OUP (2022) h/b 299pp £64 (ISBN 978019758145)
Just over a hundred years ago J.D. Duff prefaced his Loeb edition with the damning remark: ‘no reasonable judgement can rank Lucan among the world’s great epic poets. He does not tell his story well’. Voltaire in 1727 had written off Lucan as a ‘but a declamatory gazeteer’. How times and tastes change. Read this book and you may feel (as I did) that this poet’s suicide at the age of 25 robbed the Roman world of one of its finest talents.
The book’s title is taken from Statius who, in a poem addressed to Lucan’s widow on the poet’s birthday, perceptively described Lucan as a poet who was destined by the Muse Calliope to ‘thunder the wars of Pharsalus’ and to ‘lament the crime of Canopus’ (Silvae 2.7.66, 70-1) as well as to ‘surpass the poets of old’ (2.7.41-2). The triumph of Caesar(ism) on the 9th August 48 BC was (to Lucan) the end of the Roman world and he mourned it in an epic which paid valedictory homage to the epics of the past—poems which had celebrated the Roman expansion which the civil war cut off. Pharsalia was, J. argues in this engaging and brilliantly argued book, the epic to end all epics.
Certainly the past is everywhere and nowhere in the poem. J. excellently describes Caesar’s poignant visit to the site of Troy, where (as Lucan put it [9.969]) ‘even the ruins have perished’ (etiam periere ruinae), giving a pointed (if focalised) rebuke to Ennius’ faith in the immortality of Troy (Annales 344-5). In the bravura opening to the poem (1.1-32) Lucan brazenly alludes to Ennius’ style to open an epic poem which seeks to show how the Ennian/ Virgilian vision of an expansionist Rome was now doomed to fight its own entrails. ‘The Annales … begins the process of telling Rome’s ever-advancing global story, the Pharsalia delivers that story’s end’ (p.107). In this new epic of civil carnage there are no Muses—the nearest the poet gets to a Muse is the emperor Nero, a passage which comes across to this modern reader as sardonic if not downright sick—as Lucan is seeking to ‘silence and end the genre’ (p.47).
The first episode in the narrative shows the personified figure of Rome herself appearing to Caesar at the Rubicon. His spurning of her (1.183-205) is a brilliant piece of epic theatre as Rome, personified as a weeping woman, recalls Hector in Virgil’s Aeneid 2.268-97—where a fellow-citizen reproaches the hero and where the hero of the Iliad hands on the torch to the hero of the Aeneid—but also looks ahead to the seas of weeping which lie ahead for the readers of this poem.
J. gives us a poetic analysis of Lucan’s infamous horror-show gore, showing how the poet conveys the self-destruction of civil war with his use of themes from the epic tradition. It is not just people who are mutilated here, but the poetic tradition itself: the grisly mutilation of Marius Gratidianus (2.173-93) mashes up Homer, Ennius, and Lucretius in what J. sees as metapoetic dismemberment of the epic conventions: Marius the orator had his tongue cut out in an act which was ‘microcosmic of broader Roman disaster’. More deliberate metapoetics are found in Caesar’s stripping of the grove at 3.394-452—an act which recalls the preparations for Patroclus’ funeral (Iliad 23.114-22) but which is also symbolic of literary plundering as silva has literary connotations. Epic inheritance is crashing down with the trees (p.81). Similarly the defiant violence of the Caesarian Scaeva (6.140-262) standing against his enemies as a ‘brawling, braggadocious and relentless embodiment of virtus in vain’ (p.84) draws on Homer’s Ajax (Iliad 16.102-11) Ennius’ Gaius Aelius (Annales 391-8) and Virgil’s Turnus (Aeneid 9.806-14) and yet Scaeva is also something of a monster—no sweat, no breathlessness and a man thriving on death and gore. In civil wars, of course, all fire is friendly fire: Scaeva was killing fellow-citizens and no spoils are awarded for killing Romans (6.257-62). The poet’s use of Ennius here shows the difference between fighting foes and fighting friends.
Other perversions of nature abound. Book 7 opens with the sun trying not to rise on the day of the battle—a pathetic fallacy which J. sees as a rejection of the epic convention of sunrises. Ennius’ sunrise (Annales 72-91) was a ‘foundational moment in this foundational poem’ (p.99) whereas Lucan’s sun wisely wishes to hide its head under the duvet. The epic topos of ‘doomsday’ is made to show how the Roman history of expansion had been sucked back into the black hole of one bloody day (7.407-427: p.115). In a pointed rebuke to the epic tradition, Lucan tells us that the gods and their providence have gone (7.445-55) and that civil wars will make human Caesars divine (7.455-9). The world is turned upside down as men become gods, Romans are killed by Romans (7.862), and once prosperous towns of Latium are laid waste in the new world where the ‘whole Latin name will be a story’ (7.391-2). The killing of the bearers of the great names of the past (7.583-5) shows the death of the Roman tradition itself and is poetically effective even if historically tendentious as few patricians in fact died in the battle. Nor does even death end the fighting: the clairvoyant corpse evoked by Erichtho describes the parallel civil war raging in the underworld (6.777-821) in a grim nod to the final book of the Odyssey and a perversion of the Elysium shown in Aeneid 6.
Questions encircle this extraordinary poem. We cannot even be sure what its title should be, and the abrupt ending at 10.546 has caused many to wonder if the poem is unfinished. J. redeems the ‘jarring, messy’ ending by seeing that it mirrors the ending of the Roman world and the genre which described it. The argument of the whole book is that this poem somehow enacts its own subject, treating the poetic form to the (self-)destructive violence of its contents, and the final three chapters unpack this view of the poem in compelling detail.
J. looks at how Lucan takes the focus on Roman control of the sea in Ennius, Naevius and Livius Andronicus and transmutes this into the imagery of sinking ships and crashing fleets, pointing to the loss of maritime sway and also to the demolition of the genre which had celebrated maritime power (‘Latin epic begins on the sea’ p.143). The greatest crisis of the past had been the Punic Wars and Hannibal’s defeat was Ennius’ poetic victory: Lucan shows that in the civil war Rome succeeded where Hannibal failed. Caesar is a Hannibal redivivus who crosses the Alps and even compares himself to the great Carthaginian (1.303-5), ending up a victorious vicarious Hannibal. Naevius and Ennius described and celebrated the success of Roman sea power against Africa, but Lucan’s Curio and Cato fail to match up, with Curio looking for all the world like a Scipio Africanus manqué. He tells himself that Scipio guarantees his own success—only to find that Juba and Pompey crush and compress his Caesarian forces into ‘a little world’ (4.777). The saddest verdict here is the poet reminding us that everyone loses in a civil war and that it would have been better to lose to Africa herself (4.793). Africa, once the site of Roman expansionism, is now the place where it shrank along with the epic itself, as shown by the awakened corpse in Book 6 who describes old Scipio and old Cato lamenting for their progeny dying in Africa. Ennius’ epic heroes provide a lament which is a fitting antithesis to the glory of the earlier epic tales.
The epic convention of the catalogue of ships is also suitably altered in Lucan’s (3.169-295) account of the vessels scattered across the sea (9.16) after Pharsalus, the naval fragmenta reflecting the wreckage of the epic itself (p.168). Nothing goes right: the Syrtes cut short Cato’s journey and then an epic storm halts the fleet (9.319-47) leaving Cato a ‘sand-wanderer’ (harenivagum 9.941).
J. is especially illuminating on the links with the theme of ‘homecoming’ (nostos) in the Odyssey. Lucan’s heroes (Caesar, Cato, and Pompey) never get home to the conjugal reunion enjoyed by Homer’s Odysseus in what is a ‘systematic negation and undoing’ of the earlier epic. Lucan the poet ‘returns home’ to the founding epics but closes off any homecoming for his heroes. Homer’s Odysseus is victorious in his civil war with the suitors and he ends up back with the family he loves, but Lucan’s heroes get none of this. Cato never leaves Africa, and his ‘ascetic and sexless’ marriage to Marcia is a world away from Odysseus and Penelope. Pompey is ‘ever adrift’ (p.197), united with his wife Cornelia only in death, and even his ashes did not come home (8.823-72). Caesar does get home, of course—but to the daggers of his assassins. Caesar wreaks destruction on Amyclas’ humble dwelling (5.519-20), his wife Calpurnia is never mentioned—but this Odysseus married his Calypso as he is described lying in bed with Cleopatra (10.68-9).
J. gives us a good analysis of the tropes of epic lamentation (pp. 226-7) especially as showing how they represent the ‘marginalised place of epic’s female characters’ (p.228). The narrator joins in the antiphonal lament (p.238) and is a speaker in his own narrative as shown by his exceptional use of apostrophe, creating the sensation that the poem is itself a threnody for a lost world, weeping over the corpse of Rome and sharing the fate of the dead of Pharsalus in devastatingly simple first-person statements such as: ‘we are laid low’ (prosternimur (7.640)) and ‘the punishment for other men’s sins lies on our neck’ (alieni poena timoris / in nostra cervice sedet (7.644-5)).
J. sees the Pharsalia as a zombie poem ‘living off the dead, killing and consuming the lifeblood of those… it meets, only to live on itself’ (p.267). The amazing power of this text to shock and to inspire is everywhere made evident in this highly readable and superbly researched book and I defy anyone to read it without being compelled to re-read Lucan’s monstrous and mind-expanding poem and see it again with fresh eyes.
John Godwin