However ambivalent we may find Virgil’s depiction of the Julio-Claudian teleology that provided his poem with its forward thrust and that paralleled, in its coming to power, the triumph of Aeneas a millennium before, it is unquestionable that Lucan fastens on the most relentlessly ideological aspects of the poem only to set them on their head. As Hardie has well pointed out, this poem abjures the idea of the ‘‘one man’’ whose concern for his countrymen and whose sense of pietas will lead him to found (eventually) Rome: the Bellum civile is a poem in which, as Hardie notes, ‘‘the Republic is destroyed by the struggle between Caesar and Pompey to become that one man’’ (1993: 7). In Lucan’s frequent gladiatorial imagery, the two men are pares, their ambitions depraved, and the success of one of them is the state’s (and the poet’s) undoing. Lucan’s world contains no acts of commendable bravery on the battlefield, nor does his Underworld give us hope: just the depiction of an equally corrupt set of dead names, described by a rotting no-name of a soldier who is given voice in turn by no divine seer but a female witch who likes to masticate on faces. Indeed, world and Underworld seem reversed: while Pompey is an umbra and walks the earth, Lucan’s Underworld stands in sharp contrast to the parade of not-yet-living umbrae that Anchises points out to his son in Book 6 of the Aeneid. The glorious predictions of Anchises about the future of Rome find no parallel in the glum pronouncements of the Pythia to Appius Claudius and of Erictho’s corpse to Sextus Pompey.
And there are no gods - or rather, no portrayal of gods in action. The poet’s Olympus is uninhabited by recognizable gods, and although Lucan apostrophizes the rector Olympi at BC 2.4, he goes on to doubt both his existence and his agency in the lines that follow. The poem, in fact, is notably devoid of divine action. Even the origin of the story’s events is not the consequence of a divine anger, but the madness of the Romans themselves, a race who plunge their victorious sword into themselves rather than the Rutulian enemy; if Juno’s rage, or Allecto’s, is echoed anywhere, it is in the filthy Erictho, who may stand above them. The absence of divine intervention and divine will is all the more stark in comparison to Virgil’s Aeneid, with its myth of Augustan descent from Venus, and its tussle of wills between the supporters and opponents of our Trojan hero. Fatum and fortuna, virtual synonyms here, take their place. And here, obviously, one more reason to read Lucan: because he does not conform to the standards of versification, narrative, decorum, and ideology associated with his great predecessor Virgil. To fail along these lines was, for him, a failure that carried its own biting commentary on the imperial rhetoric of his own day. (On Lucan and Virgil see further Thompson and Bruere 1968; Narducci 1979; Hardie 1993; Martindale 1993.)
World History
