The Bellum civile has generated through the ages an astonishing variety of critical responses. Lucan’s closest contemporary Petronius seems to be taking a swipe at the epic when his mad poet Eumolpus deplores the choice of historical events as a topic for epic, since such a topic is marked by the absence of mythology and divine agency (Petr. 118.6). A few decades after Lucan’s death, Statius may not have had much choice but to praise him in an occasional poem addressed to Lucan’s widow Polla, Silvae 2.7, on the occasion of Lucan’s birthday; here the Aeneid itself is said to pay homage to Lucan as he sings among the Romans (‘‘ipsa te Latinis / Aeneis venerabitur canentem,’’ 2.7.79-80) and the poet’s early death at the hands of the ‘‘rabid tyrant’’ (100) is lamented as a tragic and untimely loss. Quintilian, in his assessment of Roman epic writers, is more dismissive: Lucan is ‘‘fiery and passionate and brilliant in his maxims, and, in my opinion, more to be imitated by orators than by poets’’ (Inst. 10.1.90: ‘‘Lucanus ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus’’). And this criticism in turn may find an answer in a short epigram put into Lucan’s mouth by Martial: ‘‘Some people say I’m not a poet: but the book dealer who sells me sure thinks I am’’ (14.194: ‘‘Sunt quidam, qui me dicant non esse poetam:/Sed qui me vendit bybliopola putat’’). Taking this as praise, however, should perhaps give us pause: Ahl (1976: 74) points out that this lugubrious sequence of spondees may itself be a comment on Lucan’s metrification, which was criticized for its monotony. Martial’s evidence does show the poem was being read; indeed, the Suetonian Vita of the poet tells us that his work was used as a school-text, and put up for sale by careless dealers as well as conscientious ones. (‘‘Poemata eius etiam praelegi memini, confici vero ac proponi venalia non tantum operose et diligenter sed inepte quoque.’’) The grammarian Fronto thought Lucan’s style excessive (Fr. Ep. A 344); the first seven lines, he complained, are just a repetition of same theme over and over. In the early fifth century Jerome, in defending the role of literary commentaries, lists Lucan as an author studied in this way, along with Virgil, Sallust, Cicero, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, and Persius (Adv. Ruf. 1.16), while remaining manuscripts from the fifth and sixth centuries to the late Middle Ages almost rival in number those of Virgil, and generally rank with Juvenal, Persius, and Terence.
However popular the poem, Roman readers continued to find fault with it, especially with its ‘‘historical’’ features (no divine machinery, no beginning in medias res but rather a chronological sequence of events, and even excessive historical accuracy). Isidore of Seville criticized Lucan for having written a history, not a poem (Etym. 8.7.10) as did before him Servius (ad Aen. 1.382: ‘‘Lucanus namque ideo in numero poetarum esse non meruit, quia videtur historiam composuisse, non poema’’). Nonetheless, the poem was popular in the medieval period, when its rhetorical style and scientific excursuses were admired by its readers. In the first circle ofDante’s hell, Lucan is one of the quattro grand’ombre (Inferno 4.83) in Limbo, the four great poets of antiquity who come to greet Virgil (as the fifth) and Dante and to enroll the latter among their number. Lucan thus stands with Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in Dante’s estimation; Chaucer too would honor the poet in the House of Fame (line 1499), and he was quoted or imitated in later medieval commentaries and romances.
Despite the criticism of J. C. Scaliger in his commentary on Manilius (where Lucan is denounced for his lack of astronomical expertise) and in the Poetics (where he is deemed irrational), Lucan’s fortunes did not wane during the Renaissance. The editio princeps of
Lucan was issued at Rome by Sweynheym and Pannartz in 1469. In 1493 his commentator Joannes Sulpitius tells us it is impossible to choose between Lucan and Virgd. Christopher Marlowe translated the first book of the Bellum civile into English in 1600, while Thomas May’s popular 1627 translation and 1630 supplement continued the story to the death of Julius Caesar. It has long been acknowledged that Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost (1667) shares a marked similarity with Lucan’s demonic Caesar, and Petrarch and Tasso owed him a debt as well. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the French classical dramatists such as Corneille were much influenced by Lucan’s style and subject matter, while writers of operatic libretti mined the Bellum civile for operas - an example is Handel’s Guilio Cesare in Egitto - and ‘‘whole cohorts of Whigs, radicals, revolutionaries and Romantics’’ (Martindale 1993: 65) found Lucan republican zeal au gout. The eighteenth century saw yet another new translation of the poem into English, by Nicholas Rowe in 1718.
Nonetheless, Lucan’s fortunes were now on the wane. Despite Shelley’s confession that he preferred Lucan to Virgil, the tides of taste had turned, and our author, with his ‘‘warts projecting from Herculean veins’’ (so quoth an admirer of his content, William Hayley, in 1782; cf. Martindale 1993: 66) had ceased to excite admiration. Voltaire had already dubbed the author of the Bellum civile a “declamatory gazetteer’’ and his work incoherent in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727). In 1825 Joel Barlow complains of Lucan’s rambling style, which destroys, he claims, the interest of its ‘‘great national subject,’’ and while Macaulay admired the poem’s vigor and declamatory passages, he detested Lucan’s interest in the grotesque and his ‘‘furious partiality’’ (quoted in Duff 1928: xiv-xc). Both German and English scholarship since the mid-nineteenth century continued to be largely disparaging until the second half of the twentieth century. These critics often reiterated forms of criticism that had come before, decrying Lucan’s reliance on ‘‘rhetoric’’ (understood as the use of paradox, hyperbole, and sententiae), his frothing denunciations of the Julio-Claudian regime, his sluggish versification, and his elevation of ethical commentary to the level of epic action. As late as 1967, M. P. O. Morford’s study of Lucan’s “rhetorical epic,’’ while usefully showing the techniques and themes Lucan borrowed from declamation and prior epic, contends that this segmented, prosodically monotonous, and macabre piece of work can hardly be hailed a masterpiece.
Fortunately, in more recent work these stylistic qualities have been understood as part of the message rather than as a veil drawn in front of it. Publications by Ahl, Brisset, Gagliardi, and Martindale between 1960 and 1980 stimulated new critical interest in the poem and sought to show it was worthy of serious attention. W. R. Johnson’s influential study, Momentary Monsters, opened up a whole new way of appraising the poem: not as epic, but as anti-epic, an exercise in nihilism, a depiction of a world whose machinery had gone mad, where the Stoic Cato can only seem a caricature of the figure of the sage, and where the witch Erictho is Lucan’s crazy, grotesque version of Virgil’s Sybil. The poem’s center is the ‘‘witty skepticism that devotes itself to demolishing the structures it erects as fast as it erects them’’ (Johnson 1987: x). Just before the publication of this book, Henderson had published a long article whose anti-articulacy was itself a commentary on the difficulties of reading the poet; his difficult discussion of the linguistic war within the text and his treatment of the narrator’s dual desire tell the story and to protest its telling seemed, like Johnson’s work, to lay a new path for criticism. It may be fair to say that these works, combined with Martindale’s 1976 study of Lucanian paradox and hyperbole, helped to shape a school that includes the late twentieth-century work of Bartsch, Leigh, Masters, Roller, and other scholars. In particular, what Henderson and Johnson enabled was a way of reading Lucan without respect for what one might call the ‘‘organic fallacy’’: in other words, passages which suggested that the poet or the narrator was mired in self-contradiction, confusion, or even in his own lack of literary ability could now be read as part of the poem’s message, part of its effort to rip apart the structures of intelligibility on which it was expected to stand.
This deconstructionist approach (for so it has been called, not entirely fairly: reading Lucan this way still requires complicity with that most old-fashioned of critical assumptions, authorial intention) has not won universal unanimity. Lucan’s poem can still provoke vastly different responses, with a rift opening up between the prominent Anglo-American school of interpretation described above and an incredulous critical audience centered in Italy. Perhaps the strongest elucidation of this rift is to be found in Narducci’s broadside in Esposito and Nicastri 1999, which charges that these ‘‘postmodern’’ scholars’ work (Leigh is excepted) is marred by personal biases, bizarre associations, and metaliterary fallacies: in short, that the envelope of interpretation has been pushed far too far and has deteriorated into sheer critical self-indulgence. With less justification, perhaps, Narducci also deplores readings that suggest a lack of unity in either the narrator or in the trajectory of his poem, even though scholars have found in both these approaches a way to make rich sense of aspects of the epic difficult to explain otherwise, such as inconsistencies in the narratorial voice, the shifting portrayal of Pompey, or the curious nature of Lucan’s ‘‘stoicism.’’ It remains to be seen whether this quarrel will prove a productive one, but this author’s essential sympathy with the non-unitary model of reading will be obvious in the body of this essay. (Let us not, with Brutus at BC 2.244ff., contend that selecting neither side is the path of virtue!)
World History
