Abstract
Lucan adopts the topos of the "day of doom" from epic predecessors such as Homer and Vergil and employs it on a grand scale, across his poem, for the day of Pharsalia. Lucan makes Pharsalia an all-consuming and collective doomsday, with cosmic forebodings and repercussions. The appreciation of this motif in the poem illuminates our understanding of the disputed phrase Pharsalia nostra / uiuet (9.985–6), which acts as both a polemical gesture towards Julius Caesar's radically different account of that day in Book 3 of his De Bello Civili and a commemorative gesture towards the imperial Roman readers who have suffered as a result of the day of Pharsalia.
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