Lucan and the Closing of the Maritime Moment

This chapter explores Lucan’s closure of a theme that is central to Livius Andronicus’s Odusia and Naevius’s Bellum Punicum, as well as Ennius’s Annales: Rome’s emerging control of the sea. Recent scholarly work has looked at the confluence of Rome’s “maritime moment” in the third century BCE and its epic moment, that is, the near simultaneous emergence of Roman ascendancy on the sea and Roman epic. This chapter proposes that the Pharsalia—in its concentration on sinking ships, crashing fleets, and the “un-winning” of the contest with Rome’s maritime rival Carthage—narrates the loss of Roman sway over the sea and, with it, the corresponding fall of the genre that captured and monumentalized that sway. Readers of the poem have noted how extraordinary Lucan’s attention to the sea is, and have also long mused on his focus on Africa and the Carthaginian threat, points of focus that are central to the project of revisiting and closing the epic genre’s beginnings on the sea. These early epics exhibit a keen sense of the precariousness of Rome’s launch onto the sea, but ultimately highlight the success of Roman naval expansion—and so, this chapter argues, they are keyed into the uncertainty but ultimate success of the genre of epic as well. Lucan’s poem marks a sharp difference by directing that sense of peril and contingency not toward progress (of Rome on the sea or of the Roman epic story) but toward wholesale destruction and closure.