SOURCE: "Erichto and Her Universe" in Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 1-33.

[In the following excerpt, Johnson contends that the Pharsalia reflects Lucan's view of the universe as a discordant machine bent on self-destruction.]

             But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents, what
 mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes,
 horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture?
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

1. This outrageous, sour, impossible poem—why, except to still the rumblings of antiquarian appetites—why should we bother with it at all? The Pharsalia has no hero, or too many. Its narrative is obscure, irritating, botched. It flouts epic conventions, or ignores them, or bungles them. Its central themes are scrambled by radical ambivalence of thought and feeling into what often seems not distant from gibberish. Lucan's was an interesting, small talent that, through a mixture of indolence, vanity, and hysteria, ended by squandering itself on hopeless ambitions and absurd materials.

   So it may have seemed in the century previous to ours and even in much of this century as well. But the Pimp of Fashion, who is as absent-minded as he is capricious and powerful, sometimes finds himself the sudden partisan of what he has previously scorned. A marked shift in taste, not dissimilar to the ones that have rescued for us from the dungeons of High Classicism not only Euripides but also Ovid and Seneca, has, in recent decades, begun the task of freeing Lucan from his long near oblivion.¹ About the time that Robert Graves homogenized both Apuleius and Lucan into his extraordinary version of Basic English²—an effort that was perhaps a symptom of this change in taste but hardly among its causes—students of the Pharsalia³ began learning not to apply conventional, classical criteria to this violently counterclassical poem; began to try to search out the criteria that Lucan himself, working with what his times gave him, shaped for the poem he wanted and needed to write.

   My aim in this book is to describe what I find attractive in this peculiar poem and to sketch both what I think Lucan was trying to do and what I think he may have achieved beyond his intentions.⁴ Some writers put into their work almost precisely what they intend to put there (Horace was such a writer, I think, and Goethe also; so Montaigne and Nabokov); many writers—such is life and art—put into their works rather less than they intend; and some, Lucan, I believe, among them, put into what they write rather more than they intend. Not to be in complete control of one's poem isdoubtless an artistic shortcoming, but, in Lucan's case, in addition to the trying circumstances of the poem's composition and its author's youth, the difficulties of his central themes and the audacity of his experiment should win for him considerable indulgence.⁵ Bearing in mind the obstacles to its composition and making allowance for the fact that its composition was sadly terminated in an obscure web of political events, we can, I think, begin to approach the poem without excessive prejudice, without demanding of it the perfect execution of its imperfect yet magnificent donnee. Undistracted by its possible flaws, we can begin to see something of its greatness, can begin to experience something of the energy, the violent beauty, and the strong craving for truth that made Dante admire it and prompted Marlowe to begin its translation.

   Perhaps the best way to close with the challenge of Lucan's troublesome originality is to examine the first and one of the most persistent criticisms of his epical strategy, the moment in the Satyricon where Petronius causes his Eumolpus, that sly and venemous practitioner of literary criticism, to object to the absence from Lucan's poem of the usual divine paraphernalia, deorumque ministeria. Homer's gods enter zestfully into the epic struggles of his humans (though the spiritual machinery of the Odyssey is notoriously sparer and more elegant than that of the Iliad); even Vergil, for all his ironic transformations of epic, makes copious, if deliberately eccentric, use of the divine. But Lucan does not, or so we are told. Look again. What is actually missing from the poem are only the Greek Olympians, or rather, their Italianate siblings. They are absent from Lucan's poem because, as the poem shows, by Lucan's time they have ceased to exist. What replaces them, what in fact displaces them violently from the poem, is an obscure, frightening evocation of strange gods, of nameless powers whose spheres of action and whose relationships with the human world are unknown and indeed unknowable but whose capacity for intervening in human affairs is as fearful as it is manifest.⁶

   We might suppose that Lucan's penchant for exotic, mysterious religions and for macabre spirituality stems only from his willingness to supply kinky ornament and delicate frissons for his depraved audiences but that, fully intact beneath the facade of his grotesque divine machinery, stands the firm, familiar solace of Stoic orthodoxy. If then he uses the words superi and fortuna and fatum rather casually, even capriciously and recklessly, that is only because he wants to give jaded ears the thrill of cacophonies and thus relieve what would otherwise be the boring, wholesome monotony of Stoic rationalities.⁷ The problem with trying to explain away Lucan's evocations of the irrational in this fashion is that Lucan does not offer the grotesque by way of contrast to the rational; it is not a part of a dialectical pattern from which a sane cosmos emerges in triumphant Hegelian synthesis. It is rather a ubiquitous presence that haunts the entire poem and gradually consumes it. It is not madness here, but reason, that is mere appearance. The reality is madness.

2. A crucial and representative example of Lucan's way of imagining the role of the supernatural in the shaping of Rome's fate is to be found in the prelude to Book 2, which opens just after Caesar has crossed the Rubicon on his way through Italy to Rome. At the very close of Book 1 we were treated to a wild medley of prophecies; from an Etruscan seer, from the venerable Nigidius Figulus, the neo-Pythagorean sage, and from an anonymous yet extremely vociferous mantic matron. While our minds are still humming with this rich variety of deorum ministeria, Lucan begins Book 2 by offering us this theological observation:

   iamque irae patuere deum manifestaque belli
   signa dedit mundus legesque et foedera rerum

   praescia monstrifero vertit natura tumultu
   indixitque nefas. cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi,
   sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam,
   noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades?
   sive parens rerum, cum primum informia
     regna
   materiamque rudem flamma cedente recepit,
   fixit in aeternum causas, qua cuncta coercet
   se quoque lege tenens, et saecula iussa
     ferentem
   fatorum inmoto divisit limite mundum,
   sive nihil positum est, sed fors incerta vagatur
   fertque referque vices et habet mortalia casus,
   sit subitum quodcumque paras; sit caecae
     futuri
   mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti,
   [2.1-15]

   Since it is little read today, I give, for this passage, the spirited, reasonably accurate translation, much admired by Samuel Johnson, of Nicholas Rowe.

   Now manifest the wrath divine appear'd,
   And nature through the world the war
    declar'd;
   Teeming with monsters, sacred law she broke,
   And dire events in all her words bespoke.
   Thou, Jove, who dost in heaven supremely
    reign,
   Why does thy providence these signs ordain,
   And give us prescience to increase our pain?
   Doubly we bear thy dread-inflicting doom,
   And feel our miseries before they come.
   Whether the great creating Parent-soul,
   When first from chaos rude he formed the
    whole,
   Disposed futurity with certain hand
   And bade the necessary causes stand,
   Made one decree forever to remain,
   And bound himself in fate's eternal chain;
   Or whether fickle fortune leads the dance,
   Nothing is fixed and all things come by
    chance;
   What'er thou shalt ordain, thou ruling Power,
   Unknown and sudden be the dreadful hour:
   Let mortals to their future fate be blind,
   And hope relieve the miserable mind.

   Here, in small, is what is left of the epic gods and their conventional wrath. At this early stage of the poem, guided by epic convention and misled by it, as Lucan intended we should be, we naturally take these dei for the traditional gods of epic (and at this point in the tradition, Vergil's godsare, of course, dominant), who constitute a complex yet intelligible (Vergil had begun to tamper with this intelligibility) and satisfyihg distillation of the gods of the state, the poets, and the philosophers. So far, so good. But then, in an apostrophe to Jupiter (Lucan is extremely fond of addressing his characters and his abstractions—so fond, in fact, of warning, chastising, and pitying them, that he comes finally to seem like one of the characters in his own poem),⁸ the poet asks why mortals were given omens and prophecies and divination, which serve chiefly to augment the terror that fills their yet unverified premonitions: Cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi, / sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam, / noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades (2.4-6) (Why, ruler of Olympus, did it seem good to you to add this worry to anxious mortals—that through fearful omens they should have knowledge of coming disasters?). This complaint is hardly orthodox Stoicism, but more interesting than the poet's small heresy here is the studied incoherence of his closing prayer to Jupiter to let the future remain hidden from mortal sight: "Whatever you are getting ready for us [paras], let it come upon us suddenly—let the minds of men be blind to fate, let those possessed by dread, let them at least have hope."

   Whether, says the poet, the Stoic version of the universe is the correct one, and eternal purpose rules the structure and the processes of reality through an unbreakable, irreversible, and foreseeable chain of events, or, on the contrary, the Epicureans are right and nothing is ordained and there is no plan for things as they are and were and will be, and multiple, simultaneous contingencies (what the vulgar call chance) are what rule reality—however things work, please don't let us know the good news or the bad news before what happens happens, because, for humans in the grip of fear, slim or even false hope is better far than the certainty of disaster.⁹ Clearly, this prayer and the argument that supports it are rather peculiar. If Jupiter, who is apparently both the rector Olympi and the Stoic parens rerum here, has set up the unalterable law of which Lucan is uncertain, then Lucan's prayer would make some sense, for what may have been ordained, may, if the ordainer so desires, be revealed. But if it is fors incerta that determines what does and does not occur, then Jupiter cannot reasonably be called upon to predict a future that he is ignorant of (an ignorance that the ironic paras underscores). Which is it then, design or chance? Lucan does not bother to tell us what the structure and events of his poem will plainly reveal, namely, the blatant absence of any design. Has Lucan's notorious taste for rhetorical elaboration run away with him again and lured him into constructing a cute paradox, a jejeune antinomy? Or is he, as is in wont, having a little sinister fun with his genre, his material, and his audience?

   In this passage, fate and fortune are opposed to each other in such a way as to be mutually exclusive.¹⁰ Elsewhere in the poem they are sometimes all but interchangeable, as they also are, or seem to be, in Apuleius' The Golden Ass; but in that amazing novel, what seemed to its naughty, silly, charming hero to be good luck, then bad luck, is finally revealed to be fate, which turns out to be in fact the providential love of Isis for her creatures. In Lucan there is, so far as I can discover, no trace of such an evolution from whirligig fortune to bedrock, loving destiny. (Nor do I think it likely that the harakiri at Utica would have adumbrated such a transformation.) Instead, as the passage before us shows in small, there is throughout the poem an erratic, violent feeling that oscillates between the two poles of fortune and fate and finds no equilibrium. As elsewhere in the poem, the hectic energies are almost contained in an austere, mosaic style: the great, powerful Latin nouns are slipped into strict patterns, the high abstractions are carefully controlled by neutral verbs and muted adjectives.¹¹ The spare design of the passage, on one level, recalls in its density somethingof the strategies, something of the terse clarity of Latin prose at its best; on another level, a subtle discord, fitful echoes of Lucretian, Vergilian, and Ovidian music, lets Epicurus and Zeno collide and shatter.

   What generates this passage and the poem itself (what generates most if not all epics) is divine anger, but Lucan's version of divine anger (iamque irae patuere deum) does not shape this passage or this poem. In Homer and, mutatis mutandis, in Apollonius—even, in a way, in Vergil—divine wrath, however mysterious at its core, is part of the cosmos; if it is not wholly susceptible to explanation (or, as Milton has it, of vindication), it is nonetheless not wholly unintelligible. But in Lucan's poem this is not the case. Lucan's reality, his world, is not a divine machine controlled in part by gods, some of whose intentions we feel can be explained by an allegory of anger (so Homer, so the allegorizing Stoics, so, in a way, even Plato as fabulist); nor is it a divine machine that contains gods who in no way control it and that can be so perfectly explained by rational discourse that anger and its allegories (and poetry itself) are utterly unnecessary (so the Sophists, Socrates, and Epicurus). The alternatives that Lucan posits in his ironic prayer to Jupiter are precisely what he rejects from his poem. His universe is not divine or rational. It is demonic and subrational.

   Suppose there is an eternal machine—we will be looking at such a machine presently in a slightly different context—that may be said to manifest or, more loosely, to make things according to some mad, mysterious logic of its own, to churn them out automatically, almost flawlessly, in order to mash them up, and then to start up again, modeling and mutilating. Creation and destruction, in this scheme, become an all but identical process, one with vague laws and causalities, but one wholly without purpose or meaning. Imagine, then, a machine (though it is not purposeful, it is supremely intelligent) that never ceases to function but that is never (from the human standpoint) in good repair. Imagine a machine for which making is the same as breaking, a machine that manufactures ruin. All that it can or wants to do is break and make, make and break. It is the Stoic machine gone mad.

   Accepting, for the purposes of argument, this Lucanian model of the universe, we see that it is quite possible to predict the future: things will always get broken. All prediction tells us is which things and when, in what order. (This is, by the way, all that history can tell us about the past.) There is nothing more to know. Seen in this light, the anger of Lucan's gods recalls the chilling passage at the beginning of Tacitus' history of the aftermath of Nero's reign (Histories 1.3): "Besides the manifold misfortunes that befell mankind, there were prodigies in the sky and on the early warnings given by thunderbolts, and prophecies of the future, both joyful and gloomy, uncertain and clear [laeta tristia, ambigua manifesta]. For never was it more fully proved by the awful disasters of the Roman people or by indubitable signs that the gods care not for our safety but for our punishment [non esse curae deis securitatem nostram sed ultionem]."¹² This remark is rhetorical embroidery, perhaps, but it is embroidery furnished by powerful subterranean intuitions, by religious fear become obsessive. Epicurus, then, was wrong: the gods are not indifferent to us because they are powerless over us; they are not indifferent and they are very powerful. But Zeno, too, was wrong: the gods, though very much concerned with mortals, do not want to lead us to happiness, they want us annihilated. Gods, nature, fate, fortune—these are words, words that dimly and inaccurately signify an inscrutable, omnipotent malevolence at the heart of history, of human experience. In the age of Nero, these words, these allegories masquerading as facts, are useless. Liceat sperare timenti, indeed!¹³

   I am not, of course, suggesting that Lucan consciously entertained this theological position. Rather, it seems to me it was a feeling, an archaic thought, that came to pervade his poem, a persistent mood that he perhaps sought to exorcise as he composed his poem by composing his poem. Pondering the past century of Rome, looking about him at Nero and Nero's Rome, he was led by his disaster, I think, to shape a poem that he did not want, had not intended, to write. The poem that he had wanted to write was, I think, to have been shaped by other intuitions, by other thoughts and moods. We can glimpse something of his initial inspirations toward the beginning of Book 4, where the two armies in Spain, that of Caesar and that of Petreius, enjoy a brief truce:

   nunc ades, aeterno conplectens omnia nexu,
   o rerum mixtique salus Concordia mundi
   et sacer orbis amor: magnum nunc saecula
     nostra
   venturi discrimen habent.…
   [4.189-92]

   (Now be present, O thou that gatherest all things into an unending fabric, O Harmony, savior of things that are, of this mingled world, O divine love of the world. For at this moment in time we face a great crisis whose outcome will mean much for the future.…)

   Another prayer—a sublime prayer—and another apostrophe. To make it, the poet himself journeys back in time almost a hundred years to his native Spain, to the place where the two armies are, for a brief moment, at peace. Kin greeting kin, they lay aside their arms, relax, and enjoy each other's company. This is a fully Stoic moment. Concordia and amor are aspects of pneuma, of sympnoia, the breath and fire and mind that unite all things.

   The sublimity of this prayer, however, quickly dissolves into poignancy, then into bitter tragedy and a sardonic refutation of the very spirit that had inspired prayer. Lucan imagines himself present at this moment of hostility temporarily suspended by the reunion of kinsmen (agnovere suos) (196). But the peaceful scene that is about to be sketched is introduced by a despairing cry: Pro numinefata sinistro / exigua requie tantas augentia clades (Alas the Fates, that with perverse volition only magnify such terrible slaughter through this brief respite). When we have seen the warring Romans settled down together at their campfires, chatting through the night, we learn that all the coming iniquity was worsened by the brief fellowship, by the loving feelings that, although ironically reconciling them for a short time, were unable to save them:

                       quod solum fata petebant,
   est miseris renovata fides, atque omne
     futurum
   crevit amore nefas.
   [4.203-205]

   (For these miserable soldiers mutual trust was reborn and from that renewed confidence, from that love, all the coming crimes of civil war were nourished, which was all fate aimed at when it brought them together.)

   The repetition of amor in this context, fifteen lines after its appearance in the prayer to Concordia, closes this segment of the poem with savage irony. What should have been the salvation of these Romans and their progeny, had Lucan's prayer been answered, serves only to damn them more profoundly. What is absent from this moment in Roman history is everywhere absent from the universe that Lucan, contrary to his initial inspiration, to his own best hopes and prayers, and against his will, finds himself shaping for the poem that he is writing, the poem that, in a way, is beginning to write itself. Unanswered here, Lucan's prayer will remain unanswered throughout the poem.

   This failed Concordia that both elicits and is deaf to Lucan's prayer, that in its absence shapes the structure, the manner, and the meaning of his poem, finds a superb negative image very early in Book 1, just after the notorious invocation to Lucan's muse, Nero (to which we return in the final chapter):

   fert animus causas tantarum expromere rerum,
   immensumque aperitur opus, quid in arma
     furentem
   inpulerit populum, quid pacem excusserit
     orbi.
   invida fatorum series summisque negatum
   stare diu nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus
   nec se Roma ferens.
   [1.67-72]

   Marlowe luxuriously renders these lines:

   The causes first I purpose to unfold
   Of this garboil, whence springs a long
    discourse,
   And what made madding people shake off
    peace.
   The fates are envious, high seats quickly
    perish,
   Under great burdens falls are ever grievous,
   Rome was so great it could not bear itself.

   All this seems unexceptional, perhaps. Any reader of Herodotus, for example, will remember what Solon said to Croesus and will recall what phthonos means in Herodotus and in both his Greek and his Latin heirs. But Marlowe's translation is slightly inaccurate, and the translation happens to matter. What Lucan says is invida fatorum series: not, the fates are envious, but, the cause of the civil war was the envious chain of the fates. Series: the envious, grudging, resentful linking of the fates.¹⁴Desmos: the Stoic symploke. Lucan has here conflated one might say, deliberately confused. Herodotean phthonos with Stoic desmos. In so doing, he emphasizes a difficulty that he might better, and easily, have avoided. The symploke of fate, the sympathy of nature and the universe, their Concordia, is not, cannot be, envious. It is both things as they are and must be and things as they should be. As such the symploke, the series, both explains what happens in history and transcends what happens in history. But Lucan is not interested in ta onta, things as they are; he is interested only in the destiny—which appears to him as the disintegration—of Rome. He wants to defend the greatness of Rome, he wants somehow to save it from the ruin that has overtaken it and continues, in his lifetime, to engulf it. But even as he attempts this rescue, he knows that his effort is doomed. He knows that ruin is inevitable; he seems to suspect that it may be not only inevitable but deserved. He guesses, as I will suggest later, that Rome's ruin is part of the series of things as they are and mustbe. It is a thought he can neither reasonably accept nor reasonably reject.

   But his primary concern in this passage is to evoke the horror of the ruin and to try (hopelessly) to find rational causes for it. In doing this, having drawn an impressive yet dangerous analogy between the greatness of Rome and the greatness of the universe, he offers us his first picture of apocalypse. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

                     sic, cum compage soluta
   saecula tot mundi suprema coegerit hora
   antiquum repetens iterum chaos, omnia mixtis
   sidera sideribus concurrent, ignea pontum
   astra petunt, tellus extendere litora nolet
   excutietque fretum, fratri contraria Phoebe
   ibit et obliquum bigas agitare per orbem
   indignata diem poscet sibi, totaque discors
   machina divolsi turbabit foedera mundi.
   in se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus
   crescendi posuere modum.
   [1.72-82]

   Here is Marlowe's translation of this passage.

   So when the world's compounded union
    breaks,
   Time ends and to old Chaos all things turn;
   Confused stars shall meet, celestial fire
   Fleet in the floods, the earth shall shoulder
    sea,
   Affording it no shore, and Phoebe's wain
   Chase Phoebus and enrag'd affect his place,
   And strive to shine by day and full of strife
   Dissolve the engines of the broken world.
   All great things crush themselves, such end
    the gods
   Allot the height of honor.

   In se magna ruunt: great things ruin in upon themselves. It is one of the great and, deservedly, most quoted phrases in the poem.¹⁵ But the hard glitter and the perfection of the epigram tend to distract us from something just as beautiful and just as frightening in this passage: the superb oxymoron, discors machina, which Marlowe renders as "the engines of the broken world." Other English versions include "Break up this vaste machine, dissolve the whole" (Rowe); "The whole mechanism, discordant, will confuse ties of the universe rent asunder" (Riley); "And huge discord / Shall rend the spheres asunder" (Ridley); "The whole distracted fabric of the shattered firmament will overthrow its laws" (Duff); "When the whole mechanism of the universe is thrown out of gear" (Graves).¹⁶ Only Riley approaches the shock and violence of discors machina (for Duffs obsolete"distracted" replaces cause with effect and merely repeats "shattered"); he closes with the sinister outrage that Lucan's oxymoron perpetrates. For any machine, concord is of the essence; its parts must mesh exactly. To call any machine, particularly this machine, the universe, discordant is to accuse it of failing itself, of being and not being itself simultaneously, of betraying itself, of destroying itself. That this is a bad machine which will come to a bad end is what Lucan feels about, wants to say about, Rome: in se magna ruunt; tu causa malorum / facta tribus dominis communis, Roma (1.84-85) (You, Rome, the cause of your own evils, when you became the common property of three masters, [i.e., the first triumvirate]; when the greatness of your empire invited this great corruption and the ruin of freedom). What will someday happen to the universe has happened and keeps happening to Rome, and it will keep on happening to Rome until her destruction is completed. The mysterious evil that will cause the universe to self-destruct has caused Rome to begin her self-destruction. It is from inside the process of this ruin that Lucan writes his poem: a temporal ruin that mirrors an eternal ruin, and a ruin that is therefore irreversible.

   This is not, needless to say, a very Stoical attitude. Manilius, too, uses the word machina to describe the ekpyrosis that must some day overtake the universe:

   quae nisi perpetuis alterna sorte volantem
   cursibus excipiant nectantque in vincula, bina
   per latera atque imum templi summumque
     cacumen,
   dissociata fluat resoluto machina mundo.
   [Astronomica 2.804-7]

   (Did they [the cardinal points] not receive the circle sign after sign in succession, flying in its perpetual revolution, and clamp it with fetters at the two sides and lowest and highest extremities of its compass, heaven would fly apart and its fabric disintegrate and perish.)¹⁷

   Where Lucan uses the future indicative to describe certain catastrophe, Manilius uses a present contra-factual subjunctive to describe what ekpyrosis might be like, under a given set of circumstances, in order to emphasize the order of the universe.¹⁸ But for Lucan, what should be a metaphor for ekpyrosis—a machine that seems to be malfunctioning in its conflagration but that is functioning perfectly—has become a reality, both for Rome and for the universe itself. For Manilius, the explosion of the concors machina would be only an inevitable but by no means final result of its creative energies and its rational goodness; for Lucan, it is merely the absurd, complete end for the world no less than for his city. In this careful perversion of Stoic sympatheia, the discors machina, Lucan offers his own epic divine machinery in place of the conventional deorum ministeria. The divine is not at all lacking in Lucan's epic. Rather, it has been grotesquely and decorously corrupted to suit the peculiar needs of a peculiar poem about the end of the world—for this is how the end of Rome seemed to Lucan.

3. His sinister wit and his complex anxiety forced Lucan (and allowed him) to create this bizarre universe, which is at once flawless in its functioning and devoured by its own meaningless and incomprehensible malevolence. Lucan himself is both at home and not at home in this universe, but his central characters, even the pathetic Pompey, are perfectly suited to the parodic cosmos their poet designed for them: this world founded on metaphysical and political horror, like the creatures who inhabit it, is monstrous. But although the bad reality of the bad universe is constant in its shifting aberrations and disorders, its creatures, greatand small alike, are ephemeral. The great creatures, moreover, are absurd in their fond belief that their lives and actions count for much in the scheme of things, and therefore they are worthy of deathless praise. In Lucan's universe great men are momentary monsters, brief, ironic patterns glimpsed in the wild kaleidoscope of history, phantoms disgorged by a chaos, which masquerades as order, to mock the arrogant lie of rational order, to reveal the delusion of rational purpose, and to unmask at last the true nature of rational violence. Erictho, though very much a monster, is not momentary since she is part of the fabric of bad eternity (the repetition of the inane), but I begin with her in order that, in the intense and crazy light her figure refracts, the monsters of history may find their proper illuminations.

   Not least of Erictho's considerable attractions is that she is, so far as I can discover, the first recognizably modern witch in European literature.¹⁹ Her predecessors in witchery are more classically rational than she by far: they are mostly concerned with love or money. But Erictho seems totally indifferent to sex or to cash—or even to revenge. Nor would it be fair to say that she lusts for power. She is a witch's witch, a pure artist in the black arts, and in this purity she surpasses even some of her Renaissance and Puritan progeny. She is enormously pleased with the satanic discors machina. She knows exactly how to operate it, and her prayers to it, unlike Lucan's prayers to more traditional numina, are invariably answered in her favor. For her, doing bad things to good people, or even to bad people, or to any one at all—virtue and vice do not engage her imagination—is fun. Of course, she enjoys the power she so gleefully abuses, but power for her is a means to an end: the end is evil for evil's sake.²⁰ I am immensely fond of her, and, in my eyes, if all that had come down to us of the Pharsalia was the last half of Book 6, Lucan would still be shining brightly among the more eccentric of the great poets of the West. Erictho meets, if somewhat obliquely, the sternest aesthetic criteria: she is a fresh invention, flawlessly realized; her speech and gestures are sketched with superb economy; and she shows an inexhaustible fullness of life and an unwearying zest for malicious and purposeless activity that remind me of two of my other favorite characters: Stendhal's Dr. Sansfin and the early-middle Donald Duck. She is something fairly rare outside, say, the dark farces of Ben Jonson or the savage and surreal animated cartoons of the 1930s and early 1940s: a living caricature of wickedness, a pure distillation of frenetic immorality. She is also, let it be emphasized, at the very heart of Lucan's divine machinery.²¹

   The narrative strategy underlying Erictho's introduction and development is dazzling: it shows something of a Nabokovian insolent elegance. As Pompey's son—a witty parody of Aeneas in Aeneid 6—goes off to pry into the future, Lucan employes one of his favorite sleights-of-hand, topographia, and swiftly sketches Thessaly, birthplace of warfare (and so, a fitting site for the worst and most momentous battle in world history, 395-412). Thessaly is also, as it happens, the home of the worst variety of witches in the world, of whom Erictho enjoys the signal honor of being by far the worst of the worst. Sextus, though dubious about the power of the traditional gods to reveal the future, believes that Thessalian witches have a direct line to Hell, and, as it turns out, he is not mistaken in this belief.²² What is foretold him through Erictho's magic is, in fact, what happens in the poem and what happens in history. The silent, uncommunicative Olympians, on the other hand, are, if they exist at all, utterly ignorant (see the hilarious visit of Appius to Delphi in Book 5); but Hell knows all, and Erictho is its spokes-person. Since Sextus believes in her, and since, in the poem's action, we see his belief confirmed, the reader, disbelief chloroformed by amusement, is led to believe in her as well. Thus, Lucan's casual and outrageous comment at the opening of this sectionof the poem, that the Thessalian witches surpass the wildest license of horror stories (ficti quas nulla licentia monstri / transierit, quarum, quidquid non creditur, ars est) (6.436-37) (whom no freedom of imaginary monsters could surpass and whose art is to do what cannot be believed), is fully vindicated by Sextus' visit to his witch. What we took, perhaps, as rhetorical exaggeration when the poet said that his truth was stranger than any fiction about witches we discover to be no more than modest statement of fact when Erictho gets down to business.

   In fashioning Erictho, Lucan's imagination runs with riotous discipline through the conventions of witchcraft and finally surpasses them. His Erictho is now absurd, now horrifying, now both horrifying and absurd simultaneously; but she is always as plausible as she is richly comical. It is our incredulous, unwilling laughter, engendered by her grotesque, extravagant wickedness, that wins for her a baffling plausibility. She becomes insensibly, [she is finally,] through sheer accumulation of impossible fratzenhaft excess, a poetic reality, "a fact of fiction." Whether she is merely mixing nasty potions, or snatching babies from their mothers' wombs, or incanting or threatening demons, or—my favorite snapshot of her typical activities—hanging from a crucified corpse by her teeth in an effort to tear away a bit of flesh that resists her most strenuous bites²³—the wit and the terror that she combines yield a macabre verisimilitude: she is a triumph of crazy mimesis.²⁴

   By the time she has discovered a corpse suitable for the purposes of her wicked divinations, has hauled it back to her foul den from the field of battle where it innocently lay, loath to accompany her, by the time she has converted it into a zombie and forced it to reveal the secrets of Roman history—by this time, we have begun to find ourselves accepting this peculiar world where the horrific and the unthinkable have become at once entertaining and commonplace, that is to say, credible. By daring to elaborate "the banality of evil," by taming it with his fertile, sardonic inventions, Lucan manages to win our poetic belief for this diabolical intrusion into Roman history and thereby establishes for his poem the mood of sinister ambivalence which in turn makes not only plausible but also persuasive the power of that discors machina into which his version of Roman history will be swallowed up.²⁵

   When Sextus first encounters Erictho, she is alone in the deserted fields, busily trying out a new incantation. She has heard that the coming battle may be fought somewhere other than Pharsalus, which would deprive her of all the corpses and gore that she finds necessary for her work and her fun. To avert this loss, she uses magic to force the battle to be fought where she (and destiny?) wants it fought. One anxiety in particular gnaws at her: hic ardor solusque labor, quid corpore Magni/proiecto rapiat, quos Caesaris involet artus (585-86). She is desperate, for reasons that are not spelled out yet are easily intelligible, to get hold of some of Pompey's body, and she also hopes to obtain an arm or a leg from Caesar's remains once the big battle has been fought. Later, after she has selected the anonymous, uncooperative, less prestigious Pompeian soldier who will, through her art, be transformed into the prophetic zombie, we are told that, though she is content with one corpse, she could have reanimated and set against each other all those who fell in the prelude to the battle of Pharsalia: si tollere totas / temptasset campis acies et reddere bello, / cessissent leges Erebi (633-35). The laws of Hell would have yielded to her arts. Thus, even before the zombie's prophecy, Erictho enters into the fabric of Rome and its history, for, though she does not and cannot change the course of that history, she intrudes into it and could intrude still further had she a mind to do so. Is this bad taste, this tinkering with high, tragic events and Hegelian world historical destiny? Is thisyet another example of Lucan's hunger (and, Zeitbürger that he is, that of his age) for decadence and fright-night frivolities? Doesn't her presence cheapen the poem, weaken it, just as it should be gathering all its forces for the great battle of Book 7? Or does she represent just another of those long digressions that Lucan uses to pad out his poem and to evade the major themes and scenes that properly belong to it?

   For those who dislike my favorite witch, who find themselves irritated or bored by her, such questions obviously have some meaning. Let me try to respond to them. We have seen that Lucan dramatizes himself, the poet of his poem, as one whose prayers to higher powers are ignored. But the "prayers" of Erictho—they are less prayers than demands and threats—are answered in the action of the poem. She understands not only what the discors machina is but also how to bend it to her will. Before we meet Erictho herself, in the long passage (6.434-506) in which Lucan describes the Thessalian witches in general, we learn, along with other interesting bits of information, that these witches can constrain the reluctant and unwilling gods to do what they impiously desire and command, though these same gods are often deaf to the pious supplications of other mortals: inpia tot populis, tot surdas gentibus auras / caelicolum dirae convertunt carmina gentis (443-44). When the witches turn day into night or night into day or make the earth stand still, Jupiter is puzzled (miratur non ire polos) (464-65). When, literally and meteorologically speaking, they raise Hell, even when they steal his thunder, Jupiter doesn't have a clue (et tonat ignaro caelum Iove) (466). The conventional Olympian is mentioned mockingly, only to be dismissed as irrelevant, perhaps even unreal. What matters for the discors machina (note that the witches can even arrange dress rehearsals for the cataclysm when they are in a mood for it; see 480-84) is an entirely different divine order that parodies and challenges the conventional order. Lucan emphasizes the disorder that replaces order by disingenuously asking why it is that the gods cooperate with this wickedness. Why is it that, if they are not directly involved in it, they are apparently indifferent to it? Perhaps, he says, answering himself, there is some special god (deum certum) (497-98) who, when called upon by the witches is somehow truly omnipotent (qui mundum cogere, quidquid / cogitur ipse, potest) (498-99).²⁶ The witches constrain him or it; he or it in turn constrains the world and its gods to behave contrary both to law and to nature; he or it, in fact, turns law and nature inside out. Does this seem absurd, fantastic, merely part of the conventions of ancient witchcraft? Indeed; but this is in fact what the poem shows at one of its crucial moments, just before the battle of Pharsalus is to take place. When Erictho, yielding to the request of Sextus, creates her mantic zombie and thereby displays both the near future and her version (the zombie's version) of the Roman past, Roman history becomes what Lucan thinks it is: an absurd, fantastic, incredible nightmare.

   What is the secret of that past and future? It is beyond words, beyond knowing. But powerfully here, more dimly elsewhere, Lucan offers us his intimations of it. The nameless omnipotence whom the witches at least partially control, a peculiarly ugly compound of chance and destiny whom we learned of in the general discussion of Thessalian witchcraft, returns very dramatically at the moment when Erictho is trying to vivify the corpse that she has selected for zombiehood. She has pierced its breast and poured all her noxious, efficacious poisons into this new wound. She has, in a decorously vile parody of classical prayer structure, duly invoked the powers of darkness by name and sphere of activity and has, quid pro quo, reminded them of her past services to them. Then, following the correct prayer sequence, she asks for their assistance in reanimating the corpse so that it will reveal the future to Sextus and to herself. Then, in a delicious turn, when the gods of Hell refuse her request(are they offended by her somewhat peremptory tone, or, nice Euripidean touch, are they appalled by her impiety?), Erictho turns nasty. She lashes the reluctant corpse with a live snake (irataque morti / verberat inmotum vivo serpente cadaver) (726-27), and she yowls her disappointment like a rabid dog into the cleft earth, thus giving Hell a piece of her mind. She threatens the Furies, offering to reveal their true names. Hecate she will reveal to the face of heaven in all her true deformity. She will tell the nasty secrets that Proserpina wants kept from Ceres (it seems that the classical version of the pomegranate myth is a gilded sham that Erictho can deconstruct, if she has to, to smithereens). She will expose to the fatal sunlight Pluto, pessimus mundi arbiter (742-43). (Does that make Jupiter and Neptune, respectively, bad and worse?) Paretis? (Will you obey me now?) she asks the Lords and Ladies of Hell. Or must she (744-49) call upon the most demonic of the demons, he who shakes the earth when so commanded by witchcraft, who looks at the Gorgon with a steady gaze, who lashes the Fury with her own whip, who lives in a Tartarus under Tartarus, who regards the lowest, most terrifying gods of Hell as celestial, who swears by Styx to the truth of a lie and lives to tell the tale? In short, he is as truly omnipotent as he is truly monstrous, and mention of him, unless what ensues is mere happenstance, which is unlikely, gets quick results. The spell at last begins to work. The zombie's mouth gapes wide and his eyes blink open in the best horror movie style.²⁷ Soon, in answer to Erictho's cajoling—in a nice turn, she suddenly becomes solicitous of the zombie, almost motherly (762-74)—the zombie will speak. It is not, then, one of the classical gods of Hell whom Erictho finally relies on and invokes, but someone, or something, older and more powerful than they, whose apparently limitless powers are at her beck and call (compellandus erit) (745). It is from the world of black magic, which is an aspect of the discors machina, that Lucan chooses the most telling metaphors for the metaphysical foundations of his poem: it is Seth-Typhon and his witches who replace the Olympians of classical epic.

   There is, to be sure, a vague province of action, an area of phenomena, in which the great demon and the witches who worship and manipulate him seem to be without jurisdiction. When she first learns what it is that Sextus is trying to find out, namely, who death will take in the coming battle, Erictho, flattered by his attention and by the extent of her fame that this attention tokens, tells him that finding out the future is child's play for her. Even had he wished, she implies, to escape his fated date of death (605-10), it would have been easy enough for her to oblige him. Individual destinies can be altered as witches choose. But changing the course of destiny when countless destinies are involved, rewriting history, for instance, by rescripting the outcomes of battles, is beyond them. In such larger matters, the fates and their causarum series (612), guided or directed by Fortune, prevail: plus Fortuna potest (615). The maddening ambiguity of "fatum-fortuna" is very strong in this passage, and a faded, perverse memory of Stoic orthodoxy glints from what is in fact Erictho's proud boasting about her powers.²⁸ For she is not at all perturbed by this admission of her limitations. The tone of her answer to Sextus' inquiry is, on the contrary, complacent, even smug. The chaos of Fortune's pattern, the tangled web of good and bad for nations and peoples, is of no interest to her. She likes playing with "the engines of the broken world," but she is a realist and suffers under no illusion that she can control them completely (and this absurd modesty in her contributes not a little to the aura of persuasive impossibility, of pithanon adynaton, that swathes her). She who can pervert the workings of the universe itself (who can, to be more precise, entertain herself with the perverse workings of the universe) can hardly be bothered with something as trivial as what humans call history. For Erictho to say that Fortune controls the universe is only her way of expressing its violent aimlessness, which is the only truth that matters to her (and to Lucan). We may be interested inknowing what connection there is between Fortune and the hellish unknown god, but Erictho is not. She loves the nightmare she lives in so richly and has no need of explaining it. Lucan, who invented it for her (and her for it) might want to explain it, but he cannot; he can only evoke it with the dark wit and dark pictures that Erictho incarnates so perfectly.

4. Before we take leave of Erictho (who is, after all, Lucan's answer to Vergil's Sibyl) and prepare to venture from the terrors of witchcraft to the terrors of history, let us look briefly at the zombie's prophecy which Erictho has secured with such energy and such zest. What Sextus' response is, both to the strange mantic situation he finds himself in and to the prophecy itself, Lucan does not bother to tell us. We learn only that, in a pleasant parody of epic convention, Erictho, holding back the dawn to obscure their passage, escorts Sextus safely back to the camp of his father, Pompey. Sextus may well have been disappointed by what he found out and didn't find out from the zombie. True, the zombie offers Sextus what he chooses to call "solacia" (802): the good dead are making ready for his father a special place in the nicest part of Hell. That is not, given Sextus' high level of anxiety, very warm comfort. But colder comfort is yet to come. The fatal war will make vanquished equal with victors (veniet quae misceat omnes / hora duces) (806-7). Pompey is clearly marked out by the zombie as the loser, but it turns out that winning and losing are beside the point. As for Sextus' own fate, curiosity about which has led to his participation in this unnerving seance, the zombie suggests that Pompey himself will elucidate his destiny at a later date; but the zombie's own hints about it are as ominous as they are sententious (813-20). The zombie seems less interested in the future of Rome and of Pompey's family than in the fascinating events that he witnessed before being summarily yanked back from Hell. As it turns out, all hell has broken loose down there. The good Romans—it is a list that Cicero or Cato might have compiled—are in a state of hysteria and despair because they have more than an inkling of who will soon be triumphing at Pharsalus. Only Brutus, the first but not the last of his line to deal with tyrants properly, is joyous, because he has the presence of mind to disregard the imminent defeat of libertas and to concentrate rather on the Ides of March a few years hence (792). The figure of Brutus is transitional in this hectic, underwordly frieze. He is flanked by Cato the Elder, the last mentioned of the good Romans, and by Catiline, first mentioned of the enemies of freedom, who, of course, are all clapping their manacled hands in a transport of hellish glee. But Catiline, in fact, is already loose from his bonds and is chewing the scenery of Hell with gusto. Along with Marius, Cethegus, Drusus, and the Gracchi, he is agitating to take over the campi piorum (798) from the feckless patriots who have no right to them. Anarchy, then, can reign even in this ideal, eternal republic of death. No matter that Pluto is getting ready the instruments of everlasting torture for Julius when his luck finally runs out and he plummets down to judgment day. It is the present turmoil in Hell and the curious, irrepressible stamina of tyranny and anarchy that are emphasized here. The enemies of freedom and of good order can be beaten back, it seems, but they can never be annihilated: there is no progress, no sure road to, no duration for, freedom. Instead, there is only a fearful zigzag, an endless duel between the forces of rational liberty and the champions of corrupt and corrupting civitas. As Lucan will say in Book 7 (695-96), once Pharsalus has been fought and Pompey is dead and mere love of war should have been satiated, this struggle will reveal itself for what it is, an eternal contest between freedom and slavery: par quod semper habemus, /Libertas et Caesar erit. The even match, the stalemate, is always with us and will always be with us: freedom versus Caesar. Even in eternity, as it mirrors the shifts of current events, the brutal, useless contest repeats itself endlessly.

A perfect emblem of that unending contest is the juxtaposition of Cato and Catiline here, which reminds us, and I think was intended to remind us, of a similar piece of political iconography on the shield of Aeneas (Aeneid 8.668-700): te Catilina minaci / pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem / secretosque pios, dis dantem iura Catonem. In Vergil, this dual image of Catiline punished and of Cato giving Laws to the blessed in triumph, prepares us for what is central to the Augustan—though not to Vergil's own—imagination of history: Augustus soter at Actium and after it. But in this ironic allusion to Vergil's description of the shield of Aeneas and the historical destiny that the shield ironically portrays, Lucan offers no center unless that center is Catiline and his fellow rebels against the truth of freedom. What matters in the zombie's version is the discors machina, seen sub specie civitatis, in which freedom finds an illusory, momentary equilibrium, only to lose it again. For Zeno and for Augustus, in their very different ways, what happens in history has both a design and a meaning that our pondering the events of history reveals. For Lucan, however, what happens in history is not directed toward a goal, is not shaped by values that humans hold or imagine themselves to hold, and shows no intelligible pattern, unless it be the prevalence of crime in high places and a tendency to steadily, and at times violently, fragment.

Such an attitude, so bitter, oppressive, and powerful, will not easily yield itself to the shaping of poetry, and Lucan's jagged, ferocious expressionism does not always master it.²⁹ (But before we judge Lucan harshly here, let us remember, for instance, that Shakespeare himself, bringing all the force of his incomparable dialectical imagination to bear on similar materials, is frequently hard pressed in his efforts to contemplate the meaning of what people do in the name of civitas.)³⁰ What allows Lucan to struggle brilliantly with his black sorrow is manifest in the sublime wit that informs the zombie's consolation to Sextus. Having suggested to the son of Magnus that the defeat of the republicans and the triumph of Caesar will cancel each other out, he adopts for a moment a superb Stoic posture and bids Sextus and his comrades to face death magnificently: properate mori magnoque superbi / quamvis e parvis animo descendite bustis / et Romanorum manes calcate deorum (808-10) (hasten to die and go down, splendid in your courage, go down from humble graves to trample under foot the shades of the gods of Rome). This is the hour of wanhope.

But it is touched with a fine splendor of sarcasm. Stomp on the ghosts of Rome's current gods, see for yourselves what the world knows, that emperors by dying do not become divine. With these lines, we are hurled forward into Lucan's own present, to the court of Nero, and we see now in the zombie's frieze of the damned the whole tradition of rotten Caesarism (Libertas et Caesar erit) that has always destroyed and is always bent on destroying what is truly divine—the freedom of humankind.³¹ Of Nero's place in this design I shall have more to say in my final chapter on Caesar; here I want only to suggest that it was an audacious sense of decorum which prompted Lucan to place this vision of Caesar's heirs, these monsters of power, not only in Hell but also in Erictho's cave, at the center of her ludicrous and terrifying universe, for like Erictho, but in other ways and for other reasons, they assist the discors machina in its violent self-implosions.

Notes

¹ See Sanford, 239-41, for a description of J. C. Scaliger's tiresome slander and its eventual, rotten aftermath. For the springs of the recovery in this century, see Fraenkel, 19-24. Good summaries of "the revival of interest" are made by Tucker and by Rutz (1970), 4-5, and (1985), 1457-1578.

² What droll demon prompted this master of several exquisite prose styles to eviscerate the two Latin authors least suited to his prose? See Dilke's dry, funny thanks to Graves for "making Lucan available," 107-8.

³ For a good discussion of the problems with the title, see Ahl, 326-32.

⁴ Like other critics of the poem (some of whom will not acknowledge it), I am in part a creature of my time. The unique contours of one's times open some vistas that were previously closed and close some that were previously open. I am not arguing for relativism: one opinion is not just as good as another; some opinions are, for various reasons, better than others. No opinion is perfect. The brand of pluralism I am here espousing has received classic formulations from Samuel Johnson, 196-200; Santayana, 267; and Popper 1943, 2:267-68. For a charming cartoon of the pluralistic interpreter, see O'Hara, 35-36.

⁵ It should be stressed that Lucan is, in a way, the author of a poem that is the "involuntary expression of a collectivity" (see Said, 156). But it is Lucan's conscious and perhaps in part unconscious resistance to conflicting collectivities of which he was part that gives his poem its special flavor and strength.

⁶ See Liebeschuetz, 118 and 147; Le Bonniec, 167-70.

⁷ See Tremoli, 71-75; Piacentini, 12-18; Sullivan, 146. The problem of presenting these "ideas" (they are feelings except when some philosophers and theologians think about them) poetically can be handled without exposing, as Lucan does, their complexities and imponderabilities, e.g., Vergil's breath-taking and casual and magnificent sandwiching, Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile Fatum (Aeneid 8.334), or Horace's sly tact in a biedermeier phrase for a deceptively biedermeier poem, fata donavere bonique dei (Odes 4.2.38). Lucan is interested in disrupting both the unveiling of the monument and the quiet family picnic that follows it.

⁸ See von Albrecht, 289-92; Cizek, 343-44; Williams, 234; Marti, 82-89.

⁹ For a stimulating discussion of this section of the poem, see Narducci 1979, 66-71.

¹⁰ See Pratt, 51; Liebeschuetz, 142-43, 148.

¹¹ Aspects of Lucan's style are well described by both Fraenkel, 29-31, and Mayer, 19. Heitland observes the stylistic (and narrative) manner of Lucan—and then uses his admirable observations to condemn the poet and to pity him, lxiii-xciv.

¹² The translation is that of Clifford H. Moore (Loeb, 1929).

¹³ See Narducci, 1979, 70, for "perfidious fate." One is not surprised to see Seneca the Elder saying these black things (sive fato quodam, cuius maligna perpetuaque in rebus omnibus lex est ut ad summa perducta rursus ad infimum, velocius quidem quam ascenderant, relabantur [Preface, Controversiae, 7]); but when one finds Cicero, as he explains the origins of the civil war before Caesar, striking much the same note (however disingenuously), mice dance up and down one's spine: "fato sumus nescio quo rei publicae misero funestoque compulsi" (pro Marcello, 13). To mark this statement as a topos (that of malignant, inscrutable destiny), as a convention (in this passage in Cicero, or in Lucan's poem), answers nothing. Only less than mediocre writers grab their topoi willy-nilly. To select a cliche carefully, for a given context and purpose, is usually to transform it—which is what both Lucan and Cicero do with this one. See also Demosthehes, Phil. 3.54.

¹⁴ See Liebeschuetz, 143; Narducci, 1979.

¹⁵ See Dutoit, 365, whose article remains crucial on this topic; see also Burck, 51, and Braden, 13-14.

¹⁶ Rowe (1718, the year of his death; in the following year George I gave his widow a pension in recognition of the translation, which represents perhaps the pinnacle of Lucan's popular fortunes); Riley (1853); Ridley (1905); Duff (1928); Graves (1957). Riley's translation, wherever I've checked it (he's fine with Erictho and the snakes), never fails in verve and never shies away from full-blooded and full-voiced rhetorical pleasure. It may well be the best English version (though we will always be in want of Marlowe's). Discors machina shows a rich ancestry: it is the culmination, the end of its line. Behind all its sources perhaps stands Heraclitus' palintonos harmoni, but its immediate Latin forebears are these: Lucretius (una dies dabit exitio, multosque per annos / sustenata ruet moles et machina mundi [5.95-96]), who also foreshadows in se magna ruunt and who looks on ekpyrosis, despite the pious ejaculation at 107, with calm eyes; Horace's famous concordia discors (Epistles 1.12.19), which Lucan ironically and effectively quotes (1.98) only eighteen verses after his discors machina; Ovid's charming echo of Horace when he describes the grand renewals after the flood (et discors concordia fetibus apta est [Met. 1.433]); Manilius' reversal of the Horatian phrase to emphasize the essential harmony of all things (haec discordia concors / quae nexus habilis et opus generabile fingit / atque omnis partus elementa capacia reddit [1.142-44]) and resoluto machina mundo (2.807), which I am about to discuss; and in the Aetna (230), where machina is used in a passage that raises the questions of discord and destruction only parenthetically. Lucan uses the adjective to create oxymoronic effects at 1.589-90 (discors natura) and 7.198 (discordi caelo).

¹⁷ The translation is that of G. P. Goold (Loeb, 1977).

¹⁸ See Lapidge, 357; Manilius "is concerned with cosmic order, not destruction."

¹⁹ For an excellent discussion of Erictho, see Fauth, 333-39; see also Caro-Baroja, 31-32, Fischli, 93-94, and Jantz, 159-61. Goethe's Erictho is a brilliant transformation of her model and a witty comment upon it. She complains that though somber (düstere) she is not nearly as dire (nicht so abscheulich) as poets tend to paint her (Faust II, 2.7005-6). She is not Lucan's fiend at all, then, but a High Classical sibyl who opens the classical Walpurgis Night, a spirit of philosophical history who has read the Pharsalia with Socratic eyes and sees that it is about the never-ending struggle to possess das Reich (7013-15). She warns her audience that he who does not know how to rule himself hungers to rule others (Denn jeder, der sein innres Selbst / Nicht zu regieren weiss, regierte gar zu gern / Des Nachbars Willen [7015-17]). That is part of what Lucan has to say, but he sees it from a dizzier vantage than that of Goethe's Erictho. In classicizing Lucan, Goethe teases him affectionately. He in no way mocks him. In a single page, Goethe shows himself to be one of Lucan'smost acute readers. Hardly less witty is Dante's invention, Ericto cruda (Inferno 9.18-27), the reality of whose power is attested to by Vergil himself when he recounts how the witch had forced even him to assist her in her familiar soul-stealing.

²⁰ See Klauser, 768, for interesting comments on the beginnings of the propaganda against earth goddesses and witches (the Devil's Grandmother); see also Luck, 76, n. 101.

²¹ Lucan may well have practiced magic out of curiosity, or even perhaps in the hopes of using voodoo against Nero; hence, perhaps, its centrality in his poem. Lucan the magician may unnerve us (because we keep trying to make our poets "sane"), but Lucan the man is not very available to us, so I don't bother much with him. The slender information we have about him depicts the sort of unstable compound of high spirits, raw nerves, and gross vanity which is not uncommon in poets. I am sorry he ratted on his mother, if he did, but if he did that does nothing to diminish the genius of his poem. I am looking for poetry to give me sensuous and intellectual pleasure, not role models. For the magic, see MacMullen, 121 and n. 25; for the mother, see Schönberger, 544-45; for the character of poets, see Louise Bogan's sublime poem "Several Voices out of a Cloud."

²² See 6.430-35, 598-601. Miseroque liquebat / scire parum superos (433-34), is particularly effective, since Sextus' conviction that the celestials are either incompetent or unreal is one of Lucan's own données.

²³ This passage was also much admired by Louis MacKay, in whose delightful seminar I first read Lucan (Spring, 1961). Among my teacher's many and varied teachings, the one that fastened on the charm and the truth of rhetoric has proved especially invaluable and unfailing.

²⁴ For a different view, see Vessey's strictures on her antics (243, 251); she sins, it appears, against the "epic gravity" that Statius lavishes upon his readers.

²⁵ See the excellent study by Martindale, 1980.

²⁶ For Seth-Typon, see Preisendanz, 1:76-78, 2:132-33; Fauth, 337.

²⁷ It is a pleasure to see that Cudder places Lucan prominently among the originators of the horror genre in his grand introduction to a grand selection of horror stories, 14-15.

²⁸ See Martindale (1977), 379. For an excellent evocation of the "world view" that Seneca shares, in part, with his nephew, see Motto and Clark, 134-35.

²⁹"Expressionism," here, is, of course, only a fragile, makeshift metaphor. The critics I list below find different ways of describing the Widerklassische. As long as we understand that we are using illustrative analogues that do not and cannot correspond with their monstrandum in every particular, and as long as we use such approximations without intending to write literary history or to fashion a "science of literary criticism," no great harm is done. What matters is that we try to find ways of accepting Lucan on his own terms; any similitude that will help us do that, whatever its final inadequacies, will be worth the risk. See Jameson (1971), 23-28; Serban, 17, 38, 60-62; Narducci,1979, 80-89; Kayser, 184-89; Dube, 23-95; Due (1962), 62, 74, 110; Rutz (1985), 1478-79, 1492; Furness, 8-9, 20-21.

³⁰ See Yates, 87.

³¹ See Due (1962), 71-75, 119-20.

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