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LUCAN
The poet is not present in his own person: the only concern is with the exact,
literal presentation of every single stage in a succession of events. Lucan, on
the other hand, refuses to narrate: Virgil, admittedly, had introduced emotional
and moral language into his narratives of such actions, but narratives they
remained. But now sequence is minimal, ousted by static moral comment:
when Crastinus launches the first javelin of the climactic battle of Book 7, the
action itself is relegated to a subordinate clause:
di tibi non mortem, quae cunctis poena paratur,
sed sensum post fata tuae dent, Crastine, morti,
cuius torta manu commisit lancea bellum
primaque Thessaliam Romano sanguine tinxit.
o praeceps rabies! cum Caesar tela teneret,
inuenta est prior ulla manus? (7-47°~5)
Heaven punish Crastinus/ and not with death alone, for that is a punishment in store
for all mankind alike; but may his body after death keep the power to feel, because
a lance that his hand brandished began the battle and first stained Pharsalia with
Roman blood. O reckless madness/ When Caesar held a weapon, was any other
hand found to precede his?
And even within the subordinate clause emphasis on action as such is minimal:
the participle, torta, is the only word concerned with the actual throwing of the
spear. It is the moral aspect of the deed, not the deed itself, which occupies the
poet. Nefas — the nefas of civil war — here occasions the substitution of an
indignant, moralistic rhetoric for Homeric-style narrative. In the historical
accounts, the javelin cast of Crastinus occurred after the signal for battle,
being thereby absolved of its guilt by the priority of the trumpet-sound. 1 In
Lucan's account, the javelin is launched before the signal, immediately joining
those other deeds of civil war which violate accepted values. Hence the acrimonious
apostrophe, in lieu of epic treatment: for that would have glorified, where
Lucan wants to denigrate. He begins to write his poem at a point where
narrative has ceased to matter: his audience, with its knowledge of Livy, and
of the paradigmatic history conveyed by the rhetoricians, is expected to supply
the background, and the links. Pompey's death is not mentioned at the end of
Book 8, although four hundred lines are devoted to his final hours; nor does
Lucan record the outcome of the lengthy sea battle in front of Massilia at the
end of Book 3. His interest is in interpretation, in throwing light on aspects
of a story which we •would not have noticed for ourselves. 2
1
See Dilke (i960) 24, 28.
1
For Homer's narrative technique, see Auerbach (1953) ch. 1; for Virgil's, Otis (1963) ch. in:
some interesting comments are to be found in Brower (1959), chh. iv and v. I am indebted to Seitz
(1965) for his analysis of this episode: also for his treatment of the flight from Rome, below, pp.
545-8.
540
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