Lucan’s epic is just Stoic enough to drive home to us the inversion of any Stoic universe in this poem. This was not always the most common reading of his relationship to Stoic orthodoxy: Marti, who saw Pompey as a Stoic proficiens, also saw the epic in its entirety as expressing the theme of‘‘the tribulations ofhumanity in its struggle toward the Stoic ideal of wisdom and harmony with the divine principle’’ (1945: 355). If Pompey is Man, and Caesar all that is evil in the human soul, Cato is the perfect sage; he follows the divine law of the universe, hosts god inside his breast, and cultivates austerity. Yet such an account leaves unresolved the startlingly unstoic nature of Lucan’s outlook. Like the Stoics, he too may privilege fate and fortuna as the historical movers of worldly events; he may refer to the final destruction of the universe in his description of a world gone awry; and his cosmology may be thoroughly orthodox; but the failure of a benevolent providence provides the pessimistic spine of the story and cannot be reconciled with Stoicism’s more hopeful view (Feeney 1991: 269-301). One could see the clash of Stoic and non-Stoic elements as itself a reflection of the poem’s incessant dualities: an uncertainty between them that Feeney (p. 280) dubs ‘‘a confrontation between the Stoic dispensation and a non-teleological randomness.’’
Even Lucan’s Cato does not fit well into any kind of normative framework for a Stoic sage. His horror at feeling no fear during the collapse of his world reads oddly against Horace’s ‘‘iustus et tenax propositi vir’’ of Carm. 3.3, who lets the ruins of the shattered world strike him without fear. Equally oddly, when he explains his participation in the war to Brutus at BC 2.287 by telling him that ‘‘where the fates drag virtue, it will follow unwilling’’ (‘‘quo fata trahunt, virtus secura sequetur’’), we should remember that the distinction between following and being dragged is often the pivot by which a Stoic worldview can be distinguished from others. Seneca writes in Ep. 107.11 that ‘‘The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling,’’ and by this criterion Cato is both nolens and volens at the same time: he is being dragged and follows simultaneously (Bartsch 1997: 120). In a world where the gods are guilty of making even Cato guilty, Stoicism cannot make sense, and Cato’s self-contradictory stances sharply underline this. (On Stoic elements in the poem, see Schotes 1969; Due 1970; Gagliardi 1970; Lapidge 1989; Loupiac 1998. On Lucan’s use offatum and fortuna, see Dick 1967; Le Bonniec 1970; Ahl 1974; Liebeschutz 1979b; Feeney 1991.)
World History
