11.2 Lucan's Pharsalia and the evolution of epic poetry

Historical Context and Themes

Lucan's Pharsalia (also called De Bello Civili or Civil War) broke with centuries of epic tradition by choosing recent Roman history as its subject rather than myth. Written during Nero's reign and left unfinished at Lucan's death in 65 CE (he was forced to commit suicide after joining the Pisonian conspiracy at age 25), the poem chronicles the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Its political boldness and formal innovations make it one of the most important texts for understanding how epic poetry evolved during the Silver Age.

Civil War and Republican Sympathies

The poem covers events from Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE through the war's major engagements, breaking off in Book 10 during Caesar's time in Alexandria. Lucan treats this conflict not as a glorious chapter in Rome's rise but as a national catastrophe.

• The poem displays strong Republican sympathies, framing the civil war as the death of Roman liberty
• Themes of political corruption, unchecked ambition, and institutional collapse run throughout
• Caesar appears as a driven, destructive force; Pompey as a fading symbol of the old Republic, sympathetic but past his prime
• The tone is consistently tragic: Rome itself is the real victim of the war

Key Figures and Their Roles

Lucan builds his poem around three central figures, each representing a different political and moral stance:

• Caesar functions as the primary antagonist. He's depicted as energetic and brilliant but ruthless, embodying the ambition that destroyed the Republic. Lucan consistently associates him with violence and transgression.
• Pompey represents the old Republican order, though Lucan doesn't idealize him. He's shown as aging and indecisive, a leader whose greatness belongs to the past. His death in Book 8 is one of the poem's most powerful sequences.
• Cato the Younger emerges as the poem's moral center, a Stoic sage who defends liberty on principle even when the cause is lost. His march through the Libyan desert in Book 9 becomes an allegory of virtue tested by suffering.

Historical figures like Brutus and Cornelia (Pompey's wife) appear in supporting roles, adding emotional and political depth.

Impact of Civil War on Roman Society

Lucan is deeply interested in what civil war does to a society from the inside:

• Families and communities fracture along political lines; the poem repeatedly shows Romans killing Romans
• Traditional moral values collapse as power becomes the only currency
• The transformation from Republic to autocracy is presented as irreversible damage, not progress
• Lucan reflects on how the war's consequences shaped the imperial system his own generation lived under

This focus on collective suffering, rather than individual heroism, sets the Pharsalia apart from earlier epic.

Departures from Traditional Epic

Subversion of Epic Conventions

The Pharsalia is often described as an "anti-Aeneid" because it systematically inverts the conventions Virgil established. Where the Aeneid celebrates Rome's divinely ordained destiny, Lucan presents Rome's history as a story of self-destruction.

• The poem contains no divine machinery: gods do not intervene, guide heroes, or shape outcomes. Human decisions and human failures drive everything. This was a radical departure from Homer and Virgil alike.
• There is no true hero. All the major characters are flawed, compromised, or doomed. The poem refuses to offer a figure the reader can straightforwardly admire.
• Fate in the Pharsalia is not a benevolent plan but a grim inevitability. The Republic will fall; the only question is how much suffering accompanies its collapse.
• The poem's view of history is deeply pessimistic, rejecting the teleological optimism (the idea that history moves toward a good end) found in Virgil.

Innovative Narrative Techniques

Lucan's storytelling methods reflect his training in Silver Age rhetoric and his desire to break from Virgilian smoothness:

• The narrative incorporates lengthy digressions on geography, natural philosophy, and history (the excursus on Libyan snakes in Book 9 is a famous example)
• The poet's own voice intrudes frequently through apostrophe, addressing characters, the reader, or abstract concepts like Fortune and Liberty directly
• Lucan shifts between objective battle narration and passionate editorial commentary, blurring the line between epic poet and political critic
• Elements of historiography and forensic rhetoric are woven into the epic framework, giving the poem a hybrid quality that earlier epic didn't have

Grotesque Imagery and Vivid Descriptions

One of the most immediately striking features of the Pharsalia is its graphic, often disturbing imagery:

• Battle scenes dwell on physical destruction in extreme detail: wounds, dismemberment, and mass death are described without the ennobling distance typical of Virgil
• The Erictho necromancy scene in Book 6, where a Thessalian witch reanimates a corpse to prophesy, is one of the most grotesque passages in all of Latin literature
• Natural disasters and supernatural omens appear throughout, reinforcing the sense that the natural order itself rebels against civil war
• Lucan deliberately juxtaposes beauty and horror to create dissonance, keeping the reader unsettled rather than aesthetically satisfied

Style and Technique

Rhetorical Flourishes and Literary Devices

Lucan trained as an orator before turning to poetry, and that background shapes every aspect of his style:

• The poem is highly rhetorical, favoring pointed argumentation and dramatic effect over narrative flow
• Apostrophe appears constantly: Lucan addresses Caesar, Pompey, Rome, and Fortune directly, turning the epic into something closer to a speech
• Hyperbole is a defining feature. Events and emotions are amplified to extremes, which some ancient critics admired and others found excessive (Quintilian famously called Lucan "more suitable as a model for orators than for poets")
• Frequent sententiae (compact moral maxims) punctuate the narrative, giving it an epigrammatic quality. Lines like "Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni" ("The winning cause pleased the gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato," 1.128) became widely quoted

Poetic Structure and Language

• The poem is composed in dactylic hexameter, the standard epic meter, but Lucan handles it very differently from Virgil
• Where Virgil's verse flows with careful smoothness, Lucan's is abrupt, forceful, and deliberately jarring. He favors strong stops and rapid shifts in rhythm.
• Heavy use of enjambment (running a sentence across line breaks) and varied caesurae (mid-line pauses) creates a restless, driving energy
• Sound effects like alliteration and assonance are deployed aggressively to match the poem's intense subject matter
• Lucan mixes archaisms with neologisms, building a poetic vocabulary that sounds distinctly his own rather than derivative of Virgil

Narrative Techniques and Characterization

• Characters are developed primarily through speeches and actions rather than narrator description. The extended speeches are often the poem's most philosophically rich passages.
• Internal monologues reveal psychological depth, particularly in Pompey's moments of doubt and Caesar's moments of calculation
• Ekphrasis (extended descriptive set-pieces) appears throughout, but Lucan tends to use it for scenes of destruction rather than beauty
• The narrator balances storytelling with reflective commentary, frequently pausing to interpret events for the reader and draw out their political significance

This combination of rhetorical intensity, political engagement, and formal experimentation made the Pharsalia enormously influential. It demonstrated that epic could be a vehicle for dissent, not just celebration, and it expanded the genre's possibilities in ways that poets continued to engage with for centuries.