Lucan's Bellum Research Articles

QUOTATIONS OF LUCAN AND THE INDIRECT TRADITION: TEXTUAL NOTES ON THE BELLVM CIVILE

Abstract This article deals with the contribution of the indirect tradition to establishing the text of Lucan's Bellum ciuile. First, the methodological basis for the use of quotations is outlined, and then five passages from the Bellum ciuile are discussed. The variant readings which appear in the indirect tradition constitute important points that have been wrongly neglected by most editors of Lucan's poem.

ERICHTHO THE DOCTOR? MEDICAL OBSERVATIONS ON LUCAN'S NECROMANTIC EPISODE

AbstractThis article aims to offer a fresh analysis of two passages in the extensive necromancy episode in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile: the ritual to reanimate the dead soldier's corpse (6.667–73), and the surgical procedure Erichtho then proceeds to undertake (6.750–7), resembling the practice of a vivisection. The study will focus mostly on the strong connection of magic to medical traditions in antiquity, with a commentary on, and analysis of, these verses through the lenses of medical vocabulary, themes and motifs. It ultimately concludes that Lucan was familiar with the language and characteristics of the medical tradition, enriched his report with them, and was playing with his audience's knowledge of the same.

Courtesy for Corpses: Erictho's Disturbing Decency in Lucan's Bellum Civile

Courtesy for Corpses: Erictho's Disturbing Decency in Lucan's Bellum Civile

LUCAN'S CICERO: DISMEMBERING A LEGEND

AbstractThis paper proposes a new synthetic account of the presence of Cicero as both character and source in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile. Lucan's treatment is derived primarily from Virgil's technique for creating intertextually complex characters, but further builds on Sallust's displacement of Cicero in his narrative of the Catilinarian conspiracy and on the declamatory practice of reducing the orator to a few prominent and recognizable traits. Cicero the character, as he briefly appears at the opening of the seventh book, is not simply an ahistorical caricature: he is constructed through a careful series of allusions designed to indict his use of violence in the suppression of Catiline. Other prominent aspects of Cicero in the tradition are displaced and transferred to other characters more important to Lucan's design, Cato and Pompey. Lucan's depiction of Pompey, especially his death and decapitation, draws on the language and affect of the tradition associated with Cicero, using Cicero's own words and the obituary of Cicero in the lost historical epic of Cornelius Severus. Finally, the language of Cicero's peace-making efforts in his correspondence, suppressed in Lucan's depiction of him as a warmonger, forms an important part of the narrator's own emotional evocations of the impending catastrophe of civil war. The combination of models Lucan uses is more broadly reflective of his technique in composing a historical epic.

Tragic Time in Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline

This essay explores Ben Jonson's treatment of dramatic and historical time in his Roman tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). Although the plays conspicuously fail to respect neoclassical strictures about the unity of time, both reproduce the temporal compression of Greek and Roman tragedy through their sustained intertextual engagements with a wide range of Roman source texts, including, above all, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and the works of the late antique court poet Claudian. The ultimate effect of these quotations, allusions, and reminiscences is to transform Jonson's dramas of early imperial corruption and late Republican civil conflict into proleptic visions of Roman history as a phantasmagoria of unceasing political violence, extending to the ends of both classical antiquity and classical literature.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LUCAN'S DEIOTARUS EPISODE

Book 8 of Lucan's Bellum Civile opens with Pompey in desperate flight from Caesar after the disaster of Pharsalus, and in equally desperate search for a reliable ally. Before the fateful decision is taken that Pompey should make for Egypt, where he will be murdered upon arrival by minions of the treacherous Ptolemy XIII, Pompey dispatches his Galatian client-tetrarch Deiotarus to sound out the distant Parthians and summon their armed hordes to wage war on his behalf (8.209-38); the king promptly embarks on his arduous errand (8.238-43), never to reappear in Lucan's text. Although Pompey is said by several historical sources to have expressed an interest in exploring the prospect of an alliance with Parthia, the mission of Deiotarus is almost certainly a complete fiction, as Duff has convincingly demonstrated. What could Lucan's motive have been for inventing this episode out of whole cloth?

TESTING BOUNDARIES: DIVINATION AND PROPHECY IN LUCAN

Lucan's Bellum Ciuile dates from the Neronian period and is strongly rooted in that historical context, but, as is well known, it offers plenty of food for thought to the student of late Republican religion and intellectual culture. The reading of the Civil War that it puts forward has major implications for our understanding of the ancient interpretations of that period. This is fully in keeping with the ambitions of Lucan himself, who set out to impose his work as a pervasive master-narrative of the late Republican age. The aim of this article is to pursue a narrow but important and often under-explored angle, and to assess the role of divination, especially of the prophetic kind, in the poem.

Orbis Romanus : Lucan and the Limits of the Roman World

Lucan's Bellum Civile offers two different visions of the geography of the Roman world. In the proem and the praise of Nero, the poem locates Rome at the center of a soon-to-be-completed world empire. In contrast, after the battle of Pharsalus in book 7 the remaining books divide the world into eastern and western parts, locating Rome in the center of the western part of the world. A century after the great territorial expansion of the late Republic, Lucan replaces the apparently optimistic confidence in imminent Roman world conquest with a vision of a limited Roman world.

The Violation of the Eye and the Theft of Vision in Lucan's Bellum Civile

To have one's eye removed represents more than the loss of a body part: without it, humans lose an essential means to communicate and even recognize one another. In this article, I examine the extrusion of eyes in the Bellum Civile , where each instance of eye removal exposes the dysfunction of relationships in Lucan's Rome. The individual citizen, the family and the state display a dearth of introspection, a lack of allegiance to or recognition of friends, family and political allies and an unproductive or perverted desire for intimacy. All these deficits result from mental, intellectual or physical blindness and ultimately contribute to the destruction of the Republic.

The 'Caesarist' Reader and Lucan's Bellum Ciuile, CA. 1590 to 1610

The 'Caesarist' Reader and Lucan's Bellum Ciuile, CA. 1590 to 1610

Didactic Aggressions in the Nile Excursus of Lucan's Bellum Civile

In the Nile excursus of his Bellum Civile (10.172-333), Lucan portrays Caesar's inquiry into the source of the river, a well-known topos of human ambition, as an act of aggression, an imperialistic push to transgress natural boundaries. This aggressive drive is foiled by the duplicitous response of both the priest Acoreus and the divinity who inspires him. The digressive quality of the episode offers a redirection and setback for the character of Caesar, which are achieved through the momentary transference of the conflict of the epic to the field of didactic exposition.

Caesar as Jupiter in Lucan's Bellum Civile

I offer a close reading of the assimilation of the character of Caesar to Jupiter in Lucan�s Bellum Civile, arguing that this representation is played out in Caesar�s rage against other cults of Jupiter. This �battle� becomes another layer of civil war in the poem, but Caesar�s violence is ultimately ineffectual.

Objektives Fatum und Subjektive Fatumsgläubigkeit im Bürgerkriegsepos des Lucan

The present article examines the concept of a malicious fatum as evolved by the narrator of Lucan's Bellum civile and especially the subjective attitudes adopted by the protagonists Caesar, Pompey and Cato towards this destructive force. Since Lucan's fatum is not benevolent but malicious and hence contrary to the Stoic doctrine, the ethical value of the protagonists is not measured by their readiness to follow fate (as Stoics would have done), but by the degree of their intellectual resistance to fate: Caesar follows fate unhesitatingly; Pompey sometimes seems to believe, mistakenly, in its benevolence, but in crucial and decisive situations he recognizes its malignity; Cato is the only one who, from the very beginning, internalizes the intrinsic moral corruption of fate. The last section in this article deals with a totally different concept of fate, which is recognizeable in some passages of the tenth book of Bellum civile.

Cato Uticensis als literarische Figur im Supplementum Lucani (1640) des Thomas May: Rezeption antiker Historiographie und Epik unter Charles I.

In 1640 Thomas May publishes his Supplementum Lucani in hexameters. His Continuation of Lucan's Historicall Poem till the Death of Iulius Caesar in blank verse has already appeared in 1630 and - in a second version - in 1633. As republican the author is fond of M. Porcius Cato Uticensis, depicting Caesar's opponent as a stoic and wise man and a timeless symbol of liberty. May's Supplementum was read as integral part of Lucan's Bellum Civile up to the 18th century, when Joseph Addison and Johann Christoph Gottsched wrote their Cato-plays.

Nihilistic Cosmology and Catonian Ethics in Lucan's Bellum Civile

Etude de la cosmologie nihiliste et anti-rationnelle que Lucain attribue a Caton dans le «Bellum civile», afin de saper les fondements meme de son ethique. Examinant la conception absurde de l'univers, ainsi que l'image de l'incendie celeste comme metaphore de la guerre civile et de ses causes, chez Lucain, l'A. montre que le poete latin decrit la realite de l'ekpyrosis, du feu qui consume le cosmos, afin de refuter la conception rationnaliste et stoicienne du fatum comme cycle regulier de la mort et de la regeneration. Confrontant la conception immanente du divin chez caton a la conception transcendante du logos chez les Stoiciens, l'A. montre que Lucain identifie de maniere absurde Dieu a la guerre civile et a son cortege de malheurs : la perversion, la corruption, le fratricide.

Lucan's "Auctor Vix Fidelis"

This paper provides a narratological analysis of Lucan's Bellum Civile, focusing on the role of internal and external narratees (receivers of a text). In particular it treats Pompey and Caesar in the roles of narrator and reader, respectively. An important passage (7.207-13) characterizes the external narratees of the Bellum Civile as astonished by the events of the epic, and indeed unwilling to believe the historical fact of Pompey's defeat as Pharsalia. Similarly, characters within the epic (named and unnamed) repeatedly refuse to believe Pompey's narrations. Pompey's failure as a general is, therefore, underscored by his failure as a narrator. Even in his death, Pompey becomes a text that, when read by passersby, will not gain credence. Caesar, by contrast, is a reader. By reading texts selectively (especially the "text" of the ruined Troy) he constructs for himself a noble past, a sure future, and epic fame. When he is called upon to create a narrative himself (after the death of Pompey), his narrative, too, is disbelieved. But Caesar, unlike Pompey, anticipates and reacts positively to the failure of his narrative to convince. The story that Lucan presents is constructed as unbelievable. It is a text of ruin, of that which specifically cannot be narrated. For epic narration has at its core the rescue of events, people, and places from oblivion. An epic of ruin (of that which has resulted in oblivion) is, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Thus, the Bellum Civile succeeds by its very failure to convince, recreating in its unbelievable narrative the failure of events themselves.

The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition

Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Critics: beginnings, and a synthesis 2. Apollonius' Argonautica 3. From Greece to Rome: Naevius and Ennius 4. Vergil's Aeneid 5. Ovid's Metamorphoses 6. Epic of History: Lucan's Bellum Civile and Silius' Punica 7. Epic of Myth: Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica and Statius' Thebaid Epilogue Bibliography Index

The Scholia to Lucan in Beinecke MS 673

When Heloise took up the veil, she broke out through her tears into the lament of Cornelia from Lucan's Bellum civile (8.94–98). The story illustrates the extent to which the Bellum civile appealed to the imagination of its medieval readers. Indeed, evidence for the popularity of Lucan in the Middle Ages is abundant. Manuscripts of the work are listed in medieval library catalogues. Lucan was a standard author in the school curriculum from the tenth century. Quotations from Lucan are found not only in the works of Abelard and other writers, but in compilations of history, geography, and even natural science: the poet was regarded as a source for a wide range of knowledge.

‘Stat Magni Nominis Umbra.’ Lucan on the Greatness of Pompeius Magnus

At the age of twenty-five, Gn. Pompeius acquired the spectacular cognomen of Magnus. According to Plutarch (Pomp. 13), the name came either from the acclamation of his army in Africa, or at the instigation of Sulla. According to Livy, the practice began from the toadying of Pompeius' circle (‘ab adsentatione familiar’, 30.45.6). The cognomen invited play. At the Ludi Apollinares of July 59, Cicero tells us, the actor Diphilus won ‘a dozen encores’ when he pronounced, from a lost tragedy, the line ‘nostra miseria tu es magnus’. Four or five years later Catullus scored a fine hit, filching Pompeius' cognomen and giving it to his zealously competitive father-in-law: ‘Caesaris uisens monimenta magni’ (11.10). In Lucan's Bellum Civile such plays on the cognomen are elevated into something of considerable power, testifying to a consistent controlling design, of the sort which many still deny the poem.When Pompeius first appears he is compared with Caesar, to his detriment: ‘nec coiere pares’ (1.129). So much for Pompeius' vaunted intolerance of an equal, of which we have just been reminded: ‘nec quemquam iam ferre potest Caesarue priorem | Pompeiusue parem’ (125f.). Many of the images in this introductory section have a programmatic power, and will recur. With ‘nec coiere pares’ Lucan presents the two as an ill-matched pair of gladiators. The metaphor is ubiquitous. Note, in particular, 5.1–3, and 6.3, ‘parque suum uidere dei’. We are further told that Pompeius seeks ‘fama’, is a ‘popularis’, indulges the people, basks in the applause he receives from the mob in his theatre: ‘famaeque petitor | multa dare in uolgus, totus popularibus auris | impelli plausuque sui gaudere theatri’ (131–3). We will return later to this complex of ideas.

Fatum and Fortuna in Lucan's Bellum Civile

Previous articleNext article No AccessFatum and Fortuna in Lucan's Bellum CivileBernard F. DickBernard F. Dick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 62, Number 4Oct., 1967 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/365283 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1967 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Shadi Bartsch, Kirk Freudenburg, Cedric Littlewood The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero, 61 (Nov 2017).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107280489Jesse Weiner O’Neill’s Aeneid: Virgilian Allusion in Mourning Becomes Electra, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 20, no.1-21-2 (Jun 2013): 41–60.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-013-0321-z Bibliographie, (): 275–295.https://doi.org/10.4000/books.chbeck.1465