Study guide
The Pharsalia (The Civil War)
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Overview
- Composed
- About AD 60–65, under Nero; the first three books were apparently circulated in Lucan's lifetime, the rest published after his enforced suicide in April 65
- Genre
- Historical epic on recent Roman history, deeply rhetorical and openly partisan
- Metre
- Latin dactylic hexameter
- Length
- Ten books, about 8,060 lines; unfinished, breaking off in Book 10 in the middle of the fighting at Alexandria
- Title
- Bellum Civile ('The Civil War') in the manuscripts and ancient Lives; 'Pharsalia', the traditional title, comes from the poet's own phrase at BC 9.985
- Setting
- Italy, Spain, Massilia, the Adriatic and Illyricum, Thessaly, Egypt and Libya, from Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon (January 49 BC) to his siege in Alexandria (48–47 BC)
- Narrator
- An intrusive, passionate first-person voice that laments, accuses, argues with the gods and addresses the characters directly
- Main figures
- Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great (Magnus) and Cato the Younger; no single hero
- Gods
- No Olympian machinery: events are driven by Fortune, fate and human madness, while omens, prophecy and witchcraft remain
- Key themes
- Civil war as crime and suicide of a people; law turned against itself; the death of libertas; Fortune and the absent gods; Stoic virtue; the poet as witness and mourner
Context
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus was born at Corduba (Córdoba) in Spain in AD 39, into the richest literary family of the age: his father Mela was the brother of the philosopher Seneca, Nero's tutor and minister. Brought to Rome as a child and educated in rhetoric and Stoic philosophy, Lucan was a prodigy. He was admitted to Nero's circle, made quaestor and augur before the legal age, and in AD 60 won a prize at the emperor's new festival, the Neronia, with a poem in Nero's praise. The ancient Lives (by Suetonius and the grammarian Vacca) and the historian Tacitus agree that the friendship soured. Nero, a poet himself, became jealous; he walked out of a reading, and Lucan was forbidden to publish his poetry or to plead in the courts (Ahl 1976) (Morford 1967).
In AD 65 Lucan joined the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso to assassinate Nero. It was betrayed, and Tacitus reports that under interrogation Lucan named others, including (so it was said) his own mother. Ordered to die, he opened his veins and, as he felt death coming, recited lines of his own describing a soldier bleeding to death. He was twenty-five. Seneca and Lucan's father died in the same purge. The poem was left unfinished, breaking off in Book 10; the first three books had probably circulated before the ban, and the rest was published after his death, presumably without his final revision (Ahl 1976) (Asso 2011).
The subject is the civil war of 49–48 BC between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, which ended the free Republic and began the rule of one man that led, through Augustus, to Nero himself. It was therefore, for Lucan's readers, the origin of their own political world. Lucan drew on historical sources (above all Livy's lost books on the period) but did not write versified history: he compresses, invents, rearranges and enlarges, and turns his narrative into a sustained interpretation of what Rome had lost. The manuscripts and ancient witnesses call the poem Bellum Civile, 'The Civil War'. The familiar title Pharsalia comes from the poet's claim, addressed to Caesar at Troy, that 'our Pharsalia shall live on' (BC 9.985), meaning the poem about the battle of Pharsalus as well as the battle itself (Braund 1992).
The poem defines itself against the Aeneid. Virgil's epic, written under Augustus, had told how the gods and fate guided Aeneas towards the foundation of Rome and the peace of empire. Lucan takes the same metre, the same grand manner and many of the same scenes (a storm, a descent to the dead, a prophecy, a hero's departure) and turns them inside out: the gods have withdrawn, fate is cruel, and Roman history ends not in Augustus' peace but in the death of freedom. He also dispenses with the divine council scenes that epic had used since Homer. In their place come Fortune, portents, a witch who raises the dead, and above all the narrator, who weeps, protests and takes sides (Narducci 1979) (Feeney 1991) (Quint 1993).
The poem's style is famously extreme. Lucan was trained in the declamation schools, and his verse is packed with sententiae (pointed epigrams), paradox, hyperbole, apostrophe and gruesome detail. Ancient critics already noted the effect: Quintilian judged him 'more fit to be imitated by orators than by poets'. For centuries Lucan was nevertheless one of the most read Latin poets. Dante placed him among the great poets of antiquity in Limbo and made his Cato the guardian of Purgatory; English readers knew him through Marlowe's version of Book 1 (1600), the complete translations of Sir Arthur Gorges (1614) and Thomas May (1627), and Nicholas Rowe's celebrated verse translation (1718), all four available on this site with Sir Edward Ridley's version of 1896 and J. D. Duff's Loeb prose (1928), from which the quotations in this guide are taken (Paleit 2013) (Norbrook 1999).
Plot overview
The poet announces a war 'worse than civil', a crime made legal, and asks why Romans turned on one another when the world lay open to conquest. After a panegyric of Nero, he traces the war's causes: the excess of Roman wealth, the alliance of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and the deaths of Crassus and of Julia, Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife, which had kept the two men apart. Caesar crosses the Rubicon, seizes Ariminum and marches on Rome; the city panics, portents multiply, and a Roman matron prophesies the coming slaughter. Pompey withdraws to Brundisium and escapes to Greece, while the Stoic Cato, persuaded by Brutus, joins the republican side and remarries his former wife Marcia (Books 1–2).
Caesar enters Rome and plunders the treasury, overriding the tribune Metellus. He besieges the Greek city of Massilia (Marseille), which tries to stay neutral, and cuts down its sacred grove; his fleet wins a savage sea battle there. In Spain his army corners the Pompeian generals Afranius and Petreius at Ilerda and forces their surrender by thirst. Off Illyricum a raft of Caesarians under Vulteius chooses mass suicide rather than capture, and in Africa Caesar's young partisan Curio is destroyed by King Juba (Books 3–4).
The exiled Senate meets in Epirus and names Pompey its leader; Appius consults the abandoned oracle at Delphi. Caesar crosses the Adriatic, almost drowning in a storm when he tries to cross in a fisherman's boat, and Pompey sends his wife Cornelia away to Lesbos. Round Dyrrachium Caesar tries to wall in Pompey's army; the centurion Scaeva holds a breach against all comers. As the armies move to Thessaly, Pompey's son Sextus consults the witch Erictho, who reanimates a dead soldier to foretell the outcome. At Pharsalus Pompey, pressed by his own followers, gives battle and is routed; the narrator laments the end of Roman freedom (Books 5–7).
Pompey flees to Lesbos, collects Cornelia and sails to Egypt, where the advisers of the boy-king Ptolemy have him murdered on the shore and beheaded; a loyal follower burns his body in a makeshift grave. Pompey's spirit rises to the heavens and enters the hearts of Brutus and Cato. Cato takes command of the survivors, leads them on a heroic march across the Libyan desert, refuses to consult the oracle of Ammon and endures plagues of snakes. Caesar, pursuing Pompey, visits the ruins of Troy and arrives in Egypt to be presented with his rival's head, over which he weeps false tears. In Alexandria he visits Alexander's tomb, is seduced by Cleopatra, and is besieged in the palace by the Egyptians. The poem breaks off with Caesar trapped on the mole at Pharos (Books 8–10).
Book by book
Book 1: Crossing the Rubicon
Summary
The proem announces the subject, a war fought on the plains of Emathia (Thessaly) that is worse than civil because it set kin against kin, and in which crime was given the force of law. The narrator rebukes his countrymen for wasting Roman blood when Crassus lay unavenged in Parthia and whole continents remained unconquered, and points to the ruined, empty towns of Italy. Then, abruptly, he declares that if fate could find no other way to bring Nero to power, the crimes were worth it, and promises the emperor a place among the stars.
The causes follow: the law of nature by which great things collapse under their own weight, the partnership of three masters, the deaths of Crassus and of Julia, and the luxury that corrupted Rome. Pompey and Caesar are compared in two famous similes: Pompey an old oak standing only by its weight, Caesar a thunderbolt. Caesar reaches the Rubicon, where the image of Rome herself, weeping and with torn hair, bids him halt. He hesitates, then crosses, declaring that he leaves law and treaties behind and follows Fortune.
Caesar takes Ariminum, where the tribune Curio, expelled from Rome, urges him on, and the centurion Laelius swears to commit any crime he orders. His legions gather from Gaul. Rome is seized by panic and the citizens flee. Prodigies appear; the Etruscan seer Arruns reads a monstrous sacrifice, the astrologer Figulus foretells disaster, and a matron, possessed by Apollo, runs through the city crying out visions of Pharsalus, Pompey's death in Egypt and the wars still to come.
Analysis
Book 1 is the poem's manifesto. The opening lines set out its key ideas in dense paradox: a war 'plus quam civilia' (worse than civil, because Caesar and Pompey were also related by marriage), and 'ius datum sceleri', legality conferred on crime. Lucan's point is legal as much as moral: the Senate's emergency decree and the generals' commands made killing fellow citizens lawful, and the poem will keep returning to the corruption of law by force. The comparison of Pompey and Caesar (BC 1.125–57) also establishes the poem's way of judging: the gods favoured the winning cause, but Cato the losing one, and the narrator's sympathies are with Cato (Roche 2009) (Henderson 1987).
The panegyric of Nero (BC 1.33–66) is the poem's most debated passage. Read straight, it is a conventional imperial dedication, comparable to Virgil's praise of Augustus in the Georgics. But it praises Nero as the reward for which all the horrors just listed were a fair price, asks him not to tilt heaven by sitting on one side of it, and comes from a poet who later conspired against him. Many readers find irony in its excess; others argue that its sincerity in AD 60–62 and its bitterness for later readers are both part of its meaning. The Rubicon scene, meanwhile, turns a historical anecdote into a confrontation between Caesar and the personified Republic, and shows Caesar choosing Fortune over the law.
Of war I sing, war worse than civil, waged over the plains of Emathia, and of legality conferred on crime
Duff's 'legality conferred on crime' renders ius datum sceleri. The war's horror lies not only in kin killing kin but in the forms of law being used to authorise it.
here I leave peace behind me and legality which has been scorned already; henceforth I follow Fortune.
Caesar at the Rubicon formally renounces law (iura) and treaties for Fortune; the scene makes his invasion a deliberate break with the constitutional order.
Book 2: Brutus, Cato and Pompey's Retreat
Summary
Nature shows its foreknowledge of the war in portents. In Rome, citizens mourn before the fighting begins, and an old man recalls the previous civil wars of Marius and Sulla in a long speech full of proscriptions, mutilations and massacres, suggesting that worse is to come.
At night Brutus visits his uncle Cato and asks whether a wise man should take part in civil war at all. Cato answers that civil war is the greatest crime, but that virtue must follow wherever fate leads; he will mourn Rome like a father at a child's funeral and fight for liberty, offering his own life as an atonement. The same morning his former wife Marcia, newly widowed by Hortensius, asks to remarry him, and they are joined in a bleak ceremony without festivity. The narrator sums up Cato's austere code of life.
Pompey withdraws to Capua and then to Brundisium. Domitius Ahenobarbus, besieged at Corfinium, is betrayed by his troops and pardoned by Caesar, a mercy he finds humiliating. Pompey addresses his army without stirring it, sends his son to rally the East, and, as Caesar tries to block Brundisium harbour with a mole, slips away by sea to Epirus, leaving Italy to Caesar.
Analysis
The old man's memory of Marius and Sulla shows that this is not Rome's first civil war, and that the horrors of the past were committed under the forms of law: Sulla's proscriptions were legal lists of citizens to be killed. Lucan's history of Rome is a history of repeated self-destruction. Against it stands Cato, who appears for the first time and is defined by a Stoic creed of moderation, nature and service to the whole world. His answer to Brutus (BC 2.286–323) poses the central ethical question of the book, whether a good man may take part in a crime for the sake of the state (Fantham 1992).
Cato's remarriage to Marcia is one of Lucan's strangest inventions in emphasis: a wedding without torches, garlands or embraces, in which marriage itself becomes an act of mourning and political duty. It contrasts with the passionate married love of Pompey and Cornelia later in the poem. Pompey's retreat, meanwhile, shows him as a general relying on his name rather than his energy; his speech to the troops falls flat, and his departure from Italy is the first of the poem's many images of the Republic in exile.
Brutus, I allow that civil war is the worst wickedness; but Virtue will follow fearless wherever destiny summons her.
Duff's 'worst wickedness' renders summum nefas: civil war is a religious and moral outrage, not merely a crime, yet Cato will take part in it.
to observe moderation and hold fast to the limit, to follow nature, to give his life for his country, to believe that he was born to serve the whole world and not himself.
The poem's portrait of Cato's Stoic way of life: every phrase opposes the excess and self-interest that the narrator blames for the war.
Book 3: Rome Plundered and Massilia
Summary
As Pompey sails for Greece, the ghost of Julia appears to him in a dream, promising that she will haunt him and that civil war will make the dead busy. Caesar, now master of Italy, enters a terrified Rome and, though no one resists, behaves like a conqueror. When he moves to seize the treasury in the temple of Saturn, the tribune Metellus stands in the doorway; Caesar dismisses him with contempt and takes the gold. A catalogue follows of the peoples of the East who rally to Pompey.
Caesar marches for Spain and finds the way blocked by Massilia, a Greek ally of Rome that asks to remain neutral. He besieges it. Near the city stands an ancient sacred grove, dark and terrifying, where no bird sings and the trees are stained with the blood of human sacrifice. When his soldiers refuse to cut it, Caesar takes an axe and strikes the first blow himself.
Leaving the siege to his officers, Caesar goes on to Spain. A sea battle off Massilia follows, fought by ships locked together like a land battle and full of grotesque deaths: men pierced by many weapons at once, twins, a father and son, a swimmer whose hands are cut off. Caesar's fleet under Decimus Brutus wins.
Analysis
The episode of Metellus at the treasury is the book's sharpest scene for law. The tribunes' persons were sacred and their right of veto was one of the foundations of Roman liberty; Caesar overrides both, and his reply (BC 3.138–40) claims that the laws themselves would rather be destroyed by him than saved by a man like Metellus. The narrator's comment is bitter: liberty resisted only once, and only to defend money. Here Lucan shows the moment when legal forms are emptied of power while still being spoken of (Bartsch 1997).
The cutting of the Massilian grove (BC 3.399–452) is a set piece of sacrilege. Its horror draws on the ancient topos of the inviolable grove, and on Erysichthon in Ovid's Metamorphoses, who cut down Ceres' sacred oak. Caesar's blow shows a man who acknowledges no limit, sacred or human; the gods do not punish him, which is itself the poem's point. The sea battle is also a model of Lucan's 'mannerist' violence: the bodies of the dead are fragmented, multiplied and made strange, an aesthetic critics now read as an image of a body politic tearing itself apart (Masters 1992) (Leigh 1997).
The course of time has not wrought such confusion that the laws would not rather be trampled on by Caesar than saved by Metellus.
Caesar's contempt for the tribune: he treats law as something that belongs to the powerful, to be broken or kept at will.
Believe that I am guilty of sacrilege, and thenceforth none of you need fear to cut down the trees.
Caesar takes the guilt (nefas) on himself; his willingness to violate the sacred frees his soldiers to do anything.
Book 4: Ilerda, Vulteius and Curio
Summary
In Spain Caesar fights the Pompeian generals Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda. Floods first trap his own army, then he outmanoeuvres the enemy and cuts them off from water. During a pause the two armies recognise kinsmen and friends across the lines and fraternise; Petreius, enraged, breaks up the truce with a massacre of the Caesarians in his camp. Tormented by thirst, the Pompeians surrender, and Caesar spares them. The narrator praises the simple life that needs only water and bread.
In the Adriatic, a raft carrying Caesarian troops under the tribune Vulteius is trapped off Illyricum by Pompeian ships. After a day of fighting, Vulteius persuades his men to kill one another rather than surrender, and at dawn they do so before the enemy's eyes.
In Africa Caesar's partisan Curio, the tribune who had sold himself to Caesar, lands near Utica. He hears the local legend of Hercules and the giant Antaeus, wins a first success, but is lured into an ambush by King Juba of Numidia, Pompey's ally, and dies with his army. The narrator ends with a scathing epitaph on Curio as a man who sold his country.
Analysis
The fraternisation at Ilerda (BC 4.169–205) is the poem's clearest picture of what civil war means: the soldiers recognise brothers and fathers on the other side, and the 'disguise' that made the fighting possible falls away. Petreius' massacre restores the war by an act of pure crime. Caesar's clemency, here and elsewhere, is presented by the narrator not as generosity but as a strategy of domination: to accept pardon from him is to accept him as master (Johnson 1987).
The Vulteius episode (BC 4.402–581) has divided critics. Vulteius' speech praises voluntary death as the one freedom left, in the language of Stoic suicide that Lucan's Cato and Seneca also use; yet these are Caesar's soldiers, and their self-destruction is a miniature civil war. The narrator calls their act heroic and also mad. Readers have taken it as a perversion of Stoic virtue, as an unexpected model of libertas, or as Lucan's commentary on how civil war turns even courage into crime (Leigh 1997) (Sklenář 2003). The Curio story closes the book with the poem's harshest judgement on a politician who used legal office for sale.
No life is short that gives a man time to slay himself; nor does it lessen the glory of suicide to meet doom at close quarters.
Vulteius' argument for chosen death: the power to die by one's own hand is presented as the last form of freedom.
for they all bought their country, but Curio sold it.
The epitaph on Curio closes Book 4 with a sententia: Sulla, Marius and Cinna seized power, but Curio, a tribune, betrayed his office for money.
Book 5: Senate in Exile, Delphi and the Storm
Summary
The consuls convene the Senate in exile in Epirus. Lentulus argues that wherever they meet, they are the Senate and the State, and Pompey is formally given command. Appius Claudius forces the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, whose oracle has long been silent, to prophesy; she foretells only that he will escape the war, which proves true when he dies in Euboea before the battle.
Caesar puts down a mutiny of his legions at Placentia with contemptuous confidence, has himself made dictator and consul in Rome, and crosses to Epirus. Impatient for Antony to bring the rest of his army, he sets out at night in a small boat with a poor fisherman, Amyclas, and is nearly drowned in a cosmic storm, during which he declares that Fortune owes him whatever death he chooses.
Antony at last arrives. Pompey sends his wife Cornelia to safety on Lesbos, in a long and tender farewell that both find unbearable.
Analysis
Lentulus' speech (BC 5.17–49) raises a basic constitutional question: what makes the Senate the Senate? He argues that legitimacy belongs to the body, not the place, and that the State goes wherever the senators go, as Rome went to Veii when the Gauls burned it. Caesar, meanwhile, collects the titles of dictator and consul in a Rome emptied of its magistrates, and the narrator mocks the 'lying' forms of an election held under arms. The book thus sets two claims to legitimacy against each other, one constitutional but powerless, the other powerful but hollow (Asso 2011).
The Delphi episode (BC 5.64–236) replaces the reliable oracles of Virgil with a silent or unwilling god whose priestess is forced to speak and then dies. The storm (BC 5.504–677) rewrites the storm of Aeneid 1 without any divine cause: it is Caesar's own fortune that the universe seems to rage against and then to obey. The fisherman Amyclas, secure because he has nothing, gives the narrator occasion to praise poverty, which no civil war can plunder.
having power to pass any measure, decree this first of all — and the fact is clear to all kings and nations — that we are the Senate.
Lentulus claims that legal authority survives the loss of the city: the Senate is defined by its members, not by Rome's walls.
he knew that poor men's huts are not plundered in time of civil war.
Amyclas' safety is a lesson in the Stoic theme of the security of poverty, set against Caesar's limitless ambition.
Book 6: Dyrrachium, Scaeva and Erictho
Summary
Near Dyrrachium Caesar builds vast earthworks to enclose Pompey's larger army, and both sides suffer, Pompey's from disease and Caesar's from hunger. When the Pompeians attack one fort, the centurion Scaeva holds the breach almost alone, absorbing countless missiles and wounds, until relief comes. Pompey breaks out of the encirclement but fails to press his advantage.
The armies move to Thessaly. The narrator describes the region, its mountains and rivers, and its famous witches, whose spells can halt the heavens and compel the gods. The most terrible is Erictho, who lives among tombs and uses corpses for her rites.
Sextus, Pompey's unworthy son, seeks her out to learn the outcome of the war. Erictho chooses the body of a recently killed soldier, drags it to a cave, and, after a long incantation threatening the powers of the underworld, forces its spirit back into it. The corpse foretells the doom of the Pompeians and the eventual punishment of Caesar's side, and reports that the dead are in uproar over Rome's civil war; then Erictho grants it a second death.
Analysis
Scaeva (BC 6.140–262) is Lucan's anti-aristeia. His heroism is a parody of epic valour: he is so covered with spears that he stands like a wall, and he loses an eye in grotesque detail. The narrator states the paradox plainly: in civil war, courage itself is a crime. The episode shows how Lucan uses the traditional forms of epic heroism to measure their corruption (Johnson 1987).
The Erictho episode (BC 6.413–830) is Lucan's answer to the descent to the underworld in Aeneid 6. Instead of Aeneas guided by the Sibyl to a vision of Rome's future glories, an unheroic son pays a witch to reanimate a corpse, and the prophecy is of defeat. Erictho's power over the gods replaces the divine machinery that the poem has dropped; she is horror rendered as poetic virtuosity, and some critics see in her a dark image of the poet himself, who also forces the dead of the civil war to speak (Masters 1992) (O'Higgins 1988).
Ready for any wickedness, he knew not that valour in civil war is a heinous crime.
The sententia sums up the moral inversion of civil war: virtus, the Roman soldier's highest quality, becomes a crime.
To her it was a crime to shelter her ill-omened head in a city or under a roof
Erictho is defined by inversion: what is sacred to the living is a crime to her, a parallel to the inverted values of civil war.
Book 7: Pharsalus
Summary
The sun rises reluctantly on the day of battle. Pompey dreams of his past triumphs in the theatre he built in Rome, and the narrator laments that Rome will not be able to mourn him. The Pompeian army, eager for battle, forces him to fight against his judgement; Cicero speaks for them. Pompey yields with foreboding. Portents fill the sky, and the narrator notes that the battle was felt across the world.
Caesar urges his troops to kill without pity; Pompey speaks to his of liberty and the generations to come. The battle is fought; the Pompeian cavalry is routed and the infantry slaughtered. In a long apostrophe the narrator declares that the battle's losses are for all time, that freedom has fled Italy, and that there are no gods who govern mankind. Domitius dies defiant. Pompey leaves the field so that others will not die for him, and the narrator consoles him that he has escaped the guilt of victory.
Caesar takes over the Pompeian camp, his soldiers sleeping with nightmares of the dead. He forbids the burial of the enemy dead and feasts while looking at the battlefield. The narrator curses Thessaly, whose soil will forever be full of Roman bones.
Analysis
Book 7 is the centre of the poem, and the narrator is never more present. He delays the battle, speaks to Pompey and to Caesar, refuses at one point to describe the worst of the slaughter, and makes the battle a turning point for all subsequent history. His remark that the fighting was 'the never-ending contest between Freedom and Empire' (BC 7.695–6; Latin libertas et Caesar) makes the war a struggle between two principles rather than two men, and implies that the contest continues in the poet's own time. This apostrophe is the focus of Leigh's study of the narrator's 'engagement' with the action he describes (Leigh 1997) (Bartsch 1997).
The claim that 'there are no gods' (BC 7.445–55) is followed by the bitter consolation that the dead are avenged because emperors are made gods: civil war has produced the imperial cult. For an author writing under Nero, this is the boldest political statement in the poem. The battle itself is narrated less as a series of duels than as a mass death of peoples, which the narrator calls a wound too great for its age to bear (Masters 1992).
In very truth there are no gods who govern mankind: though we say falsely that Jupiter reigns, blind chance sweeps the world along.
The narrator's despair over Pharsalus: a rejection of Virgil's providential gods and of the theology of empire.
we were overthrown for all time to come; all future generations doomed to slavery were conquered by those swords.
The battle's real cost is political: every later generation, including Lucan's, is born into servitude.
Book 8: The Death of Pompey
Summary
Pompey flees through Thessaly to the coast and sails to Lesbos, where Cornelia faints at the sight of him; the people of Mytilene offer him refuge, but he leaves with her. At sea he discusses the stars with the helmsman and considers where to go, and sends King Deiotarus to seek help from Parthia. In Cilicia he consults his followers; his plan to ally with the Parthians is denounced by Lentulus, who persuades him to seek refuge in Egypt, whose king owes his throne to Pompey.
In Egypt the boy-king Ptolemy's council debates. The eunuch Pothinus argues that loyalty to the unfortunate is folly and that they should kill Pompey to win Caesar's favour. Achillas and the Roman renegade Septimius row out to meet him in a small boat. Pompey goes aboard, leaving Cornelia watching from the ship. He covers his face as they strike, and dies in silence.
His head is cut off and embalmed for Caesar, and his body is thrown into the sea. A loyal follower, Cordus, retrieves it at night and burns it on a poor pyre, burying the ashes under a stone with a hastily written inscription. The narrator laments that so small a grave holds Magnus, and predicts that later ages will disbelieve it.
Analysis
Pompey's death (BC 8.560–711) is staged as a Stoic exemplum. He covers his head, a Roman gesture of dignity in death (Caesar would do the same), and the narrator gives him an inner speech in which he resolves to show the world his constancy. The man who was 'the shadow of a great name' in Book 1 gains in death a moral greatness he lacked in life. His humiliation at the hands of a eunuch, a boy-king and a Roman deserter also exposes the moral bankruptcy that civil war produces even outside Rome (Johnson 1987) (Ahl 1976).
Pothinus' speech (BC 8.484–535) is a cynical argument from expediency that echoes the political realism of the age: right and wrong must give way to necessity, and loyalty belongs only to the fortunate. Against it, Cordus' tiny pyre and the improvised epitaph give the book an ending of private piety. The narrator's protest at the paltry tomb (BC 8.792–872) reflects on the contrast between Pompey's world-wide fame and the handful of earth that covers him, and on the gap between public history and its monuments.
When Pompey saw the blades come close, he covered his face and head, disdaining to expose them bare to the stroke of doom
The covered head is a gesture of Roman self-possession: Pompey dies as a Stoic, refusing to give his murderers the sight of his suffering.
Book 9: Cato in Libya
Summary
Pompey's spirit rises from the pyre to the region of the blessed, looks down on the smallness of the earth, and enters the hearts of Brutus and Cato. Cato, who had followed the republican cause as a duty, now embraces it wholeheartedly. Cornelia joins the survivors in Africa and mourns Pompey; Cato delivers a measured eulogy of Pompey as a citizen who preserved some liberty. When the troops threaten to give up, Cato shames them into continuing the war.
Cato leads the army across the Syrtes and the Libyan desert. When a soldier offers him water in a helmet, he pours it out on the sand. At the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, Labienus urges him to consult the god about the war; Cato refuses, declaring that god dwells in the virtuous mind and that he needs no oracle to know that he must die. The army is then attacked by snakes born from the blood of Medusa's head, and the soldiers die in a catalogue of horrible ways. Cato endures everything with them.
Caesar, pursuing Pompey, visits the ruins of Troy, where even the ruins have perished, and pledges to rebuild it. When he lands in Egypt he is presented with Pompey's head, and he weeps; the narrator exposes his tears as hypocrisy.
Analysis
Book 9 makes Cato the poem's moral centre. The narrator calls him the true father of his country and predicts that if Romans ever free themselves, they will make a god of him: a pointed contrast with the deified Caesars. Cato's speech at Ammon (BC 9.566–86) is a Stoic credo: god is in all things and in virtue, and there is nothing to learn from oracles. His march, in which hardship becomes the theatre of his virtue, is a Stoic version of a heroic quest. Critics differ over whether Lucan's Cato is a sage to be admired without reservation or a figure whose rigour borders on the absurd (Johnson 1987) (D'Alessandro Behr 2007) (Sklenář 2003).
The snake catalogue (BC 9.619–937) is Lucan's most notorious display of grotesque invention, a sequence of deaths by melting, swelling, bleeding and burning. It was imitated by Dante (Inferno 24–25), who challenged Lucan to be silent. The visit to Troy (BC 9.950–99) brings Caesar face to face with the origins of the Roman myth that Virgil had celebrated; amid the ruins the narrator promises that his poem will make both himself and Caesar live forever, and calls it 'our Pharsalia', the source of the traditional title (Masters 1992).
Behold the true father of his country, a man most worthy to be worshipped by Romans; to swear by his name will never make men blush; and if they ever, now or later, free their necks from the yoke and stand upright, they will make a god of Cato.
'Father of his country' (parens patriae) was an imperial title; Lucan transfers it, and divinity, to the republican Cato.
Has he any dwelling-place save earth and sea, the air of heaven and virtuous hearts? Why seek we further for deities? All that we see is God; every motion we make is God also.
Cato's refusal to consult Ammon states the Stoic view that the divine is everywhere and that virtue needs no oracle.
Book 10: Caesar and Cleopatra
Summary
Caesar enters Alexandria and visits the tomb of Alexander the Great, whom the narrator denounces as a mad robber of the world, a precedent for every tyrant. Cleopatra, who has been shut out of power by her brother Ptolemy, slips into the palace to plead with Caesar, who is won over by her beauty.
Caesar is entertained at a sumptuous banquet whose luxury the narrator describes in disgust. During the feast he asks the priest Acoreus about the sources of the Nile, and Acoreus gives a long account of the river and the theories about its flooding.
Pothinus plots against Caesar and sends Achillas to attack the palace. Caesar defends himself, sets fire to the ships in the harbour, and takes the island of Pharos. Pothinus is executed. Ganymede, the eunuch of Arsinoe, renews the attack, and Caesar is trapped on the mole with the sea on one side and the enemy on the other. As he looks for a way out, he sees in the ranks Scaeva, the hero of Dyrrachium. The poem breaks off.
Analysis
Book 10 is the shortest and incomplete; its last line (BC 10.546) ends in the middle of the action. Its view of Caesar is particularly hostile. The narrator presents Alexander as the model of the world-conquering autocrat, and Cleopatra (BC 10.53–171) as the new Helen, the 'Fury' of Rome; Caesar, in love with luxury, comes close to the corruption he has served. The episode of the Nile, a traditional subject of scientific enquiry, reflects on the limits of knowledge and empire, since even Caesar cannot master the source of the river (Asso 2011).
How Lucan meant to end the poem is unknown. Many scholars think it would have run to twelve books, ending with Cato's suicide at Utica in 46 BC, a Stoic death that would have balanced the death of the Republic; others propose a longer plan reaching the Ides of March and Caesar's assassination, which the poem repeatedly foreshadows. Some argue that the abrupt end, with Caesar trapped and Scaeva's name the last image, is accidentally fitting for a poem that refuses closure, though the break was almost certainly caused by Lucan's death (Masters 1992) (Ahl 1976).
There lies the mad son of Macedonian Philip
Lucan goes on to call Alexander a lucky robber whose death avenged the world: the archetypal tyrant, and an unmistakable comment on Caesar, and on Caesar's heirs.
Cleopatra, the shame of Egypt, the fatal Fury of Latium, whose unchastity cost Rome dear.
Lucan draws on the Augustan demonisation of Cleopatra, but turns it against Caesar, whose desire for her nearly costs him everything.
Characters
Caesarians
- Julius Caesar
- The poem's dynamic force and its antagonist, Caesar is compared to a thunderbolt: restless, fearless, contemptuous of law and the sacred, and propelled by Fortune. He crosses the Rubicon, plunders the treasury, cuts down the grove at Massilia and exults over the dead at Pharsalus. His clemency is presented as a weapon of domination and his tears over Pompey's head as hypocrisy. Yet the poem cannot help admiring his energy, and he dominates the narrative wherever he appears.
- Curio
- Gaius Scribonius Curio, a tribune of the people who changed sides for Caesar's money. He urges Caesar to cross into Italy in Book 1, and dies in an ambush in Africa in Book 4, where the narrator's epitaph condemns him for selling his country.
- Vulteius
- A Caesarian tribune whose men, trapped on a raft off Illyricum in Book 4, kill one another rather than surrender. His speech on the freedom of chosen death makes him one of the poem's most disturbing examples of courage corrupted by civil war.
- Scaeva
- A centurion who holds a breach at Dyrrachium almost alone in Book 6, his body bristling with weapons. His grotesque heroism illustrates the poem's paradox that valour in civil war is a crime. His name is the last the poem mentions before it breaks off.
Pompeians and republicans
- Pompey the Great (Magnus)
- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, once Rome's greatest general, now ageing and resting on past glory: 'the mere shadow of a mighty name'. He is a hesitant leader, overruled by his followers at Pharsalus. In defeat and death, however, he grows in moral stature, dying in Egypt with Stoic dignity, and the poem's sympathy for him deepens throughout. His tender love for Cornelia is one of its few warm relationships.
- Cato the Younger
- Marcus Porcius Cato, the Stoic senator who embodies the Republic's conscience. He joins the war as a duty, mourning Rome like a father, and after Pompey's death becomes the leader of the cause. His march across the Libyan desert and his refusal to consult the oracle of Ammon make him the poem's moral hero, the 'true father of his country' whom free Romans would worship.
- Brutus
- Marcus Junius Brutus, Cato's nephew, who consults him in Book 2 about whether a wise man should fight. He fights at Pharsalus in disguise, and the narrator repeatedly looks ahead to his part in the assassination of Caesar and his death at Philippi.
- Cornelia
- Pompey's devoted wife, sent to Lesbos for safety before Pharsalus. She witnesses his murder from the ship and mourns him in Africa. She is a figure of tragic love who blames herself for bringing misfortune to her husbands.
- Lentulus
- Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Crus, consul in 49 BC, who argues in Book 5 that the Senate in exile is the true Senate, and in Book 8 persuades Pompey not to seek help from Parthia.
- Domitius Ahenobarbus
- A republican noble pardoned by Caesar at Corfinium in Book 2, who dies at Pharsalus glad not to be pardoned a second time.
- Sextus Pompey
- Pompey's younger son, called by the narrator unworthy of his father, who consults the witch Erictho before Pharsalus.
Others
- Marcia
- Cato's former wife, who had been given in marriage to Hortensius and returns as a widow to remarry Cato in a joyless ceremony in Book 2.
- Julia
- Caesar's daughter and Pompey's first wife, whose death broke the bond between the two men. Her ghost appears to Pompey in Book 3, promising to haunt him.
- Erictho
- A Thessalian witch who lives in tombs, commands the powers of the underworld and reanimates a dead soldier to prophesy in Book 6. She embodies the poem's taste for horror and its replacement of the Olympian gods by darker forces.
- Ptolemy, Pothinus and Achillas
- The boy-king of Egypt and his advisers, who murder Pompey in Book 8 to win Caesar's favour. Pothinus, a eunuch, makes the case for expediency over loyalty; Achillas strikes the blow; both later plot against Caesar in Book 10.
- Cleopatra
- Ptolemy's sister, who slips into the palace in Book 10 and wins Caesar's favour. The narrator presents her through the hostile Augustan image of the seductive queen, a new Helen and a Fury of Rome.
- Acoreus
- An aged Egyptian priest who advises Ptolemy against killing Pompey and later lectures Caesar on the Nile in Book 10.
Themes
Civil war as crime and suicide
The poem's first lines describe Rome turning its victorious right hand against its own vitals, and the image of a people committing suicide runs throughout: kin kill kin at Massilia, soldiers kill one another on Vulteius' raft, and the battle of Pharsalus is a wound inflicted by Rome on itself. Lucan's preferred word for civil war is nefas, an offence against the gods and nature, and the poem treats it as a crime in which everyone, even the virtuous, is implicated.
This is why Lucan's epic has no proper heroes. Traditional epic values, such as courage, loyalty and the desire for glory, become crimes when they are turned against fellow citizens. Scaeva's courage and Vulteius' loyalty are monstrous precisely because they are genuine (Masters 1992) (Henderson 1987).
Law, right and might
The proem announces 'ius datum sceleri', crime given the status of law, and the poem keeps returning to the legal forms through which civil war was waged: the Senate's decrees, the authority of consuls and tribunes, the dictatorship, the treaties Caesar renounces at the Rubicon, and the emergency powers Sulla used to legitimise murder. Caesar's override of the tribune Metellus, the debate about whether the Senate in exile is still the Senate, and Caesar's sham election show legality turned into a mere cloak for power.
Lucan's view of law is therefore deeply pessimistic: once force decides, law becomes either a weapon of the strong or a powerless memory. The only standard left is the inner law of the Stoic sage, embodied by Cato, whose obedience to nature and duty stands above the corrupted public order. For readers interested in Roman legal thought, the poem is a sustained meditation on what happens to ius when citizens are at war (Bartsch 1997) (Roche 2009).
Libertas and the end of the Republic
For Lucan, Pharsalus was the battle in which Roman libertas died. The narrator declares that freedom has fled beyond the Rhine and Tigris, that every later generation was conquered on that field, and that the contest between freedom and Caesar continues. These claims are made under the Caesars' own heir, and they give the poem its political urgency.
The libertas Lucan mourns is the freedom of the senatorial Republic, the right of a governing class to share power among equals, rather than modern democratic liberty. Critics debate whether the poem advocates a return to the Republic, voices a nostalgic aristocratic grievance, or (as Bartsch argues) expresses a deliberate commitment to political action despite its own despair (Bartsch 1997) (Ahl 1976).
Fortune, fate and the absent gods
The Olympian gods, who intervene so actively in Homer and Virgil, play no part in Lucan's action. Instead, events are driven by Fortune, which favours Caesar, and by fate, which is cruel rather than providential. Omens, prophecies and witchcraft show that the universe is aware of the catastrophe, but it does not prevent it.
The narrator at times blames the gods, at others denies that they exist, and suggests that they will be replaced by deified emperors. This is both a literary and a theological challenge: Lucan's poem asks what epic becomes when the gods have left, and what Romans should believe when divine justice seems absent (Feeney 1991) (Narducci 1979).
Stoicism and virtue
Lucan was the nephew of Seneca, and the poem is full of Stoic ideas: the universe as a living whole that will dissolve into fire, death as release and freedom, poverty as security, and virtue as the only good. Cato, the poem's model of virtue, follows nature, rejects luxury and endures hardship without complaint.
Yet Lucan's Stoicism is troubled. The cosmos he describes is collapsing rather than rational, and the Stoic virtue of endurance can look like a taste for death. Scholars disagree about whether the poem affirms Stoicism, questions it, or turns it into a philosophy of heroic resistance (Sklenář 2003) (D'Alessandro Behr 2007).
Motifs
Apostrophe
The narrator constantly breaks into the story to address characters, places, Rome and even the reader: he calls out to Pompey, curses Thessaly, pleads with Caesar, and asks the gods why they allow such crimes. These apostrophes make the narration a form of protest and mourning, and they turn the poem into a contest between the narrator's will and the history he must narrate (Leigh 1997).
Sententiae
Lucan ends many passages with a short, pointed maxim, such as 'victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni' or Curio's epitaph. These sentences condense the poem's paradoxes and were endlessly quoted and imitated in later literature.
Paradox and hyperbole
The poem is built on contradictions: a war worse than civil, legality given to crime, a victory that is a defeat, valour that is criminal. Its hyperbole, in battles, storms and deaths, conveys the sense that civil war exceeds every normal measure.
Dismemberment
Bodies in the poem are torn apart, beheaded, pierced, melted and mutilated. Critics read this violence as an image of the body politic tearing itself apart, the head of Pompey being the final symbol of the Republic's decapitation (Masters 1992).
Delay
The narrator repeatedly delays crucial events, especially the battle of Pharsalus, as if reluctant to narrate them. Masters reads this as a sign of the poem's divided will, at once telling and refusing to tell the story of the civil war (Masters 1992).
Symbols
The Rubicon
The small river that marked the boundary of Caesar's province becomes a symbol of the line between legality and crime. The personified figure of Rome who meets Caesar there represents the Republic itself, and his crossing marks the point where law is abandoned for force.
The oak and the thunderbolt
The two similes of Book 1 define the rivals: Pompey as an old oak standing only by its weight, laden with trophies but with weak roots, and Caesar as lightning that strikes everything in its path. The images anticipate the fall of Pompey and the violence of Caesar.
The sacred grove
The ancient grove at Massilia, cut down by Caesar in Book 3, represents the sacred order that civil war violates. Caesar's willingness to strike it, and the gods' failure to punish him, symbolise the absence of divine justice in the poem.
Pompey's head
Cut off by the Egyptians and presented to Caesar, Pompey's head becomes a symbol of the Republic's decapitation and of the shameful end of Roman greatness. Its embalming and presentation also show the corruption of loyalty and the cynicism of power.
Critical debates
An anti-Virgilian epic?
The poem constantly echoes the Aeneid: Pompey's ghostly wife recalls Creusa, Erictho's necromancy answers the underworld of Book 6, the storm in Book 5 rewrites the storm of Book 1, and the march of Cato recalls the wanderings of Aeneas. Many scholars therefore call it an 'anti-Aeneid', a deliberate inversion of Virgil's providential epic of Roman destiny. Narducci's La provvidenza crudele (1979) and Lucano: un'epica contro l'impero (2002) are key statements of this view.
Others argue that Lucan's relation to Virgil is more complex: he draws out the darker voices already present in the Aeneid, and the inversion depends on close imitation. Quint places Lucan at the head of a tradition of 'epics of the defeated', opposed to Virgil's epic of the victors (Narducci 1979) (Narducci 2002) (Quint 1993) (Hardie 1993).
The panegyric of Nero
The praise of Nero in BC 1.33–66 has long divided readers. Ancient scholiasts already suspected irony, and modern critics point to the excess of the praise and to details that might be read as mockery, such as the request that Nero not sit off-centre in heaven lest his weight tilt the sky. Ahl argues for a pervasive ironic reading consistent with the poem's republicanism.
Others argue that the passage is a conventional dedication, probably written before Lucan's quarrel with Nero, and that it should be taken at face value; the irony lies in the way later events, and the rest of the poem, change its meaning. Roche's commentary surveys the arguments (Ahl 1976) (Roche 2009) (Asso 2011).
Republicanism and libertas
Is the poem a political statement? Its lament for lost libertas, its hostility to Caesar and its praise of Cato have led many readers, from the English Civil War to the present, to see it as republican propaganda. Ahl and others have read it as an attack on the principate from within.
Bartsch's Ideology in Cold Blood argues that the poem holds together an ironic awareness that ideological positions are constructed with a passionate commitment to libertas, and that its partisanship is a deliberate choice against despair. Henderson and Masters stress instead the poem's fractured and self-contradictory character (Bartsch 1997) (Henderson 1987) (Masters 1992).
The partisan narrator
Lucan's narrator is unusually intrusive for epic. He takes sides, addresses the characters, comments on the action and even tries to prevent events from happening. Leigh's Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement argues that the poem confronts the reader with spectacles of violence in order to force engagement with them, resisting the passive spectatorship of the arena.
Others have explored how the narrator positions himself as a vates, a prophetic poet, or as a mourner at the funeral of the Republic. O'Higgins shows how the poem's prophets (the matron, the Delphic priestess, Erictho's corpse) mirror the narrator's own role (Leigh 1997) (O'Higgins 1988) (Masters 1992).
Cato as Stoic sage
Cato is the poem's moral hero, but how far Lucan admires him is disputed. The traditional reading takes him as an idealised Stoic sage, the one figure who remains free in a world of slaves. Johnson's Momentary Monsters reads Lucan's heroes, including Cato, as partly comic and grotesque figures, whose virtue verges on absurdity.
Sklenář argues that the poem shows the failure of virtue in a nihilistic universe, while D'Alessandro Behr emphasises the role of emotion in Lucan's Stoic poetics (Johnson 1987) (Sklenář 2003) (D'Alessandro Behr 2007).
Law, ius and nefas in civil war
The poem's opening phrase 'ius datum sceleri' has drawn scholars interested in the relation between Roman law and civil war. The poem explores how legal forms such as the Senate's emergency decree, tribunician sacrosanctity, magistracies and treaties were invoked and violated, and how the categories of ius and nefas collapse when citizens fight citizens. Roche's commentary and Fantham's on Book 2 discuss the legal vocabulary in detail.
Bartsch and others have read the poem's treatment of law in the light of Nero's regime, in which legal forms persisted while real power lay with the emperor. The episodes of Metellus and Lentulus, and Pothinus' argument for expediency, make the poem a valuable source for Roman ideas of legitimacy (Roche 2009) (Fantham 1992) (Bartsch 1997).
The unfinished ending
The poem breaks off at BC 10.546. How long it was meant to be is unknown. A twelve-book plan ending with Cato's suicide at Utica is often proposed, on the analogy of the Aeneid's twelve books; others suggest sixteen books ending with the death of Caesar, or argue that the poem could have no conclusion at all.
Masters, reflecting on the poem's habits of delay and self-division, asks whether an epic of civil war could ever reach a satisfying conclusion; Ahl stresses how often the poem looks forward to Caesar's assassination (Masters 1992) (Ahl 1976).
Reception
Lucan was widely read in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Dante placed him in Limbo and made Cato the guardian of Purgatory; Marlowe translated Book 1 (published 1600); Thomas May's translation (1627) and continuation became associated with republican politics, and May became the historian of the Long Parliament. Nicholas Rowe's verse translation (1718) was praised by Samuel Johnson. Shelley admired Lucan and named him among the 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown' in Adonais.
Norbrook shows how Lucan became a key text for English republican writers, while Paleit traces the reception of the poem in England from 1580 to 1650 (Norbrook 1999) (Paleit 2013).
Key passages
Of war I sing, war worse than civil, waged over the plains of Emathia, and of legality conferred on crime
The poem's opening states its subject and its paradoxes. The war is 'worse than civil' because the leaders were relatives, and it gave legal form to crime. The phrase 'legality conferred on crime' (ius datum sceleri) sets out the poem's concern with the corruption of law.
yet Rome owes much to civil war, because what was done was done for you, Caesar.
The climax of the panegyric of Nero, which declares that the civil wars were worth it if they led to his reign. Whether this is sincere flattery or bitter irony is one of the poem's central debates.
Caesar could no longer endure a superior, nor Pompey an equal. Which had the fairer pretext for warfare, we may not know: each has high authority to support him; for, if the victor had the gods on his side, the vanquished had Cato.
The causes of the war are reduced to personal ambition, and the question of justice is answered with a famous paradox: the gods favoured Caesar, Cato favoured Pompey. The narrator sides with Cato against the gods.
The mere shadow of a mighty name he stood.
In Latin stat magni nominis umbra. Pompey is presented as a man living on past glory, his name larger than his present power. The image of the shadow anticipates his decline and death.
Brutus, I allow that civil war is the worst wickedness; but Virtue will follow fearless wherever destiny summons her.
Cato's reply to Brutus states his Stoic resolution: although civil war is the greatest crime, virtue must accept the role that fate assigns, even if it means taking part in the crime.
Ready for any wickedness, he knew not that valour in civil war is a heinous crime.
The sententia condenses the moral inversion of civil war: virtus, the traditional Roman soldierly quality, becomes a crime when it is turned against fellow citizens.
In very truth there are no gods who govern mankind: though we say falsely that Jupiter reigns, blind chance sweeps the world along.
In response to Pharsalus, the narrator denies divine providence. This rejection of the gods is both a challenge to Virgil and a political statement under the deified Caesars.
it was the never-ending contest between Freedom and Empire
The battle is presented as a struggle between two principles, liberty and Caesar (Duff's 'Empire'), which continues beyond Pharsalus into the poet's own time.
Behold the true father of his country, a man most worthy to be worshipped by Romans
The imperial title 'father of his country' is given to Cato, and the narrator predicts that free Romans would worship him rather than the Caesars.
posterity shall read my verse and your deeds; our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion.
The poet claims immortality for his poem and for Caesar, in a passage that gives the poem its traditional title. The claim binds the poet to his enemy: Caesar's fame depends on the poem that condemns him.
Questions for study
What does Lucan mean by a war 'worse than civil' and 'legality conferred on crime'?
Consider the family ties between Caesar and Pompey, and the legal forms (decrees, commands, magistracies) under which the war was fought.
Is the panegyric of Nero in Book 1 sincere or ironic?
Look at the details of the praise, the date of composition, and how the rest of the poem changes its meaning.
Why does Lucan leave out the gods? What takes their place?
Think about Fortune, fate, omens, prophecy and Erictho, and about the narrator's own role.
Compare the characterisation of Caesar and Pompey in the similes of Book 1.
Consider the oak and the thunderbolt, and how these images anticipate the course of the war.
How does the poem treat law and legitimacy? Use the episodes of Metellus (Book 3) and Lentulus (Book 5).
Consider who has power and who has legal right, and how the poem relates them.
Is Vulteius' mass suicide heroic or monstrous?
Consider the language of Stoic suicide, the narrator's judgement, and the fact that the soldiers are Caesarians.
In what ways is the Erictho episode a response to Aeneid 6?
Compare the guide, the questioner, the means of access to the dead and the content of the prophecy.
What role does the narrator play in Book 7?
Look at the apostrophes, the delays, and the claims about freedom and the gods.
How far is Cato an ideal Stoic sage?
Consider his speech to Brutus, his marriage to Marcia, his refusal at Ammon and the march through Libya.
Why did Lucan's poem appeal to English writers in the seventeenth century?
Think about Marlowe and May, the English Civil War, and the poem's treatment of liberty and tyranny.
Further reading
- Ahl, Frederick M. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.
- Asso, Paolo, ed. Brill's Companion to Lucan. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
- Bartsch, Shadi. Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
- Braund, Susan H., trans. Lucan: Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- D'Alessandro Behr, Francesca. Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007.
- Fantham, Elaine, ed. Lucan: De Bello Civili Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Feeney, D. C. The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
- Hardie, Philip. The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Henderson, John. 'Lucan / The Word at War.' Ramus 16 (1987): 122–164.
- Johnson, W. R. Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
- Leigh, Matthew. Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
- Masters, Jamie. Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Morford, M. P. O. The Poet Lucan: Studies in Rhetorical Epic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.
- Narducci, Emanuele. La provvidenza crudele: Lucano e la distruzione dei miti augustei. Pisa: Giardini, 1979.
- Narducci, Emanuele. Lucano: un'epica contro l'impero. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002.
- Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- O'Higgins, Dolores. 'Lucan as Vates.' Classical Antiquity 7 (1988): 208–226.
- Paleit, Edward. War, Liberty, and Caesar: Responses to Lucan's Bellum Ciuile, ca. 1580–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
- Roche, Paul, ed. Lucan: De Bello Civili Book I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Sklenář, Robert. The Taste for Nothingness: A Study of Virtus and Related Themes in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.