Timothy Joseph looks at what the epic poet can tell us about dealing with disaster
The experience of reading Lucan’s (39–65 ce) first-century epic poem Pharsalia might be compared with the increasingly prevalent twenty-first-century exercise of ‘doomscrolling’, that is, the excessive consumption, on our screens, of bad news. The poem narrates the sprawling civil war between Julius Caesar and his senatorial enemies in 49-48 bce, bombarding the reader with depictions of a warring and crumbling society. Each episode of discord and destruction spills over into the next, not unlike the bad-to-worse news bites popping up one after the other on a Twitter feed. Early in the Pharsalia Lucan pictures Cato the Younger, the staunch defender of Roman traditions, sleepless and rolling over in his mind the doom confronting his country (2.239–41). In many ways this snapshot of Cato stands as a mirror image of the reader, who over the poem’s ten books rolls – we might say scrolls – through the battery of Roman calamities with him.
Lucan makes the devastation of these civil wars manifest in a number of ways. There are physical deaths – by decapitation, mutilation, starvation, suicide, shipwreck, snakebite, and so on – described with a gory specificity bearing no precedent in Greek or Latin literature. There are also the impassioned meditations by Lucan’s narrator on the political destruction that Caesar’s victory at the Battle of Pharsalia brought, the collapse of the long-standing Roman Republican system into the authoritarian rule of the Caesars.
Caesar Before Alexandria by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (1675–1741), Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library
Intertwined with the depictions of physical and political doom are images of ecological destruction – an intersection in Lucan’s doomscrolling that we also see increasingly often in the news cycles of our own time. Lucan explores this nexus of catastrophe from the outset of the Pharsalia. In his prologue he compares the fall of the Roman state to the rule of the Caesars with nothing less than the apocalyptic collapse of the natural order, when land and sea, as well as sun and moon and stars, will return into chaos (1.72-80). Soon after this arresting early simile, Lucan opens his battle-narrative with Caesar and his army crossing the Rubicon River, the natural border between Gaul and Italy that by law was not to be breached by Roman legions (1.183-226). The body of water swells in protest (1.204) and, buffeted by winter’s snows, shows its strength (1.217), but it is no match for the unremitting advance of the dictator-to-be. Later Lucan dwells in an even more elaborate way on Caesar’s deforestation of a sacred grove in Gaul (3.399-452). This act of violent ecological sacrilege elicits mourning from the nearby Gallic farmers, and to the poet it represents Caesar’s brazen irreverence for all tradition – religious, political, cultural. Elsewhere Lucan imagines the natural world battling back against Caesar(ism)’s transgressions: the skies conspire to bring drought, flooding, and famine to the Caesarian troops in Spain (4.48–120); the sea combats plans for a blockade at Brundisium by actively gobbling up the mounds of earth Caesar’s men throw into it (2.660–8); and a ferocious storm repels Caesar’s audacious efforts to cross the Adriatic Sea on a tiny skiff (5.561–677).
Appearing before our eyes one after the other, the scenes in which political warfare is dramatized as ecological warfare – humans attacking nature and nature fighting back – have a powerful cumulative effect. In the crumbling world that Lucan depicts, destructive political actions are destructive ecological actions; they are one and the same. Just as clear is the certainty that human transgressions will be matched by vengeful responses from the natural world.
The interrelation of political and ecological violence that Lucan captures is uncomfortably familiar to the doomscrollers of our time. Political combat over climate legislation (the repeated failures of the U.S. government to pass carbon-taxing laws come to mind) has resulted time and again in inaction and thus the continuation of the onslaught on the natural world – and in turn our progression toward an ever hotter and more dangerous planet. Then there is the reality of nation-states whose geopolitical influence rests on their control of fossil fuel production. When military power moves in tandem with the power to assail ecosystems and unleash fossil fuels, the parallels with the political-ecological alignment in Lucan’s poem are particularly striking.
It is easy to come away from the gloomy worldview of the Pharsalia with the despair of the doomscroller. It is also sobering to note that Lucan himself failed as a political revolutionary. In the year 65 ce, he participated in the conspiracy that tried but failed to overthrow the despotic emperor (and descendent of Julius Caesar) Nero. In the aftermath he was forced to open his veins and end his life at the age of 25. As the historian Tacitus tells it at Annals 15.70, with his last words Lucan recited verses he had written about a wounded soldier’s death on the battlefield, a scene resembling his own grisly end.
Battle of Pharsalus and the Beheading of Pompey by Apollonio di Giovanni di Tomaso (died, 1465), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
However, while Lucan failed spectacularly in the arena of Roman imperial politics, he achieved transcendent success as an artist and an innovator. Like its central actor and agent of chaos Caesar, the Pharsalia itself is a rule-breaking, transformative work, one that disrupts and discards many of the conventions of epic poetry, one that responds to a new story and new circumstances with a new kind of poem. In this way, in the process of creating his doom-ridden poetic world, Lucan points towards a profound hope in humanity – a confidence in the human capability to adapt and innovate. In Book 9 of the Pharsalia, the poet has Caesar visit the site of Troy (9.961-999), the setting of Homer’s Iliad and in this regard a sort of birthplace of epic poetry and of Greek and Roman literature more broadly. The Troy he pictures is burnt down and dilapidated; “even its ruins have perished” (9.969). Lucan’s Caesar, in keeping with the irreverence he exhibits across the poem, tramples the ancient city’s sacred sites underfoot. As this is happening, the narrator arrestingly addresses Caesar and assures him that his story will be told forever. But it will be told on Lucan’s poetic terms, as he makes clear in the first-person plural assertion concluding the address: “Our Pharsalia will live on, and we will be condemned to darkness by no age” (Pharsalia nostra | vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo, 9.985–6).
Lucan is certain about the success and staying power of his account of Caesar’s and Caesarism’s victory, his artistic creation, his Pharsalia. He is determined to wrest the narrative of the Battle of Pharsalia and its consequences away from other sources, such as Julius Caesar’s own Commentaries on the Civil War. What will assure the survival of Lucan’s poem is its rule-breaking, irreverent, and frequently jarring newness. Defunct – indeed trampled upon much like Homer’s Troy – are the old modes of writing. A novel type of storytelling is needed to capture the times and transformations Lucan is describing. And so, while we might see in Lucan a sort of content producer for ancient doomscrolling, in his commitment to innovation and brazen originality lies the fundamental hopefulness of the Pharsalia. As we in the twenty-first century look to prevail over resignation and look towards a different, better eco-political vision, we can find in Lucan a champion of the urgency of creativity in response to cataclysm and doom.
Timothy Joseph is Professor of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His book Thunder and Lament: Lucan on the Beginnings and Ends of Epic was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
