The sheer dynamism of Lucan’s Caesar, like that of Seneca’s tragic Atreus, undercuts any secure sense of disapproval at the moral or political character of their actions. For in both the Civil War and the Thyestes, there would be no epic, there would be no tragedy, but for the determination of the work’s ostensible villain to drive the plot forward. Modern scholarship has paid particular attention to this aspect of both works and has founded metapoetic analyses on the tendency of the respective villains to describe their actions in terms otherwise applied by poets to their work: when Caesar launching the civil war bids Rome to ‘‘favor my undertakings’’ (Luc. 1.200 Roma, fave coeptis), his words are not far from those of Propertius launching a new poetic program (Prop. 4.1.67 Roma, fave: tibi surgit opus); when Atreus resolves to outdo the crime of Procne and Philomela, he uses the language of a playwright pitting himself against the works of a noted predecessor (Sen. Thy 267-77). All this matters, for we do indeed gain far greater aesthetic pleasure from the energy of Caesar or the machinations of Atreus than ever we do from the inertia of Pompey or the empty pieties of Thyestes, but there is some way to go between asserting that Lucan’s role in poetry is analogous to that of Caesar in politics and then concluding that for that reason Lucan is also in sympathy with Caesar’s political program.
That any account of Lucan’s politics cannot simply be founded on the identification of an aesthetic affinity with his Caesar is implicit in the works of one of the most important proponents of the metapoetic analysis of the Civil War. For Jamie Masters’s Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (1992) follows up a pioneering analysis of Caesar as surrogate for the poet with an attempt to demonstrate at least one instance of explicit sympathy with his politics. This he finds in book 4 and the clemency shown by Caesar to the Republican forces he has defeated in Spain (Luc. 4.337-401). In a previous contribution to this topic, I argued against this position by asserting that the very lines that Masters identifies as most favorable to Caesar (Luc. 4.363-4), by allusion to key lines of Vergil and Ennius, also give him a Jovian aspect and remind the reader that any state that can do no better than appeal to the benevolence of an all-powerful ruler is one that has accepted that it is made up not of citizens but of subjects. In the short term, any act of clemency may seem preferable to a massacre, but in the longer term it will be realized that the man who arrogates to himself the right to spare or to forgive those who were once his fellow citizens has successfully subverted a crucial constitutional principle.
The point that I make is essential to our understanding of Caesar in Seneca, Lucan, and elsewhere. That Caesar chose not to persecute his defeated foes in the aftermath of civil war is something for which he is widely praised (Plut. Caes. 46.2, 57.3; Suet. Jul.75; Dio 41.62.1-63.6); his tears shed over the head and ring of Pompey are more often taken as proof of humanity (Val. Max. 5.1.10; Plut. Caes. 48.2) than of skill as an actor (Luc. 9.1055-6; Dio 42.8.2-3); and he gains credit for his refusal to examine the latter’s correspondence and thus discover who had opposed him, who had stayed neutral in the war (Sen. Ira 2.23.4; Dio 41.63.5). Yet simply to launch the civil war was a crime against the state and, however dubious the motives of his principal opponent Pompey, it is possible to look to Cato for the unflinching defense of constitutional principle. This is as true of Seneca (Sen. Prov. 3.14, Constant. 1.3, Ep. 94.65, 95.70, 104.29-33) as it is of Lucan (e. g. 9.190-214), and the debate between Brutus and Cato in book 2 of the Civil War effectively replays and resolves one first staged by Seneca in his 14th Epistle (Luc. 2.234-325; cf. Sen. Ep. 14.12-13).
When Seneca addresses himself to the young king Nero, he commends to him a policy of moderation (Sen. Clem., passim). Yet his model for the clement monarch is never Julius Caesar himself but rather the emperor Augustus (Sen. Clem. 1.9-11). It is one thing to praise clemency at a time when there is no practical alternative to monarchy, quite another to celebrate a man whose claim to spare his enemies was part and parcel of his subversion of the constitution they had been fighting to defend. It is for this reason that book 2 of the De Beneficiis, in a passage characterized by its bracing political realism and acceptance of the death of the Republic, can still admit that it was by injurious means that Caesar acquired the power to grant Brutus his life, and observe that the man does not save a fellow citizen who omits to kill him (Sen. Ben. 2.20.1-3). Likewise the recognition in the 24th Epistle that Cato had to die lest any man be able either to slay or to spare him (Sen. Ep. 24.6 ne cui Catonem aut occidere liceret aut servare contingeret).
It has been observed that clementia itself was very likely not part of the historical Caesar’s political vocabulary. The same cannot be said of the verb servare and its often contradictory senses of‘‘to save’’ and ‘‘to spare’’ (often represented in Greek sources by the verb n®qeiv). Plutarch, for instance, quotes Caesar’s dictum that the greatest and sweetest reward he gained for victory in civil war was the chance to spare some of those who had fought against him (Plut. Caes. 48.2, cf. Luc. 9.1066-8) and records his reaction to the suicide of Cato: ‘‘O Cato, I begrudge you your death just as you begrudged me the chance to spare you’’ (Plut. Caes. 54.1, Cat. Min. 72.2). Cato himself, meanwhile, is made to give voice to the fundamental critique of clemency: ‘‘For if I were willing to be spared by grace of Caesar, I ought to go to him in person and see him alone; but I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts. And he acts illegally in sparing, as if their master, those over whom he has no right at all to be the lord’’ (Plut. Cat. Min. 66.2).
When therefore scholars find an endorsement of Caesar in the clemency scene in book 4 of the Civil War, they should not just consider the potential tensions internal to it, but also examine the rest of the poem and acknowledge the persistent tendency of Caesar’s Republican foes to express distaste at any prospect of being spared by him. Domitius the commander of Corfinium is both humiliated and spared by Caesar in book 2 and resolves immediately to seek death and shun Caesar’s gift (Luc. 2.512-15; cf. 524-5); this he finally achieves at Pharsalus where he dies rejoicing to have escaped a second pardon (Luc. 7.603-4). Pompey twice expresses distaste at the prospect of Caesar’s clemency (Luc. 8.133-7, 314-16), while Cato merely hopes that the African king Juba will do to him what the Egyptian Ptolemy did to Pompey: he does not deprecate being spared by his enemy as long as he is spared with his head chopped off (Luc. 9.212-14). Yet perhaps the key scene is precisely Caesar’s response to being presented with the head of Pompey in the closing lines of book 9. He repeats the adage, also quoted by Plutarch, that the greatest reward of civil war is the chance to spare his fellow citizens (Luc. 9.1066-8) and he betrays the true meaning of his clemency when he complains that he has in vain convulsed the world in civil war if any other power exists than his or if he has to share any land with another: by killing Pompey Ptolemy has usurped part of that absolute power over life and death that Caesar wanted for his own (Luc. 9.1075-8). Lucan himself thanks fortune for denying Caesar the chance to decide on Pompey’s fate and for sparing Rome the shame of allowing Caesar to take pity on Pompey while he lived (9.1058-62).
When Lucan dedicates his poem to the future divinity Nero, then later lambasts the deification of dead emperors as a pernicious fiction (Luc. 1.33-66, cf. 6.807-9, 7.454-9), it is fashionable to speak of him ‘‘recontextualizing’’ his initial statement or deliberately injecting inconsistency into his poem. This I find a dubious alternative to the straightforward statement that the later passages unmask the emptiness of the former, for I cannot see how the claim can be inverted and the dedication to Nero be said seriously to recontextualize the later denunciations of emperor-cult. There is a similar problem with the interpretation of Caesar’s pardon to the defeated Republicans in Spain. We will not pretend that clemency here is the less desirable alternative to a massacre or that the common troops whose relief at escaping civil war Lucan so lyrically evokes (Luc. 4.382-401) will feel the sting of accepting Caesar’s right to forgive as strongly as do the traditionally empowered members of the senatorial oligarchy. Yet throughout the rest of the poem it is precisely the perspective of that oligarchy, that is to say of those who had effective rights to lose, that Lucan so consistently evokes. This, moreover, is a poem moving inexorably towards a climactic narrative of the African campaign. Lucan did not live to give voice to the defeated Cato’s rejection of clemency but this he could not possibly have omitted. Lucan in book 4 of the Civil War presents the Republican general Petreius as ready to be spared, but how would the same man’s suicide in the wake of Thapsus have recontextualized this act ([Caes.] B Afr. 94.1-2; Livy Epit. 114; Flor. 2.13.69; App. B Civ. 2.100.415)?
World History
