Chapter XXIII: Book X: , on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on the mighty

Julius himself than into the _Pharsalia_. Yet it has energy, in spite of a divagation on Alexander the Great, against whom Lucan inveighs as a “successful bandit” (_felix praedo_), and a longer excursus on the Nile. The principal incidents are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his amour with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation with Ptolemy, the plot of Pothinus to kill Caesar, and the attack at dawn with Caesar at bay:

He dreads the onset, yet disdains to dread:
So roars some noble brute in cage confined
And gnaws his prison till he breaks his teeth.[910]

Before the book is broken short, his arch-enemies, Pothinus and Achillas, are dead; but the renewal of resistance by Ganymedes brings him again into imminent danger. There we leave the Caesar of Lucan. In the opinion of so Pompeian a poet, he cannot be fittingly punished by any blow from Egypt:

Not till his country’s swords transfix the heart
Of Caesar, shall great Pompey be avenged.[911]

This reference to the postponement of a fated penalty has in some eyes lent colour to the view that the poem was designed to continue Caesar’s history up to his assassination in 44. The tenth book is on the face of it incomplete; even were that not obvious, we should detect an unfinished scheme from the assurance given to Sextus Pompey that his fate would be foretold by the shade of his dead father.[912] That promised episode, a parallel to Anchises’s prophecy uttered to Aeneas, would have come into one of the unwritten books. A likely chronological limit would be Thapsus and the suicide of Cato in 46 B.C. That is M. Pichon’s view,[913] which seems more commendable than his associated argument that, as the necromancy of _Pharsalia VI_ corresponds in weirdness to the descent into the lower world in _Aeneid VI_, therefore twelve books must have been planned to answer to Virgil’s twelve. Much closer parallelism between the several books of _Pharsalia_ and _Aeneid_ would have to exist before this contention had validity. In the seventeenth century, the historian Thomas May, whose works in verse and prose are all forgotten save his translation of the _Pharsalia_, believed that Lucan meant to carry his epic as far as Caesar’s death. To fill the gap. May composed a _Supplementum_, which Hallam ventured to call “the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt.” The whole matter is, however, conjectural; and the arguments for a contemplated prolongation to 44 B.C. are not of compelling cogency.

Another point on which there is divergence of opinion concerns the three books first composed according to Vacca’s _Life_. Ussani thinks they were I, VII, IX; Pichon thinks II, VII, VIII. One might defend I, II, VII as a more likely group than either, if one took certain mistakes in VII to prove its comparative earliness and were to offer a plausible explanation of its touching-up with anti-Caesarism. In all the suggestions, however, there are difficulties concerning Lucan’s attitude to Caesar and Nero; and waverers may do worse than fall back on the traditional view, which presents at least as few difficulties, and is the most natural interpretation of Vacca’s words, namely, that I, II, III constituted the _tres libros quales uidemus_.

The seven books not published till after Lucan’s death may have been already known to literary circles from the author’s readings; for the composition of the _Pharsalia_ presumably extended over several years before A.D. 65. If one is satisfied that Lucan even in his first book,[914] as well as in others, borrowed from Seneca’s _Naturales Quaestiones_ belonging to A.D. 62 and 63, then that circumstance may be taken to limit the period; but Vitelli’s endeavour still further to narrow the time of writing seems unconvincing.[915]

Let us realize the audacity of this youthful author. Himself in touch with an imperial court, he dared write a long poem glorifying the opposition to the founder of the imperial principle at Rome. Possibly, in an age of ingenious and bizarre compositions under a clever sovereign, he imagined that his work might pass muster or evade censure as an artistic _tour de force_, and that a generous interpretation would be placed upon a historical thesis handled with epic talent and oiled with introductory adulation. But Lucan must have been sufficiently intimate with the arbitrary despotism of Nero to recognize that in taking such a risk he played a game involving the highest of stakes. A consciousness of genius and an independence of spirit combined with the impetuosity of youth to drive him upon a hazard, in which perhaps he was keen to welcome the fascination of double danger. It was jeopardy enough to challenge the ruler of the world by rivalry in any field of literary eminence; but it was still more perilous to champion the defenders of the ancient republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause; and yet Lucan by setting himself to make idols of Pompey and Cato threw down the gauntlet to Caesarism again. Several factors contributed to this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish home of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey; Lucan’s own boyish imagination conjured up roseate visions of the republican past; his reading in the Pompeian books of Livy confirmed his attitude; and the sense of Nero’s intolerable unfairness in trying to silence him eventually turned intimacy into detestation.

This independence of spirit has its literary side, where Lucan proves himself an original genius. Apart from possession of a distinctive style, he refused to be encumbered by tradition. His originality lay not in the choice of a Roman historical theme—for there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the decision to treat his theme without the conventional introduction of gods as controllers of the action. This novel method of treatment is, we know, criticized in Petronius.[916] Well aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme he thus broke away from Virgilian precedent, and substituted for legendary glamour the interest of a fierce human conflict waged in comparatively recent times.

His equipment for his task may be indicated by a sketch of his sources—historical, philosophical and literary. As regards history, the theory which holds the field is that certain lost books of Livy are the well-springs of Lucan’s subject-matter.[917] This thesis, the outcome of a hint given by Reifferscheid to Baier, his pupil, was maintained by the latter in a work published in 1874. It has in recent years been reaffirmed by M. Pichon,[918] whose skill, in what is the most complete study of Lucan’s sources, has addressed itself to the emancipation of Baier’s hypothesis from the exaggerations of Ziehen and Vitelli, and to its defence against the objections of Westerburg and Ussani. For the accessory material in his digressions Lucan no doubt went elsewhere: serpent-lore he could draw from Macer, who had copied Nicander; geography, in which he is inaccurate, from some general treatise; and data about Egypt in particular very likely from Seneca’s missing work on that country. Much of his merely allusive and decorative matter could be furnished from the standard academic learning, amplified by his own experience—he had been a quaestor, an augural priest, and he had travelled. But for details of his main theme there lay open at that time the complete decades of Livy, who had derived information from Caesar, Posidonius and others. Material contemporary with the civil war could thus be reached through Livy as an intermediary. By Livy it had been to a large extent already Pompeianized. Lucan was not temperamentally likely to follow Caesar’s own account; he would distrust Asinius Pollio, as one too active on Caesar’s side; and although he might well have found facts to recommend the writings of Cremutius Cordus, we do not know that Cordus related the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. On the other hand, Livy was an author for whose literary power the Senecas expressed warm admiration, and Lucan, while subscribing to the opinion entertained by his grandfather[919] and his uncle,[920] felt the special call of political sympathy.

Lucan’s historical value must remain a debatable question. It is comparatively easy, though it costs time, to construct a formidable list of his inexactitudes and deliberate departures from fact.[921] It is also easy to illustrate his strong bias against Caesar. The bias may be readily explained; but it is not always so easy to be sure that the unhistorical in him is due either to bias or to ignorance. When, for instance, he introduces Cicero, contrary to truth, in Pompey’s camp before Pharsalia, is he simply careless, or has he yielded to a half-poetic, half-rhetorical desire to insert a speech from the orator? The almost infectious enthusiasm of M. Pichon for Lucan, while it makes him too tolerant of his wearisome digressions, too laudatory of poetic merit in his rhetoric, too appreciative of the originality of his borrowings, at the same time makes him perhaps too ingenious in finding excuses for his misstatements. Yet the defence is at times justifiable. For example, as regards the frequently criticized epithets applied to Gallic tribes, their appropriateness is plausibly supported on historical, philological and archaeological grounds.[922] Again, on the alleged confusion between Arverni and Aedui (I. 427), Lucan’s language need not involve the mistake commonly supposed, if proper stress be laid on both verbs in the line,

Aruernique ausi Latios se fingere fratres.

Certainly, to construct against Lucan a laborious indictment of error is quite misleading. It should, in any case, be noted that his additions are fewer than his omissions, and many alterations of historical fact charged against the _Pharsalia_ may be due to Livy. One may surmise that Lucan himself is responsible for the silence about Caesar’s pacific overtures, for the sinister misconstruction laid upon Caesar’s clemency, and for the undervaluing of Caesarian bravery; because Livy, writing near the events, could hardly have risked such falsification of history. But, to hazard a guess—and here it is all guesswork—if Livy recorded generous acts by Caesar with some reserve as to their motives, then Lucan might conceivably drop them out because he did not think them sincere; and if characteristic episodes of bravery among the Caesarians were recorded, as we might expect, by Livy, then Lucan might with a kind of Stoic casuistry decline to take them over, because it would be evil to praise valour so ill employed. On the other hand, the elimination of Pompeian bloodthirstiness is presumably a feature already occurring in Livy;[923] and it is highly probable that incidents which put Pompey in an unfavourable light would be toned down by the historian who was twitted with having proved himself a good “Pompeian.” In short, Lucan’s suppressions and transpositions of fact are sometimes those of a partisan (and herein Livy preceded him), sometimes those of the artist who is interpreting history in a poet’s way.

One result of his choice of subject, it will thus be seen, is that some questions affecting Lucan are not literary questions at all, but concern historical value and misstatements intentional or unintentional. There is a risk of harbouring an exaggerated estimate of his historical acumen. Granted that he is at least scientific enough to note certain causes of the civil war, yet he betrays no conception of the vital constitutional principles involved, of the extent to which past abuses rendered the conflict inevitable, or of the real significance of the victory for the destinies of Rome and the world. Though in some aspects very Roman, Lucan is without Virgil’s profound insight into the mission of the Empire. Readers will concede that he is sensitive to the nefarious horror and enormity of civil strife, for he calls shame upon it in exclamatory outbursts repeated till we weary; but this fervour arises less from social or moral or even vaguely humanitarian considerations than from his ingrained rhetoric. One should not presume to blame him: we have little right to demand scientific history from a poet. Although he selected a historical subject and so must remain, faults notwithstanding, a source of history,[924] yet it is not by historical standards that Lucan must be judged, nor, despite his Livian basis, could we unreservedly use his text to supply some of the missing matter of Livy. Frank allowance must be made for prejudices and inconsistencies, which are but natural to juvenile ardour and emotion. He had definitely taken his side, and it is absurd to look for a dispassionate attitude to Caesarian or Pompeian. Interested in philosophy without being a philosopher, he was not concerned to reflect how un-Stoic it was, and in any case, how futile, to reproach Caesar, the man of destiny, for being also a man of blood. Here, as so often, he lets feeling speak.

What philosophy appears in the poem is Stoic. Remembering the poet’s family and his training alongside of Persius, we should expect nothing else; but it should also be remembered that the philosophical colour is incidental, and that the _Pharsalia_ must, in the last resort, be judged less for its history or its philosophy than for its poetry. Critics like Heitland make as great a mistake in claiming a systematic character for Lucan’s Stoicism as Souriau does in over-emphasizing its contradictions. To demand rigid consistency in his thought is to end in the negative conclusion of Lejay—that Lucan had no philosophy. If a lapse into pessimism caused him to wonder whether the world is guided by the Stoic Providence or by blind chance, it was a very human aberration from his normal creed; and if, poet-like, he used the older mythological beliefs, such literary decoration must be no more pressed against him than against Lucretius.

Lucan’s literary training implied acquaintance with the classics of the past. It would be far too much to call him a disciple of Virgil: his spirit is alien to the Virgilian, and yet his debt to the great epic poet was inevitable owing to the education of the times. Here the truth lies between Merivale’s astonishing opinion that Lucan was in style practically independent of Virgil and Heitland’s that Lucan was “steeped” in Virgil’s language. The debt is seen in borrowed words and locutions (like _felix qui potuit_, IV. 393, and _uenit summa dies_, VII. 195), in a fresh use of Virgilian epithets and phrases, in a heightening of Virgilian simplicity to achieve strong effects, and in imitation of Virgilian episodes. Conscious and subconscious echoes are so plentiful and obvious that one cannot feel like Merivale “almost tempted to imagine that he had never read Virgil.” At the same time, there is no need to hunt for parallels where no parallels exist. Many of the alleged analogies in Heitland’s elaborate list are too vague and faint to be reckoned as definite borrowings; and even M. Pichon, who adopts a sounder attitude regarding the Virgilian influence, scarcely convinces us in his claim that the vanishing of Julia’s ghost is modelled on that of Creusa, or that a father’s anguish over a dying son is modelled on Anna’s grief over Dido.[925]

Horace influenced Lucan slightly, Ovid very considerably. Sharing his uncle’s admiration for Ovid, he not only borrowed mythological material from him but also inherited much of his rhetorical dexterity. The Ovidian gift of repeating an idea in surprisingly new ways reappears in Lucan, and accounts for Fronto’s criticism that in his first seven lines he simply rang the changes on the one idea of “worse than civil wars.”[926] He has not Ovid’s wonderful lightness and facility, but in the smoothness and monotony of his versification it can be seen that the rhythms of the _Metamorphoses_ have told upon him. Resemblances to earlier poets like Ennius[927] are not distinct enough to base conclusions upon; and a similarly negative result, many will agree, comes from the evidence adduced by Hosius[928] to detect verbal influences exerted by Manilius, by the author of _Aetna_, by the earlier books of Livy and by Q. Curtius. This inquiry has considerable interest in its bearing on works so conjectural in date as the _Astronomica_, _Aetna_ and the _History of Alexander_; but unfortunately the evidence rests upon slight similarities and amounts to little. Some of the not very impressive resemblances between Curtius and Lucan are due to analogy of facts (deserts, for example, are much alike the world over, and prompt similar terminology); other resemblances may be ascribed to community of source; and others are simply part of the common stock of Latin expression. One exceptional case is that of Seneca, some of whose works, particularly the tragedies, appear (after allowance has been made for the wide prevalence of the same mythology and the same rhetoric) to have affected Lucan. This hypothesis, if accepted, would prove the anteriority of the tragedies and support their attribution to Seneca.

Far more important, however, than the discovery of verbal similarities is the consideration of the action of rhetoric on Lucan’s genius. When it is remembered that the essential aim in academic declamation was to appear clever and striking at all costs, the central characteristic of his epic is at once grasped. The dominant note is one of display. The object, not to be natural, but above everything to be piquant and impressive, is pursued with marvellous vigour and with mastery of all effective artifices. To his training, therefore, and to his aim we owe the parade of erudition which leads him into digressions[929] and enumerations; the descent into realistic detail which is calculated to cause a shudder; the subtlety of argument which makes a debating speech cogent; the tendency to hyperbole which is bound to arrest attention; the love of point, epigram, antithesis which produces memorable phrases; and the recollection or invention of pithy maxims which embody human experience. His erudition is in part encyclopaedic, based on the science of the day, and in part mythological, based on the ancient literary education. The former accounts for excursuses on subjects like astronomy and geography,[930] many of which are out of place; the latter appears in allusions or descriptions. The allusions may be straightforward, as when the preparations for Pharsalia are likened to those before the giants’ war, and when Caesar haunted by ghosts is likened to the matricide Orestes;[931] or they may be slightly more recondite, as when the olive-branch is called “the leafage of Cecropian Minerva,” and when Marius is said to “gather Libyan wrath,” because, like the giant Antaeus, he drew fighting-force from the soil of Africa.[932] Myth in Lucan’s eyes yields opportunities for exhibiting book-knowledge and so overpowers his philosophy upon occasion. Certainly in a critical mood he would, Stoic-like, reject the legends. It is the free-thinker that speaks through Cornelia’s guarded promise to follow her husband “through hell, if hell there be” (_per Tartara, si sunt ulla_, IX. 101-102). But should the old traditional colour seem requisite, Lucan makes no scruple about its introduction: thus Julia’s ghost, expelled from Elysium (III. 12), knows that Tartarus is being enlarged to punish human misdeeds. His attitude is, in fact, not consistent: On the one hand, when Pompey reaches Cyprus, Lucan resists the attraction of the tale which long after inspired Botticelli’s “Nascita di Venere,” and so surrenders to rationalism with the unpoetic caveat “si numina nasci credimus”[933]: on the other hand, he is romantic enough to discern in the story of Antaeus or of the Golden Apples a chance for a telling description:[934]

None but a churl insults time-hallowed eld
And summons bards to tell plain truth. There was
Once on a time a forest all of gold
Whose wealth weighed down its boughs with yellow fruit.
A troop of maidens watched that radiant grove:
And round the trees, ’neath ruddy metal bowed,
A serpent never doomed to slumber coiled.

Realism in Lucan is now natural, now morbid, now grotesque. Too often it is coupled with the desire to harrow by dwelling on the horrible. Hence he revels in describing tortures, the agonies of the wounded, the repulsive ghoulishness of a witch, the still twitching mouth of Pompey after his head has been hacked off, revolting aspects of cremation, and equally revolting aspects of putrefaction.[935] So zealous is he in making a point that he again and again overshoots the mark, as in his account of a crowd of victims mutually smothering each other;[936] or of an old man’s reminiscence of searching among the slain during the Sullan Terror for a body whose neck would fit his brother’s head, which he was carrying;[937] or of Curio’s slaughtered men in Africa having no room to fall:

Hemmed by the throng each corpse still kept its feet
(_Compressum turba stetit omne cadauer_, IV. 787).

When the realism is strained to breaking-point, it becomes unreal, as in the carnage during the seafight at Massilia. There the devilish ingenuity in inventing bizarre modes of death fails to make the struggle truly heroic, because the artificiality detracts from strong simplicity and pathos.[938] The poet, having caused smiles by far-fetched conceits, only just succeeds towards the end in striking a note of human feeling when he relates the parting of the mortally wounded Argus from his father.[939]

Good examples of Lucan’s management of speeches are those of Caesar and Pompey in Book VII, where the two great opponents are made to express themselves in the author’s forceful, if rather bombastic, rhetoric. In Volteius’s speech in Book IV, encouraging his men to slay each other, we have virtually a thesis supported by the tricks of the schools and transferred to verse: the men by their death have to make a spectacle of themselves and the speech is correspondingly spectacular. The same rhetoric, often powerful and ingenious, invades parts of the epic where there is no set speech, but where the poet becomes declamatory, rendering his work, Quintilian thought, _magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus_. Thus the reflections upon Pompey’s grave in Book VIII are composed after the fashion of a special pleader in a _controuersia_. The smartness in shifting positions and the disregard for consistency argue little solidity; and even where, as in this passage,[940] the author’s favourite Pompey is concerned, the limited depth of feeling is comparable to nothing so much as that of a versatile advocate. One is naturally reminded of Lucan’s lost prose speeches for and against Sagitta.

Hyperbole is among his most noticeable rhetorical tendencies. He overstates and, in pursuit of overstatements, is drawn into the kind of elaboration which characterizes the storm in Book V.[941] But the exaggeration is often confined to a single idea: so, to convey the notion of Caesar’s immense lines of circumvallation near Dyrrhachium, Lucan avers that, inside them, rivers run their whole length from source to mouth,

There many rivers rise and speed their course
Till yet within the lines they join the sea;[942]

and, of Thessaly polluted by the slain,

What crop shall rise unstained with tainted blade?
Thy plough shall ever wound a Roman ghost![943]

One of the great secrets of Lucan’s brilliant rhetoric is his subtle power of expressing thought in terse[944] pointed form, often assisted by antithesis. When this subtlety is not carried to excess, the results are extraordinarily effective in producing memorable lines and phrases, epigrammatically summarizing a character or a situation or, in the older meaning of _sententia_, a general truth. Even his less natural conceits have a way of clinging to the memory, like his paradoxical manner of suggesting that when Caesar’s ships lie helpless on a still sea the crews would prefer a watery grave to being thus becalmed: “all hope of shipwreck vanishes” (_naufragii spes omnis abit_).[945] Typical common-places admirably expressed in his neat Latin are those on the peril of success,

Greatness is wrecked upon itself: the gods
Have set that limit on prosperity
(_In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus_
_Crescendi posuere modum_, I. 81-82);

on the danger of delay,

Postponement ever hurts the well-prepared
(_Semper nocuit differre paratis_, I. 281);

on famine as a cause of revolt,

A starving people knows not fear
(_Nescit plebes ieiuna timere_, III. 58);

on the secret happiness of death,

From those who are to live the gods conceal
The bliss of death; so they endure their life
(_Victurosque dei celant ut uiuere durent_
_Felix esse mori_, IV. 519-520);

on condonation of a widely supported fault,

The sin that many share goes unavenged
(_Quidquid multis peccatur inultum est_, V. 260);

on death, as viewed in Pompey’s last words,

In life success is mutable: in death
Man meets not misery.
(_Mutantur prospera uitae,_
_Non fit morte miser_, VIII. 631-632);

on the true attitude to death,

The brave man’s finest lot
Is knowledge how to die; next, death enforced
(_Scire mori sors prima uiris, sed proxima cogi_, IX. 211).

Alliteration is noticeable in some of the examples cited. Lucan does not use it so sparingly as Heitland suggests: on the contrary, much of his verse gains additional emphasis from being alliterative, as does his best known line,

Heaven loved the winning cause, Cato the lost
(_Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni_, I. 128);

or the simile descriptive of a storming charge by African horse,

The loud sound shook the land: from shattered earth,
High as the dust the Thracian whirlwind drives,
A cloud dimmed heaven and drew the darkness down
(_Tum campi tremuere sono: terraque soluta_
_Quantus Bistonio torquetur turbine puluis,_
_Aëra nube sua texit traxitque tenebras_, IV. 766-768).

A scrutiny of Lucan’s feverish mannerisms and wilful faults must not blind one to his merits. It is true that he is rhetorical and sensational; and that behind his clever artifices lies no mystery. He is able half to surprise, half to weary us with dazzling tricks of style; but he seldom enchants us with beauty. Yet, when all his inaccuracies, distortions, conceits, digressions and tediousness have been urged against him, his great passages prove that, in spite of artificiality, he can be fiery[946] and well-nigh irresistible. He would have gained extraordinarily by compression: that is to say, he shows to most advantage in extracts. His best rhetoric is something intensely stirring, though it is a style more appreciated in France than in England. Nor, even if he seldom is deeply poetic, should the vein of poetry that is in him be overlooked: it appears in passages such as that on Pompey’s last look at Italy, or on Cornelia in love with sorrow:

Locking in fast embrace her cruel grief,
She hath her joy in tears, enamouréd
Of woe that henceforth is her lord,
(_Saeuomque arte complexa dolorem_
_Perfruitur lacrimis et amat pro coniuge luctum_, IX. 111-112).

Some have submitted that the _Pharsalia_ is an epic without a hero, or alternatively an epic with three. Perhaps it is truer to argue that Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem in virtue of the defiant egoism and the untiring energy summarized in the line,

Thinking naught done while aught remained to do,
(_Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum_, II. 657).