The Pharsalia and the Loss of Nostos

This chapter builds on the understanding of nostos as a binding master trope in the Odyssey, and as an end accomplished by hero (Odysseus) and poet (Homer) alike. It argues that Lucan crafts the journeys of each of his central characters—Caesar, Cato, and Pompey—as reversals of Odysseus’s nostos, each in a distinct way, but with none reaching home in the poem, and each conspicuously failing to achieve the spousal reunion that is so central to Odysseus’s nostos. It examines how each narrative arc is emblematic of the larger story in the Pharsalia of Rome’s own imperiled journey and ultimate loss of nostos and even the very idea of “home.” In this process, epic poetry too is undone, left without the fulfillment and completion of nostos—as here the marker of closure comes in the thematic exploration of opening up. Within this chapter the place of Homer’s Odyssey as an anti-model is paramount, but the chapter also advances the argument that Livius’s Odusia—the poem that first carried over and initiated the telling of epic at Rome—stands alongside the Homeric poem as a foil for Lucan, and in this way the unraveling of the epic arc of nostos carries a doubly powerful poetic force.