LUCAN: HISTORICAL EPIC

The author of the _Pharsalia_—Authorities for his life—His career—Relations with Nero—Lost works—The _Pharsalia_—Summary of the ten books—What was its contemplated length?—The three books first composed—Daring in choice of subject—Originality in epic treatment—Lucan’s sources, historical, philosophical and literary—Historical value—Misstatements and anti-Caesarian bias—Stoicism—Influence of previous poets—How rhetoric affected him—Erudition—Realism—Speeches—Pointed style in _sententiae_—A vein of poetry—His hero.

LUCAN

Precocity and enthusiasm were eminent characteristics of the young poet who first throve under Nero’s favour and finally succumbed to that emperor’s jealousy. Byron, dying at thirty-six, is reckoned a fertile genius; but when Lucan had to face death at an age earlier by more than ten years, there stood to his credit an almost equally wonderful mass of work—letters and speeches, epic and drama, miscellaneous verse, court-poetry, panegyrics and satires, as well as librettos for mimes. Of all these, however, time has spared only his _Pharsalia_, broken off in the tenth book. The determining factors in his career were his descent from two prominent Spanish families and his rhetorical education; for upon these depended the success and failure of his life, and the main qualities of his thought and style.

Lucan’s maternal grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a Corduban speaker of note. His paternal grandfather was the elder Seneca, well known to Roman literary circles in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius; his father was Annaeus Mela, an _eques_, apparently something of a philosophic recluse,[848] while his uncles were M. Annaeus Novatus (the “Gallio” of the Acts of the Apostles) and the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca. To the latter he owed his introduction to court-life, which proved an incentive to brilliant achievement but ultimately compassed his ruin.

While the impersonality of epic precludes the _Pharsalia_ from yielding details about Lucan’s life, yet from it alone sure influences could be drawn as to his training in literature, rhetoric and philosophy, his anti-Caesarism, his self-confident and impetuous spirit. We are not, however, without definite biographical sources. There are two lives of importance, one imperfect and inimical, manifestly the basis of Jerome’s entry[849] regarding the death of Lucan, and, since the days of Joseph Scaliger, concluded with justice to come from Suetonius’s _De uiris illustribus_; and the other life a fuller and appreciative one, assigned to Vacca, a grammarian of the sixth century. Statius and Martial were admirers of Lucan and joined with his widow Polla in keeping his memory green; hence the _Genethliacon Lucani_ of the former and several short pieces by the latter poet supply additional information.[850] The record of Lucan’s connexion with the Pisonian conspiracy is in Tacitus, who also in the _Dialogus_ ranks Lucan as already a classic alongside of Horace and Virgil.[851]

M. Annaeus Lucanus[852] (A.D. 39-65) was born, about the year of his grandfather Seneca’s death, at the “Patrician Colony” of Corduba, itself for generations a centre of intellectual importance in Spain. The infant, when eight months old, was brought to Rome; for it was natural that his father Mela should migrate in response to the lure of the great city, where already his own father and brother had made their mark. Later, there are interesting references by the philosopher Seneca to the child. In the _Consolatio_ addressed to his mother Helvia he writes about a nephew, who must be Lucan, as a winning boy whose merry playfulness and talkativeness would keep anyone amused (_ad cuius conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia ... cuius non lacrimas illius hilaritas supprimat?_)[853] and an epigram of his prays that one day this prattling child (_dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit_) may rival his uncles in eloquence.[854] His education under the best teachers was directed towards the realization of that very wish. Grounded in literature and in the traditionally wide range of learning subsidiary to “grammar,” he proceeded in due course to the study of rhetoric and philosophy. His declamations in Latin and Greek were of astonishing ability, eclipsing the efforts of his fellow-students, if not of his masters, and commanding the applause of his hearers. Such brilliance was at once a result and a cause of self-confidence: and the habitual desire to win attention confirmed him in many artificial conceits inseparable from the rhetorical system. Some philosophy he derived from his uncle; but he had at least one other famous Stoic teacher in Cornutus, at whose lectures, if we may trust Probus, he met Persius.[855] For Persius’s poetry Lucan expressed cordial admiration—a noticeable tribute from one whose precocious fertility had led him to compare himself favourably with Virgil.[856]

Quite early in his reign[857] Nero had his attention drawn by Seneca to a nephew so talented. Little is known precisely regarding the development of his relations with the emperor; but we read of a visit paid to Athens from which Nero recalled him to join his _entourage_, and of honours conferred, such as the quaestorship before the regular age of twenty-five, and an augural priesthood. In A.D. 60, when twenty-one, he achieved his first public literary triumph in his _Laudes Neronis_ at the quinquennial festival of the _Neronia_, then newly established, and at this date Nero and his youthful panegyrist were evidently on the best of terms. But Lucan’s position became insecure as Nero’s dislike for Seneca grew pronounced. It was perilous to vie with a clever and conceited imperial egotist prone to arrogate a principate in arts as well as in state, and an award of the prize to Lucan in a competition where he had the hardihood to enter against Nero rankled in the ruler’s heart. Suetonius implies that the final breach arose from Lucan’s sensitive fancy that Nero’s attitude towards his recitations was deliberately insulting, and from the poet’s unbecoming ridicule of the emperor’s verses. Vacca ascribes the quarrel to Nero’s jealousy of Lucan’s powers, and declares that he was forbidden further poetical production or forensic pleading. Thus silenced, except for covert satire, his passionate and wounded genius was driven into the bypaths of Piso’s conspiracy, in which he took a prominent part,[858] indulging, according to Suetonius, in ferocious threats against the tyrant and in rapturous praises of tyrannicide. When, however, this over-ripened intrigue was unmasked, disaster revealed the weakness of his character; for, oblivious of his professed Stoicism, he descended to abject entreaties, and, in anxiety to save his life, made confessions involving among his accomplices his apparently innocent mother. That at least is what Suetonius records.[859] But pusillanimity did not capture Nero’s indulgence. Lucan was ordered to die; and after a sumptuous repast had his veins opened. Then he recollected, and recited as his last words, a piece of his own about a soldier similarly bleeding to death. This dying quotation, although Tacitus’s words[860] might very well suggest that it belonged to a separate poem, has been sought for in three[861] different places in the _Pharsalia_, and by some[862] identified with a passage from the ninth book:

His tears were blood; and, where the ooze can find An outlet, wells abundant gore; the mouth And open nostrils stream: his sweat comes red: And every limb is drenched from teeming veins. So the whole body is a single wound.

Thus, when “the mad despot’s crime” (_rabidi nefas tyranni_) cut short the poet’s career, his epic was incomplete and only in part published. “Why doth cruel allotment debar greatness from old age?” asks Statius in his tribute to Lucan’s memory.[863]

Thirteen of Lucan’s lost works were known to Vacca, and five of these are alluded to by Statius, who adds the _Adlocutio ad Pollam_.[864] Suetonius, who confirms the other two authorities regarding the _Laudes Neronis_, mentions also a lampoon on Nero. The sagacious Vacca is clear that his thirteen are minor works compared with the epic on the civil war, but still “not all to be disdained”;[865] and one might guess that the most important are those common to Vacca and Statius—the _Iliacon_ from the Trojan cycle, the _Catachthonion_, a descent into the underworld, the _Laudes Neronis_, and the _Orpheus_. Naturally, although in all likelihood less important, the _Adlocutio_ to Lucan’s wife Polla is mentioned by Statius in his poem addressed to her in widowhood; but we do not know whether it was in prose or verse, unless its inclusion immediately after the _De Incendio Vrbis_, the one prose composition in Statius’s list, raises a presumption that it likewise was in prose. The remaining items in Vacca’s list are the _Saturnalia_, on the gaieties of December,[866] ten books of miscellaneous _Siluae_, the unfinished tragedy of _Medea_, fourteen _Salticae Fabulae_,[867] _Epigrammata_;[868] and in prose (besides his account of the Great Fire at Rome) a series of _Epistulae ex Campania_ (which, if they had survived, ought to have proved a fascinating addition to our specimens of ancient letter-writing) as well as a speech for and one against Octavius Sagitta. These _orationes_ suggest that Lucan in A.D. 58, perhaps filled with the detective instinct characteristic of not a few literary men, seized upon one of the most exciting murder trials of the day[869] as material for two clever rhetorical show-pieces in proof of what a versatile genius could say on both sides of a case complicated by cross-swearing and by an innocent freedman’s self-accusation.

The number of these works would be reduced by one on the suggestion which has been made[870] that the _Catachthonion_ and _Orpheus_ may be identical. But this seems impossible. True, both concern the underworld and are in hexameters;[871] but Statius makes separate allusions to them, and they are mentioned at different points in the _Life_ by Vacca in the sixth century, when Lucan’s works were, as his words imply, still extant.

The ten books of the _Pharsalia_,[872] on the war which broke out in 49 B.C. between Caesar and Pompey, amount to over 8000 hexameters, but do not complete the poet’s design; for the tenth book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.

Book I, though in many respects powerful, might have had more epic force, had it plunged at once into the narrative. As it is, the action is delayed by the announcement of the theme, a remonstrance on the iniquity of civil warfare, the comforting reflection that but for that warfare Rome would have had no Nero, the fantastic picture of the emperor as a god, and a fawning address to him as sufficient inspiration for the poet without need to invoke Apollo or Bacchus. The ensuing sketch of the causes of strife omits the burning question between the Senate and Caesar concerning Caesar’s command, but contains a vivid glance at the motives and characters of the two protagonists, spurred by rival claims (_stimulos dedit aemula uirtus_):

Caesar could brook no man in front of him, Pompey none by his side.[873]

Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent campaigning, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age.[874] Now a man of 58, he was only six years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds us, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death rendered the breach between them more likely. In Pompey the poet, warmly though he espouses his cause, discerns a man over-confident in his previous record, who

Finds not new strength, but trusting much past luck Stands there the shadow of a mighty name.[875]

The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn with force, though not with sympathy:

His manhood knew No rest—his only shame to lose a fight. Keen and untamed, where hope or anger called, He turned his hand, nor quailed to stain his sword ... To make a path by havoc was his joy.[876]

Strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage of the Alps (l. 183), bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon—the antithesis in adjectives is Lucan’s—to be confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance:

The waters of the little Rubicon Were won, when, in the general’s sight, arose The mighty Phantom of his land, dismayed, Clear through the darkling night, most sad of look, Letting her grey locks stream from head that wore A crown of towers: so, with her tresses torn, Bare-armed she took her stand hard by and spoke Words blent with groans: “Men, whither press ye on? Where bear my standards? If with right ye come, Or if as citizens, thus far ye may.”

Then thrilled a shudder through the general’s frame, Stiffening his hair, and on the river’s brim Curbing his march a languor held his steps. Forthwith he prayed: “O Thou, that lookest forth From the Tarpeian Rock down on the walls Of our great city, O Thou Thunderer, And Phrygian Home-Gods, ... Vestal Fires, and peer Of highest Godhead, Rome, bless my design! Not thee do I pursue in frenzied arms. Lo! I am Caesar, lord on land and sea O’er all the world, and with thy leave e’en now Thy champion.”[877]

The Rubicon crossed, Ariminum is taken; Caesar is met by Curio and other tribunes expelled from Rome. A summons sent for troops from Gaul gives occasion for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides and Druids: then a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of prodigies and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amidst presages of disaster. Lucan, it will be noted, while he removes from his historical poem the conventional gods of epic, supplies their place by the supernatural, as represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophetic second sight of both an astrologer and a matron so weirdly possessed that she has power to behold Pompey already lying dead.

A hesitant note of philosophy opens Book II. Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed knowledge of future woes through omens? Then, with a transient departure from Stoic dogmatism, he speculates on the operation of cause in the world. Is it the outcome of law or chance? Yet he clinches this old debate with the Epicureans by uttering the prayer,

Thy will be done forthwith: let human thought Be blind to coming doom: grant hope mid fear![878]

Mourning, as at a death, falls on Rome: men pray for the peril of foreign attack in preference to internecine strife. It is a passage typically rhetorical in the tumid declamation of its earlier portion and the argumentative point of its close:

Make Rome the foe of all the nations, but Spare us a civil war! Let Dacians hem Us here and Getae there: one rival should Meet Spain, the other turn his standard ’gainst The quivers of the East. And let thy hand, O Rome, have no relief from toil! Or, if, Ye Gods, ye will to blast th’ Italian name, Then let all ether, fallen into fire, Crash manifold in lightning on the earth! O wrathful Father, in one instant smite Both sides, both leaders, ere they yet have earned Their doom! From such a crop of novel crime Seek they to prove which shall be lord at Rome? Scarce had it been worth while to stimulate A civil war, if neither were to rule.[879]

The chief incidents of the book are the remarriage to Cato of his former wife, Marcia, widow of Hortensius; the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius (pointedly introduced because an ancestor of Nero) and the driving of Pompey southwards to Brundisium and thence overseas to Epirus. What Heitland frankly calls “padding” consists in digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The figure of Cato is of significance in relation to Book IX, where he plays a commanding part. In Lucan’s eyes Cato is the incarnation of virtue, hitherto guiltless of his country’s blood, but now, as Brutus tells him, drawn perforce into the struggle:

Thy virtuous past shall have this one reward— War makes thee guilty as it finds the rest: (_Accipient alios, facient te bella nocentem._)[880]

Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly depicts his Stoic ability to combine a self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims,

To keep the Mean and hold due boundary, To follow Nature, spend a life for Rome, Deeming his birth was for the world, not self: His feast to stifle hunger, and his Gods To ward the storm from roof-tree: richest garb For him to draw i’ the old way round his limbs The Roman burgher’s shaggy gown.... But ne’er Did selfish joy creep in to steal a part In Cato’s deeds.[881]

Book III, mainly concerned with Caesar’s doings on his return to Rome and during his siege of Massilia, is impoverished by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and an incessant series of too ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the combatants. But among compensating passages are the descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and of the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos:

The South Wind fell upon the yielding sails And sped the Armada till its argosies Ploughed through the midmost deep: each mariner Kept steadfast outlook for the Ionian Main. Pompey alone ne’er turned his eyes aside From Italy, but all the while he watched The homeland havens fade away and shores That ne’er would meet his sight again, and peaks Cloud-wrapt, and scarce distinguishable hills.[882]

The second passage, a study in the sombre touched with the spirit of Celtic romance, describes the grove of the Druids. Here we are in a haunted twilight wood, polluted with inhuman rites, shunned by bird and beast as by sylvan deities, and though windless yet aquiver with a mysterious thrill in its leaves (_arboribus suus horror inest_)—a forest of black waters and misshapen images of eldritch gods, awesome through a wan aspect of decay and nameless terrors, where caverns resound with the rumble of the earthquake, where the hewn death-yew comes to life again, where flame plays among branches that do not burn and serpents hold the oak in their embrace.[883]

Three episodes constitute most of the action in Book IV—Caesar’s Spanish operations against Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda; the failure of one of three Caesarian rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the descent of Curio, in Caesar’s interest, upon Africa, when he is defeated by Juba and meets death. The pangs of thirst suffered by Pompeians in Spain prompt one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury,[884] while the counsel of Volteius to his men on the trapped raft that they must slay each other rather than surrender is argued in the overstrained manner of the schools, and is an ingenious combination of special pleading and boastfulness. When the crew carry out their dreadful compact of mutual slaughter, like the offspring of the teeth of mythical dragons, characteristic realism is indulged in to describe the crawling writhing bleeding agony of the lacerated men. But this virtual suicide closes in a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan—death is a ready way of eluding tyranny. Here it is still the Stoic who speaks; for Stoicism, while recognizing the theoretical obliquity of suicide, admitted that it was in certain circumstances defensible:

Despite such, lessons shown of manliness, Yet craven peoples will refuse to learn How smooth the path of valour which the hand Can make to ’scape from bondage; but a King Is dreaded for the steel; and liberty Is galled with cruel arms, in ignorance That swords were given that none might be a slave. Ah Death! That thou mightst scorn to take from life Cowards, and none but brave be free to die![885]

The African expedition suggests the single long deviation of this book on the legend of the earth-born Antaeus strangled by Hercules. Curio’s soliloquy before battle reflects his not unnatural nervousness as commander of soldiers who had become Caesarians only by surrendering at Corfinium:

’Tis daring cloaks great fear: myself shall first Seize arms, and let my men, while yet mine own, March down to level ground; for idleness Aye bringeth changeful mind. End plots by fight! When blood-lust prompts and sword is firmly gripped, The helmet covers qualms. Who minds to weigh Opposéd leaders then or balance claims? Each backs the side he stands on; as at shows Within the fateful amphitheatre, No ancient grudge makes combatants engage— Pairs hate at sight.[886]

The apostrophe to Curio after his death leads up to the familiar line which implies that his desertion to Caesar’s side turned the scale of history:

_Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum._

Though Book V opens in Epirus with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia for safety to Lesbos, yet Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers (who express their grievances with pointed rhetoric), and recrosses the Adriatic in a small boat on a tempestuous night to bring Antony to his aid. The action is delayed by a digression of about 150 lines on the Delphic Oracle consulted by Appius.

Caesar’s will-power is well brought out in his defiant braving of the storm despite the fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune for his sole attendant (_sola placet Fortuna comes_) in crossing the sea to ensure the transport of his troops from Italy; for

Mad-set on battle-mellay was his heart.[887]

But the storm proves an irresistible temptation to Lucan. Having exhausted his list of contending winds, he turns to hyperbole—mountains long buffeted in vain now at last succumb, and portentous waves new to those seas roll in from the encircling ocean. Next he elaborates the description by a resort to mythology. Much more human, however, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part:

Words fail him, though his purpose be resolved; And so he fain would clog what is to come, Indulge delay and moments steal from doom. All slumber banished and the night far gone, Cornelia clasps his breast that teems with care, And seeks fond kisses from her lord now turned Away. She marvels that his cheeks are wet, And, smitten with a wound mysterious, She dare not find great Pompey shedding tears. He sighing said: “My own, more dear than life— I mean the life of happier times, not this That burdens me—the woeful day hath come, Which we postponed too little, yet too much: Caesar is nigh, all eagerness for fight!”[888]

Overloaded with digressions, besides detail of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachium, and hyperbolical praise of the centurion Scaeva’s repulse of Pompey’s attempt to break through, Book VI is not on the whole successful. The plan to construct gigantic lines of investment is at first as little grasped by Pompey

As wild waves boiling on the Kentish shore Rave all unfelt by Caledonians.[889]

In time, he is driven to counter-movements, and would have made a victorious sortie but for the prowess of one outstanding Caesarian, on whom, with incredible exaggeration, the whole fighting is made to concentrate. This champion is not to be dislodged save by a war-engine; he bristles with a thick forest of missiles in his chest; he offers the resistance of an African elephant; and, tearing out his eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it,

Stamps on the weapon and his eye as well![890]

This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary discomfiture of Caesar, who retires upon Thessaly followed by Pompey. If only Pompey had been a Sulla, reflects Lucan, and had used his advantage for an immediate descent upon Rome, there would have been no Pharsalia. The mention of Thessaly is responsible for digressions on geography and magic; and, though the wizardry and witches of Thessaly appear more convincing in the pages of Apuleius, yet Lucan, when he leaves off cataloguing the astounding potency of Thessalian enchantments over love, weather, rivers, mountains and laws of the universe, does achieve an effect of gruesome _diablerie_ through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but, like Saul at Endor, from necromancy. After he and his attendants have made their way past ruined tombs towards the sunless and hell-like cavern when the sorceress Erichtho sits crooning her malignant spells, he holds a midnight _séance_ with the hag. Conceding his request, she scares off birds and beasts of prey from the battle-field, and selects a fallen warrior to be revivified by loathsome ingredients and eerie incantations for the purpose of revealing prophetic messages from the other world. The revelation is that the shades await both Sextus’s father and his house; Caesar’s daring, on the other hand, delights the spirits of dead Roman revolutionaries, but his triumph will be short. With such ominous responses Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.