Chapter VI · LUCAN: HISTORICAL EPIC

The author of the Pharsalia—Authorities for his life—His career—Relations with Nero—Lost works—The Pharsalia—Summary of the ten books—What was its contemplated length?—The three books first composed—Daring in choice of subject—Originality in epic treatment—Lucan’s sources, historical, philosophical and literary—Historical value—Misstatements and anti-Caesarian bias—Stoicism—Influence of previous poets—How rhetoric affected him—Erudition—Realism—Speeches—Pointed style in sententiae—A vein of poetry—His hero.

LUCAN

Precocity and enthusiasm were eminent characteristics of the young poet who first throve under Nero’s favour and finally succumbed to that emperor’s jealousy. Byron, dying at thirty-six, is reckoned a fertile genius; but when Lucan had to face death at an age earlier by more than ten years, there stood to his credit an almost equally wonderful mass of work—letters and speeches, epic and drama, miscellaneous verse, court-poetry, panegyrics and satires, as well as librettos for mimes. Of all these, however, time has spared only his Pharsalia, broken off in the tenth book. The determining factors in his career were his descent from two prominent Spanish families and his rhetorical education; for upon these depended the success and failure of his life, and the main qualities of his thought and style.

Lucan’s maternal grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a Corduban speaker of note. His paternal grandfather was the elder Seneca, well known to Roman literary circles in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius; his father was Annaeus Mela, an eques, apparently something of a philosophic recluse,⁠[848] while his uncles were M. Annaeus Novatus (the “Gallio” of the Acts of the Apostles) and the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca. To the latter he owed his introduction to court-life, which proved an incentive to brilliant achievement but ultimately compassed his ruin.

While the impersonality of epic precludes the Pharsalia from yielding details about Lucan’s life, yet from it alone sure influences could be drawn as to his training in literature, rhetoric and philosophy, his anti-Caesarism, his self-confident and impetuous spirit. We are not, however, without definite biographical sources. There are two lives of importance, one imperfect and inimical, manifestly the basis of Jerome’s entry⁠[849] regarding the death of Lucan, and, since the days of Joseph Scaliger, concluded with justice to come from Suetonius’s De uiris illustribus; and the other life a fuller and appreciative one, assigned to Vacca, a grammarian of the sixth century. Statius and Martial were admirers of Lucan and joined with his widow Polla in keeping his memory green; hence the Genethliacon Lucani of the former and several short pieces by the latter poet supply additional information.⁠[850] The record of Lucan’s connexion with the Pisonian conspiracy is in Tacitus, who also in the Dialogus ranks Lucan as already a classic alongside of Horace and Virgil.⁠[851]⁠

M. Annaeus Lucanus⁠[852] (A.D. 39-65) was born, about the year of his grandfather Seneca’s death, at the “Patrician Colony” of Corduba, itself for generations a centre of intellectual importance in Spain. The infant, when eight months old, was brought to Rome; for it was natural that his father Mela should migrate in response to the lure of the great city, where already his own father and brother had made their mark. Later, there are interesting references by the philosopher Seneca to the child. In the Consolatio addressed to his mother Helvia he writes about a nephew, who must be Lucan, as a winning boy whose merry playfulness and talkativeness would keep anyone amused (ad cuius conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia ... cuius non lacrimas illius hilaritas supprimat?)⁠[853] and an epigram of his prays that one day this prattling child (dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit) may rival his uncles in eloquence.⁠[854] His education under the best teachers was directed towards the realization of that very wish. Grounded in literature and in the traditionally wide range of learning subsidiary to “grammar,” he proceeded in due course to the study of rhetoric and philosophy. His declamations in Latin and Greek were of astonishing ability, eclipsing the efforts of his fellow-students, if not of his masters, and commanding the applause of his hearers. Such brilliance was at once a result and a cause of self-confidence: and the habitual desire to win attention confirmed him in many artificial conceits inseparable from the rhetorical system. Some philosophy he derived from his uncle; but he had at least one other famous Stoic teacher in Cornutus, at whose lectures, if we may trust Probus, he met Persius.⁠[855] For Persius’s poetry Lucan expressed cordial admiration—a noticeable tribute from one whose precocious fertility had led him to compare himself favourably with Virgil.⁠[856]⁠

Quite early in his reign⁠[857] Nero had his attention drawn by Seneca to a nephew so talented. Little is known precisely regarding the development of his relations with the emperor; but we read of a visit paid to Athens from which Nero recalled him to join his entourage, and of honours conferred, such as the quaestorship before the regular age of twenty-five, and an augural priesthood. In A.D. 60, when twenty-one, he achieved his first public literary triumph in his Laudes Neronis at the quinquennial festival of the Neronia, then newly established, and at this date Nero and his youthful panegyrist were evidently on the best of terms. But Lucan’s position became insecure as Nero’s dislike for Seneca grew pronounced. It was perilous to vie with a clever and conceited imperial egotist prone to arrogate a principate in arts as well as in state, and an award of the prize to Lucan in a competition where he had the hardihood to enter against Nero rankled in the ruler’s heart. Suetonius implies that the final breach arose from Lucan’s sensitive fancy that Nero’s attitude towards his recitations was deliberately insulting, and from the poet’s unbecoming ridicule of the emperor’s verses. Vacca ascribes the quarrel to Nero’s jealousy of Lucan’s powers, and declares that he was forbidden further poetical production or forensic pleading. Thus silenced, except for covert satire, his passionate and wounded genius was driven into the bypaths of Piso’s conspiracy, in which he took a prominent part,⁠[858] indulging, according to Suetonius, in ferocious threats against the tyrant and in rapturous praises of tyrannicide. When, however, this over-ripened intrigue was unmasked, disaster revealed the weakness of his character; for, oblivious of his professed Stoicism, he descended to abject entreaties, and, in anxiety to save his life, made confessions involving among his accomplices his apparently innocent mother. That at least is what Suetonius records.⁠[859] But pusillanimity did not capture Nero’s indulgence. Lucan was ordered to die; and after a sumptuous repast had his veins opened. Then he recollected, and recited as his last words, a piece of his own about a soldier similarly bleeding to death. This dying quotation, although Tacitus’s words⁠[860] might very well suggest that it belonged to a separate poem, has been sought for in three⁠[861] different places in the Pharsalia, and by some⁠[862] identified with a passage from the ninth book:

Thus, when “the mad despot’s crime” (rabidi nefas tyranni) cut short the poet’s career, his epic was incomplete and only in part published. “Why doth cruel allotment debar greatness from old age?” asks Statius in his tribute to Lucan’s memory.⁠[863]⁠

Thirteen of Lucan’s lost works were known to Vacca, and five of these are alluded to by Statius, who adds the Adlocutio ad Pollam.⁠[864] Suetonius, who confirms the other two authorities regarding the Laudes Neronis, mentions also a lampoon on Nero. The sagacious Vacca is clear that his thirteen are minor works compared with the epic on the civil war, but still “not all to be disdained”;⁠[865] and one might guess that the most important are those common to Vacca and Statius—the Iliacon from the Trojan cycle, the Catachthonion, a descent into the underworld, the Laudes Neronis, and the Orpheus. Naturally, although in all likelihood less important, the Adlocutio to Lucan’s wife Polla is mentioned by Statius in his poem addressed to her in widowhood; but we do not know whether it was in prose or verse, unless its inclusion immediately after the De Incendio Vrbis, the one prose composition in Statius’s list, raises a presumption that it likewise was in prose. The remaining items in Vacca’s list are the Saturnalia, on the gaieties of December,⁠[866] ten books of miscellaneous Siluae, the unfinished tragedy of Medea, fourteen Salticae Fabulae,⁠[867] Epigrammata;⁠[868] and in prose (besides his account of the Great Fire at Rome) a series of Epistulae ex Campania (which, if they had survived, ought to have proved a fascinating addition to our specimens of ancient letter-writing) as well as a speech for and one against Octavius Sagitta. These orationes suggest that Lucan in A.D. 58, perhaps filled with the detective instinct characteristic of not a few literary men, seized upon one of the most exciting murder trials of the day⁠[869] as material for two clever rhetorical show-pieces in proof of what a versatile genius could say on both sides of a case complicated by cross-swearing and by an innocent freedman’s self-accusation.

The number of these works would be reduced by one on the suggestion which has been made⁠[870] that the Catachthonion and Orpheus may be identical. But this seems impossible. True, both concern the underworld and are in hexameters;⁠[871] but Statius makes separate allusions to them, and they are mentioned at different points in the Life by Vacca in the sixth century, when Lucan’s works were, as his words imply, still extant.

The ten books of the Pharsalia,⁠[872] on the war which broke out in 49 B.C. between Caesar and Pompey, amount to over 8000 hexameters, but do not complete the poet’s design; for the tenth book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.

Book I, though in many respects powerful, might have had more epic force, had it plunged at once into the narrative. As it is, the action is delayed by the announcement of the theme, a remonstrance on the iniquity of civil warfare, the comforting reflection that but for that warfare Rome would have had no Nero, the fantastic picture of the emperor as a god, and a fawning address to him as sufficient inspiration for the poet without need to invoke Apollo or Bacchus. The ensuing sketch of the causes of strife omits the burning question between the Senate and Caesar concerning Caesar’s command, but contains a vivid glance at the motives and characters of the two protagonists, spurred by rival claims (stimulos dedit aemula uirtus):

Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent campaigning, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age.⁠[874] Now a man of 58, he was only six years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds us, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death rendered the breach between them more likely. In Pompey the poet, warmly though he espouses his cause, discerns a man over-confident in his previous record, who

The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn with force, though not with sympathy:

Strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage of the Alps (l. 183), bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon—the antithesis in adjectives is Lucan’s—to be confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance:

The Rubicon crossed, Ariminum is taken; Caesar is met by Curio and other tribunes expelled from Rome. A summons sent for troops from Gaul gives occasion for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides and Druids: then a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of prodigies and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amidst presages of disaster. Lucan, it will be noted, while he removes from his historical poem the conventional gods of epic, supplies their place by the supernatural, as represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophetic second sight of both an astrologer and a matron so weirdly possessed that she has power to behold Pompey already lying dead.

A hesitant note of philosophy opens Book II. Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed knowledge of future woes through omens? Then, with a transient departure from Stoic dogmatism, he speculates on the operation of cause in the world. Is it the outcome of law or chance? Yet he clinches this old debate with the Epicureans by uttering the prayer,

Mourning, as at a death, falls on Rome: men pray for the peril of foreign attack in preference to internecine strife. It is a passage typically rhetorical in the tumid declamation of its earlier portion and the argumentative point of its close:

The chief incidents of the book are the remarriage to Cato of his former wife, Marcia, widow of Hortensius; the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius (pointedly introduced because an ancestor of Nero) and the driving of Pompey southwards to Brundisium and thence overseas to Epirus. What Heitland frankly calls “padding” consists in digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The figure of Cato is of significance in relation to Book IX, where he plays a commanding part. In Lucan’s eyes Cato is the incarnation of virtue, hitherto guiltless of his country’s blood, but now, as Brutus tells him, drawn perforce into the struggle:

Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly depicts his Stoic ability to combine a self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims,

Book III, mainly concerned with Caesar’s doings on his return to Rome and during his siege of Massilia, is impoverished by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and an incessant series of too ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the combatants. But among compensating passages are the descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and of the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos:

The second passage, a study in the sombre touched with the spirit of Celtic romance, describes the grove of the Druids. Here we are in a haunted twilight wood, polluted with inhuman rites, shunned by bird and beast as by sylvan deities, and though windless yet aquiver with a mysterious thrill in its leaves (arboribus suus horror inest)—a forest of black waters and misshapen images of eldritch gods, awesome through a wan aspect of decay and nameless terrors, where caverns resound with the rumble of the earthquake, where the hewn death-yew comes to life again, where flame plays among branches that do not burn and serpents hold the oak in their embrace.⁠[883]⁠

Three episodes constitute most of the action in Book IV—Caesar’s Spanish operations against Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda; the failure of one of three Caesarian rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the descent of Curio, in Caesar’s interest, upon Africa, when he is defeated by Juba and meets death. The pangs of thirst suffered by Pompeians in Spain prompt one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury,⁠[884] while the counsel of Volteius to his men on the trapped raft that they must slay each other rather than surrender is argued in the overstrained manner of the schools, and is an ingenious combination of special pleading and boastfulness. When the crew carry out their dreadful compact of mutual slaughter, like the offspring of the teeth of mythical dragons, characteristic realism is indulged in to describe the crawling writhing bleeding agony of the lacerated men. But this virtual suicide closes in a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan—death is a ready way of eluding tyranny. Here it is still the Stoic who speaks; for Stoicism, while recognizing the theoretical obliquity of suicide, admitted that it was in certain circumstances defensible:

The African expedition suggests the single long deviation of this book on the legend of the earth-born Antaeus strangled by Hercules. Curio’s soliloquy before battle reflects his not unnatural nervousness as commander of soldiers who had become Caesarians only by surrendering at Corfinium:

The apostrophe to Curio after his death leads up to the familiar line which implies that his desertion to Caesar’s side turned the scale of history:

Though Book V opens in Epirus with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia for safety to Lesbos, yet Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers (who express their grievances with pointed rhetoric), and recrosses the Adriatic in a small boat on a tempestuous night to bring Antony to his aid. The action is delayed by a digression of about 150 lines on the Delphic Oracle consulted by Appius.

Caesar’s will-power is well brought out in his defiant braving of the storm despite the fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune for his sole attendant (sola placet Fortuna comes) in crossing the sea to ensure the transport of his troops from Italy; for

But the storm proves an irresistible temptation to Lucan. Having exhausted his list of contending winds, he turns to hyperbole—mountains long buffeted in vain now at last succumb, and portentous waves new to those seas roll in from the encircling ocean. Next he elaborates the description by a resort to mythology. Much more human, however, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part:

Overloaded with digressions, besides detail of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachium, and hyperbolical praise of the centurion Scaeva’s repulse of Pompey’s attempt to break through, Book VI is not on the whole successful. The plan to construct gigantic lines of investment is at first as little grasped by Pompey

In time, he is driven to counter-movements, and would have made a victorious sortie but for the prowess of one outstanding Caesarian, on whom, with incredible exaggeration, the whole fighting is made to concentrate. This champion is not to be dislodged save by a war-engine; he bristles with a thick forest of missiles in his chest; he offers the resistance of an African elephant; and, tearing out his eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it,

This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary discomfiture of Caesar, who retires upon Thessaly followed by Pompey. If only Pompey had been a Sulla, reflects Lucan, and had used his advantage for an immediate descent upon Rome, there would have been no Pharsalia. The mention of Thessaly is responsible for digressions on geography and magic; and, though the wizardry and witches of Thessaly appear more convincing in the pages of Apuleius, yet Lucan, when he leaves off cataloguing the astounding potency of Thessalian enchantments over love, weather, rivers, mountains and laws of the universe, does achieve an effect of gruesome diablerie through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but, like Saul at Endor, from necromancy. After he and his attendants have made their way past ruined tombs towards the sunless and hell-like cavern when the sorceress Erichtho sits crooning her malignant spells, he holds a midnight séance with the hag. Conceding his request, she scares off birds and beasts of prey from the battle-field, and selects a fallen warrior to be revivified by loathsome ingredients and eerie incantations for the purpose of revealing prophetic messages from the other world. The revelation is that the shades await both Sextus’s father and his house; Caesar’s daring, on the other hand, delights the spirits of dead Roman revolutionaries, but his triumph will be short. With such ominous responses Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.

Book VII is not free from turgidity and extravagance, but it is the greatest book of the poem, and describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalia as well as their fortunes in the culminating battle. With an outburst of enthusiasm, Lucan predicts the enduring power of his subject to engross readers:

In the famous passage on Pompey’s dream, he is fancied to be once more receiving the plaudits of the Roman people in his own theatre:

He awakes to realities. The Pompeians clamour for the fray and criticize their leader’s caution:

Unhistorically Cicero, who was not present, is introduced as urging him to give battle. He consents under protest and his men have their will; but

Amidst other presages of disaster, Lucan’s bias insinuates that Caesar sacrificed to the infernal powers. The harangue to his followers is, some of it plausible argument, some of it rhodomontade, but, by reason of its vigour, all very readable. Observing the disposition of Pompey’s troops (Lucan’s account of which does not agree with that of other authorities), and seeing his wish fulfilled in the enemy’s descent upon the plain, Caesar confidently addresses his soldiers as the true arbiters of his destiny:

and continuing his alliterative rhetoric:

With corresponding alliteration, and not without bravado, Pompey’s speech to his army expresses his reasons for confidence:

But in vain. Tyranny, in Lucan’s view, was triumphant at Pharsalia. Why did Rome ever know freedom, if she was to lose it?⁠[898] Surely, the gods’ apathy had led through civil warfare to the creation of new deities and a new religion in emperor-worship!⁠[899] Refraining from details of individual horrors on the battle-field, Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey looking back upon lost greatness with Caesar, whose adversary is henceforward not Pompey but freedom,⁠[900] and who to discerning eyes might well be an object of pity—“’twas worse to win” (uincere peius erat). The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was leader of the really guilty side, was hunted Orestes-like by avenging furies, callously surveyed the dead, and withheld from the rotting corpses that cremation which would not be refused (and here a piece of far-fetched Stoicism is dragged in) by the universal conflagration at the end of the world.

The main interest of Book VIII lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land: it is broken by reflections on and apostrophes to both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, alarmed at the rustle of woodland leaves in the wind,⁠[901] the defeated warrior escapes in a frail craft to Lesbos, where he endeavours to console his swooning wife:

He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his converse with the pilot upon astronomy. By the Levant he reaches Cilicia, the scene of his old victories over piracy, and holds council with his remaining supporters on the policy, cunning but unprincipled, of playing East against West. Why not entangle and weaken Parthia by inducing her to fight in Rome’s civil wars? This proposal of Pompey’s is scouted as dishonourable by Lentulus—why not rather, he argues, keep the conflict within the Roman world, and try Egypt, whose King, Ptolemy, owed his throne indirectly to Pompey? So he sails to meet the death prepared for him by Ptolemy’s cynical adviser Pothinus, whose contention is that expediency must be preferred to right and that it is wisdom to side with the conqueror:

In the offing at Pelusium, overmastering fate secured that Pompey should be enticed from his high-sterned vessel into a small boat, where, within sight of wife and son, he was stabbed by the traitor Septimius. Achillas, that “Pharian satellite,” claimed the right to carry the victim’s head to the young king. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his besetting passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Virgil’s dignity of sorrow, or beauty of simile, we have the repulsive details of the still gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid cross-wise on a boat-thwart to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins to cut; there are bones to break; it all takes time (diu); for the art of whirling off the head at a single blow, Lucan remarks (with his thoughts perhaps on Caligula), had yet to be developed—nondum artis erat caput ense rotare.⁠[904] Such realism is rendered superfluous by what follows:

The headless body is recovered from the sea in the moonlight by Cordus, one of Pompey’s Roman attendants, and, after an incomplete cremation, for which the material has to be supplied by the somewhat ludicrous device of theft from a conveniently deserted funeral pile, it is buried hastily; for the dawn has surprised Cordus at his ceremonial. But the lonely grave on the beach cannot confine one so illustrious:

Imprecations upon Egypt follow—futile, because Lucan’s curse of barrenness, if it could have been fulfilled, would have closed the chief granary of Rome. With further wild rhetoric on the burial-place the book ends.

Pompey’s apotheosis begins Book IX:

The lamentations of Cornelia, her announcement of her husband’s injunction that unceasing war must be waged for liberty against Caesar, the vengeance on Egypt threatened by Pompey’s elder son when he learns of his father’s murder, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminary to the chief theme of the book—the heroism of Cato. He will have none of the argument that continuance of war is criminal, now that Pompey is dead. Expostulating with reluctant Pompeians, he sarcastically declares that Caesar will believe they did him an intentional benefit by running before him at Pharsalia—here and in other passages erroneously called Philippi. As their next objective is Juba’s kingdom, Lucan is enabled to describe the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes, a storm that imperils Cato’s fleet, and the swamps of Triton which most of the ships reach in safety. The resolution to march across the desert to Mauretania occasions a digression on Libya as well as passages recounting Cato’s marvellous endurance⁠[906] of thirst, and his refusal to consult the oracle of Hammon (whose misplacement is one of the not uncommon geographical blunders in Lucan). Labienus would have the will of Jupiter ascertained by this austere captain of men:

Cato, however, in tones worthy of the oracle itself, scouts the idea, criticizing it on Stoic principles:

Cato’s inspiring fortitude during the march with his soldiers is almost smothered beneath the mass of irrelevance expounding the origin of serpents in Africa, and catalogues enumerating not only various species of serpents but also various sorts of death from snake-bite. Late in the book Caesar reappears on a voyage which brings him to the ruins of Troy; and Lucan’s confidence in his own literary immortality prompts an apostrophe to poetry as conferring eternal renown:

Caesar’s veneration of his ancestral gods at Troy would have received more sympathetic treatment from Virgil. Lucan is content to record his coasting voyage along Asia Minor and his crossing by Rhodes to Egypt, where, amidst his hesitation whether to land, one of Ptolemy’s courtiers comes aboardship with the head of Pompey. To Lucan his grief over his rival’s murder is hypocrisy: now that he had ocular proof of the crime and thought it safe to be a good father-in-law (tutumque putauit iam bonus esse socer),

Book X, on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on the mighty Julius himself than into the Pharsalia. Yet it has energy, in spite of a divagation on Alexander the Great, against whom Lucan inveighs as a “successful bandit” (felix praedo), and a longer excursus on the Nile. The principal incidents are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his amour with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation with Ptolemy, the plot of Pothinus to kill Caesar, and the attack at dawn with Caesar at bay:

Before the book is broken short, his arch-enemies, Pothinus and Achillas, are dead; but the renewal of resistance by Ganymedes brings him again into imminent danger. There we leave the Caesar of Lucan. In the opinion of so Pompeian a poet, he cannot be fittingly punished by any blow from Egypt:

This reference to the postponement of a fated penalty has in some eyes lent colour to the view that the poem was designed to continue Caesar’s history up to his assassination in 44. The tenth book is on the face of it incomplete; even were that not obvious, we should detect an unfinished scheme from the assurance given to Sextus Pompey that his fate would be foretold by the shade of his dead father.⁠[912] That promised episode, a parallel to Anchises’s prophecy uttered to Aeneas, would have come into one of the unwritten books. A likely chronological limit would be Thapsus and the suicide of Cato in 46 B.C. That is M. Pichon’s view,⁠[913] which seems more commendable than his associated argument that, as the necromancy of Pharsalia VI corresponds in weirdness to the descent into the lower world in Aeneid VI, therefore twelve books must have been planned to answer to Virgil’s twelve. Much closer parallelism between the several books of Pharsalia and Aeneid would have to exist before this contention had validity. In the seventeenth century, the historian Thomas May, whose works in verse and prose are all forgotten save his translation of the Pharsalia, believed that Lucan meant to carry his epic as far as Caesar’s death. To fill the gap. May composed a Supplementum, which Hallam ventured to call “the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt.” The whole matter is, however, conjectural; and the arguments for a contemplated prolongation to 44 B.C. are not of compelling cogency.

Another point on which there is divergence of opinion concerns the three books first composed according to Vacca’s Life. Ussani thinks they were I, VII, IX; Pichon thinks II, VII, VIII. One might defend I, II, VII as a more likely group than either, if one took certain mistakes in VII to prove its comparative earliness and were to offer a plausible explanation of its touching-up with anti-Caesarism. In all the suggestions, however, there are difficulties concerning Lucan’s attitude to Caesar and Nero; and waverers may do worse than fall back on the traditional view, which presents at least as few difficulties, and is the most natural interpretation of Vacca’s words, namely, that I, II, III constituted the tres libros quales uidemus.

The seven books not published till after Lucan’s death may have been already known to literary circles from the author’s readings; for the composition of the Pharsalia presumably extended over several years before A.D. 65. If one is satisfied that Lucan even in his first book,⁠[914] as well as in others, borrowed from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones belonging to A.D. 62 and 63, then that circumstance may be taken to limit the period; but Vitelli’s endeavour still further to narrow the time of writing seems unconvincing.⁠[915]⁠

Let us realize the audacity of this youthful author. Himself in touch with an imperial court, he dared write a long poem glorifying the opposition to the founder of the imperial principle at Rome. Possibly, in an age of ingenious and bizarre compositions under a clever sovereign, he imagined that his work might pass muster or evade censure as an artistic tour de force, and that a generous interpretation would be placed upon a historical thesis handled with epic talent and oiled with introductory adulation. But Lucan must have been sufficiently intimate with the arbitrary despotism of Nero to recognize that in taking such a risk he played a game involving the highest of stakes. A consciousness of genius and an independence of spirit combined with the impetuosity of youth to drive him upon a hazard, in which perhaps he was keen to welcome the fascination of double danger. It was jeopardy enough to challenge the ruler of the world by rivalry in any field of literary eminence; but it was still more perilous to champion the defenders of the ancient republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause; and yet Lucan by setting himself to make idols of Pompey and Cato threw down the gauntlet to Caesarism again. Several factors contributed to this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish home of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey; Lucan’s own boyish imagination conjured up roseate visions of the republican past; his reading in the Pompeian books of Livy confirmed his attitude; and the sense of Nero’s intolerable unfairness in trying to silence him eventually turned intimacy into detestation.

This independence of spirit has its literary side, where Lucan proves himself an original genius. Apart from possession of a distinctive style, he refused to be encumbered by tradition. His originality lay not in the choice of a Roman historical theme—for there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the decision to treat his theme without the conventional introduction of gods as controllers of the action. This novel method of treatment is, we know, criticized in Petronius.⁠[916] Well aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme he thus broke away from Virgilian precedent, and substituted for legendary glamour the interest of a fierce human conflict waged in comparatively recent times.

His equipment for his task may be indicated by a sketch of his sources—historical, philosophical and literary. As regards history, the theory which holds the field is that certain lost books of Livy are the well-springs of Lucan’s subject-matter.⁠[917] This thesis, the outcome of a hint given by Reifferscheid to Baier, his pupil, was maintained by the latter in a work published in 1874. It has in recent years been reaffirmed by M. Pichon,⁠[918] whose skill, in what is the most complete study of Lucan’s sources, has addressed itself to the emancipation of Baier’s hypothesis from the exaggerations of Ziehen and Vitelli, and to its defence against the objections of Westerburg and Ussani. For the accessory material in his digressions Lucan no doubt went elsewhere: serpent-lore he could draw from Macer, who had copied Nicander; geography, in which he is inaccurate, from some general treatise; and data about Egypt in particular very likely from Seneca’s missing work on that country. Much of his merely allusive and decorative matter could be furnished from the standard academic learning, amplified by his own experience—he had been a quaestor, an augural priest, and he had travelled. But for details of his main theme there lay open at that time the complete decades of Livy, who had derived information from Caesar, Posidonius and others. Material contemporary with the civil war could thus be reached through Livy as an intermediary. By Livy it had been to a large extent already Pompeianized. Lucan was not temperamentally likely to follow Caesar’s own account; he would distrust Asinius Pollio, as one too active on Caesar’s side; and although he might well have found facts to recommend the writings of Cremutius Cordus, we do not know that Cordus related the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. On the other hand, Livy was an author for whose literary power the Senecas expressed warm admiration, and Lucan, while subscribing to the opinion entertained by his grandfather⁠[919] and his uncle,⁠[920] felt the special call of political sympathy.

Lucan’s historical value must remain a debatable question. It is comparatively easy, though it costs time, to construct a formidable list of his inexactitudes and deliberate departures from fact.⁠[921] It is also easy to illustrate his strong bias against Caesar. The bias may be readily explained; but it is not always so easy to be sure that the unhistorical in him is due either to bias or to ignorance. When, for instance, he introduces Cicero, contrary to truth, in Pompey’s camp before Pharsalia, is he simply careless, or has he yielded to a half-poetic, half-rhetorical desire to insert a speech from the orator? The almost infectious enthusiasm of M. Pichon for Lucan, while it makes him too tolerant of his wearisome digressions, too laudatory of poetic merit in his rhetoric, too appreciative of the originality of his borrowings, at the same time makes him perhaps too ingenious in finding excuses for his misstatements. Yet the defence is at times justifiable. For example, as regards the frequently criticized epithets applied to Gallic tribes, their appropriateness is plausibly supported on historical, philological and archaeological grounds.⁠[922] Again, on the alleged confusion between Arverni and Aedui (I. 427), Lucan’s language need not involve the mistake commonly supposed, if proper stress be laid on both verbs in the line,

Certainly, to construct against Lucan a laborious indictment of error is quite misleading. It should, in any case, be noted that his additions are fewer than his omissions, and many alterations of historical fact charged against the Pharsalia may be due to Livy. One may surmise that Lucan himself is responsible for the silence about Caesar’s pacific overtures, for the sinister misconstruction laid upon Caesar’s clemency, and for the undervaluing of Caesarian bravery; because Livy, writing near the events, could hardly have risked such falsification of history. But, to hazard a guess—and here it is all guesswork—if Livy recorded generous acts by Caesar with some reserve as to their motives, then Lucan might conceivably drop them out because he did not think them sincere; and if characteristic episodes of bravery among the Caesarians were recorded, as we might expect, by Livy, then Lucan might with a kind of Stoic casuistry decline to take them over, because it would be evil to praise valour so ill employed. On the other hand, the elimination of Pompeian bloodthirstiness is presumably a feature already occurring in Livy;⁠[923] and it is highly probable that incidents which put Pompey in an unfavourable light would be toned down by the historian who was twitted with having proved himself a good “Pompeian.” In short, Lucan’s suppressions and transpositions of fact are sometimes those of a partisan (and herein Livy preceded him), sometimes those of the artist who is interpreting history in a poet’s way.

One result of his choice of subject, it will thus be seen, is that some questions affecting Lucan are not literary questions at all, but concern historical value and misstatements intentional or unintentional. There is a risk of harbouring an exaggerated estimate of his historical acumen. Granted that he is at least scientific enough to note certain causes of the civil war, yet he betrays no conception of the vital constitutional principles involved, of the extent to which past abuses rendered the conflict inevitable, or of the real significance of the victory for the destinies of Rome and the world. Though in some aspects very Roman, Lucan is without Virgil’s profound insight into the mission of the Empire. Readers will concede that he is sensitive to the nefarious horror and enormity of civil strife, for he calls shame upon it in exclamatory outbursts repeated till we weary; but this fervour arises less from social or moral or even vaguely humanitarian considerations than from his ingrained rhetoric. One should not presume to blame him: we have little right to demand scientific history from a poet. Although he selected a historical subject and so must remain, faults notwithstanding, a source of history,⁠[924] yet it is not by historical standards that Lucan must be judged, nor, despite his Livian basis, could we unreservedly use his text to supply some of the missing matter of Livy. Frank allowance must be made for prejudices and inconsistencies, which are but natural to juvenile ardour and emotion. He had definitely taken his side, and it is absurd to look for a dispassionate attitude to Caesarian or Pompeian. Interested in philosophy without being a philosopher, he was not concerned to reflect how un-Stoic it was, and in any case, how futile, to reproach Caesar, the man of destiny, for being also a man of blood. Here, as so often, he lets feeling speak.

What philosophy appears in the poem is Stoic. Remembering the poet’s family and his training alongside of Persius, we should expect nothing else; but it should also be remembered that the philosophical colour is incidental, and that the Pharsalia must, in the last resort, be judged less for its history or its philosophy than for its poetry. Critics like Heitland make as great a mistake in claiming a systematic character for Lucan’s Stoicism as Souriau does in over-emphasizing its contradictions. To demand rigid consistency in his thought is to end in the negative conclusion of Lejay—that Lucan had no philosophy. If a lapse into pessimism caused him to wonder whether the world is guided by the Stoic Providence or by blind chance, it was a very human aberration from his normal creed; and if, poet-like, he used the older mythological beliefs, such literary decoration must be no more pressed against him than against Lucretius.

Lucan’s literary training implied acquaintance with the classics of the past. It would be far too much to call him a disciple of Virgil: his spirit is alien to the Virgilian, and yet his debt to the great epic poet was inevitable owing to the education of the times. Here the truth lies between Merivale’s astonishing opinion that Lucan was in style practically independent of Virgil and Heitland’s that Lucan was “steeped” in Virgil’s language. The debt is seen in borrowed words and locutions (like felix qui potuit, IV. 393, and uenit summa dies, VII. 195), in a fresh use of Virgilian epithets and phrases, in a heightening of Virgilian simplicity to achieve strong effects, and in imitation of Virgilian episodes. Conscious and subconscious echoes are so plentiful and obvious that one cannot feel like Merivale “almost tempted to imagine that he had never read Virgil.” At the same time, there is no need to hunt for parallels where no parallels exist. Many of the alleged analogies in Heitland’s elaborate list are too vague and faint to be reckoned as definite borrowings; and even M. Pichon, who adopts a sounder attitude regarding the Virgilian influence, scarcely convinces us in his claim that the vanishing of Julia’s ghost is modelled on that of Creusa, or that a father’s anguish over a dying son is modelled on Anna’s grief over Dido.⁠[925]⁠

Horace influenced Lucan slightly, Ovid very considerably. Sharing his uncle’s admiration for Ovid, he not only borrowed mythological material from him but also inherited much of his rhetorical dexterity. The Ovidian gift of repeating an idea in surprisingly new ways reappears in Lucan, and accounts for Fronto’s criticism that in his first seven lines he simply rang the changes on the one idea of “worse than civil wars.”⁠[926] He has not Ovid’s wonderful lightness and facility, but in the smoothness and monotony of his versification it can be seen that the rhythms of the Metamorphoses have told upon him. Resemblances to earlier poets like Ennius⁠[927] are not distinct enough to base conclusions upon; and a similarly negative result, many will agree, comes from the evidence adduced by Hosius⁠[928] to detect verbal influences exerted by Manilius, by the author of Aetna, by the earlier books of Livy and by Q. Curtius. This inquiry has considerable interest in its bearing on works so conjectural in date as the Astronomica, Aetna and the History of Alexander; but unfortunately the evidence rests upon slight similarities and amounts to little. Some of the not very impressive resemblances between Curtius and Lucan are due to analogy of facts (deserts, for example, are much alike the world over, and prompt similar terminology); other resemblances may be ascribed to community of source; and others are simply part of the common stock of Latin expression. One exceptional case is that of Seneca, some of whose works, particularly the tragedies, appear (after allowance has been made for the wide prevalence of the same mythology and the same rhetoric) to have affected Lucan. This hypothesis, if accepted, would prove the anteriority of the tragedies and support their attribution to Seneca.

Far more important, however, than the discovery of verbal similarities is the consideration of the action of rhetoric on Lucan’s genius. When it is remembered that the essential aim in academic declamation was to appear clever and striking at all costs, the central characteristic of his epic is at once grasped. The dominant note is one of display. The object, not to be natural, but above everything to be piquant and impressive, is pursued with marvellous vigour and with mastery of all effective artifices. To his training, therefore, and to his aim we owe the parade of erudition which leads him into digressions⁠[929] and enumerations; the descent into realistic detail which is calculated to cause a shudder; the subtlety of argument which makes a debating speech cogent; the tendency to hyperbole which is bound to arrest attention; the love of point, epigram, antithesis which produces memorable phrases; and the recollection or invention of pithy maxims which embody human experience. His erudition is in part encyclopaedic, based on the science of the day, and in part mythological, based on the ancient literary education. The former accounts for excursuses on subjects like astronomy and geography,⁠[930] many of which are out of place; the latter appears in allusions or descriptions. The allusions may be straightforward, as when the preparations for Pharsalia are likened to those before the giants’ war, and when Caesar haunted by ghosts is likened to the matricide Orestes;⁠[931] or they may be slightly more recondite, as when the olive-branch is called “the leafage of Cecropian Minerva,” and when Marius is said to “gather Libyan wrath,” because, like the giant Antaeus, he drew fighting-force from the soil of Africa.⁠[932] Myth in Lucan’s eyes yields opportunities for exhibiting book-knowledge and so overpowers his philosophy upon occasion. Certainly in a critical mood he would, Stoic-like, reject the legends. It is the free-thinker that speaks through Cornelia’s guarded promise to follow her husband “through hell, if hell there be” (per Tartara, si sunt ulla, IX. 101-102). But should the old traditional colour seem requisite, Lucan makes no scruple about its introduction: thus Julia’s ghost, expelled from Elysium (III. 12), knows that Tartarus is being enlarged to punish human misdeeds. His attitude is, in fact, not consistent: On the one hand, when Pompey reaches Cyprus, Lucan resists the attraction of the tale which long after inspired Botticelli’s “Nascita di Venere,” and so surrenders to rationalism with the unpoetic caveat “si numina nasci credimus”⁠[933]⁠: on the other hand, he is romantic enough to discern in the story of Antaeus or of the Golden Apples a chance for a telling description:⁠[934]⁠

Realism in Lucan is now natural, now morbid, now grotesque. Too often it is coupled with the desire to harrow by dwelling on the horrible. Hence he revels in describing tortures, the agonies of the wounded, the repulsive ghoulishness of a witch, the still twitching mouth of Pompey after his head has been hacked off, revolting aspects of cremation, and equally revolting aspects of putrefaction.⁠[935] So zealous is he in making a point that he again and again overshoots the mark, as in his account of a crowd of victims mutually smothering each other;⁠[936] or of an old man’s reminiscence of searching among the slain during the Sullan Terror for a body whose neck would fit his brother’s head, which he was carrying;⁠[937] or of Curio’s slaughtered men in Africa having no room to fall:

When the realism is strained to breaking-point, it becomes unreal, as in the carnage during the seafight at Massilia. There the devilish ingenuity in inventing bizarre modes of death fails to make the struggle truly heroic, because the artificiality detracts from strong simplicity and pathos.⁠[938] The poet, having caused smiles by far-fetched conceits, only just succeeds towards the end in striking a note of human feeling when he relates the parting of the mortally wounded Argus from his father.⁠[939]⁠

Good examples of Lucan’s management of speeches are those of Caesar and Pompey in Book VII, where the two great opponents are made to express themselves in the author’s forceful, if rather bombastic, rhetoric. In Volteius’s speech in Book IV, encouraging his men to slay each other, we have virtually a thesis supported by the tricks of the schools and transferred to verse: the men by their death have to make a spectacle of themselves and the speech is correspondingly spectacular. The same rhetoric, often powerful and ingenious, invades parts of the epic where there is no set speech, but where the poet becomes declamatory, rendering his work, Quintilian thought, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus. Thus the reflections upon Pompey’s grave in Book VIII are composed after the fashion of a special pleader in a controuersia. The smartness in shifting positions and the disregard for consistency argue little solidity; and even where, as in this passage,⁠[940] the author’s favourite Pompey is concerned, the limited depth of feeling is comparable to nothing so much as that of a versatile advocate. One is naturally reminded of Lucan’s lost prose speeches for and against Sagitta.

Hyperbole is among his most noticeable rhetorical tendencies. He overstates and, in pursuit of overstatements, is drawn into the kind of elaboration which characterizes the storm in Book V.⁠[941] But the exaggeration is often confined to a single idea: so, to convey the notion of Caesar’s immense lines of circumvallation near Dyrrhachium, Lucan avers that, inside them, rivers run their whole length from source to mouth,

and, of Thessaly polluted by the slain,

One of the great secrets of Lucan’s brilliant rhetoric is his subtle power of expressing thought in terse⁠[944] pointed form, often assisted by antithesis. When this subtlety is not carried to excess, the results are extraordinarily effective in producing memorable lines and phrases, epigrammatically summarizing a character or a situation or, in the older meaning of sententia, a general truth. Even his less natural conceits have a way of clinging to the memory, like his paradoxical manner of suggesting that when Caesar’s ships lie helpless on a still sea the crews would prefer a watery grave to being thus becalmed: “all hope of shipwreck vanishes” (naufragii spes omnis abit).⁠[945] Typical common-places admirably expressed in his neat Latin are those on the peril of success,

on the danger of delay,

on famine as a cause of revolt,

on the secret happiness of death,

on condonation of a widely supported fault,

on death, as viewed in Pompey’s last words,

on the true attitude to death,

Alliteration is noticeable in some of the examples cited. Lucan does not use it so sparingly as Heitland suggests: on the contrary, much of his verse gains additional emphasis from being alliterative, as does his best known line,

or the simile descriptive of a storming charge by African horse,

A scrutiny of Lucan’s feverish mannerisms and wilful faults must not blind one to his merits. It is true that he is rhetorical and sensational; and that behind his clever artifices lies no mystery. He is able half to surprise, half to weary us with dazzling tricks of style; but he seldom enchants us with beauty. Yet, when all his inaccuracies, distortions, conceits, digressions and tediousness have been urged against him, his great passages prove that, in spite of artificiality, he can be fiery⁠[946] and well-nigh irresistible. He would have gained extraordinarily by compression: that is to say, he shows to most advantage in extracts. His best rhetoric is something intensely stirring, though it is a style more appreciated in France than in England. Nor, even if he seldom is deeply poetic, should the vein of poetry that is in him be overlooked: it appears in passages such as that on Pompey’s last look at Italy, or on Cornelia in love with sorrow:

Some have submitted that the Pharsalia is an epic without a hero, or alternatively an epic with three. Perhaps it is truer to argue that Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem in virtue of the defiant egoism and the untiring energy summarized in the line,