Pompey-The View from the Hill

Abstract The dissenting voice with which Lucan narrates the Phrasalia emphasizes the degree of its engagement by contrasting itself with others and deploring their inaction. Frequently the contrasting figure of disengagement is represented as simply watching the action, as a spectator. When that spectator is clearly the Jupiter of the Augustan poets, the refusal to intervene is testimony not just to a generalized apathy but actually to a culpable complicity with the politics of the regime Lucan detests. These are the principal conclusions to be drawn from the previous two chapters. As the three chapters that follow examine the enthusiasm of Caesar’s army to transform the civil wars into a show to be performed for the sake of their general, the ideological significance of spectacle will become ever more apparent Meanwhile the mentality to be examined in this chapter stands at a revealing point between the poles that have been established: a Republican general who can bear neither to watch a civil war nor to engage, and whose perspective on the civil war betrays his underlying bad faith; a Republiccan narrator whose instinct to praise that general can never be carried through with complete conviction.