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

LUCAN
Death from the swords of their companions awaits those who step out of
line: so densely packed are the Romans: 1
uix impune suos inter conuertitur enses (4-779)
he could scarce move about unhurt amongst the swords of his comrades.
Here we are back in the civil war ambience, where the harm and violence is
done to oneself. Prefiguring his treatment of the trumpet signal in Book 7,
Lucan lets self-destruction take over from the normal pattern of conflict:
non arma mouendi
iam locus est pressis, stipataque membra teruntur,
frangitur armatum conjiso pectore pectus (4.781—3)
The crowded soldiers have no longer space to ply their weapons; their bodies are
squeezed and ground together; and the armoured breast is broken by pressure against
another breast.
After the prefatory negative — never before was there a battle in which one side
could not move —a bold inversion: dispensing with one set of combatants,
Lucan sets Roman against Roman with a verbal scheme more appropriate to
two opposing forces. Homer, admittedly, had used it of one army; but Virgil,
and Lucan himself, had established a more natural usage. 2 On reading
stipataque membra teruntur; \ frangitur armatum cordiso pectore pectus, we think
of Virgil's equivalent of Iliad 16.215:
haud aliter Troianae acies aciesque Latinae
concurrunt; haeretpedepes densusque uiro uir (Aen. 10.360—1)
Just so did the ranks of Troy and Latium clash
Together, foot to foot, man to man locked in the miUe,
or again, of the pattern Virgil uses for two opposing chargers:
perfractaque quadrupedantum
pectora pectoribus rumpunt. (Aen. 11.614—15)
their horses collided, head on, so that breast
Was broken and shattered on breast.
Expecting the Roman context of a clash between two armies — Lucan himself
employs the schema thus, at 7-573, conjractique ensibus enses — the reader is
asked to remember Lucan's introduction to the battle — bellumque trahebat \
auctorem citdle suum — and, beyond that, the proem's motif of the hand that
turns on itself. The destruction has become internal, confined to Curio's army:
the instigator of civil strife will die according to its laws.
1 Note the progression, from splssantur 77 to densaturque glotus 780, constrinxit gyros acies 781,
pressis and stipata 782, and finally compressum 787.
2 It would help to know the contexts of Enn. Ann. 572 V, and Bibac. fr. 10 M.
552
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008