Pharsalia

A translation into English prose by A. S. Kline. Published with selected illustrations.

The Pharsalia, transmitted in the earliest manuscripts under the title De Bello Civili, is Lucan’s epic treatment of the conflict between Julius Caesar and the senatorial forces commanded by Pompey. The conventional title derives from the Battle of Pharsalus (48 BC), Caesar’s decisive victory and the subject of the poem’s seventh book. Some contemporary scholars have objected that the designation accords undue prominence to an episode situated at the poem’s centre rather than its climax, though the phrase Pharsalia nostra vivet (9.985-6) lends it internal sanction.

Composition began around AD 61. Lucan had initially stood high in Nero’s favour, admitted to the emperor’s inner circle, advanced early to the quaestorship, and chosen to deliver a panegyric of Nero at the Neronia of AD 60. The cause of their estrangement is uncertain, though the ancient biographical tradition ascribes it to Nero’s jealousy of the younger man’s poetic reputation. Whatever its origin, the quarrel ended in an imperial ban on the publication of Lucan’s poetry. Lucan continued work on the epic nonetheless, and subsequently joined the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso against the emperor. When the plot was betrayed in AD 65, he was compelled to take his own life, leaving the poem unfinished.

Ten books are extant, the last terminating abruptly amid Caesar’s Alexandrian campaign. The poem’s incompleteness is broadly accepted, but its intended scope remains contested. Hypothesized termini at Philippi or Actium are generally dismissed as incompatible with the poem’s narrative pace, which covers some twenty months across ten books. One influential proposal posits a twelve-book design answering the Aeneid, culminating in the death and Stoic apotheosis of Cato. Against this, it has been argued that the irresolution of Book 10 is deliberate, integral to a poetics of civil war that admits no closure.

The extant narrative extends from the crossing of the Rubicon to Caesar’s arrival in Egypt. Its principal figures are Caesar, Pompey, and Cato. The poem’s most conspicuous departure from epic convention is the suppression of the divine apparatus. Lucan’s relation to Virgil is systematically antagonistic. The necromancy of Erichtho in Book 6 inverts the katabasis of Aeneid 6, substituting for Virgil’s teleology of Augustan Rome a pessimistic account of liberty extinguished. Stylistically, the poem bears the imprint of declamatory training - Quintilian judged Lucan most notable for his sententiae - and it proceeds by discrete, episodically organized scenes in the manner of Ovid rather than by continuous narration.

Critical estimation has shifted markedly. Early twentieth-century judgments denied Lucan a place among the major epic poets, whereas scholarship of recent decades has reassessed the poem as a central document of Neronian politics and aesthetics.