Sacrificial Acrostics and the Fall of Great Cities in Virgil and Lucan

Abstract

This note argues that an intertextual acrostic conversation spanning key passages in Virgil and Lucan draws a connection between the fall of Troy, depicted as a sacrifice, and the “fall” of Rome in its civil war. A long vertical utterance, spanning the lines in which the gods destroy Troy, simultaneously admonishes the city to be sacrificed and Aeneas to leave it behind (Aen. 2.614–28). Lucan echoes this acrostic in lines whose horizontal text transitions from fulsome flattery of Nero to the reasons for Rome’s doom (BC 1.62–70), simultaneously hinting at the necessity for “sacrificing” the emperor and questioning the theology underpinning his own poem.