The Bellum Civile as a Roman Epic

Abstract

As an epic poem on Roman history, Lucan’s Bellum Civile stands squarely in the Roman poetic tradition. Its meditation on civil war forces us to reread that tradition’s representations of Roman expansion and to reanalyse its representations of Roman identity. Whereas Virgil’s Aeneid had insisted on the overlap between national identities, Lucan’s poem evokes the differences not only between Romans and others, but also among Romans, finally leaving little of Roman identity to the empire of the Caesars.