Chapter XXI: Book III: , mainly concerned with Caesar’s doings on his return to Rome

and during his siege of Massilia, is impoverished by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and an incessant series of too ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the combatants. But among compensating passages are the descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and of the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos:

The South Wind fell upon the yielding sails
And sped the Armada till its argosies
Ploughed through the midmost deep: each mariner
Kept steadfast outlook for the Ionian Main.
Pompey alone ne’er turned his eyes aside
From Italy, but all the while he watched
The homeland havens fade away and shores
That ne’er would meet his sight again, and peaks
Cloud-wrapt, and scarce distinguishable hills.[882]

The second passage, a study in the sombre touched with the spirit of Celtic romance, describes the grove of the Druids. Here we are in a haunted twilight wood, polluted with inhuman rites, shunned by bird and beast as by sylvan deities, and though windless yet aquiver with a mysterious thrill in its leaves (_arboribus suus horror inest_)—a forest of black waters and misshapen images of eldritch gods, awesome through a wan aspect of decay and nameless terrors, where caverns resound with the rumble of the earthquake, where the hewn death-yew comes to life again, where flame plays among branches that do not burn and serpents hold the oak in their embrace.[883]

Three episodes constitute most of the action in Book IV—Caesar’s Spanish operations against Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda; the failure of one of three Caesarian rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the descent of Curio, in Caesar’s interest, upon Africa, when he is defeated by Juba and meets death. The pangs of thirst suffered by Pompeians in Spain prompt one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury,[884] while the counsel of Volteius to his men on the trapped raft that they must slay each other rather than surrender is argued in the overstrained manner of the schools, and is an ingenious combination of special pleading and boastfulness. When the crew carry out their dreadful compact of mutual slaughter, like the offspring of the teeth of mythical dragons, characteristic realism is indulged in to describe the crawling writhing bleeding agony of the lacerated men. But this virtual suicide closes in a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan—death is a ready way of eluding tyranny. Here it is still the Stoic who speaks; for Stoicism, while recognizing the theoretical obliquity of suicide, admitted that it was in certain circumstances defensible:

Despite such, lessons shown of manliness,
Yet craven peoples will refuse to learn
How smooth the path of valour which the hand
Can make to ’scape from bondage; but a King
Is dreaded for the steel; and liberty
Is galled with cruel arms, in ignorance
That swords were given that none might be a slave.
Ah Death! That thou mightst scorn to take from life
Cowards, and none but brave be free to die![885]

The African expedition suggests the single long deviation of this book on the legend of the earth-born Antaeus strangled by Hercules. Curio’s soliloquy before battle reflects his not unnatural nervousness as commander of soldiers who had become Caesarians only by surrendering at Corfinium:

’Tis daring cloaks great fear: myself shall first
Seize arms, and let my men, while yet mine own,
March down to level ground; for idleness
Aye bringeth changeful mind. End plots by fight!
When blood-lust prompts and sword is firmly gripped,
The helmet covers qualms. Who minds to weigh
Opposéd leaders then or balance claims?
Each backs the side he stands on; as at shows
Within the fateful amphitheatre,
No ancient grudge makes combatants engage—
Pairs hate at sight.[886]

The apostrophe to Curio after his death leads up to the familiar line which implies that his desertion to Caesar’s side turned the scale of history:

_Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum._

Though Book V opens in Epirus with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia for safety to Lesbos, yet Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers (who express their grievances with pointed rhetoric), and recrosses the Adriatic in a small boat on a tempestuous night to bring Antony to his aid. The action is delayed by a digression of about 150 lines on the Delphic Oracle consulted by Appius.

Caesar’s will-power is well brought out in his defiant braving of the storm despite the fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune for his sole attendant (_sola placet Fortuna comes_) in crossing the sea to ensure the transport of his troops from Italy; for

Mad-set on battle-mellay was his heart.[887]

But the storm proves an irresistible temptation to Lucan. Having exhausted his list of contending winds, he turns to hyperbole—mountains long buffeted in vain now at last succumb, and portentous waves new to those seas roll in from the encircling ocean. Next he elaborates the description by a resort to mythology. Much more human, however, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part:

Words fail him, though his purpose be resolved;
And so he fain would clog what is to come,
Indulge delay and moments steal from doom.
All slumber banished and the night far gone,
Cornelia clasps his breast that teems with care,
And seeks fond kisses from her lord now turned
Away. She marvels that his cheeks are wet,
And, smitten with a wound mysterious,
She dare not find great Pompey shedding tears.
He sighing said: “My own, more dear than life—
I mean the life of happier times, not this
That burdens me—the woeful day hath come,
Which we postponed too little, yet too much:
Caesar is nigh, all eagerness for fight!”[888]

Overloaded with digressions, besides detail of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachium, and hyperbolical praise of the centurion Scaeva’s repulse of Pompey’s attempt to break through, Book VI is not on the whole successful. The plan to construct gigantic lines of investment is at first as little grasped by Pompey

As wild waves boiling on the Kentish shore
Rave all unfelt by Caledonians.[889]

In time, he is driven to counter-movements, and would have made a victorious sortie but for the prowess of one outstanding Caesarian, on whom, with incredible exaggeration, the whole fighting is made to concentrate. This champion is not to be dislodged save by a war-engine; he bristles with a thick forest of missiles in his chest; he offers the resistance of an African elephant; and, tearing out his eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it,

Stamps on the weapon and his eye as well![890]

This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary discomfiture of Caesar, who retires upon Thessaly followed by Pompey. If only Pompey had been a Sulla, reflects Lucan, and had used his advantage for an immediate descent upon Rome, there would have been no Pharsalia. The mention of Thessaly is responsible for digressions on geography and magic; and, though the wizardry and witches of Thessaly appear more convincing in the pages of Apuleius, yet Lucan, when he leaves off cataloguing the astounding potency of Thessalian enchantments over love, weather, rivers, mountains and laws of the universe, does achieve an effect of gruesome _diablerie_ through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but, like Saul at Endor, from necromancy. After he and his attendants have made their way past ruined tombs towards the sunless and hell-like cavern when the sorceress Erichtho sits crooning her malignant spells, he holds a midnight _séance_ with the hag. Conceding his request, she scares off birds and beasts of prey from the battle-field, and selects a fallen warrior to be revivified by loathsome ingredients and eerie incantations for the purpose of revealing prophetic messages from the other world. The revelation is that the shades await both Sextus’s father and his house; Caesar’s daring, on the other hand, delights the spirits of dead Roman revolutionaries, but his triumph will be short. With such ominous responses Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.