify his fears and warnings only too well, and civil wars were to be for centuries, in varying scale, a dominant concern of the Empire.

The war of which he wrote was on a scale that justifies comparison with the war of our recent past, and was in many ways far more akin to it in scope and in combatants than other ancient conflicts. How deep the likeness goes, obscuring the immense differences of weapons and transport, is seen in the striking similarities between Lucan's reactions to the horrors, not so much of the actual carnage, as of the inner workings of the war on the body and soul of the Empire. There is an accidental touch of sheer historical irony in the description of Caesar's march through Northern Italy (i. 255-57) which provided the famous phrase furor Teutonicus for later men, from Priscian through the Middle Ages to Petrarch, Bismarck, and the much-disputed Louvain inscription.

Lucan wrote of war a century past, as many of the present generation are writing of a war begun less than a score of years ago. How he recaptured so authentic a feeling and how his pampered literary life afforded such insight is impossible to determine. Certainly his use of Livy and Caesar and the other historians we know cannot explain it. His "road to Emathia" may not be traced, however scholars argue about the sources of his accounts of army movements and tactics, but it may be understood in the light of our own contemporary reactions to the aftermath of war.

How far this conflict diverged from the set Roman conception of war as a source of glory is shown in Curio's speech:

usque adeo miserum est civili vincere bello?14

to which Lucan's whole work is an affirmative answer. The problem of war guilt is suggested not only by the bitter summary of the causes of the war, open and concealed, ending

hinc usura vorax avidumque in tempore
  fenus
et concussa fides, et multis utile bellum,¹⁵

but by the words of Caesar himself:

nulla manus, belli mutato iudice, pura est.16

A similar conception is stated more fully in the first book, with the added idea of the impossibility of stopping a civil war once begun:

imminet armorum rabies; ferrique potestas
confundet ius omne manu: scelerique
  nefando
nomen erit virtus: multosque exibit in annos
hic furor. et superos quid prodest poscere
  finem?¹⁷

The conception of the "lost generation" recurs frequently, as in the soldiers' plea for return after Pompey's death—perierunt tempora vitae.¹⁸ The speech of Vulteius in the fourth book has its parallels with the verses of Allan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, and other recent poets.¹⁹

The demoralizing sense of the utter loss of personal security in a ruined world is clearly conceived in Brutus' words to Cato:

  pacemne tueris
inconcussa tenens dubios vestigia mundo?

and in the contrast between the anxieties of the living and the peace of the fallen soldier:

felix, qui potuit mundi nutante ruina
quo iaceat iam scire loco.²⁰

His intimate realization of the evils wrought by civil strife naturally did not lead Lucan to any general denunciation of war. The victories of Rome over barbarians were a totally different matter, remote from his inner anxieties. Did any classical writer before Orosius suggest the reverse side of victories in externa bella? And even against the recurrence of civil wars, an epic poem was too frail a defense to work on the minds of men of action and ambition.

Notes

¹ J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age (New York, 1927), p. 328.

² W. E. Heitland, Introduction to Haskins, M Annei Lucani "Pharsalia" (London, 1887), p. Ixii.

³ "Un poète républicain," Révue des deux mondes, X (1878), 423-44; the points cited above are found on pp. 424-25 and 427.

⁴ H. C. Nutting, "The Hero of the Pharsalia," American Journal of Philology, LIII (1932), 41-52.

⁵ Horace Carmen i. 2. 21-24, dated by J. Elmore in Class. Phil., XXVI (July, 1931), 260, as composed in the latter part of the year 30 B.C.

⁶Historia Francorum, Preface to Book v.

⁷ A greater poem has given rise among some critics to a similar-controversy, but why should anyone argue whether Lucifer is, in despite of Milton's will, the hero of an epic that begins "Of man's first disobedience"?

⁸ Material on this point from the accessus and glosses in various MSS, as well as from separate commentaries, is cited in an article, "The Manuscripts of Lucan: Accessus and Marginalia," to be published in Speculum during 1933. I have, therefore, merely summarized its general tenor here.

⁹Carmen ix. 230 ff.

¹⁰Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum, ed. Migne, in Patrologia Latina, Vol. CCX, s.v. "Bellum."

¹¹Bellum civile ii. 60-63.

¹²Ibid. 251.

¹³Ibid. vii. 638-41.

¹⁴Ibid. i. 366.

¹⁵Ibid. 181-82.

¹⁶Ibid. vii. 263.

¹⁷Ibid. i. 666-69.

¹⁸Ibid. ix. 233.

¹⁹Ibid. iv. 476-520.

²⁰Ibid. ii. 247-48, with which cf. ii. 286-90, and iv. 393-94.