Lucan’s epic treats years 49-47 bce of the civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey (and his successors). After a proem which praises Nero in terms that some have found ambiguous (including the ancient commentators), Lucan goes on to narrate the causes of the conflict, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon (despite the pleas of a personified Roma), and his capture of Arminium. After an address to his troops, Caesar begins his
March on Rome; the city is thrown into terror by this new development and the seers Arruns and Figulus both foretell ruin. At the start of the second book, older citizens recall the gruesome happenings of the previous civil war between Sulla and Marius, while the Stoic hero Cato informs Brutus of his decision to support Pompey, ‘‘lest he think he has triumphed on his own behalf’’ (2.324). The brave Domitius, an ancestor ofNero’s, resists the Caesarian troops at Corfinium as they overrun Italy, but to no avail, and Pompey is forced to flee the peninsula at Brundisium. He successfully eludes Caesar’s blockade to get to Epirus.
In the next two books, we follow Caesar’s military campaigns in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Illyricum, and Africa: he plunders Rome and moves on to besiege Massilia, where he defeats Pompey’s forces in a horrific naval battle. His troops are similarly successful against the Republican forces of Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda in Spain, though in Illyricum one of his soldiers, Vulteius, commits suicide with a raftful of men rather than fall into Pompeian hands, and in Africa his deputy Curio is defeated and killed in a battle against the African king Iuba.
In Book 5, the narrative turns back to the exiled Senate in Epirus, which meets to legitimize Pompey’s leadership in the struggle against Caesar. Appius goes to consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, where the Pythia prophesies his death in terms he fails to understand. Meanwhile, Caesar subdues a mutiny in his army and sails across the stormy Adriatic, intending to do battle with the Pompeian forces in Epirus when all his own forces finally arrive. An abortive attempt to sail back to Brindisium on his own to muster these troops fails when a storm almost sinks his little boat. Worried about the outcome of the coming battle, Pompey sends his wife Cornelia to Lesbos for safety. In the subsequent book, Caesar tries but fails to surround Pompey’s army at Dyrrachium, and then moves his forces to Thessaly instead. In a famous scene of necromancy, Pompey’s cowardly son Sextus consults a Thessalian witch, Erictho, who can disrupt the course of nature, knows the mysteries of Hades, and returns the dead to life (unless she has nibbled off their faces first). Erictho duly resuscitates a dead soldier and forces him to foretell the course of future events: Pompey will be defeated, but Caesar too will be assassinated in the years to come.
Book 7 treats the battle itself. Although Pompey is reluctant to engage, he is persuaded to do so by the restless soldiers and by Cicero’s oratory (although Cicero was not historically present at this battle). Carnage ensues, Pompey’s forces are routed, and Caesar has a happy picnic overlooking the battlefield and its unburied corpses. In the next book, Pompey flees to Lesbos to collect Cornelia, and decides, after consultation with his allies, to seek assistance from the young Pharaoh of Egypt. The treacherous Pharaoh sends a small boat to meet him offshore and has him murdered in it while Cornelia watches in horror; her husband is decapitated and the headless corpse is tossed overboard to wash up on the Egyptian coast, where a stray Roman soldier buries it.
Book 9 starts with the catasterism of Pompey: his soul ascends to heaven and then flutters down to take up residence in the hearts of Brutus and Cato. Cato assumes control of Pompey’s forces and leads them to North Africa, where they are beset by thirst, despair, and an assortment of lethal snakes. They finally reach Leptis, where they spend the winter. In the meantime, Caesar is on a tour of the ruined site of Troy, a city once as great as Rome is in his own time. In the last book, he continues on to Egypt, where he and Cleopatra have an affair and he pledges his support to her. Pothinus, Ptolemy’s minister, tries to assassinate Caesar, fails, and is killed himself (the point at which Caesar’s Bellum civile ends), and in some 15 additional lines we end with Caesar fighting off the forces of another Egyptian, one Ganymede. (Lucan’s epic concludes at a point in time covered near the beginning of the pseudo-Caesarian Bellum Alexandrinum.) (On the question of whether the epic is complete as it stands, see the comprehensive discussion, with bibliography, in Masters 1992: 216-57).
World History
