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26-05-2015, 18:22

History to Epic: Caesar and the Gods

The Caesar of the biographical tradition shows little respect for conventional religion in general and for omens in particular. This is most famously true of his mockery of the seer Spurinna and refusal to beware the Ides of March (Cic. Div. 1.119, 2.36-7; Suet. lul. 81.4; App. B Civ. 2.153.645), but further examples abound (Suet. lul. 59, 77). This places him in an interesting relationship to Lucan himself, for one of the most significant features of the Civil War is its elimination of the traditional epic gods as agents (if not of portents and other phenomena conventionally indicative of divine anger), and indeed perhaps the greatest proof of the absence or total indifference of the gods is precisely the fact of Caesar’s victory (see esp. Luc. 7.445-59). This aspect of Lucan’s Caesar is perhaps best exemplified by the famous episode of the desecration of the sacred grove of Massilia perpetrated in book 3 of the Civil War (Luc. 3.399-452). Caesar here finds himself in urgent need of timber in order to construct siege machinery (Luc. 3.398-4), but he and he alone is willing to seek that timber in the grove that Lucan so ghoulishly describes (Luc. 3.399-425). His men hesitate to touch it (Luc. 3.426-30); both the Gauls who groan outside and the Phocaean Greeks who rejoice within the walls do so because they presume that Caesar must now be subject to the vengeance of the gods (Luc. 3.445-8). As Caesar marches on unscathed, Lucan quips that fortune preserves many a guilty man and the divine forces know how to be angry only at the wretched (Luc. 3.458-9).

The Caesar of the historians and the biographers would never allow himself to be deterred from undertaking a hazardous voyage (Cic. Div. 2.52; Min. Fel. Oct. 26.4; Plut. Caes. 52.2-3; Dio 42.58.2). Plutarch and Suetonius both record one such sea journey undertaken in the course of the civil wars though Suetonius claims that he sailed across the Adriatic from Brundisium to Dyrrachium while Plutarch suggests that he endeavored to follow the opposite trajectory from Apollonia to Brundisium (Plut. Caes. 38; Suet. lul. 58.2). In both instances Caesar boards a small boat (Plut. Caes. 38.1 specifies one of 12 oars) and does so by night, in disguise, and unknown to all; he then obliges the helmsman to sail on in the face of the storm and is as good as drowned before finally being obliged to put back to land. In Plutarch the helmsman’s anxiety at the conditions leads Caesar to reveal himself, take him by the hand, and utter the exhortation: ‘‘Go on, good man, be brave and fear nothing: you carry Caesar and Caesar’s fortune sailing with you’’ (Plut. Caes. 38.3). Lucan in turn addresses this episode in book 5 of the Civil War and entangles Caesar in perhaps the most notoriously hyperbolic storm of the famously stormy epic genre (Luc. 5.597-677). Here too Caesar embraces the challenge of Fortune (Luc. 5.592-3) and even addresses her, addresses the gods at the moment of his greatest peril (Luc. 5.655-71). When finally Caesar is blown ashore, back where his great voyage began, Lucan comments: ‘‘And together, touching land, he recovered so many kingdoms, so many cities, and his fortune’’ (Luc. 5.676-7).

If Caesar in a storm is at once the Odysseus of Odyssey 5 and the Aeneas of Aeneid 1, in the opening stages of this episode he plays a rather different role. For Lucan has found a name for the otherwise anonymous helmsman - Amyclas - and has chosen to describe his humble hut in such a way as to recall that of the aged but hospitable Baucis and Philemon of Ovid, Metamorphoses 8 (Luc. 5.517 cannaque intexta palus-tri; cf. Ov. Met. 8.630 et canna tecta palustri). There is a point here, for Baucis and Philemon play host to Jupiter and Mercury in disguise, and it is only after they have demonstrated their complete benevolence and generosity towards previously unknown guests that the gods reveal themselves and offer them whatever reward they choose. Lucan’s Caesar, however, is rather too impatient for all of this. Dressed though he is in plebeian garb, he is unable to speak in the manner of a private citizen (Luc. 5.537-8), and the first thing that he does when Amyclas opens the door is to instruct him to expect rewards greater than his modest prayers (Luc. 5.532), then order him not to delay to submit his destiny to a god who wishes to fill his humble home with sudden wealth (Luc. 5.536-7). It is perhaps a reflection of Caesar’s celeritas that he has no time for the process of test and reward, that he reveals his ‘divinity’ from the first and short-circuits the time-honored structure of the theoxeny motif.



 

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