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LUCAN
to warrant the hypothesis of a growing discontent with Caesarism — a dubious
concept anyway — culminating in the conspiracy and suicide of A.D. 65.'
As the epic unfolds, we find a greater sympathy for the Republican party:
but that is inevitable, as Pompey moves towards his death, and Cato emerges
as Stoic saint. Rhetoric may demand an increasing amount of anti-Caesarian
invective, but that has no necessary bearing on Lucan's relations with the
princeps. It has been argued that the completed epic's structure was to be tetradic,
the first four books concerned with Caesar, and culminating in the death
of the Caesarian Curio, the second four with Pompey, whose death occupies
die last half of Book 8, while the projected final tetrad — the epic breaks off
part way through Book 10 — was to end with the death and apotheosis of
Cato. 2 If Lucan's aim was a vindication of the Republican cause through Cato's
suicide — and Book 9, an allegory of the testing of the Stoic sage, gives every
indication that it was — then structural requirements are sufficient explanation
of any increase in his antipathy towards Caesar, the tyrannical egotist, and
Stoic villain.
But we should not press the tetradic structure too closely: in the first two
sets of four books, focus alternates between the Pompeians and Caesarians
without overdue regard for a principle of organization, and Book 10 is as
dedicated to Caesar as 9 is to Cato. Moreover there is some indication, tenuous
though it may be, that Lucan thought in terms of two hexads: lists of sympathetic
omens are common to Books 1 and 7, and 6, with its closing inferno, reminds us
of the Aeneid and its twelve books. 3 But Lucan's method of composition, by
the self-contained episode, paratactically arranged, as well as the unfinished
state of the poem, should warn us against imposing schemata and eliciting
interior correspondences: for instance, we cannot make much of the fact that
Books 5 and 9 both have storms in common, while geographical excursuses —
scientific, not pseudo-scientific — occupy a great deal of Books 2, 6 and io. 4
Unlike the Aeneid, the Bellum civile shows few traces of organic design. And,
again unlike the Aeneid, it has no single hero: tetradic structure, or, more
plausibly, the exigencies of his theme, occasion the choice of three main
characters, Pompey, Caesar, and Cato, along with various ancillary figures,
like Julia and Curio. 3 Pompey, the least impressive of the three, comes across
most forcefully in the oak tree and lightning simile of Book 1, but is a rather
shadowy figure after that. 6 His stoical death in Book 8 is a literary failure,
1 See Tac. Ann. 15,70, with its story of Lucan's narcissistic death-bed recitation of his own poetry.
2 For structure see the summaries in Due (1962), Rutz (1965) 262—6, and Marti (1968).
3 In general, see Guillemin (1951), and for particular Virgilian debts, Thompson and Bruere (1968).
•• See Eckhardt (1936).
> For the characters, see Ahl (1976) 116-274. Juli*> who could be a figure from Ovid's Heroides,
needs a closer study.
6 1.136-43, contrasting with the lightning simile used of Caesar, 151—7.
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