IN THIS paper it is proposed to assemble and discuss evidence bearing upon the scope contemplated by Lucan for his historical poem. Although formal appreciation of an incomplete epic is hardly possible in the absence of a hypothesis concerning its scope-to determine the extent to which a poet would have achieved his purpose one must take into consideration what this purpose was-no agreement on this question has been reached, and for many years there has been little awareness of its importance. That Lucan's poem is incomplete, breaking off as it does in the midst of a sentence with Caesar in mortal peril on the Alexandria mole, is too evident to require proof; that if it is to attain a tolerable conclusion the narrative should be carried beyond the Bellum Alexandrinum, hardly less so.' There is no reason to suppose that the ancients possessed more of the poem than we do, and strong indications that they did not.2 None of the statements concerning Lucan found in ancient writers has to do with what the poem, had it been completed, would have contained; with the exception of what may be inferred from some verses of Statius,3 there has survived no allusion to its unfinished condition.4 The question of the scope of the poem was first raised by Sulpitius, the best of the renaissance commentators on Lucan,5 who believed, basing his conclusion upon internal evidence, that Lucan planned to continue his poem to the re-establishment of peace after Actium.6 In the seventeenth century the English poet Thomas May composed a Continuation of Lucan's poem to the death of Caesar, which he subsequently recast in Latin hexameters; the title Continuation makes it probable that May originally chose the death of Caesar merely as a convenient stopping point; however he soon became convinced that he was thus fulfilling the intentions of his predecessor.7 Br6beuf, who not only translated Lucan with independence and felicity, but added a pleasing romantic episode to the sixth book,8 thought that Lucan did not attain the halfway mark.9 Weber in his Prolusiol? argues that Lucan meant to end with the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, a view he later modified, when having come to believe that BC1' i. 1-7 formed a later exordium and i. 8-66 an earlier one, he surmised that when Lucan composed the first introduction he had intended to continue to the definitive peace which followed Actium, but as his feud with Nero exacerbated his republican bias, he resolved to go no farther than Philippi, which marked the end of organized republican resistance, although by no means that of internal warfare, and with this in mind wrote the second introduction.2 Since Weber's second article no consequential effort has been made to come to grips with the problem. On the basis of five passages of the poem W. E. Heitland opts for the assassination of Caesar as terminal point;3 F. Plessis accepts Weber's hypothesis of two exordia, but does not, it would seem, believe that the second one was designed for a poem ending with Philippi. He thinks it likely that Lucan set out to recount the entire series of civil conflicts that continued, with occasional respite, for a period of