greatest book of the poem, and describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalia as well as their fortunes in the culminating battle. With an outburst of enthusiasm, Lucan predicts the enduring power of his subject to engross readers:
’Mid tribes in far-off years, ’mid folks unborn, Haply by fame alone to time bequeathed, Or haply profited by such renown As e’en my toiling pen can lend the great, When men shall read of war, this tale shall still Move hope and fear alike, or futile wish. Spellbound each reader still shall fancy doom Is yet to come, not past and gone, and so Will favour thee, great Pompey, to the end.[891]
In the famous passage on Pompey’s dream, he is fancied to be once more receiving the plaudits of the Roman people in his own theatre:
In dreamland Rome seemed his. Break not that sleep, O camp-watch! Ne’er let bugle strike his ears! To-morrow’s ghastly night, sad to recall The day, brings naught but deadly battle-lines.[892]
He awakes to realities. The Pompeians clamour for the fray and criticize their leader’s caution:
In Pompey’s camp “Pharsalia!” was the prayer.[893]
Unhistorically Cicero, who was not present, is introduced as urging him to give battle. He consents under protest and his men have their will; but
On many a face was paleness as of death To come—a look most eloquent of doom.[894]
Amidst other presages of disaster, Lucan’s bias insinuates that Caesar sacrificed to the infernal powers. The harangue to his followers is, some of it plausible argument, some of it rhodomontade, but, by reason of its vigour, all very readable. Observing the disposition of Pompey’s troops (Lucan’s account of which does not agree with that of other authorities), and seeing his wish fulfilled in the enemy’s descent upon the plain, Caesar confidently addresses his soldiers as the true arbiters of his destiny:
No need for prayer: woo fortune now by fight,[895]
and continuing his alliterative rhetoric:
Wave but the blade and bring the whole world low.[896]
With corresponding alliteration, and not without bravado, Pompey’s speech to his army expresses his reasons for confidence:
Our better cause bids hope for help from Heaven.[897]
But in vain. Tyranny, in Lucan’s view, was triumphant at Pharsalia. Why did Rome ever know freedom, if she was to lose it?[898] Surely, the gods’ apathy had led through civil warfare to the creation of new deities and a new religion in emperor-worship![899] Refraining from details of individual horrors on the battle-field, Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey looking back upon lost greatness with Caesar, whose adversary is henceforward not Pompey but freedom,[900] and who to discerning eyes might well be an object of pity—“’twas worse to win” (_uincere peius erat_). The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was leader of the really guilty side, was hunted Orestes-like by avenging furies, callously surveyed the dead, and withheld from the rotting corpses that cremation which would not be refused (and here a piece of far-fetched Stoicism is dragged in) by the universal conflagration at the end of the world.
The main interest of Book VIII lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land: it is broken by reflections on and apostrophes to both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, alarmed at the rustle of woodland leaves in the wind,[901] the defeated warrior escapes in a frail craft to Lesbos, where he endeavours to console his swooning wife:
Thy husband’s woe alone may win thee praise. Take heart: let thine affection strive with fate And love me for myself, a vanquished man.[902]
He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his converse with the pilot upon astronomy. By the Levant he reaches Cilicia, the scene of his old victories over piracy, and holds council with his remaining supporters on the policy, cunning but unprincipled, of playing East against West. Why not entangle and weaken Parthia by inducing her to fight in Rome’s civil wars? This proposal of Pompey’s is scouted as dishonourable by Lentulus—why not rather, he argues, keep the conflict within the Roman world, and try Egypt, whose King, Ptolemy, owed his throne indirectly to Pompey? So he sails to meet the death prepared for him by Ptolemy’s cynical adviser Pothinus, whose contention is that expediency must be preferred to right and that it is wisdom to side with the conqueror:
Freedom in crime protects a hated sway.... Who would be good must quit a royal court: Virtue and sovereign power do not accord. Blush to be cruel and you’ll always fear![903]
In the offing at Pelusium, overmastering fate secured that Pompey should be enticed from his high-sterned vessel into a small boat, where, within sight of wife and son, he was stabbed by the traitor Septimius. Achillas, that “Pharian satellite,” claimed the right to carry the victim’s head to the young king. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his besetting passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Virgil’s dignity of sorrow, or beauty of simile, we have the repulsive details of the still gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid cross-wise on a boat-thwart to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins to cut; there are bones to break; it all takes time (_diu_); for the art of whirling off the head at a single blow, Lucan remarks (with his thoughts perhaps on Caligula), had yet to be developed—_nondum artis erat caput ense rotare_.[904] Such realism is rendered superfluous by what follows:
To let the curséd boy prince know the dead, Yon manly wealth of hair by kings admired, The locks which graced that noble brow, were seized, And, while the features lived and sobbing breath Yet moved the lips to murmur, while the eyes Unclosed were glazing, on a Pharian spear Was fixed that head whose word for war had rung The knell of peace, the head that swayed our laws In _campus_ or from _rostra_ eloquent. This face, O Roman Fortune, pleased thee once!
The headless body is recovered from the sea in the moonlight by Cordus, one of Pompey’s Roman attendants, and, after an incomplete cremation, for which the material has to be supplied by the somewhat ludicrous device of theft from a conveniently deserted funeral pile, it is buried hastily; for the dawn has surprised Cordus at his ceremonial. But the lonely grave on the beach cannot confine one so illustrious:
The Roman name and the wide realms of Rome Mark the true boundary of great Pompey’s tomb.[905]
Imprecations upon Egypt follow—futile, because Lucan’s curse of barrenness, if it could have been fulfilled, would have closed the chief granary of Rome. With further wild rhetoric on the burial-place the book ends.
Pompey’s apotheosis begins Book IX:
Not in Egyptian ashes lay his soul: A little dust held not so great a shade. Spurning the tomb and quitting limbs half-burned And the unworthy pyre, it makes for Heaven.
The lamentations of Cornelia, her announcement of her husband’s injunction that unceasing war must be waged for liberty against Caesar, the vengeance on Egypt threatened by Pompey’s elder son when he learns of his father’s murder, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminary to the chief theme of the book—the heroism of Cato. He will have none of the argument that continuance of war is criminal, now that Pompey is dead. Expostulating with reluctant Pompeians, he sarcastically declares that Caesar will believe they did him an intentional benefit by running before him at Pharsalia—here and in other passages erroneously called Philippi. As their next objective is Juba’s kingdom, Lucan is enabled to describe the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes, a storm that imperils Cato’s fleet, and the swamps of Triton which most of the ships reach in safety. The resolution to march across the desert to Mauretania occasions a digression on Libya as well as passages recounting Cato’s marvellous endurance[906] of thirst, and his refusal to consult the oracle of Hammon (whose misplacement is one of the not uncommon geographical blunders in Lucan). Labienus would have the will of Jupiter ascertained by this austere captain of men:
The laws above have ever ruled thy life, And thou dost follow God. Lo! now the leave Is thine to speak with Jove. Ask of the doom That waits accursed Caesar, and hold search Into thy country’s future character.[907]
Cato, however, in tones worthy of the oracle itself, scouts the idea, criticizing it on Stoic principles:
What should be asked? Whether I’d rather die Free, arms in hand, or look on tyranny? Whether a life is naught, e’en when prolonged? Or if years make a difference? Or if A good man can be hurt by any blow? Does Fortune drop her threats when Virtue fights? Is it enough to wish what merits praise? Does right ne’er grow by gain? All this we know: Jove cannot plant it deeper in our heart.[908]
Cato’s inspiring fortitude during the march with his soldiers is almost smothered beneath the mass of irrelevance expounding the origin of serpents in Africa, and catalogues enumerating not only various species of serpents but also various sorts of death from snake-bite. Late in the book Caesar reappears on a voyage which brings him to the ruins of Troy; and Lucan’s confidence in his own literary immortality prompts an apostrophe to poetry as conferring eternal renown:
Hallowed and mighty toil of bards empowered To rescue all from fate and grant the gift To mortal nations of eternity! Grudge not, O Caesar, fame to heroes old— If Latin poësy may promise aught, Then, long as Homer’s honours shall endure, Peoples to come will read both thee and me; For my _Pharsalia_ will live, and time Shall ne’er damn Lucan to obscurity.[909]
Caesar’s veneration of his ancestral gods at Troy would have received more sympathetic treatment from Virgil. Lucan is content to record his coasting voyage along Asia Minor and his crossing by Rhodes to Egypt, where, amidst his hesitation whether to land, one of Ptolemy’s courtiers comes aboardship with the head of Pompey. To Lucan his grief over his rival’s murder is hypocrisy: now that he had ocular proof of the crime and thought it safe to be a good father-in-law (_tutumque putauit iam bonus esse socer_),
Some tears he shed that fell not of freewill, And forced his moanings from a mirthful heart.
Book X, on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on the mighty Julius himself than into the _Pharsalia_. Yet it has energy, in spite of a divagation on Alexander the Great, against whom Lucan inveighs as a “successful bandit” (_felix praedo_), and a longer excursus on the Nile. The principal incidents are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his amour with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation with Ptolemy, the plot of Pothinus to kill Caesar, and the attack at dawn with Caesar at bay:
He dreads the onset, yet disdains to dread: So roars some noble brute in cage confined And gnaws his prison till he breaks his teeth.[910]
Before the book is broken short, his arch-enemies, Pothinus and Achillas, are dead; but the renewal of resistance by Ganymedes brings him again into imminent danger. There we leave the Caesar of Lucan. In the opinion of so Pompeian a poet, he cannot be fittingly punished by any blow from Egypt:
Not till his country’s swords transfix the heart Of Caesar, shall great Pompey be avenged.[911]
This reference to the postponement of a fated penalty has in some eyes lent colour to the view that the poem was designed to continue Caesar’s history up to his assassination in 44. The tenth book is on the face of it incomplete; even were that not obvious, we should detect an unfinished scheme from the assurance given to Sextus Pompey that his fate would be foretold by the shade of his dead father.[912] That promised episode, a parallel to Anchises’s prophecy uttered to Aeneas, would have come into one of the unwritten books. A likely chronological limit would be Thapsus and the suicide of Cato in 46 B.C. That is M. Pichon’s view,[913] which seems more commendable than his associated argument that, as the necromancy of _Pharsalia VI_ corresponds in weirdness to the descent into the lower world in _Aeneid VI_, therefore twelve books must have been planned to answer to Virgil’s twelve. Much closer parallelism between the several books of _Pharsalia_ and _Aeneid_ would have to exist before this contention had validity. In the seventeenth century, the historian Thomas May, whose works in verse and prose are all forgotten save his translation of the _Pharsalia_, believed that Lucan meant to carry his epic as far as Caesar’s death. To fill the gap. May composed a _Supplementum_, which Hallam ventured to call “the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt.” The whole matter is, however, conjectural; and the arguments for a contemplated prolongation to 44 B.C. are not of compelling cogency.
Another point on which there is divergence of opinion concerns the three books first composed according to Vacca’s _Life_. Ussani thinks they were I, VII, IX; Pichon thinks II, VII, VIII. One might defend I, II, VII as a more likely group than either, if one took certain mistakes in VII to prove its comparative earliness and were to offer a plausible explanation of its touching-up with anti-Caesarism. In all the suggestions, however, there are difficulties concerning Lucan’s attitude to Caesar and Nero; and waverers may do worse than fall back on the traditional view, which presents at least as few difficulties, and is the most natural interpretation of Vacca’s words, namely, that I, II, III constituted the _tres libros quales uidemus_.
The seven books not published till after Lucan’s death may have been already known to literary circles from the author’s readings; for the composition of the _Pharsalia_ presumably extended over several years before A.D. 65. If one is satisfied that Lucan even in his first book,[914] as well as in others, borrowed from Seneca’s _Naturales Quaestiones_ belonging to A.D. 62 and 63, then that circumstance may be taken to limit the period; but Vitelli’s endeavour still further to narrow the time of writing seems unconvincing.[915]
Let us realize the audacity of this youthful author. Himself in touch with an imperial court, he dared write a long poem glorifying the opposition to the founder of the imperial principle at Rome. Possibly, in an age of ingenious and bizarre compositions under a clever sovereign, he imagined that his work might pass muster or evade censure as an artistic _tour de force_, and that a generous interpretation would be placed upon a historical thesis handled with epic talent and oiled with introductory adulation. But Lucan must have been sufficiently intimate with the arbitrary despotism of Nero to recognize that in taking such a risk he played a game involving the highest of stakes. A consciousness of genius and an independence of spirit combined with the impetuosity of youth to drive him upon a hazard, in which perhaps he was keen to welcome the fascination of double danger. It was jeopardy enough to challenge the ruler of the world by rivalry in any field of literary eminence; but it was still more perilous to champion the defenders of the ancient republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause; and yet Lucan by setting himself to make idols of Pompey and Cato threw down the gauntlet to Caesarism again. Several factors contributed to this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish home of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey; Lucan’s own boyish imagination conjured up roseate visions of the republican past; his reading in the Pompeian books of Livy confirmed his attitude; and the sense of Nero’s intolerable unfairness in trying to silence him eventually turned intimacy into detestation.
This independence of spirit has its literary side, where Lucan proves himself an original genius. Apart from possession of a distinctive style, he refused to be encumbered by tradition. His originality lay not in the choice of a Roman historical theme—for there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the decision to treat his theme without the conventional introduction of gods as controllers of the action. This novel method of treatment is, we know, criticized in Petronius.[916] Well aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme he thus broke away from Virgilian precedent, and substituted for legendary glamour the interest of a fierce human conflict waged in comparatively recent times.
His equipment for his task may be indicated by a sketch of his sources—historical, philosophical and literary. As regards history, the theory which holds the field is that certain lost books of Livy are the well-springs of Lucan’s subject-matter.[917] This thesis, the outcome of a hint given by Reifferscheid to Baier, his pupil, was maintained by the latter in a work published in 1874. It has in recent years been reaffirmed by M. Pichon,[918] whose skill, in what is the most complete study of Lucan’s sources, has addressed itself to the emancipation of Baier’s hypothesis from the exaggerations of Ziehen and Vitelli, and to its defence against the objections of Westerburg and Ussani. For the accessory material in his digressions Lucan no doubt went elsewhere: serpent-lore he could draw from Macer, who had copied Nicander; geography, in which he is inaccurate, from some general treatise; and data about Egypt in particular very likely from Seneca’s missing work on that country. Much of his merely allusive and decorative matter could be furnished from the standard academic learning, amplified by his own experience—he had been a quaestor, an augural priest, and he had travelled. But for details of his main theme there lay open at that time the complete decades of Livy, who had derived information from Caesar, Posidonius and others. Material contemporary with the civil war could thus be reached through Livy as an intermediary. By Livy it had been to a large extent already Pompeianized. Lucan was not temperamentally likely to follow Caesar’s own account; he would distrust Asinius Pollio, as one too active on Caesar’s side; and although he might well have found facts to recommend the writings of Cremutius Cordus, we do not know that Cordus related the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. On the other hand, Livy was an author for whose literary power the Senecas expressed warm admiration, and Lucan, while subscribing to the opinion entertained by his grandfather[919] and his uncle,[920] felt the special call of political sympathy.
Lucan’s historical value must remain a debatable question. It is comparatively easy, though it costs time, to construct a formidable list of his inexactitudes and deliberate departures from fact.[921] It is also easy to illustrate his strong bias against Caesar. The bias may be readily explained; but it is not always so easy to be sure that the unhistorical in him is due either to bias or to ignorance. When, for instance, he introduces Cicero, contrary to truth, in Pompey’s camp before Pharsalia, is he simply careless, or has he yielded to a half-poetic, half-rhetorical desire to insert a speech from the orator? The almost infectious enthusiasm of M. Pichon for Lucan, while it makes him too tolerant of his wearisome digressions, too laudatory of poetic merit in his rhetoric, too appreciative of the originality of his borrowings, at the same time makes him perhaps too ingenious in finding excuses for his misstatements. Yet the defence is at times justifiable. For example, as regards the frequently criticized epithets applied to Gallic tribes, their appropriateness is plausibly supported on historical, philological and archaeological grounds.[922] Again, on the alleged confusion between Arverni and Aedui (I. 427), Lucan’s language need not involve the mistake commonly supposed, if proper stress be laid on both verbs in the line,
Aruernique ausi Latios se fingere fratres.
Certainly, to construct against Lucan a laborious indictment of error is quite misleading. It should, in any case, be noted that his additions are fewer than his omissions, and many alterations of historical fact charged against the _Pharsalia_ may be due to Livy. One may surmise that Lucan himself is responsible for the silence about Caesar’s pacific overtures, for the sinister misconstruction laid upon Caesar’s clemency, and for the undervaluing of Caesarian bravery; because Livy, writing near the events, could hardly have risked such falsification of history. But, to hazard a guess—and here it is all guesswork—if Livy recorded generous acts by Caesar with some reserve as to their motives, then Lucan might conceivably drop them out because he did not think them sincere; and if characteristic episodes of bravery among the Caesarians were recorded, as we might expect, by Livy, then Lucan might with a kind of Stoic casuistry decline to take them over, because it would be evil to praise valour so ill employed. On the other hand, the elimination of Pompeian bloodthirstiness is presumably a feature already occurring in Livy;[923] and it is highly probable that incidents which put Pompey in an unfavourable light would be toned down by the historian who was twitted with having proved himself a good “Pompeian.” In short, Lucan’s suppressions and transpositions of fact are sometimes those of a partisan (and herein Livy preceded him), sometimes those of the artist who is interpreting history in a poet’s way.
One result of his choice of subject, it will thus be seen, is that some questions affecting Lucan are not literary questions at all, but concern historical value and misstatements intentional or unintentional. There is a risk of harbouring an exaggerated estimate of his historical acumen. Granted that he is at least scientific enough to note certain causes of the civil war, yet he betrays no conception of the vital constitutional principles involved, of the extent to which past abuses rendered the conflict inevitable, or of the real significance of the victory for the destinies of Rome and the world. Though in some aspects very Roman, Lucan is without Virgil’s profound insight into the mission of the Empire. Readers will concede that he is sensitive to the nefarious horror and enormity of civil strife, for he calls shame upon it in exclamatory outbursts repeated till we weary; but this fervour arises less from social or moral or even vaguely humanitarian considerations than from his ingrained rhetoric. One should not presume to blame him: we have little right to demand scientific history from a poet. Although he selected a historical subject and so must remain, faults notwithstanding, a source of history,[924] yet it is not by historical standards that Lucan must be judged, nor, despite his Livian basis, could we unreservedly use his text to supply some of the missing matter of Livy. Frank allowance must be made for prejudices and inconsistencies, which are but natural to juvenile ardour and emotion. He had definitely taken his side, and it is absurd to look for a dispassionate attitude to Caesarian or Pompeian. Interested in philosophy without being a philosopher, he was not concerned to reflect how un-Stoic it was, and in any case, how futile, to reproach Caesar, the man of destiny, for being also a man of blood. Here, as so often, he lets feeling speak.
What philosophy appears in the poem is Stoic. Remembering the poet’s family and his training alongside of Persius, we should expect nothing else; but it should also be remembered that the philosophical colour is incidental, and that the _Pharsalia_ must, in the last resort, be judged less for its history or its philosophy than for its poetry. Critics like Heitland make as great a mistake in claiming a systematic character for Lucan’s Stoicism as Souriau does in over-emphasizing its contradictions. To demand rigid consistency in his thought is to end in the negative conclusion of Lejay—that Lucan had no philosophy. If a lapse into pessimism caused him to wonder whether the world is guided by the Stoic Providence or by blind chance, it was a very human aberration from his normal creed; and if, poet-like, he used the older mythological beliefs, such literary decoration must be no more pressed against him than against Lucretius.
Lucan’s literary training implied acquaintance with the classics of the past. It would be far too much to call him a disciple of Virgil: his spirit is alien to the Virgilian, and yet his debt to the great epic poet was inevitable owing to the education of the times. Here the truth lies between Merivale’s astonishing opinion that Lucan was in style practically independent of Virgil and Heitland’s that Lucan was “steeped” in Virgil’s language. The debt is seen in borrowed words and locutions (like _felix qui potuit_, IV. 393, and _uenit summa dies_, VII. 195), in a fresh use of Virgilian epithets and phrases, in a heightening of Virgilian simplicity to achieve strong effects, and in imitation of Virgilian episodes. Conscious and subconscious echoes are so plentiful and obvious that one cannot feel like Merivale “almost tempted to imagine that he had never read Virgil.” At the same time, there is no need to hunt for parallels where no parallels exist. Many of the alleged analogies in Heitland’s elaborate list are too vague and faint to be reckoned as definite borrowings; and even M. Pichon, who adopts a sounder attitude regarding the Virgilian influence, scarcely convinces us in his claim that the vanishing of Julia’s ghost is modelled on that of Creusa, or that a father’s anguish over a dying son is modelled on Anna’s grief over Dido.[925]
Horace influenced Lucan slightly, Ovid very considerably. Sharing his uncle’s admiration for Ovid, he not only borrowed mythological material from him but also inherited much of his rhetorical dexterity. The Ovidian gift of repeating an idea in surprisingly new ways reappears in Lucan, and accounts for Fronto’s criticism that in his first seven lines he simply rang the changes on the one idea of “worse than civil wars.”[926] He has not Ovid’s wonderful lightness and facility, but in the smoothness and monotony of his versification it can be seen that the rhythms of the _Metamorphoses_ have told upon him. Resemblances to earlier poets like Ennius[927] are not distinct enough to base conclusions upon; and a similarly negative result, many will agree, comes from the evidence adduced by Hosius[928] to detect verbal influences exerted by Manilius, by the author of _Aetna_, by the earlier books of Livy and by Q. Curtius. This inquiry has considerable interest in its bearing on works so conjectural in date as the _Astronomica_, _Aetna_ and the _History of Alexander_; but unfortunately the evidence rests upon slight similarities and amounts to little. Some of the not very impressive resemblances between Curtius and Lucan are due to analogy of facts (deserts, for example, are much alike the world over, and prompt similar terminology); other resemblances may be ascribed to community of source; and others are simply part of the common stock of Latin expression. One exceptional case is that of Seneca, some of whose works, particularly the tragedies, appear (after allowance has been made for the wide prevalence of the same mythology and the same rhetoric) to have affected Lucan. This hypothesis, if accepted, would prove the anteriority of the tragedies and support their attribution to Seneca.
Far more important, however, than the discovery of verbal similarities is the consideration of the action of rhetoric on Lucan’s genius. When it is remembered that the essential aim in academic declamation was to appear clever and striking at all costs, the central characteristic of his epic is at once grasped. The dominant note is one of display. The object, not to be natural, but above everything to be piquant and impressive, is pursued with marvellous vigour and with mastery of all effective artifices. To his training, therefore, and to his aim we owe the parade of erudition which leads him into digressions[929] and enumerations; the descent into realistic detail which is calculated to cause a shudder; the subtlety of argument which makes a debating speech cogent; the tendency to hyperbole which is bound to arrest attention; the love of point, epigram, antithesis which produces memorable phrases; and the recollection or invention of pithy maxims which embody human experience. His erudition is in part encyclopaedic, based on the science of the day, and in part mythological, based on the ancient literary education. The former accounts for excursuses on subjects like astronomy and geography,[930] many of which are out of place; the latter appears in allusions or descriptions. The allusions may be straightforward, as when the preparations for Pharsalia are likened to those before the giants’ war, and when Caesar haunted by ghosts is likened to the matricide Orestes;[931] or they may be slightly more recondite, as when the olive-branch is called “the leafage of Cecropian Minerva,” and when Marius is said to “gather Libyan wrath,” because, like the giant Antaeus, he drew fighting-force from the soil of Africa.[932] Myth in Lucan’s eyes yields opportunities for exhibiting book-knowledge and so overpowers his philosophy upon occasion. Certainly in a critical mood he would, Stoic-like, reject the legends. It is the free-thinker that speaks through Cornelia’s guarded promise to follow her husband “through hell, if hell there be” (_per Tartara, si sunt ulla_, IX. 101-102). But should the old traditional colour seem requisite, Lucan makes no scruple about its introduction: thus Julia’s ghost, expelled from Elysium (III. 12), knows that Tartarus is being enlarged to punish human misdeeds. His attitude is, in fact, not consistent: On the one hand, when Pompey reaches Cyprus, Lucan resists the attraction of the tale which long after inspired Botticelli’s “Nascita di Venere,” and so surrenders to rationalism with the unpoetic caveat “si numina nasci credimus”[933]: on the other hand, he is romantic enough to discern in the story of Antaeus or of the Golden Apples a chance for a telling description:[934]
None but a churl insults time-hallowed eld And summons bards to tell plain truth. There was Once on a time a forest all of gold Whose wealth weighed down its boughs with yellow fruit. A troop of maidens watched that radiant grove: And round the trees, ’neath ruddy metal bowed, A serpent never doomed to slumber coiled.
Realism in Lucan is now natural, now morbid, now grotesque. Too often it is coupled with the desire to harrow by dwelling on the horrible. Hence he revels in describing tortures, the agonies of the wounded, the repulsive ghoulishness of a witch, the still twitching mouth of Pompey after his head has been hacked off, revolting aspects of cremation, and equally revolting aspects of putrefaction.[935] So zealous is he in making a point that he again and again overshoots the mark, as in his account of a crowd of victims mutually smothering each other;[936] or of an old man’s reminiscence of searching among the slain during the Sullan Terror for a body whose neck would fit his brother’s head, which he was carrying;[937] or of Curio’s slaughtered men in Africa having no room to fall:
Hemmed by the throng each corpse still kept its feet (_Compressum turba stetit omne cadauer_, IV. 787).
When the realism is strained to breaking-point, it becomes unreal, as in the carnage during the seafight at Massilia. There the devilish ingenuity in inventing bizarre modes of death fails to make the struggle truly heroic, because the artificiality detracts from strong simplicity and pathos.[938] The poet, having caused smiles by far-fetched conceits, only just succeeds towards the end in striking a note of human feeling when he relates the parting of the mortally wounded Argus from his father.[939]
Good examples of Lucan’s management of speeches are those of Caesar and Pompey in Book VII, where the two great opponents are made to express themselves in the author’s forceful, if rather bombastic, rhetoric. In Volteius’s speech in Book IV, encouraging his men to slay each other, we have virtually a thesis supported by the tricks of the schools and transferred to verse: the men by their death have to make a spectacle of themselves and the speech is correspondingly spectacular. The same rhetoric, often powerful and ingenious, invades parts of the epic where there is no set speech, but where the poet becomes declamatory, rendering his work, Quintilian thought, _magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus_. Thus the reflections upon Pompey’s grave in Book VIII are composed after the fashion of a special pleader in a _controuersia_. The smartness in shifting positions and the disregard for consistency argue little solidity; and even where, as in this passage,[940] the author’s favourite Pompey is concerned, the limited depth of feeling is comparable to nothing so much as that of a versatile advocate. One is naturally reminded of Lucan’s lost prose speeches for and against Sagitta.
Hyperbole is among his most noticeable rhetorical tendencies. He overstates and, in pursuit of overstatements, is drawn into the kind of elaboration which characterizes the storm in Book V.[941] But the exaggeration is often confined to a single idea: so, to convey the notion of Caesar’s immense lines of circumvallation near Dyrrhachium, Lucan avers that, inside them, rivers run their whole length from source to mouth,
There many rivers rise and speed their course Till yet within the lines they join the sea;[942]
and, of Thessaly polluted by the slain,
What crop shall rise unstained with tainted blade? Thy plough shall ever wound a Roman ghost![943]
One of the great secrets of Lucan’s brilliant rhetoric is his subtle power of expressing thought in terse[944] pointed form, often assisted by antithesis. When this subtlety is not carried to excess, the results are extraordinarily effective in producing memorable lines and phrases, epigrammatically summarizing a character or a situation or, in the older meaning of _sententia_, a general truth. Even his less natural conceits have a way of clinging to the memory, like his paradoxical manner of suggesting that when Caesar’s ships lie helpless on a still sea the crews would prefer a watery grave to being thus becalmed: “all hope of shipwreck vanishes” (_naufragii spes omnis abit_).[945] Typical common-places admirably expressed in his neat Latin are those on the peril of success,
Greatness is wrecked upon itself: the gods Have set that limit on prosperity (_In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus_ _Crescendi posuere modum_, I. 81-82);
on the danger of delay,
Postponement ever hurts the well-prepared (_Semper nocuit differre paratis_, I. 281);
on famine as a cause of revolt,
A starving people knows not fear (_Nescit plebes ieiuna timere_, III. 58);
on the secret happiness of death,
From those who are to live the gods conceal The bliss of death; so they endure their life (_Victurosque dei celant ut uiuere durent_ _Felix esse mori_, IV. 519-520);
on condonation of a widely supported fault,
The sin that many share goes unavenged (_Quidquid multis peccatur inultum est_, V. 260);
on death, as viewed in Pompey’s last words,
In life success is mutable: in death Man meets not misery. (_Mutantur prospera uitae,_ _Non fit morte miser_, VIII. 631-632);
on the true attitude to death,
The brave man’s finest lot Is knowledge how to die; next, death enforced (_Scire mori sors prima uiris, sed proxima cogi_, IX. 211).
Alliteration is noticeable in some of the examples cited. Lucan does not use it so sparingly as Heitland suggests: on the contrary, much of his verse gains additional emphasis from being alliterative, as does his best known line,
Heaven loved the winning cause, Cato the lost (_Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni_, I. 128);
or the simile descriptive of a storming charge by African horse,
The loud sound shook the land: from shattered earth, High as the dust the Thracian whirlwind drives, A cloud dimmed heaven and drew the darkness down (_Tum campi tremuere sono: terraque soluta_ _Quantus Bistonio torquetur turbine puluis,_ _Aëra nube sua texit traxitque tenebras_, IV. 766-768).
A scrutiny of Lucan’s feverish mannerisms and wilful faults must not blind one to his merits. It is true that he is rhetorical and sensational; and that behind his clever artifices lies no mystery. He is able half to surprise, half to weary us with dazzling tricks of style; but he seldom enchants us with beauty. Yet, when all his inaccuracies, distortions, conceits, digressions and tediousness have been urged against him, his great passages prove that, in spite of artificiality, he can be fiery[946] and well-nigh irresistible. He would have gained extraordinarily by compression: that is to say, he shows to most advantage in extracts. His best rhetoric is something intensely stirring, though it is a style more appreciated in France than in England. Nor, even if he seldom is deeply poetic, should the vein of poetry that is in him be overlooked: it appears in passages such as that on Pompey’s last look at Italy, or on Cornelia in love with sorrow:
Locking in fast embrace her cruel grief, She hath her joy in tears, enamouréd Of woe that henceforth is her lord, (_Saeuomque arte complexa dolorem_ _Perfruitur lacrimis et amat pro coniuge luctum_, IX. 111-112).
Some have submitted that the _Pharsalia_ is an epic without a hero, or alternatively an epic with three. Perhaps it is truer to argue that Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem in virtue of the defiant egoism and the untiring energy summarized in the line,
Thinking naught done while aught remained to do, (_Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum_, II. 657).