SOURCE: "General Introduction" in Lucan: Pharsalia, translated by Jane Wilson Joyce, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. ix-xxv.

[In the following excerpt, Joyce provides an overview of Lucan's Pharsalia, his life, reception as a poet, and his influence.]

Poet

Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) was born 3 November 39 C. E. at Cordoba, son of the Spanish financier Marcus Annaeus Mela and member of a remarkable family.¹ His grandfather Lucius Annaeus Seneca ("the Elder"), a successful businessman, wrote a history of Rome, now lost, beginning with the civil war that forms the subject of Lucan's Pharsalia; blessed with longevity (he lived to be nearly a hundred) and a phenomenal memory, a keen critic of Roman rhetoric, he could quote at length even from speeches heard in boyhood; some of his work on oratory is extant. One of Lucan's two uncles, Lucius Annaeus Gallio (later adopted and renamed Lucius Iunius Novatus Gallio), is the Gallio who, as governor of Achaea in 52 C. E., threw out the Jews' case against St. Paul in Acts 18:12ff. The other, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was Rome's richest citizen, the most popular living author of his day, and, for a short while, virtual co-ruler of the Roman world.

Within a few months of Lucan's birth, his father moved the family to Rome; he then retired to a house deep in the country. While it is possible that Lucan received his early education at home in the old Roman style, all indications are that he was educated at Rome. Perhaps he lived there with his uncle Gallio while attending a grammar school. Here he would have learned to read and write both Latin and Greek until he was about eleven (51 C. E.); then, for the next five years, he would have studied grammar and literature and other subjects intended to give pupils a good general education and a foundation for advanced study of rhetoric. In 49, a shift in the kaleidoscope of Roman imperial politics and intrigue brought his uncle Seneca home from exile on Corsica, and Seneca may well have taken an interest in his gifted nephew's education.

An exceptional student, Lucan continued his studies under the tutelage of Lucius Annaeus Cornutus (born circa 20 C. E.). Possibly related to Lucan or in some other way connected with his family, this young Stoic teacher of rhetoric and philosophy was author of works in both Greek and Latin, including a critique of Vergil's poetry and a handbook of Stoic allegorical interpretations of Greek mythology. In the classroom with Lucan was another gifted young poet, Persius, whose satires still exist. After two or three years' study under Cornutus, Lucan went abroad sometime in the late 50s C. E. for a final year of schooling at Athens. According to Suetonius' biographical sketch of Lucan, it is at this point that the poet's life intertwines with that of the emperor Nero, who summoned Lucan home to make him a member of the "cadre of friends" (cohors amicorum).²

It seems highly likely, however, that poet and emperor had become well acquainted much earlier, for, from 49 to 54, Lucan's uncle Seneca served as Nero's tutor. What would have been more natural than that he bring the two youths together in those years? They were almost of an age, Lucan being only about eleven months younger than Nero, and they shared a passionate interest in literature. Indeed, in 60 C. E., Nero established games patterned on Apollo's Pythian Games, with contests for poets as well as for athletes and horsemen; Lucan won top honors in these games with a poem praising Nero (Laudes Neronis).

The cordial, even friendly, relations implied by these events continued. In 62 or 63 C. E., Nero appointed Lucan quaestor and augur both. The normal age for a quaestorship (the lowest rung of the Roman political ladder) was twenty-five. Even if we accept the later date, Lucan, who turned twenty-four only in November, was still too young to hold such an office; in fact, early appointment to the quaestorship was an honor usually reserved for members of the imperial family. The augurate, too, was an honor: the College of Augurs was restricted to sixteen members.

The motives of princes, however, are notoriously difficult to read, and it is well to remember that, also in 62, Seneca had begged permission to cede the bulk of his huge fortune to Nero and to be allowed to go into retirement. While refusing the first request for a while, Nero granted the second.³ Considering the reckless course of action Nero had set himself in the late 50s (the infamous murder of his mother occurred in 59), it is unlikely that Seneca's retirement was an entirely simple matter. Seneca may have been maneuvered into making the request, or he may have felt himself in danger and hoped to avoid trouble. In any case, it is possible that, despite the honors accorded him, Lucan was beginning to feel uneasy about Nero's friendship; it is equally possible that his own friendly feelings were fading. Nor should we overlook the possibility that Nero was using the nephew to get at the uncle.

The dual honors awarded to Lucan carried with them dual responsibilities. As quaestor, he became a member of the Senate and organized a show of gladiatorial games; as augur, he had many ceremonial functions to perform. In the meantime, he kept up his writing—something that can be said of few Roman authors, who tended either to be uninvolved in official duties or to postpone literary activity until their political careers had ended. Though only his unfinished epic remains, we know the titles of many more works by Lucan. Among those on mythological themes were Iliacon (Song of Troy), Catachthonion (Trip to the Underworld), Orpheus, Medea (an unfinished tragedy), and libretti for fourteen pantomimes (Salticae Fabulae). There were ten books of occasional verse (called Silvae), a collection of epigrams, another of Saturnalia, and a third of Letters from Campania; we hear of an Address to Polla (Lucan's wife) and of a pair of speeches in the declamatory style—one for, one against Octavius Sagitta (involved in 58 C. E. in a sex-and-murder scandal recounted by Tacitus in Annales 13.44). In addition to the Laudes Neronis (In Praise of Nero) already mentioned, a poem titled About the Burning of the City (De Incendio Urbis) is also listed.

Vacca, Lucan's only ancient biographer other than Suetonius, says that these works were all extant in his day (four or five centuries after Lucan's death). While some titles may refer to juvenilia, the output is nonetheless prodigious; equally, we should note their longevity. And even if some works date as early as 55, or even 52 C. E., still we must be impressed by a writer who produced so much in little more than a decade.

The strands of literature and politics in Lucan's life become more tightly interwoven from this point on. Indeed, it may have been in 62 or 63 that he set to work on the Pharsalia, though chronology for events in the last two or three years of his life is hazy. We hear from Vacca that up through the year of his quaestorship, relations between poet and emperor were friendly; then things changed drastically as Lucan incurred Nero's envy and hatred (equidem hactenus tempora habuit secunda. quae autem sequuntur mutata invidia et odio Neronis …).

Like Vacca, Suetonius suggests that Nero's jealousy of Lucan created the rift between them. He sees the turning point in an act of deliberate humiliation. While Lucan was giving a public reading, Nero suddenly called a meeting of the Senate and departed, his sole intention being to give Lucan "the freeze" (nulla nisi refrigerandi sui causa). Suetonius goes on to say that Lucan read a "libelous poem" (carmen famosum) in which he gave both the emperor and his most powerful friends a severe tongue-lashing; it is at least possible that Suetonius is referring to Lucan's De Incendio Urbis, which, if it was about the Great Fire at Rome, would have to have been written sometime after July 64 C. E. Towards the end of that same year, according to Tacitus, Dio, and Vacca, Nero imposed a ban on all Lucan's public speaking. (Suetonius makes no mention of such a ban.)⁴

Early in 65 C. E., Lucan joined a conspiracy of senators headed by Calpurnius Piso and sworn to assassinate Nero.⁵ Vacca says Lucan was led astray by the older senator (deceptus est), while Suetonius describes him as the virtual standard-bearer of the group (paene signifer). The conspiracy was discovered, and Lucan, along with his uncles Seneca and Gallio, was forced to commit suicide. When his father came forward to claim Lucan's property, he, too, was compelled to kill himself.⁶

Lucan's relationship with Nero traces a meteoric trajectory—a steep climb to the heights swiftly followed by a plunge into oblivion. Throughout his life run twin themes of literature and politics, the two elements gradually drawing together and intermingling until, in the end, Lucan the political conspirator, compelled by Nero to die, sends his father corrections of verses in the Pharsalia before ordering the surgeon to open his veins. He died 30 April 65 C. E.⁷

For most of the twentieth century, Lucan has been a shadowy literary pressence, an author little read and largely ignored. Yet, as we have seen, his literary output was vast; his talent was recognized in his own day; and his many works were all still available long after his death. A brief history of Lucan's fluctuating literary reputation is in order here, beginning with his reputation as author in his lifetime.

In the ancient world, the first step in publication was often the public reading. Who listened when Lucan read his Pharsalia? The emperor did, for one. In his Life of Lucan, as we have seen, Suetonius tells us that Nero walked out of one of Lucan's recitations; ergo, he was there. Clearly, if the emperor was present, then the audience must have been large and prestigious. Given Nero's passion for the arts, even those with little genuine interest in poetry would have felt compelled to feign interest, would have wanted to see and be seen at such gatherings. So it seems likely that Lucan could have counted on a large audience of distinguished and well-educated men and women—or at least he could before the break with Nero.

What would such a reading have been like? The Younger Pliny, whose letters are our principal source of information, tells us that an author, having decided to give a reading, would issue invitations.⁸ One can imagine that an invitation from the well-connected Lucan must have been much sought after. Readings could last an afternoon or continue over the space of several days. Poetry, especially epic and tragedy, was most commonly the type of work presented. It was also the author's responsibility to hire a hall or theater for his recitation, and he had to supply the seating and platform as well—no problem for the wealthy Lucan, although these expenses must often have been prohibitive for a man of limited means.⁹ Once his guests had assembled, the author spoke a few words, then sat to read from his new work. At intervals, the audience cheered or even rose to its feet if especially stirred. (Occasionally an author would ensure the stirring by judicious disbursements of money beforehand.)

Such readings were very much a feature of the social landscape in Lucan's day and had been so since their inception in the 30s B. C. E. Asinius Pollio, friend of Vergil and Horace, and founder of Rome's first public library, started the fashion.¹⁰ Juvenal, writing a generation after Lucan, complains of the large number and low quality of these public readings (Satires 1.1 and 3.9).

It seems likely, than, that Lucan, the courtier shown preferential treatment by the emperor, nephew of the emperor's chief counselor, and a wealthy senator and augur in his own right, could have counted on a glittering assembly of senators and knights, their womenfolk and hangers-on, even had his work been mediocre. But, in addition to his political connections, Lucan the author seems to have been popular. Statius, in his poem in honor of Lucan's birthday (Silvae 2.7), has the mother of Orpheus, the Muse Calliope, make an implicit comparison between her mythological son and the infant Lucan; leaning over the baby's cradle, she predicts:

No stream, no herds of wild creatures will you
 stir
with your plectrum, nor yet the Getic ash-
 trees,
but the Seven Hills, Mars' river Tiber,
learned Knights and the Senate clad in
  purple—
these you'll charm and lead with your eloquent
  song …
(vv. 43-47)

The implication is clearly that Lucan will be an urban, a specifically Roman, Orpheus.

In addition to full-blown public performances, there were also private readings, to which, after Nero imposed the ban, Lucan may have resorted. Perhaps we should think of his uncle's well-appointedvilla (where Seneca, too, may have presented private readings or even productions of his tragedies). And, if the author was Lucan and the text his Pharsalia, very private indeed such readings must have been, for, with Nero's ban in effect, both reader and listener were subject to the treason laws. Certainly the overt and violent hostility to Caesarism expressed in Pharsalia Seven would not have been safe for public recitation at any time, even in the heyday of Lucan's intimacy with Nero.

Lucan's influence since his death has been variable. In the decades immediately afterward, as in much of the twentieth century, interest in his work was muted; but in the centuries between—especially in the Middle Ages—it was considerable.

Presumably, Lucan's papers, including the manuscript of the Pharsalia, came into the hands of Polla Argentaria after the deaths of her husband, his uncles, and his father in 65 C.E. It might seem more appropriate that the poet's former master of rhetoric, rather than his widow, should have become Lucan's literary executor; after all, Comutus filled that role for his other famous pupil, Persius. But Cornutus would seem not to have been a candidate for literary executor, since it is unclear when or if he ever returned from exile after his banishment in the early 60s C.E. At the end of his Life of Lucan, Suetonius says that he can recall public lectures on the Pharsalia, and he mentions that several copies, some of them better than others, were available at the book-sellers' stalls in his day (c. 100 C.E.). The poet Martial, in an unflattering epigram published about the same time, confirms that sales of the Pharsalia were brisk.¹¹

Though his epic was recognized to be ground-breaking, though he was an author much admired during most of his short life, Lucan found no imitators, no poets in his audience ready to take up his principles. In antiquity, it was not his poetry or his rhetoric that stopped Lucan's contemporaries from following his innovative lead in the creation of epic: it was his politics and his death. Although the influence of Lucan's epic may be discerned in the Punica of Silius Italicus (composed c. 88-98 C.E.), in the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus (composed c. 80-92 C.E.), and in Statius' Thebaid (also composed in the 80s), none of these imperial epics could be said to have been modelled on the Pharsalia; only the Punica uses history rather than mythology as its subject, but even so, the Second Punic War was safely in the distant and glorious past. Silius Italicus, despite his historical subject, joins the other two poets in reverting to the traditional epic device of divine machinery. As Frederick M. Ahl has put it, "If Vergil proved to be a poet the Flavian writers could not rival, Lucan was one they dared not rival."¹²

The clearest indication that this was the tenor of the times is the criticism levelled at the Pharsalia in Petronius' Satyricon (paragraphs 118-124), published (perhaps) shortly after Lucan's death. Although Lucan is never mentioned by name, Petronius clearly means that he is the poet who would profit from a study of the sample Civil War sketched out there. Petronius, a literary conservative, is alarmed and a little affronted by Lucan's innovativeness. In particular, Petronius advocates in his sample epic a return to traditional use of the gods to explain motivation and events.

Other notices about Lucan and his work from the next generation were equally unflattering. In his Dialogue on the Roman literary tradition, Tacitus—never a friend of Lucan—has one of hisless-imposing characters praise Lucan, only to be outdone in the debate by a more traditionalist speaker. Quintilian, the eminent teacher of rhetoric, has left us a famous assessment of the Pharsalia: "Lucan is intense and keyed up and best known for his epigrams; also, speaking for myself, he is a model more useful to orators than to poets" (Lucanus ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus). But after this flurry of interest on the part of Lucan's younger contemporaries, there was a period of silence lasting nearly two and a half centuries.

Then, in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Lucan came into his own. Around 350 C.E., a learned commentary was composed on the Pharsalia; it survives, with many later additions, in two separate manuscripts—the Commenta Bernensia and the Adnotationes super Lucanum. Early in the 400s, the poets Claudian and Prudentius were great admirers of Lucan; Vacca probably wrote his Life of Lucan in the fifth or sixth century. In the ninth through eleventh centuries, what are now the major manuscripts of the Pharsalia were copied and circulated, and from the mid-tenth century to the 1400s, Lucan was listed in the top category of meritorious pagan authors, along with Terence, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Persius, and Sallust. A little later, Lucan's epic seems to have been readily available for classroom use.

The most important admirer of the Pharsalia in medieval Europe was Dante, who, guided by Vergil ("the Prince of Poets") to the First Circle of Hell, sees a brilliant band of pagan poets: Homer, Horace, Ovid—and Lucan. As Dante-Pilgrim says:

… I saw gathered at the edge of light
  the masters of that highest school whose
  song
outsoars all others like an eagle's flight.
(Inferno, Canto IV, 94-96)¹³

The Renaissance, too, evinced interest in the Pharsalia. Thus, Lucan's epic is the only poem from the classical era included among the editiones principes, classical texts printed between 1465 and 1469, the first five years of the printing press. Montaigne often quotes from and makes favorable mention of Lucan's epic. Translations into French, Italian, and Spanish appeared from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Christopher Marlowe's splendid translation of the first book of Lucan's poem was published in 1600.¹⁵

Again, the eighteenth century, which began in a period of literary classicism and which ended with the reactionary Romantics, was—despite its diverse tastes—friendly to Lucan throughout. Nicholas Rowe's translation of the epic appeared in 1718 and was hailed near the end of the century by Dr. Johnson as "one of the greatest productions of English poetry."¹⁶ In 1815, Shelley wrote to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, twice, indicating his preference for Lucan over Vergil (probably on political rather than poetic grounds).¹⁷ Later, in 1821, Shelley still expressed admiration for Lucan, this time in the "sincerest form of flattery": in a passage from the Adonais strikingly reminiscent of Pompey's apotheosis in the opening lines of Pharsalia Nine, Shelley links Lucan with Thomas Chatterton and Sir Philip Sidney; as the souls of poets who died young, they will greet the spirit of John Keats as it enters the fiery non-material world above (Adonais 45).

In contrast, the climate of the modern world has not been favorable to Lucan. For much of the twentieth century, the word "rhetorical" has been devalued in popular idiom to the extent that it now means little more than "bad (and probably deceitful)." Classical scholars themselves have too often been among the first to close Lucan out. This exclusion seems surprising, for, whatever one may think of the literary merits of the work, it is a document from antiquity; more than this, it is a rare example of an ancient work in progress as well as an indicator of the political sentiments of a suppressed opposition. Fortunately, in recent years, Lucan has received more of the attention he deserves.

Poem

At one level, Lucan's poem is about the battle of Pharsalus, the decisive conflict of 48 B. C. E. fought on the Emathian fields of Thessaly in northern Greece and pitting forces led by Julius Caesar against those led by his kinsman Pompey Magnus; it recounts events that prefigure Pharsalus, the battle itself, and the aftermath; it also portrays the dominant personalities of the time—Caesar, Pompey, and Cato. This battle, according to the more traditional view, ushers in the last chapter in the long, ugly chronicle of Roman civil war which stretches back nearly a century. Although it was decisive, the battle of Pharsalus was by no means the end of this struggle, for the war raged on until 31 B.CE., when Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) won out. Equally, although Pharsalus is the first major engagement after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was but one battle of many fought by Roman factions in the last century of the Republic. For Lucan, however, more than any previous or subsequent episode in the civil war, Pharsalus was the death scene of the Roman Republic.

At another level, the poem is about Lucan's Rome, how Roman folly and disaster led to the establishment of the Julio-Claudian dynasty; it is about the price paid to purchase Nero.

At its deepest level, the poem is a meditation on liberty in the state and free will in the individual. Lucan wrestles with questions of courage and patriotic ideals, even tyrannicide. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the poem is how it seems to reveal the poet's own swings of mood, his ups and downs during the last years of his life, the period of his involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy.

The poem, then, is not so much an account of historical events as it is a study of politics and psychology, of disastrous patterns of behavior and the compulsion to repeat them, the compulsion of Rome to destroy itself. In Lucan's poem, Pharsalus stands for all such acts of political self-destruction; it is the pure "type," the gladiatorial match between Liberty and a Caesar. Pharsalus is to Lucan a doomsday; that day, almost a century before his birth, changed Lucan's world for the worse. As the surrealistic vision of the battlefield at the end of Book Seven clearly shows, Pharsalus was for Lucan the event that brought the forces of death and destruction to power at Rome.

It is because the battle of Pharsalus holds such sway in Lucan's imagination that Bellum Civile seems a less satisfactory choice for the title of the poem than Pharsalia. Lucan's poem is not only about the civil war between Caesar and the Senate: it is about bellaplus quam civilia (1.1), "wars worse than civil"; it is about the day Romans brought the Roman Republic to an end, the day the world turned its sword against its own vitals.

The Pharsalia is undoubtedly an epic poem; equally certainly, it is a quirky one. First and foremost (by ancient standards at any rate) among those characteristics of a traditional epic which the Pharsalia does maintain is its use of dactylic hexameters, the definitive meter of epic poetry from Homer on. Second, with its ten books averaging 800 lines each, the Pharsalia is long. Third, it is a continuous narrative. Fourth, the style is generally elevated.

Lucan's choice of subject matter naturally dictates his choice of characters, accounting, to some extent, for one of the more radical aspects of Lucan's epic—the presence of not one but three heroes. Or rather, one anti-hero, one would-be-again hero, and one philosopher-hero whom Lucan seems not to like very much. Caesar, Pompey, and Cato have all had their share of critics to say that he is the one true hero of the epic. Rather, Lucan's point seems to be that no one man is the center of his epic; he prefers to concentrate on the self-destruction of Rome at Pharsalus and the brood of evils hatched there.

The fact that the subject matter of the Pharsalia is drawn not from myth but from history—and fairly recent history at that—is not without precedent: Naevius (third century B.CE.) wrote an epic in native Italian verse-form about the First Punic War, which had dominated his youth and early manhood; soon after, Ennius ("the Father of Roman Poetry") wrote an epic in hexameters called the Annales in which he traced Roman history from the Fall of Troy down through the war with Hannibal (the Second Punic War). Although Lucan's use of a severely restricted chronological focus represents a new development in the course of Roman epic, his choice of historical subject matter does not.

But subject matter alone cannot account for the spirit of innovation which suffuses Lucan's Pharsalia. There is no getting round the fact that this poem, while it is recognizably an epic, is deeply, radically new and different. We might call it a "slant epic" as "road" and "read" would be called a "slant rhyme."

Perhaps the most noticeable difference between Lucan's epic and a traditional epic is the drastically diminished role played by members of the old Greco-Roman pantheon; no gods as puppeteers here, no Jupiter with the scroll of destiny on his knees, no solicitous Venus or Juno to whisk a beloved son out of danger. In fact, in a sequence of three parallel scenes (in Books Five, Six, and Nine), Lucan makes it abundantly clear that these deities are moribund and that supernatural power has passed into the hands of Thessalian witches and foreigners' gods. When Appius goes to Apollo's Delphic oracle (5.65-236) to learn his future, he finds the place shut down; when Sextus approaches the witch Erictho to learn his future (6.570-830), she is only too willing and able to oblige. The third scene, in which Cato refuses to consult Ammon's flourishing African oracle when urged by Labienus to do so (9.511-586), seems designed to suggest that Romans have driven away the old simple gods or become too corruptly sophisticated for them. A few men, true Stoics of the Roman school like Cato, heirs to the ideals preserved in their exemplary tales, have that philosophy to sustain them. Ordinary Romans, however, represented by Appius, Sextus, and Labienus, lump oracles and witchcraft together as mildly amusing carnival tricks and possible sources of information useful to themselves personally.

The usual reason given for Lucan's shift away from the Olympians is that the events he narrates are too recent to make their inclusion plausible. It does make literary sense to leave out the (dilapidated) divine machinery, to use the exotic African oracle as a means of displaying Cato's Stoic virtues in yet another light. But the negligible role of Jupiter, Juno & Co. also points up a political message.

In the first place, Lucan's avoidance of traditional divine machinery emphasizes one of his major premises in the Pharsalia, namely, that Caesar's defeat of the Republican forces proves that, if there are gods, either they are not omnipotent or they do not have Rome's best interests at heart. In the second place (and here Lucan is putting effect before cause), the attitude of ordinary Romans to divinity and the supernatural is, Lucan seems to say, directly attributable to the Julio-Claudian practice of emperor deification. If godhood may be conferred on a mortal man by decree of a fawning Senate, then bona fide gods are devalued, and the fabric of belief weakened or destroyed. Philosophy is the only alternative. In the address to Nero (1.33-66), Lucan suggests that his emperor, when deified, will enter Olympus as a usurper or as an actor choosing a role to play; by contrast, the apotheosis of Pompey (9.1-18) takes the form of a soul soaring through a Platonic universe.

The divine and the supernatural are not entirely absent from the Pharsalia. On the contrary, omens and clairvoyants abound, especially in the first six books. In a satiric reenactment of Aeneas' encounter with Venus (Aeneid 1.305ff.), Caesar experiences a visitation from Roma (Pharsalia 1.183-203). In Africa, that simpler and purer country, Lucan finds a congenial setting for his accounts of Hercules and Antaeus (4.581-660), of Hercules and the Apples of the Hesperides (9.348-367), of Perseus and Medusa (9.619-699).

Above all, the forces of fortune and fate (sometimes appearing in mythological form as the Three Sisters) rule the Lucanian universe. Fate was a force in the Aeneid, too, but Vergil's concept was one of harmony between fate and Roman destiny; Lucan's contrasting outlook is summed up in his pithy observation In se magna ruunt—"Great things fall in on themselves" (1.81).

As when we first learn that the Parthenon was intended to be not merely virginal white marble, but marble resplendent with paint and ornament, so we may be taken aback to find that, while the Pharsalia is an epic, it is not all solemnity and high-mindedness. In fact, some parts of it are downright funny. Take Book Five, for example: what of the scene with the Pythia trying to fob Appius off with a simulated trance (vv. 120-161)? Having given a long, admiring description of the oracle and having lamented its decline, Lucan presents the Roman Senator Appius determined at the outbreak of hostilities to use the oracle to find out his own personal fortunes in the war ahead. First, the reluctant Pythia (who has grown fond of retirement) thinks up a dozen reasons why the shrine is out of order, each more pseudo-scientific than the one before. Then, when forced into the shrine, she hangs back at the door and fakes a prophecy—a ruse the not-too-shrewd Appius notices only after the poet has given him eight lines of hints.

Or take Caesar's scene with the poor fisherman (5.510-559), an episode that reads like a fractured fairy tale. Caesar slips out of his camp at night, disguised as a commoner, and goes in search of a ship to take him from Greece back to Italy (he's tired of waiting for Antony and wants to hurry him up). When Caesar, larger than life, knocks at the door of a fisherman's hut (shades of Odysseus at the door of Eumaios the swineherd!), he makes the roof tiles rattle; nor is Caesar (in actuality, renowned for his mastery of the plain style) able to stop himself from speaking in a high, not to say high-handed, style. The poor fisherman gives Caesar sixteen hexameters explaining why the voyage is impossible on such a night, then says with comic abruptness, "But, if you must go, we'll go—either we'll get there or we won't" (vv. 557-559).

Later in Book Five, we have another example of Lucan's wry humor—the send-up of Caesar as Hero Toss'd Upon Stormy Seas (vv. 577-596). Having described a ferocious storm at sea, Lucan has Caesar make a similarly blustering speech of self-aggrandizement, whereupon Lucan unleashes a storm of even greater ferocity. And yet, after fifty lines of lashing winds and crashing waves, all that happens is that Caesar is gently deposited on the very shore from which he set out (vv. 672-678).

We have seen how closely linked politics and literature are in the life of Lucan. There is a similar interweaving of intent in his epic. The Pharsalia is the vehicle for Lucan's political as well as his literary ideas.

Lucan excels at the deft mixture of humor and horror, as in his long description of the witch Erictho (6.507-569) or in the retelling of the myth of Medusa (9.624-629). A particularly effective example of this aspect of the Pharsalia occurs at 6.564-569, where Lucan gleefully describes the witch engaged in necrophilia. Indeed, Lucan seems spurred to increasingly wild and grotesque flights of fancy as he describes the witch. In a sense, Erictho becomes for him an image of himself as poet, for she is able to mimic all animals and forces of nature. He says of her, Tot rerum vox unafuit ("One voice was all of Nature." See 6.685-693). Like Erictho, Lucan has simulated many voices; like her, he is attempting to raise up the dead and make them speak—but not just Caesar and Pompey and their generation: Lucan is trying to reanimate the corpse of the Republic.

As this comparison implies, antiestablishment politics is the most potent force in the Pharsalia; not surprisingly, then, the most noticeable type of humor in Lucan's epic is political satire. Lucan's uncle Seneca had a flair for this genre, too: he wrote a farcical account (wickedly entitled the Apocolocyntosis or "Gourdification") of the arrival in Olympus of the emperor Claudius, recently deceased, recently deified, and depicted by Seneca as a drooling idiot. The best example of political satire in the Pharsalia is perhaps the zombie's description of insurrection in the underworld (6.777-802), with Elysian Romans pitted against Tartarean; but the episode in Book Nine (w. 950-979) where Caesar, accompanied by an overzealous guide, tours the dusty briar patch that once was Troy, runs a close second. Both these passages stand Vergil's Aeneid on its head—yet another example of Lucan's habit of seeing politics and literature as two sides of a single coin.

Caesar is not the only major figure to serve as a target for Lucan's barbs; Cato gets his, too. For example, in Book Two (vv. 350-380), Lucan (like a disdainful society editor) gives us a catalogue of all the refinements that Cato's remarriage to Marcia lacked: there was no fancy clothing (the bride wore black), no elaborate ceremony, no guests or toasts or bawdy jokes, and no resumption of conjugal rights, either. The fun Lucan pokes at Pompey is much milder: Pompey's dream at the beginning of Book Seven, for instance, is more sad than funny, and if we smile at moments during Cordus' hasty burial of Pompey at the end of Book Eight, then Pompey's spirit joins us in that smileat the opening of Book Nine.

In fact, Lucan's most startling innovation as epic poet may hinge on his outlook: more than its multiplicity of heroes or its paucity of gods, ultimately what sets the Pharsalia apart is mood. This difference shows up most clearly in contrast to the Aeneid. Vergil's poem is the work of a gentle but gloomy optimist; Lucan's, of a witty but angry pessimist. While anger is the poem's pervasive, underlying mood, its surface displays many tones. It is tender and elegiac in scenes between Pompey and Comelia, eerie and evocative in its descriptions of deserted farmlands and ghost towns, lush and exotic at Cleopatra's banquet, and so on. Each scene has its own flavor. The poem may owe its tonal diversity to the poet's nature as much as to his education. Perhaps, too, he is indebted to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses is similarly an epic remarkable for its constantly shifting tone and mood.

The pervasive anger of the Pharsalia, though often in the cloak of satiric humor, is black and bitter nonetheless. Why must his generation pay with its liberty for the cowardice and ineffectiveness of previous generations? This sense of personal grievance and the conviction that the world died at Pharsalus nearly a century before he was born account in large measure for the quirkiness of Lucan's Pharsalia. …

Notes

¹ The Latin sources for Lucan's life are gathered in W. E. Heitland's Introduction to C. E. Haskins' edition of Lucan's epic, xiii-xx. Frederick M. Ahl gives a detailed analysis of the sources in the first chapter and in the Appendix of Lucan: An Introduction (Cornell University Press, 1976). Dates for events in Lucan's life (other than birth and death) are conjectural, based on Ahl, pp. 36-47 and 333-353.

² Most easily found in English translation in J. C. Rolfe's Suetonius in the Loeb Classical Library series (Harvard University Press, 1959), vol. 2, pp. 500-503.

³ See Tacitus Annales 14. 52-56.

⁴ For ancient testimony to the ban, see Tacitus Annales 15.49; Vacca, vv. 24-32 (Heitland); Dio 62.29.4.

⁵ Member of a family which had long demonstrated strong Republican feelings, Calpumius Piso had already come into conflict with Gaius (Caligula) in 40 C. E. over the deification of his wife.

⁶ Tacitus describes the discovery of the Pisonian conspiracy at Annales 15.54-57 and the suicides of Lucan (15.70), Seneca (15.60-64), Gallio (15.73), and Mela (16.17).

⁷ See Suetonius' Life of Lucan, pp. 502-503 (Loeb).

⁸ See his Letters 7.17.11-12 and 9.34.2.

⁹ See Tacitus Dialogus de Oratoribus (Dialogue about Orators) par. 9.

¹⁰ Lucan's grandfather Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 55 B. C. E. to C. E. 37) tells us this in the preface (par. 2) to his fourth book of Controversiae (Debates), a collection of school exercises in oratory, debating imaginary cases before the law court.

¹¹ Martial Epigrams 14. 104; see also 7.23 and 25.

¹² Ahl, Lucan: An Introduction, p. 80.

¹³ Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor Books/New American Library, 1954), p. 52.

¹⁴ Some examples of translations made of the Pharsalia in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries include: P. Le Rouge's French prose paraphrase of 7.62ff. (Paris, 1490, 1500), Michel de Marolles' translation (1623), and Brebeuf s French verse translation (1655); Montechiello's Italian version of 1492, Giulio Morigi's of 1579, and Alberto Campani's of 1640; in Spanish we have Juan de Jauregui's Farsalia (trans., 1614; pub. 1684).

¹⁵ See Marlowe's Poems, L. C. Martin, ed. (New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1966), pp. 261-295.

¹⁶ In his Life of Nicholas Rowe (in Lives of the Poets, 1779), Samuel Johnson (himself partial to Lucan) goes on to say: "There is, perhaps, [no other translation] that so completely exhibits the genius and spirit of the original. Lucan is distinguished by a kind of dictatorial or philosophick dignity … full of ambitious morality and pointed sentences, comprised in vigorous and animated lines." And Johnson goes on to commend Rowe's translation further for its melody and force and its adherence to the original.

¹⁷ See Letters 254 and 257 in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 9, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 116 and 119.

Select Bibliography

Texts and Commentaries

Endt, Iohannes, ed. Adnotationes super Lucanum. Lipsiae: B. G. Teubner, 1909.

Getty, R. J., ed. M Annaeus Lucanus. De Bello Civili. Liber L. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940.

Haskins, C. E., ed. Pharsalia with an Introduction by W. E. Heitland. New York: Georg Olms, 1971; reprint of 1887 ed.

Housman, A. E., ed. M Annaei Lucani Belli Civilis Libri Decem. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927.

Mayer, R. Lucan. Civil War VIII. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1981.

Postgate, J. P., ed. M Annaei Lucani De Bello Civili Liber VII (rev. ed.), with an Introduction by 0. A. W. Dilke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Usener, Hermann Karl, ed. Commenta Bernensia. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967; reprint of 1860 Teubner ed.

Wuilleumier, Pierre, and Henri Le Bonniec, eds. Bellum Civile Liber Primus ("Érasme" Collection des Textes Latins Commentes). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.

Specialized Reference Works

Deferrari, Roy J., et al. A Concordance of Lucan. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1940.

Mooney, George W. Index to the Pharsalia of Lucan. Hermathena, XLIV (first supplemental volume), 1927.

Pichon, Rene. Les sources de Lucain. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1912.

Secondary Sources

Ahl, Frederick M. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.