[In the following excerpt, Widdows offers an overview on Lucan's life, writing, and reputation.]

Life

Our knowledge of the life of Marcus Anneus Lucanus—known variously in the modern vernacular as Lucan, Lucain, and Lucano—is derived principally from two short "lives" prefixed to medieval manuscripts of his poem, one attributed to Suetonius (c. A.D. 70-160), and the other to a grammarian named Vacca, who is thought to have lived in the sixth century, but who derived his material froma much earlier source. Lucan came from a distinguished family of Spanish Romans living in Corduba. His father, M. Anneus Mela, a wealthy knight and businessman, had two brothers, the philosopher Seneca, and Lucius Anneus Junius Gallio, proconsul of the Roman province of Achea (i.e., Greece) in the days of St. Paul's missionary journeys.' His mother, Acilia, came from a talented family, also. Her father was Acilius Lucanus (hence Lucan's name), a well-known lawyer and writer.

Lucan was born in A.D. 39 in Corduba and was taken to Rome in his first year to be brought up and educated. He went through the traditional education of the Roman upper classes, first studying with a grammarian; then with a rhetorician, under whose tutelage he became a star in the art of declamation (see below); and finally with the Stoic philosopher Cornutus. Thus the two chief talents of his family, rhetoric and philosophy, especially Stoic philosophy, were further reinforced by his education. Lucan also acquired in his short life an encyclopedic knowledge (some of it inaccurate, but that was not his fault) of a remarkably wide range of other subjects, including geography, ethnology, astronomy, astrology, mythology, history, and politics.

In about the year A.D. 60 Lucan attracted the attention of Nero (two years younger than Lucan), who appointed him qumstor (the first step in a political career at Rome) before the statutory age of twenty-five, and then made him a member of the College of Augurs, a position of great prestige from which he derived his detailed knowledge of the pseudo-science of augury. At the same time he was active on the literary scene, producing, according to Vacca, a poem on Troy, a Saturnalia, a Catachthonion (Descent to the Underworld), an unfinished tragedy on the myth of Medea, fourteen dramatic ballets, some epigrams, a speech in prose against one Octavius Sagitta and another in his defense, a speech (?) on the burning of the city, and letters from Campania—none of which have survived. Of his Civil War we have nine complete books and half of the tenth, although he published only three books in his lifetime.

In the same year that he was made qucstor, Lucan won the prize in a public contest of poetry at the Neronian Games, for a poem in praise of Nero. There is no knowing what resentment was building up in Nero's jealous and suspicious mind, but relations seem to have continued to be outwardly friendly until 64, the year in which Nero broke up a poetry recital by Lucan and forbade him to publish poetry or practice in the law courts.

In the end Nero's extravagance and eccentricity led, in A.D. 65, to the formation of a conspiracy under a senator named Caius Calpumius Piso. Many of the leading senators and knights joined it, including Lucan. Their purpose was to assassinate Nero and replace him with Piso. Two days before the planned assassination, the conspiracy was betrayed, and all the participants were either executed or ordered to kill themselves. Lucan, one of the last to be given the order, opened his veins, reciting as he died, according to Tacitus, some lines that he had written about a soldier who had suffered a similar fate.

Lucan, Nero, and The Civil War

The relationship between Lucan, his epic poem, and Nero is a complicated one, and little is certain beyond the facts that Lucan recited and published three books of The Civil War while he was a friend and fellow poet of Nero; that he quarrelled with Nero and was forbidden to publish any more;and that he joined the conspiracy of Piso and was among those ordered to commit suicide when it was detected.

It would be neat and convenient to be able to say that the first three books were favorable to Nero and free from strong libertarian sentiments, and that the remaining seven were strongly libertarian and republican and openly offensive to the emperor. Unfortunately, there is no such clear division. For example, one of the strongest expressions of libertarian sentiment is in Book 1, the paradoxical wish expressed by Nigidius Figulus at the end of his prophecy (lines 669/739-672/743). [Here and elsewhere such double notation indicates the numbers of the original Latin lines and those of the translation.] And, contrariwise, in Book 7 Lucan goes out of his way to give Nero's ancestor L. Domitius a heroic death at the battle of Pharsalia (lines 599/656-616/675), when he must have known, as we know from Cesar's account, that Domitius escaped from the battle and was overtaken and killed by Cesar's cavalry. The only apparent reason for this distortion is the desire to please Nero.

In any case, the writing and partial publication of The Civil War came late in Lucan's short life, probably in the last three or four years of it; and it is disconcerting to realize that he remained on good terms with Nero long after most men of goodwill had become disgusted with the emperor's behavior. Certainly, Nero's reign started well. In his first speech to the senators, in A.D. 54, Nero promised to share power with them and to exercise generosity and clemency; and it seems that in the first five years, with the excellent Burrus as commander of the pratorian guard, Seneca to advise him, and his mother, Agrippina, as a controlling influence on his personal behavior, he did carry out that policy.

It is generally agreed that the turning point in his reign was the murder of Agrippina in A.D. 59, after which Nero became increasingly capricious and uncontrolled. Seneca continued his efforts to influence him for another three years, until he retired from public life in 62; and Lucan seems to have remained in favor until the ban on publication in 64. This suggests that Lucan's quarrel with Nero was artistic rather than political, although by 64 personal differences would have been aggravated by the suspicion, widely held, that Nero himself had started the Great Fire of Rome in that year. It must be remembered that Nero was not only unbelievably vain but also genuinely proud of his artistic ability, especially as a poet, and that he considered Lucan a serious rival. How, in the circumstances of 64 and 65, Lucan can have expected to publish a poem that, whatever the conditions under which it was written, breathes Stoic fervor and hatred of tyranny from almost every page, is a mystery. Perhaps, at least from the year 64 onward, he did not. Perhaps he was writing with a view to a future when everything would be different, when the struggle between Liberty and a Cesar would be over, and when freedom would once more exist.

Reputation

It is unlikely today that the average reader, if asked to name the greatest poets of Rome, would reply with Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Yet from the Middle Ages to the early part of the nineteenth century the inclusion of Lucan in the list would have occasioned no surprise. Even so, right from the beginning there has been something equivocal about his reputation. Martial, his compatriot, coeval, and friend, represents Lucan in an epigram as saying:

Sunt quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam:
 Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.

(There are some people around who deny that
  I am a poet:
  Not so my publisher; he sells me and thinks
  that I am.)

The basis of criticism by his contemporaries was that Lucan was not like Virgil. Like most artists who react against the influence of a towering figure from the recent past, he went too far, from the strictly classical point of view, in the opposite direction. His reaction against Virgil (with whose work he was well acquainted) took two salient forms: abandonment of a notable feature traditional to epic poetry since Homer, namely, the intervention of the gods in the affairs of mortals; and the retention of certain features, for example, storms at sea and single combat between heroes, but in a wildly exaggerated form, as if to out-Virgil Virgil.

A little later, Quintilian, another Spaniard, prominent in Rome as a teacher and practitioner of rhetoric, continued the note of uncertainty in the thumbnail sketch of Lucan as a poet which is perhaps the best-known description of his special qualities:

Lucanus ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus, et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus.

(Lucan is full of passion and energy and remarkable for his sententiœ, and, to give my honest opinion, more suitable as a model for orators than for poets.)

Nevertheless, Lucan's reputation was firmly established by the time of Tacitus, who, in the mouth of a character in a dialogue, ranked him with Horace and Virgil.² His popularity continued through the Middle Ages, as is attested by the number of manuscripts of the Bellum Civile,³ the constant quotation from him by other authors, and his presence in the florilegia, or anthologies, compiled for purposes of quotation by speakers and writers. It continued through the Renaissance, whose scholars set to work compiling manuscripts and editing the Bellum Civile.

It was, as mentioned above, in the early part of the nineteenth century that Lucan's reputation began to decline, at least in England and Germany—less so in France, where people are more tolerant of rhetoric. In England, the spirit of Victorianism that disparaged Lucan was the same as the spirit that disparaged the poetry of Pope. Poetry to the Victorians had to be "poetic" in their limited sense of the term, with a strong emphasis on melancholy, sentiment, and moral purpose; whereas the qualities that immediately strike the reader in Lucan are energy, passion, indignation, cleverness, and wit. He was indeed a "rhetorical" poet, but not in the sense that is usually understood by the term today. This requires some explanation.

Rhetoric

It is impossible to understand the special flavor of Lucan's manner of writing without some consideration of its source, namely, the practice of declamation, which was the stage to which rhetoric had been reduced. Declamation had already existed in the time of Cicero, and he practicedit, but only as an amusement. To him oratory was the great glory of man. It comprehended knowledge of history, philosophy, literature, and language, all enrolled in the cause of persuasion, and persuasion in defense of justice and truth. By those exalted standards declamation was a sorry thing, no more than an intellectual game.

Declamation was, nevertheless, the main part of rhetorical education in the age of Nero. Its teachers taught it in school and practiced it in performance. "Performance" is the mot juste. It took place in public and had its experts and its stars. It took two specific forms, the Suasoria and the Controversia.

The Suasoria is easily described. The student or performer chose a theme and spoke persuasively for or against it. Naturally after a time the supply of themes ran out, and it became a stereotyped exercise on a limited number of well-worn subjects. Juvenal, in a characteristically oblique and memorable way of expressing the fact that he had had a conventional education, phrases it as follows:

Et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus, et
 nos
Consilium dedimus Sulla, privatus ut altum
Dormiret.

(Well, I too have withdrawn my hand from
  the cane of the tutor,
I too have given advice to Sulla to lay down
  the reins of
Power, and slumber away in peace as a
  private person.)

Typical Suasoriw, as recorded by Seneca the Elder and Quintilian, are:

"Cicero deliberates whether to ask pardon from Antony."

"Alexander, having reached India, deliberates whether to set sail across the Ocean."

"Agamemnon deliberates whether to sacrific Iphigeneia."

"Antony promises to spare Cicero's life if he burns his writings. Cicero deliberates whether to do so."

Lucan was a star at these student exercises, and clear signs of his education can be seen in the Civil War. For example:

Curio persuades Casar to cross the Rubicon and seize sole power (Book 1, lines 273-291)

On the morning of Pharsalia Cicero urges the hesitant Pompey to engage in battle against Caesar (Book 7, lines 67-85).

At a council of war in Cilicia, the senator Lentulus persuades the defeated Pompey to take refuge in Egypt rather than, as he intended, in Parthia (Book 8, lines 331-453).

In Egypt, the councillor Pothinus persuades King Ptolemy to murder Pompey (Book 8, lines484-535).

The other and more difficult type of declamation was the Controversia. It was based on a law, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, and a legal case was constructed in relation to it, in which the students took opposing sides. To develop nimbleness of wit they would sometimes take one side, sometimes the other. One example will suffice to give an idea of what was involved:

The Brave Man Who Had Lost His Hands (Seneca, Controversioe, i, 4)

The law: Whoever catches an adulterer with his wife, so long as he kills them both, may not be prosecuted. A son, also, may punish adultery by his mother.

The case: A brave man has lost his hands in a war. He caught an adulterer with his wife, by whom he had a grown-up son. He ordered the son to kill the guilty pair. The son refused: the adulterer escaped. The man disinherited his son.

In this preposterous situation passionate speeches were made on both sides, marked by ingenious colores and startling sententice (see below), the cleverer and more unexpected the better.

In the framing of such arguments there were two main techniques: colores and sententice. Color was the technical term for the line of argument, the approach, the interpretation of the facts, whether for or against, depending on the side of the speaker. The reader of the Bellum Civile will find widespread use of this technique, sometimes with alternate colores piled on top of one another. They are not always in support of or against an argument, but are possible explanations or interpretations of an event or state of affairs. An example of the latter is the series of explanations for the source and behavior of the Nile in Book 10. In Book 1, the introduction to the controversial passage in praise of Nero (lines 33-45) is a typical color. Having graphically described the disastrous results to Italy of the civil war, and having considered other, more useful, ways in which the blood of Romans could have been shed, Lucan retracts and says that if this suffering was the necessary price to pay for the advent of Nero as ruler, then it was well worth it.

The word sententia, as understood by the declaimers, had developed well beyond its meaning of "aphorism." It has been well described as follows: "the sententia of the Silver Age was no longer necessarily aphoristic: it included the making of a hit, a point, a terse culminating effect, by various devices of thought or language."⁴ Since there is no English word that covers all this, I shall use the Latin sententia. In Lucan it is all-pervasive. It is found at its most striking, perhaps, at the end of an argument or a speech, neatly and memorably summing up. A few examples from Book I will give an idea of Lucan's skill at sententiœ:

[Lines 98-99]

Temporis angusti mansit concordia discors,
Paxque fuit non sponte ducum.

(Concord there was of a sort, albeit short-
  lived and discordant,
Peace in spite of the marshals.)

[Lines 126-128]

             Quis iustius induit arma,
Scire nefas; magno se iudice quisque
 tuetur:
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.

               (Impossible to determine
Which had the juster cause, for both had
 impeccable sanction:
Gods on the conquering side, but Cato
 choosing the conquered.)

[Lines 503-504]

                Sic urbe relicta
In bellum fugitur.

(So at Rome: premature abandonment of the
city,
Flight into battle.)

[Lines 670-672]

"Cum domino pax ista venit. Duc, Roma,
 malorum
Continuam seriem clademque in tempora
 multa
Extrahe, civili tantum iam libera bello."

("When it comes, that peace, it will come
  combined with a tyrant.
Better that Rome should endure an endless

 chain of disaster,
On and on; civil war is the sole condition of
 freedom.")

An epigram attached to one of the old commentaries well expresses Lucan's peculiar qualities. It is in the form of an epitaph, and the writer puts it in Lucan's mouth:

Corduba me genuit; rapuit Nero; proelia
 dixi
Quae gessere pares, hinc gener, inde socer.
Continuo numquam direxi carmina ductu
Quae tractim serpant: plus mihi comma
 placet.
Fulminis in morem que sunt miranda
 citentur;
Haaec vere sapiet dictio que feriet.

(Corduba bore me; Nero destroyed me; I
  wrote of the battles
Fought by the rival pair, father and husband
 of one.
None of my verses flow in an ordered
 symmetry, winding
Slowly along: I prefer sentences short, to the
 point.
Startling events should be phrased like a
 sudden volley of thunder;
Language, to strike the mind, needs to have
 flavor and bite.)

Critical Questions

There has been much discussion among scholars about the unity, or lack of it, of the Civil War, and about the question of who, if anyone, is its hero.

As to its unity, the matter is to some extent bedeviled by uncertainty as to the intended length of the poem and what the contents of the unwritten part would have been. Clearly it is difficult to talk about the unity of an incomplete work. Certain views that were once held can now be dismissed, namely, at one extreme that the poem as we have it is complete, and at the other that it was planned to continue in perhaps twenty-four books to the victory of Augustus over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. The two most probable answers are that the poem would have concluded with the suicide of Cato at Utica, in a total of twelve books; and that it would have continued to a total of perhaps sixteen books and ended with the assassination of Caesar.

Great ingenuity has been displayed on behalf of both these solutions, but neither can be considered proven. My own opinion inclines toward the first, on the grounds that after the death of Cato, who alone represented for Lucan genuine human virtue and the hope of political freedom, anything else would be an anticlimax; and that Lucan had already poured such passion and indignation into his account of the conflict that it would have been very difficult to avoid duplication and staleness, two defects from which the poem as we have it is notably free. Lucan needed no more space and no more events beyond the death of Cato. All his points would have been made.

Assuming that one of these two conclusions is correct, we may tentatively broach the question of unity. It is generally accepted that Lucan's main source for his historical narrative was Livy. Livy's books on the Civil War are lost, but there survives from antiquity a series of summaries of these lost books, known as the Periochœ. Comparison of Lucan with the Periochae leaves little doubt that Lucan was indeed following Livy.⁵ That being so, he had only a limited choice in his narrative line. Certainly he could select and omit, emphasize and dilute; he could indulge in digressions; he could concentrate and amalgamate similar episodes into one. All these things he could and did do: but he was ultimately constrained by the unfolding events of history. Constrained, though, is not really the word. After all, he chose that period rather than another, and for a purpose; and it served him well. Like all writers of epic since Homer, he stated his theme at the outset: it is civil war and the guilt that it engenders, spreading from Rome to taint the world:

War, civil war and worse, fought out on the
 plains of Thessalia,
Times when injustice reigned and a crime
 was legally sanctioned,
Times when a powerful race, whose prowess
 had won it an empire,
Turned its swords on itself, with opposing
 armies of kinsmen—
This is my theme. I shall tell of the compact
 of tyranny broken,
Huge contention throughout the shattered
 world, to engender
Universal guilt, and of spears and standards
 and eagles
Facing each other in battle, of Roman arms
 against Roman.

This passage is not as specific as the introductions to the Iliad or the Æneid, but it nevertheless tells us what Lucan's subject is: guilt and fratricide, and all the evils that stem from them.

I would say, then, that although the poem does not have unity in the conventional Aristotelian sense, it does have a unity of mood and of shape. It is entirely pessimistic. It starts with the bad (Cesar's crossing of the Rubicon); it continues through the worse (fratricidal fighting in Spain and the senatorial defeat at Pharsalia); and hypothetically it ends (after a brief glimpse in Book 9 of what virtue can really be like) with the worst, the death of Cato. Of course the narrative is interrupted constantly, but the line is clear, one long decline from relative grace to infamy, from relative freedom to servitude. This is on the assumption that the poem ends with the death of Cato. If it continued to the assassination of Caesar, then the harmony and consistency would have been upset, and the poem would have ended on a false note of hope with that one short-lived and meaningless flaring up of freedom which was soon to be lost again under Augustus and his successors.

The poem has no single hero. The person nearest to being its hero is Cato, Lucan's ideal, the Stoic saint. But he is not near enough to the center of action throughout the poem to be given that title. Rather, one could say that there are heroes of individual books or episodes: Vulteius, the brave fighter on the wrong side in Book 4; the centurion Scava, also on Cesar's side, in Book 6; Cornelia, Pompey's wife, the epitome of womanly virtue and courage, in the early part of Book 8; Pompey himself, that ambivalent character, during the scene of his death in the last part of Book 8; and Cato, leading his men through the dangers of the Libyan desert, in Book 9. The dominating character of the whole poem is Cesar, and he, so far from being its hero, is its evil genius. On him Lucan lavishes a marvelous extravagance of hatred, mitigated only by touches of grudging admiration for his demoniac energy.

Evaluation

Like all great poetic achievements, Lucan's Civil War is at once a very simple and a very elaborate work. Its claim to be an epic poem, rather than imaginative history or versified rhetoric, rests on the splendor of its language and on the enormous and encyclopedic superstructure of episode and commentary, so elaborate that the story line sometimes gets lost or is reduced to an insignificant minimum.

Much of the professional criticism of Lucan has been devoted to relating him to his predecessors and contemporaries in the epic tradition. This is not without value: it is always interesting to examine the provenance of a work of art. But the thing that strikes readers who come to Lucan for the first time is the way he differs from all other Latin writers, his originality. For example, in Book 6 of the Æneid, Virgil describes the descent of Æneas to the Underworld, where he receives a prophecy of the future greatness of Rome; while in Book 6 of the Civil War the witch Erictho resuscitates a dead soldier at the request of Sextus Pompeius, and when she asks the soldier to prophesy the outcome of the civil war, he does so in very vague and perfunctory terms. What is striking is not the fact that Lucan gives us in his sixth book, parallel to Virgil's, a scene that is in some sense concerned withthe Underworld. What is striking is the total difference between the two authors. Æneas' descent to the Underworld is the center of the whole poem, uniting what has been and what will be; and the grand vision of Rome's future that is vouchsafed is what more than anything else made the Æneid Rome's national epic. In Lucan all is different. The visitor is Sextus Pompeius,

Pompey's unworthy son, who was later to
 prowl as an exile
Over Sicilian waters, and stain as a pirate the
 triumph
Won by his father precisely for clearing the
 sea of the pirates.

His motive is fear for the outcome of the civil war and desire to know that outcome, whatever it may be. Instead of trying the various reputable forms of prophecy, he resorts to the worst and lowest—witchcraft. Lucan's description of Erictho, the witch he consults, is a masterpiece of the macabre. So is the description of the bringing to life of a dead soldier, whom she summons from the Underworld to prophesy. Incidentally, it is typical of Lucan that the provenance of this dead soldier is mysterious. We are in the period before the battle. of Pharsalia. Commentators dutifully suggest that there must have been some preliminary skirmishing. Very likely there was, but Lucan is not interested in such background details. He simply needs a soldier for Erictho to raise, that being the only means of answering Sextus Pompeius' far-reaching question. His interest is in the raising of the soldier (he paradoxically dies backwards, as it were), the questioning, the prophecy, and the return to death.

Similarly, all epics had a storm, and Lucan therefore gives us, in Book 5, a storm to outdo all storms. The occasion of it is Cesar's crossing from Epirus to Italy to rouse the lethargic Marcus Antonius, whom he had been fruitlessly summoning to cross with his reinforcements. Cesar eludes the guards on his camp (complaining, in a Lucanian aside, that he was able to do so), rouses a poor fisherman, and persuades him, against his will and against the signs of the weather, to sail him across. So great is Lucan's absorption in the tremendous storm that overtakes them, and so small is his concern for the facts of the situation, that the reader has to study the ending of the episode quite carefully to discover that Cesar never got across the Adriatic at all, but was driven back to his place of departure. The point again is the description of the unprecedented storm and its unsuccessful challenge to Caesar's invincible self-confidence.

Lucan is capable of quiet and moving effects, such as the fraternization of the soldiers on opposing sides in Spain, in Book 4, or the visit of Cato to the oracle of Juppiter Hammon, in Book 9. There are many such passages. But the key words in the criticism of Lucan's style are "surpassing," "outdoing," "exaggerating"; and the consequences of them cannot be avoided. The sea battle at Massilia in the third book, the heroic stand of the centurion Scæva in the sixth, and the deaths by snakebite during Cato's march through the Libyan desert in the ninth—these are the usual targets for critical scorn. Of course they are grotesque and sometimes even inadvertently comic, as excessive enthusiasm usually is to the sober viewer, but credit, however grudging, must be given to their vigor and inventiveness. Lucan is never half-hearted. He explores every thought and situation to the limit. He does so relentlessly, in matters great and small. The resulting impression is overwhelming. It is not to everybody's taste, but it is this furious commitment to his task, together with a mastery of language that lives up to every demand made on it, that makes the Civil War an eccentric masterpiece.

Translation

The first translation of Lucan into English that is likely to interest the general reader is Nicholas Rowe's, published in 1719.⁶ Rowe was a person of some consequence in his time, being among other things poet laureate and the first editor of Shakespeare's plays. He was a member of the Whig literary circle and imbued with their tradition of opposition to royal usurpation and tyranny. Hence, probably, his interest in Lucan, than whom no Latin poet was a more passionate or eloquent up-holder of freedom against tyranny (for which reason he later appealed strongly to Shelley). Rowe was also heir to the poetic tradition of Dryden, and at the time when he was writing there was probably no alternative to the form he chose for his translation of Lucan: the heroic couplet. For the translation of rhetorical epic, the heroic couplet has two fatal disadvantages: the inevitable distortion and expansion imposed by the use of rhyme, and the strong tendency to limit the sense and syntax of the sentences to the couplet. Add to this Rowe's natural diffuseness and the tolerance of the age for extreme freedom in translation, and the result is a mannered poem of 12,275 lines for Lucan's 8,060, roughly one extra line for every two of the original. A short passage will give an idea of Rowe's style. Early in Book I the narrative begins with Casar's arrival at the Rubicon:

[Lines 183-190]

Iam gelidas Casar cursu superaverat Alpes
Ingentisque animo motus bellumque futurum
Ceperat. Ut ventum est parvi Rubiconis ad
 undas,
Ingens visa duci patrim trepidantis imago
Clara per obscuram voltu mmstissima noctem
Turrigero canos effundens vertice crines
Caesarie lacera nudisque adstare lacertis
Et gemitu permixta loqui.

[As translated by Rowe]

Now Casar, marching swift with winged
 haste,
The summits of the frozen Alps had past.
The vast events and enterprizes fraught,
And future wars revolving in his thought,
Now near the banks of Rubicon he stood;
When lo! as he survey'd the narrow flood,
Amidst the dusky horrors of the night,
A wondrous vision stood confest to sight.
Her awful head Rome's rev'rend image
 rear'd,
Trembling and sad the matron form appear'd:
A tow'ry crown her hoary temples bound,
And her torn tresses rudely hung around:
Her naked arms uplifting e'er she spoke,
Then groaning, thus the mournful silence
 broke.

Rowe's Lucan was highly esteemed in its day, and it is, by its own standards, a workmanlike job: but Lucan it is not. It has none of the latter's energy, oddness, and passion, and I do not think that a modern reader could easily make his way through it.

Nevertheless, Rowe's translation held the field for 200 years. The next verse translation came in 1896, a version by Edward Ridley in blank verse. It has never, I think, been reprinted, and there is nothing to say about it except that it is a fairly accurate rendering of the Latin in undistinguished language, relying heavily on Victorian "poetic" diction. Here is Ridley's translation of the above passage:

Caesar had crossed the Alps, his mighty soul
Great tumults pondering and the coming
 shock.
Now on the marge of Rubicon, he saw,
In face most sorrowful and ghostly guise,
His trembling country's image; huge it
 seemed
Through mists of night obscure; and hoary
 hair
Streamed from the lofty front with turrets
 crowned:
Tom were her locks and naked were her
 arms.
Then thus, with broken sighs, the vision
 spake.

In 1928 there appeared a prose translation by J. D. Duff for the Loeb Classical Library. It was based on A. E. Housman's text (see below), and Duff had the great scholarly advantage of having attended Housman's lectures on Lucan at Cambridge. It serves its purpose well in the Loeb series, which is to guide the reader through the Latin printed on the opposite page. It is written in pedestrian prose which nevertheless makes a serious attempt to catch the subtleties of Lucan's highly condensed expressions, and sometimes it succeeds. But, being in prose, it fails even to suggest the powerful elan of the original.

Robert Graves, in his translation of 1956 for the Penguin Classics, also chose to translate Lucan into prose, but prose of a very different sort from Duffs—clean, modern, and lively. Here is Graves's version of our specimen passage:

Caesar had crossed the icy Alps before he began to consider the disastrous and far-reaching effects of this war; but on his arrival at the Rubicon, a small river which divides the pastures of Gaul from the cornfields of Italy, he was granted a night vision of Rome, his own distressed motherland. She stood bare-armed, her features expressing profound sorrow and her white hairs streaming dishevelled from underneath a mural crown. "Where are you bound, soldiers?" she asked, sighing deeply.

Graves avowedly disliked Lucan and took all kinds of liberties with his text. He does convey something of his spirit and is at least readable; but again, it is not Lucan.

In the matter of translation, it seems that every age requires a different interpretation of the great masters of the past who have something permanent to say. Rowe satisfied the taste of the eighteenth century, Ridley perhaps that of the nineteenth, and Graves in certain limited respects that of the twentieth. But beyond questions of taste and fashion, there are three things that a translation of Lucan should ideally have: rhythm, energy, and point. Rowe's version had rhythm and sometimes point; Ridley's had not enough of any; and Graves's has point and a certain energy, but not rhythm.

One of the first things a verse translator has to decide is what meter to use. For translating Lucan the choices were: firstly, conventional iambic pentameters—dismissed as being too short a line and too tired a form (nobody, I think, writes long poems in straight iambic pentameters any more); secondly, a six-foot iambic line, the line used in speeches and dialogue in all of Greek tragedy and Seneca's plays—dismissed as being artificial (it has never taken root in the English poetic tradition, and for some mysterious psychometrical reason it reads unsatisfactorily); thirdly, a modified form of iambic pentameter, fashionable at the moment and usually described as "a loose iambic line of five beats," with anything from ten to about seventeen syllables—dismissed on the grounds of insufficiency of rhythm and uncertainty of stress; fourthly, "a loose line of six beats," with a style based on speech rhythms. There was much to be said for the last, and it is the meter used in C. Day Lewis's admirable Aneid However, I felt that a more driving and regular rhythm was needed for Lucan, whose versification is closer to Ovid's than to Virgil's. This left Lucan's own meter, the hexameter. There were two objections to it: it is dactylic rather than iambic, which is the metrical unit into which English speech most naturally falls; and it is unfamiliar to most readers. The latter point is not a serious objection. The reader soon gets used to it, and I have never heard of anyone having any difficulty reading Evangeline (although admittedly Longfellow's hexameters are much smoother and more dactylic than mine). As to the former point, I am of the opinion that a translator needs the discipline of a limiting form, which paradoxically sharpens the language. This, of course, is a matter of degree. At one extreme, rhyme is too limiting a discipline, and at the other, "loose iambic lines" and free verse are not limiting enough. In fact, I found that the hexameter was the most satisfactory meter of all. It is a long line, comparable to the original (my version averages eleven lines to every ten of the Latin), and it has a strong, identifiable rhythm—in particular a swinging and memorable line ending well suited for the expression of pointed language. As for its supposed unsuitability to English, I would point (apart from Evangeline and Miles Standish) to Arthur Hugh Clough's fascinating poetic novella, Amours de Voyage, whose versification is lively, natural, and unmonotonous. As to its success as a medium for translation, I must leave that for readers to judge for themselves.…

Notes

¹ He was the Gallio who "cared for none of these things" (Acts 18:17).

²Dialogus de Oratoribus 20, 5.

³ All the medieval manuscripts call this poem either Bellum Civile or De Bello Civili, and I have followed them in calling it The Civil War. It has more commonly been known in modern times, until recently, as The Pharsalia, a title that originated in the Renaissance based on a misunderstanding of Book 9, lines 985-986. This title is really a misnomer: its only advantages are that it has become familiar from long usage and avoids confusion with Cesar's De Bello Civili. The tendency nowadays is to be purist and go back to the title of the manuscripts.

⁴ E. Phillips Barker, The Poet in the Forcing House, Occasional Publications of the Classical Association, number 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), p. 13.

⁵ For the whole question, see Rend Pichon, Les Sources de Lucain (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1912).

⁶ For a description of the few earlier versions, see O. A. W. Dilke, "Lucan and English Literature," in Neronians and Flavians, edited by D. R. Dudley (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).…