Civil war: a country turns violently against itself, and, in Lucan’s opening image - a reverse mirror image of the final act of the Aeneid (on which see Chapter 33, by Putnam) - plunges its sword into its own viscera, signaling the onset of an epic in which agent and recipient of violence will be the same people. Fronto may have complained of the monotony of these initial lines, but in them is contained in nuce the major themes of the Bellum civile: a war that is (paradoxically) more internecine than even civil war; a criminal act on which (paradoxically) legality has been conferred, a pollution that affects the entire world, kindred soldiers pitted against kindred soldiers, and - as the language takes on the shape of its content - words pitted against themselves ( signa/signis, pila/pilis). The boundaries of the state-as-body have been breached; as the narrative proper moves into action after the praise of Nero, Caesar ceases to hesitate at the most significant boundary of them all, the narrow banks of the Rubicon, and crosses over into Italy, permanently leaving behind (by his own account) the laws he has scorned and voicing the cynical prerogative ofthose in power: the guilt shall (after the war) belong to the other side.
Lucan’s language strains to express conceptually and grammatically the outrage of these themes. As Henderson notes, this language is ‘‘caught up in the ‘civil war’ of Lucan’s text, where opposed senses tear themselves up and rip the signifiers from signification’’ (1987: 128; for further discussion, see Hubner 1972, 1975; Martindale 1976; Bramble 1982; Henderson 1987; and Bartsch 1997). The poem is marked by a constant usage of paradox, catachresis, subject-object reversal, the inversion of ethical terminology, and the use of negatives to confound epic expectation (‘‘negation antithesis,’’ Bramble 1982: 46-61). And so we see Lucan using antonyms to set common concepts on their head: against expectation, his warriors flee to war ( in bellum fugitur, 1.404) only the exiled senators gather at Rome; Cornelia’s punishment for surviving Pompey is - to survive Pompey; and, of course, Scaeva’s great valor on the battlefield is now a criminal act, scelus. Normal oppositions fall apart, as has, already, the normative opposition between two sides of a battlefield, where friend and foe should be clearly delineated. Reversal rules the day: cowards do not seek flight, the brave do not seek battle (4.749); even Cato’s remarriage to Marcia is a string of negatives denoting what was not there and what did not happen.
The sense of confusion is enhanced by other atypical usages of language: in particular, the strange way in which the agency associated with human intervention in the world is canceled out, to be replaced by a world in which the animate becomes inanimate, the inanimate animate. Swords are struck by humans, bodies are the protection for shields, chests pass through spears, and, as Clytemnestra might cry, the dead are killing the living. Darkness does not come of its own accord, but depends on the agency of the dead (‘‘modo luce fugata/descendentem animam,’’ 6.713-4), which Henderson (1987) translates as ‘‘a soul on its way down, having just put the light of day to flight.’’ Lucan’s syntactic choices here seem to resonate with the larger sentiments of the narrator, who laments the passivity and paralysis of his own position and those of his peers: as he exclaims in despair over the battle of Pharsalus, Fortuna stripped his generation of the chance to fight against their master (7.645-6: ‘‘post proelia natis / si dominum, Fortuna, dabas, et bella dedisses’’) And when agency is reversed, teleology must follow: the reverse trajectory of this epic is from freedom to slavery, and from the existence of Rome to its undoing. Unlike the relentless forward movement of the Aeneid, the Bellum civile presents us with a deformed and fragmented narrative (Quint 1993: 131-209). No heroism indeed, here, at least not ethically unperverted heroism: Caesar’s whirlwind agency, or the aristeia of Scaeva, are forms of virtus that must be counted as nefas. And Lucan’s prosaic vocabulary works still further to undo the stylistic register of epic. His use of such words as mors, aqua, caelum jolts us back into the tawdry world of non-heroic action, while his unmusical and monotonous prosody, with its dreary spondees, works in strange contrast to the frantic interventions of the narrator into his own story. His extensive use of enjambment only adds to the non-poetic effect. (On the sameness of both sides in civil war, see Jal 1963: 322-6, 415-16. On the ethics of civil war, Roller 1996.)
World History
