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LUCAN
Lucan devoting too much space to moralization, and little, if any, to narrative;
and his apotheosis at the beginning of Book 9 is too abstract to reflect on him
as an individual. As one of the initiators of civil war he must die in order that
the Republican cause be satisfied; but whether he has reached any personal
moral goal at the moment of his death — as Marti puts it, whether he is a
TrpoKdirrcov, a Stoic acolyte progressing to salvation — is a doubtful proposition. 1
Cato is more obviously a product of the philosophy textbook, a negatively
characterized moral archaist in Book 2, z yielding to the impersonal saint of
Book 9, who prepares himself, and his men, for a death which will be the
ultimate vindication of the Liberty destroyed by Caesar. Cato had long since
been an exemplum for poets and moralizing historians: in Book 9 he is more
fully drawn than ever before, an imaginative, at times incomprehensible counterpart
to the rigid hero of Seneca's De constantia sapientis — the tract which
helps explain the more extreme of Lucan's metaphysical Stoic conceits. 3
Where, in the case of Cato, Stoic abstractions called for a rarefied, almost
mathematical manner of writing, with Caesar we find an unphilosophically
passionate conception, a nervous enthusiasm, learnt from the rhetoricians in
their declamations on Alexander. Caesar, like the felix praedo of Macedon at
the opening of Book 10, is a predecessor of Christopher Marlowe's heroes — an
overreacher, an evil genius who pits himself against nature and mankind in an
attempt to subjugate their order to his individual will. Sallust, who likewise
went to the rhetorical portrait of Alexander for his depiction of young Catiline,
would have applauded the idea: the evil self-will of one person is responsible
for chaos in the state, and beyond that, chaos in the universe. 4 But it would be
romantic, and false, to give pride of place to the anti-hero: Book 9, abstract and
difficult though it is, begins to redress any imbalance caused by the flagging
of our spirits during Pompey's last hours, and Book 12 would surely have
set Cato over Caesar. If the two Republican heroes are less convincing to us,
that is a result of a failure of execution on Lucan's part, or a failure of understanding
on ours: there is clearly no intention that Caesar should steal the
epic.
No single hero, then: but what of theme? Civil war, as the title states, not
the loss of Liberty, or any other ancillary topic implied in that title. 5 Rome had
seen a good deal of civil war, and a literature had been adapted to the theme.
No single genre claimed it as its own, but a series of stock motifs and conventional
sentiments became the vehicle for its presentation: epic, history,
1
Marti (1945).
2
See especially 2.354—64, on Cato's unconventional marriage, with its remarkable number of
negatives.
3
For the figure of Cato in Roman literature, see Pecchiura (1965).
4
See Levin (1952), and for Alexander, Sen. Suas. 1.
5
See, for example, the rather inconsequential discussion in Marti (1945), and Due's summary
(1962).
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