The Bellum civile’s bodies are notoriously prone to fragmentation, like the poem’s epic narrative itself and like the formal structures and rhetorical figures it disdains to leave unwracked. Men shed limbs and organs and scarcely notice, like the anonymous twin in the naval battle at Massilia who in leaning over to grip an enemy ship loses first one hand, then the other, before tossing his torso itself on to the boat (3.609 ff.). The destruction of the body is the fleshy enactment of the raging attack on normative boundaries that civil war itself enacts. Precedent was offered by the struggle between Marius and Sulla, brought to life in an old man’s laments in Book 2: there had been no one to lament Baebius, ripped apart and lying in his own guts, or Antonius, whose head was carried by its white hair; the mutilated trunks of the Crassi, or Marius Gratidianus, whose arms were pulled off his body, his tongue severed, his ears and nose cut off, and last off all, his unbelieving eyeballs plucked from their sockets.
How to read this assault on the human form? Lucan himself gives us the answer, if one well supplemented by recent scholarship on his treatment of narrative form, the influence of Stoicism, and the influence of the arena. For this mutilation is repeated in Sulla’s surgery on Rome as he seizes power once again: ‘‘While he is cutting back the limbs that are now too rotten to survive, his medicine transgresses the bounds, and his hand pursued too far where the disease led it’’ (‘‘dumque nimis iam putria membra recidit / excessit medi-cina modum, nimiumqe secuta est, / qua morbi duxere, manus,’’ BC 2.141-3). The human body and the body of the state suffer the same fate, and the violated boundaries ofthe physical form are echoed over and over in the transgressed political boundaries ofthe state and its institutions: Caesar’s impious crossing of the Rubicon, an army in the forum, the plebs mixing with the potentes; the lurking possibility of an Egyptian woman as a leader of Rome, the former Senate now meeting in Epirus; a leader who revels in, rather than laments, the death of Roman citizens; and of course, in one of the poem’s most famous passages, the traditional aristeia transformed into an act of evil.
Quint too suggests that ‘‘the narrative disunity of the Pharsalia corresponds to a body in pieces, mutilated until it is beyond recognition’’ (1993b: 141) - a reaction to the stress on unity in ancient literary criticism from Aristotle to Cicero. Moreover, ‘‘the epic narrative, which classical literary theory describes with the metaphor of the whole, well-knit body, is deliberately fragmented by Lucan to depict a world out of joint’’ (p. 147). Glenn Most, in pointing out that Lucan has a greater percentage of amputation wounds than his epic predecessors and than Statius and Silius both, suggests that ‘‘one way to interpret the Neronian obsession with the dismemberment of the human body, then, is to see in it the symptom of an anguished reflection upon the nature of human identity and upon the uneasy border between men and animals’’ (1992: 405; animals were regularly torn apart in the amphitheater).
Lucan here may be reflecting Roman Stoic attitudes towards the human body, which is discussed in Seneca and Epictetus in terms of its expendability and relative nonimportance where the sage’s happiness is concerned. Among these writers, to disdain bodily pain as an indifferent becomes now the highest trophy of virtus, or, as Lucan’s uncle Seneca put it, ‘‘the wise man is vulnerable to no injury: therefore it does not matter how many spears are hurled at him, since he is penetrable (penetrabilis) by none’’ (Sen. Const. Sap. 3.5). Read against this background, the lack of interest in suffering or pain (or its elision in favor of the merely grotesque) might be taken itself as a form of grotesque commentary on the dehumanizing Stoic emphasis on mind over matter, and Lucan’s Scaeva now becomes a twisted metaphor for the Stoic sage (even as the narrator condemns him for a virtus used only in the service of evil). Pierced by so many weapons that nothing can protect his innards except the spears that have made of him a human hedgehog, Scaeva is now inured to further harm; his ultra-penetrability has become ultra-impenetrability. In metaphorical terms, his willingness to completely relinquish his body to abuse has made him immune to that abuse, just like the good Stoic sage.
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