Lucan’s Follies: Memory and Ruin in a Civil-War Landscape

Abstract

‘uilia sunt nobis quaecumque prioribus annis uidimus, et sordet quidquid spectauimus olim.’‘all the things which we saw in former years are worthless to us, and squalid - everything that in times past we gazed upon (esteemed/respected).’Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogue 7.45–6When Calpurnius’ old Roman tells Corydon, the country-boy fresh in town, that nothing that one has seen before can prepare one adequately for Nero's Roman spectacle (probably the games of 57 CE), it is almost impossible not to recall the magnificent loathing that Suetonius (Nero 12.1-2) and Tacitus (Annals 13.31) express for the new emperor's extravaganzas. Eleanor Leach comments that: ‘The builder of the amphitheatre [Nero] has combed the world for his marvels, creating a new cosmos within his gilded wooden oval.’ This spectacular new cosmos maps out a world in which pastoral can no longer exist because Nero has distorted the notion of rus in urbe to such an extent that Calpurnius’ only recourse is obituary. Here, Calpurnius’ eclogue functions not just as an elegy for pastoral, but as a poem which opens up a dialogue with Lucan's civil war landscape; in this world, metaphorical and real species of ruin take on an ever greater cultural urgency as means of interpreting the dramatic artifice of Rome's present.