The Pharsalia and the End of the Ennian Story

This chapter builds upon the anchoring allusions to Ennius discussed in Chapters 1–2 to consider the poem’s narrative closure of Ennius’s epic on a broader thematic scale, with the argument that Lucan aims to end the Ennian project and close the book on the Roman story narrated in the Annales. In a broad polemic against the Ennian master trope of Roman spatial and temporal expansion, the Pharsalia forcefully and emphatically closes this narrative—figuring Roman movement inward, into and against itself, with Pharsalia as a space and time of collapse and self-destruction for Rome. This chapter focuses on crucial passages on the end of Rome/the Roman story in Pharsalia 7, read alongside fragments from the Annales, while also proposing that Lucan’s structuring of the Pharsalia takes on the Annales as code model and structural foil. The collapse at the end of Book 10 of the poem’s essentially annalistic framework mirrors and underscores the poem’s attention to the collapse of the Ennian master trope of Roman dominance in time and space.