Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

POETRY
while fr. i, T, .,
' Idaeos summa cum margine colles
/Jean hills with their topmost verge
is conventional in word-order, as well as diction. Civil war reappears as an
epic theme at Ov. Pont. 4.16.21 and 23, ueliuolique marts nates, and quique
acies Libycas Romanaque proelia dixit, the latter, a poem on the campaigns in
Africa, perhaps a source for Lucan Book 9, the former, probably an epic on
Sicily or Actium. Next, more substantially, Cornelius Severus and Albinovanus
Pedo.
One significant thing about their fragments is that they are embedded in the
Suasoriae — and that Seneca adduces both as instances of a poet capping the
prosateurs. The line between prose and verse has become blurred. If an epicist
is comparable to a rhetorician or a historian, an epicist is discussable in terms
appropriate to prose: and the terms appropriate to declamation and history are
only occasionally appropriate to Virgil. We therefore have an alternative epic
tradition: Lucan did not write in magnificent isolation. True, the Petronian
parody, the debate reflected by Martial ('some say I'm not a poet'), and the
criticisms of Qyintilian ('the Bellum civile is stuff for orators, not for poets')
show that Lucan caused a stir in his own day: and today he still has a reputation
for extremism. But studied against the background of the fragments of Augustan
historical epic his extremes are not only the extravagances of a youth in love
with rebellion: and after all, when even younger, Lucan was a ' Neoteric'.
Severus' fragment on the death of Cicero is prosy, cold, logical — the work
of a writer arranging words around ideas. Sextilius Ena's single line:
deflendus Cicero est Latiaeque silentia linguae
tears for Cicero and the silence of the Latin tongue,
hardly as ingenious as Seneca would have us believe, disappoints by contrast.
One of Severus' phrases (8—9 Hie senatus \ uindex) crops up in Lucan: but common
stock may explain the parallel as easily as imitation. His historical exempla
reflect the trend which produced the handbook of Valerius Maximus; his
declamatory negligence of historical detail shows that Lucan was not the first
to be offhand with events: disregard for narrative — abridgement, curtailment,
or total neglect - a factor common to both poets, leads to insistence on, and
rationalistic hypertrophy of, the rhetorical moment. It cannot be said with
certainty that Cornelius dispensed with the Olympians: but Jupiter would have
looked decidedly unhappy in such surroundings.
Scope is uncertain: conflating the three ancient titles — res Romanae, carmen
regale, bellum Skulum — we are left with an epic on Roman history, part of
which may have consisted of an account of the regal period, and part, of the
war with Sextus Pompeius around Sicily. Evidence for a regal section is tenu-
487
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008