Toppling Topoi: Epic’s Violence Directed against Itself

This chapter considers the Pharsalia’s inclusion of conventional episodes of violence that go back to epic’s foundational texts, and Lucan’s redirection of the violence in those episodes toward self-destruction. Each of these episodes (the mutilation of Marius Gratidianus at 2.173–93; Caesar’s deforestation of a grove at 3.394–452; and the defiant battlefield stand of Scaeva at 6.140–262) contains anchoring allusions to early epic texts; in each passage Lucan develops, at the lexical and thematic levels, his conception of the genre coming to an end by mutilating, crashing upon, and slaughtering itself. As in the passages considered in Chapter 1, here Ennius and Homer frequently emerge as joint models of epic primacy and joint foils for Lucan’s agenda of epic closure.