Thunder and Lament

Lucan’s epic poem Pharsalia tells the story of the cataclysmic “end of Rome” through the victory of Julius Caesar and Caesarism in the civil wars of 49–48 BCE. This book argues that Lucan’s poetic agenda moves in lockstep with his narrative arc, as he fashions the Pharsalia to mark the momentous end of the epic genre. In order to accomplish the closure of the genre, Lucan engages pervasively and polemically with the very first works of Greek and Roman epic—inverting, collapsing, undoing, and completing tropes and themes introduced in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and in the foundational Latin epic poems by Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and most of all Ennius. By focusing on Lucan’s effort to “surpass the poets of old”—a phrase Statius would use of his achievement—this study deepens our appreciation of Lucan’s poetic accomplishment and of the tensions between beginning and ending that lie at the heart of the epic genre. Statius also read Lucan as a poet who both thunders and laments, and this book argues that Lucan closes off epic’s beginnings through gestures of thundering poetic violence and also through a transformation and completion of the traditional epic mode of lament. Equipped with these two registers of closure, each engaging and taking aim at epic’s primal texts, Lucan positions the Pharsalia as epic’s final song.