Lucan's Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre

238 Pages·2011·1.55 MB·English

Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre

Fran Alexis BA (Hons) MA

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of History and Classics
University of Tasmania
2011
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Declaration of Originality

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma
by the University or any other institution, except by way of background
information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of the my
knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another
person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor
does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright.

Fran Alexis

Authority of Access

This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance
with the Copyright Act 1968.

Fran Alexis
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Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre

Abstract
This thesis demonstrates that Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile takes epic to a new level,
testing the generic paradigm, because Rome’s civil war is a new subject for epic
poetry. Lucan’s epic presents civil war as the self-destruction of republican Rome,
and close reading reveals the poem’s intricate relationship with Homeric,
Virgilian and Ovidian epic. We see that it changes and exaggerates characteristic
tropes of the genre, by techniques such as delay, digression and frequent
intervention by a complex narrator / persona, whose dramatic intrusions are like
the speeches of characters in a tragedy. Such a politically risky subject, a type of
impious war where Romans fight against and kill Romans, necessitates a long
preamble and an insistent narrator’s voice to justify poetic commemoration of
such a crime.

Unlike earlier epic where civil war is rare or treated only as an unfortunate but
necessary prelude to peace, Lucan’s poem is wholly taken up with this type of
internecine war, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It also includes the
civil wars of Marius and Sulla, introduced as a mise en abyme to intensify this
subject, which suggests the predictability of recurring civil war and ideas of
persistent political instability. Lucan’s poem offers a detailed portrayal of the sea-
battle at Massilia, and paradoxically, this inventive battle is the most ‘epic’ of its
civil war battles, because many conventions of epic land battles are applied to this
conflict on ships. Lucan’s sea-battle re-presents and revitalises epic topoi by their
new location, the sea.

The episode concerning Hercules and Antaeus is also an example of a mise en
abyme, reflecting the focus of Lucan’s poem, the idea that civil war degrades both
sides equally. It argues that the wrestling match between Hercules and Antaeus
illustrates how participants in combat become similar and assume corresponding
characteristics. This episode shows how the poem interacts with its own past
battle narrative, relates to accounts of conflict in earlier epic, and reflects Roman
gladiatorial spectacle. Lucan’s paradoxical poem presents the battle at Pharsalus
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more symbolically than a typical epic battle narrative. Rhetorical praeteritio of the
unspeakable wounds, weapons and forms of death in civil war draws a parallel
between the human body and the state of Rome.

Lucan’s epic stretches the limits of the genre to overcome the difficulty of
recounting Romans fighting against fellow Romans in civil war and demonstrates
that there is more to this type of war than blood and guts and gruesome mutilation.
Lucan’s poem is evidence for how much has been and how much more can be
articulated through the language and tropes of epic.
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Acknowledgements

My most grateful thanks go to my supervisor Peter Davis who has been a source
of inspiration, guidance and support since the first lecture in Ancient Civilisations
I attended in 1998. I thank him for his unstinting encouragement, and appreciate
greatly the enthusiasm for the subject generated during the weekly ‘Reading
Lucan’ sessions we had together with Rod Thomson, Jessica Dietrich, Jenna
Mead and fellow post-grad David Nolan throughout 2007-08. I thank Jonathan
Wallis and Graeme Miles, who took over as supervisors, for their advice and help.
Special thanks go to fellow post-grad Michael Berry for his infectious passion for
languages and invaluable support during the final stages of this thesis. I also
acknowledge the friends I have made among the group of post-grad students and
the assistance provided by the office staff. Heartfelt thanks and gratitude go to my
family: to my husband, Peter Alexis, for his unfailing confidence and love
throughout my years of study; and to our son Adam and daughter Ami, for their
love, support and encouragement. I dedicate this thesis to the memory of our son,
Rowan, who died 20 October 1999.
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre 1
1. Chapter 1: Lucan’s Book 1: Beginnings of Epic 9
2. Chapter 2: Lucan - The Intrusive Narrator 37
3. Chapter 3: Lucan’s Book 2: Civil War and More 73
4. Chapter 4: Lucan’s Book 3: Sea Battles 111
5. Chapter 5: Lucan’s Book 4: Taking sides 148
6. Chapter 6: Lucan’s Book 7: Wounds and Weapons 185
Conclusion 214
Bibliography 217
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Introduction:
Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and the Epic Genre

tot mihi pro bellis bellum ciuile dedisti. BC 5.269

In place of so many wars, you have given civil war to me. 1

The spokesman for Caesar’s mutinous troops complains that instead of many wars
against a foreign enemy he is asked to fight in a civil war. As readers of Lucan’s
poem, we might level a similar complaint: in place of the kind of war found in
Homer’s Iliad, the quintessential epic,2 Lucan, as poet, gives us an epic about
Rome’s civil war, the war which changed Rome from republic to principate. In
the line above, the poet accentuates his subject matter, war, by polyptoton and
proximity (bellis bellum), and so glances back to the opening word of his poem
where the first word (bella) indicates, through its allusion to the weighty subject
of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, that these are the most significant epic texts
with which it engages. Lucan’s poem is about the events of a civil war, bella ...
plus quam ciuilia, BC 1.1, ‘wars ... more than civil’, about battles ‘more than’ or
different from those found in these earlier epics.3 This phrase, however, remains
unclear as to precise meaning, and on another level it illustrates how difficult it is
for Lucan’s poem to portray in epic manner Rome’s civil war where the
protagonists are more than just enemies, they are fellow Romans, and the events
are from Rome’s recent history more than from the battles of myth or legend. As a
result of its subject, Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile asks to be compared with martial epic,
Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid while its many allusions not only point to these
two epics but also to Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as poems
within the epic genre. I examine Lucan’s epic in conjunction with these works and

1 This translation and all others in the thesis are my own.
2 Baldick, 2008, 111, defines epic as a ‘long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one
or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style. The hero, usually protected or even
descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvellous voyages, often
saving or founding a nation ... .’
3 Henderson, 1998, 186, writes: ‘Lucan’s difficult language is strange, foregrounded in
reading above the tale it tells’. With Henderson, I see that the meaning or sense of the phrase, bella
... plus quam ciuilia, ‘wars ... more than civil’ is difficult to pin down with any great precision.
Paradox and inconsistency in Lucan’s epic often reflect back to this strange phrase and the type of
wars it recounts.
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explore the extent to which Lucan’s poem displays new modes of expression for
its subject, Rome’s civil war.

This thesis argues that Lucan’s choice of subject, Rome’s civil war, is the critical
factor which drives the changes to his battle narrative. The presumably knowing
and self-inflicted choice of subject might be Lucan’s response to poetic or literary
concerns, as the poet succeeds in differentiating his epic from all earlier extant
epics, especially that of Virgil, through his detailed engagement with the battles of
Rome’s civil war. The poet articulates an almost Ovidian measure of self-
awareness and self-assurance about his place within the literary canon, as well as
a certain level of political disquiet. Lucan’s choice of subject might reflect the
political or cultural anxiety of a young poet living under the rule of Nero, the
legacy of Rome’s civil war.4 We know that earlier poets had written on aspects of
Rome’s civil war or referred to it directly and that in earlier epic some battles can
be read as civil war (as shown in Chapter 3), but Lucan undertakes directly what
might be seen as a concern of Latin Literature, that is, how to write about such a
politically sensitive issue as Rome’s civil war.5

Aspects of Rome’s civil war as a subject that necessitate the remodelling of many
of the poetic conventions of the epic genre are discussed in this thesis. Lucan’s
Bellum Ciuile speaks out about a topic almost taboo, a type of war considered to
be a crime against humanity. The tensions aroused by the subject cause the poet to
stretch the elasticity and adaptability of the genre, as the poem reflects the strain
of exposing the self-destruction of Roman society in civil war. The poem displays
Romans fighting against Romans and citizens killing fellow citizens and an author

4 Bartsch, 1997, 3-7, looks closely at scholarship on Lucan, and identifies two schools of
thought – one brings biography to aid interpretation – mostly before 1980, while the second
engages with the medium of epic language and form, for example, the deconstructional analysis of
Lucan’s style as civil war by Johnson, Masters and Henderson. Leigh, 2000, 472, writes of
Lucan’s Pharsalia: ‘It is perhaps the most overtly political and, indeed, rebellious work of its age
and is unsparing in its condemnation of the corruption of Rome in the age of the emperors’.
5 Braund, 1992, xix, comments on Lucan’s subject and writes: ‘the theme was far from
confined to epic, but featured in history, declaration and iambus too. Augustan writers of epic,
including Cornelius Severus, Albinovanus Pedo, Sextilius Ena and Rabirius seem to have chosen
civil war or parts of it as their material; it is hard to deduce anything securely from the fragments
which survive, but it looks as if a sparse, unelevated prosaic style was favoured for this topic’. See
Roche, 2009, 3, who points out that Lucan’s choice of subject matter has antecedents, and makes a
list of earlier epic poems on civil wars which ‘were either recited privately or treated themes
amenable to Augustus’ own version of events’, 19-45.
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intruding into his text to express condemnation of this, instead of epic heroes
fighting gloriously in a war against a foreign enemy. While change is part of the
epic genre, Lucan’s poem, because it is about Rome’s civil war, has changes
which exceed those of earlier poets and takes epic to an unsustainable position, a
place to which later epic poets cannot or will not follow.6

From the simplest definition of epic,7 we see that the ‘epic tradition’ is a ‘norm’
based on the epics of Homer, a benchmark against which all later epic writing is
measured.8 Lucan’s poem gestures toward and diverges from patterns of Homeric
epic because Rome’s civil war calls for reproach or censure rather than Homeric
commemoration and glorification. In this thesis I will investigate, through close
reading, the way Lucan’s epic both connects with and veers away from earlier
epic because his poem is about a relatively recent historical event, Rome’s civil
war.9 Traditional features of epic must be modified or altered in such a way that
the genre of the new poem is still recognisable since acceptance depends to a large
extent on an authority conferred by earlier epic.10 This thesis will consider
Lucan’s poem with respect to such conventions as epic catalogues, similes, and
battle narrative. What it is that constitutes the essential attributes of the genre for
Lucan and what ‘civil war’ and ‘epic’ meant to Lucan can be found within his
poem, especially in his overt allusion to the epics mentioned above.

6 Statius and Valerius Flaccus revert to the mythological themes of earlier epic and Silius
Italicus writes about Rome’s victory against a traditional foreign enemy, although all these later
epic poets can be seen to allude to Lucan’s exaggerated style to some degree.
7 OED: ‘epic, pertaining to that species of poetical composition represented typically by the
Iliad and the Odyssey, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of
one or more heroic personages of history or tradition’.
8 Literary conventions are built up from comparisons and allusions between works of earlier
poets, comprising, for Lucan, many more examples than just the epics of Homer. We know from
extant fragments that Virgil, Ovid and Lucan most likely had the rest of the Epic Cycle to draw on
as well as the works of such poets as Callimachus, Naevius and Ennius. See Boyle, 1993, 1-6, for
an investigation into tradition of epic poetry which preceded Virgil’s Aeneid. He also writes:
‘before Virgil there seems to have been no mythological historico-symbolic Roman - or Greek -
epic,’ and that Virgil’s ‘solution of the genre problem was ... to revivify the old [form] and to
revivify it so successfully as to change the ground rules permanently for Roman epic’, 80. Aicher,
1990, 218, writing about the work of Ennius sees that: ‘With so much of Roman literature lost, this
later literature gets cast in the unrealistic dichotomy of either looking to a Greek model or showing
a creativity and sensibility which have no heritage’.
9 I acknowledge that the classification or definition of epic poetry becomes even more
problematic if we venture outside the Graeco-Roman context.
10 OED: ‘genre, b. spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary
work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose’.
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Lucan’s poem narrates episodes of battle in a way different from battle narrative
in earlier epic because they are impious civil war battles with no heroes or gods.
His choice of subject is Rome’s civil war, yet, paradoxically, it describes only
some of the battles of that war and this select portrayal seems to emphasise
discord and fragmentation on a geographical, natural and political level. Lucan’s
choice of battle sites could be simply the result of his historical (rather than
fictional) subject, but the poem shows a bias toward civil war battle action in
locations atypical of Homeric epic. Lucan’s poem has extended the historical /
mythological mix of Virgil’s epic and has even stretched Ovid’s change to the
epic genre in order to gain attention and to claim its place within the genre.

Exaggeration in Lucan’s battle narrative can be seen to reflect the extravagance of
Nero’s Rome and, with republican Rome as the main character, it is an overtly
political epic with a partisan narrator who intervenes to tell us how the poem
should be read.11 With its allusions to earlier epic, Lucan’s poem elevates the civil
war to epic proportions equal to the Trojan War as if it is the start of a new epic
cycle for Rome. Because his poem deals with major epic themes such as the
nature of heroism, honour and glory gained from war, the death and wounds of
war, and the downfall of a civilisation, it retains many of the conventions found in
Homer’s and Virgil’s martial epic. In Lucan’s poem, however, ‘type scenes’ of
paired battle lines or named opponents are often overshadowed by detailed
descriptions of the location, topography and natural forces such as flood and
storm. Although there are opposed and named warriors in Lucan’s poem, often
these are not even well known Romans as we might expect, but minor or
anonymous characters, rather than legendary epic heroes.

It becomes clear as I focus on the beginnings of epic, narratorial intrusion and the
presentation of battles that Lucan’s epic is further from the Homeric tradition than
the epics of either Virgil or Ovid. Hyperbaton, hyperbole and praeteritio are
rhetorical tools used by Lucan to arouse emotion in the reader as well as to

11 In the poem Bellum Ciuile the reader is often drawn to conflate Lucan with his narrator
persona but, at the same time, to remember that the poetic identity and views of the narrator must
also be separate from the forever unknowable opinion of Lucan, a Roman poet who lived and
wrote his epic while Nero was emperor of Rome. See Hinds, 1998, 47-48, on the ‘ultimate
unknowability of the author’s intention’.