Lucan at and against Epic’s Beginnings

This chapter offers close readings of three programmatic passages in which Lucan holds up his polemical engagement with early epic models. The chapter begins with treatment of Caesar’s visit to Troy in Book 9, a passage including Lucan’s most explicit statement about his place in the epic tradition. Here, through a series of evocative allusions, he places his work alongside and indeed beyond the epics of Ovid, Virgil, Ennius, and Homer—the last two imagined together. The age-old crux of how to refer to the poem (Pharsalia or Bellum Civile) is also addressed, with the argument that the name Pharsalia speaks in meaningful ways to the poem’s relationship with its model texts, especially the Iliad (as a toponym and central epic place that is dislocated by Pharsalia) and the Annales (as a marker of the progression of Roman time that is ended by the day of Pharsalia). The chapter then considers the opening lines of the poem (1.1–32), with a focus on the anchoring allusions to Homer, Livius Andronicus, and Ennius, and on the themes and master tropes from early epic that Lucan explores there. The chapter concludes with a new reading of the poetics in the first episode of the Pharsalia’s narrative (1.183–205), where Caesar’s spurning of the goddess Roma at the Rubicon also marks the poet’s rejection of the spirit of epic continuation that had carried through from Homer to Ennius to Virgil.