Chapter VI: Lucan: Historical Epic

The author of the _Pharsalia_—Authorities for his life—His
career—Relations with Nero—Lost works—The _Pharsalia_—Summary
of the ten books—What was its contemplated length?—The three
books first composed—Daring in choice of subject—Originality
in epic treatment—Lucan’s sources, historical, philosophical
and literary—Historical value—Misstatements and anti-Caesarian
bias—Stoicism—Influence of previous poets—How rhetoric affected
him—Erudition—Realism—Speeches—Pointed style in _sententiae_—A
vein of poetry—His hero.

LUCAN

Precocity and enthusiasm were eminent characteristics of the young poet who first throve under Nero’s favour and finally succumbed to that emperor’s jealousy. Byron, dying at thirty-six, is reckoned a fertile genius; but when Lucan had to face death at an age earlier by more than ten years, there stood to his credit an almost equally wonderful mass of work—letters and speeches, epic and drama, miscellaneous verse, court-poetry, panegyrics and satires, as well as librettos for mimes. Of all these, however, time has spared only his _Pharsalia_, broken off in the tenth book. The determining factors in his career were his descent from two prominent Spanish families and his rhetorical education; for upon these depended the success and failure of his life, and the main qualities of his thought and style.

Lucan’s maternal grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a Corduban speaker of note. His paternal grandfather was the elder Seneca, well known to Roman literary circles in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius; his father was Annaeus Mela, an _eques_, apparently something of a philosophic recluse,[848] while his uncles were M. Annaeus Novatus (the “Gallio” of the Acts of the Apostles) and the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca. To the latter he owed his introduction to court-life, which proved an incentive to brilliant achievement but ultimately compassed his ruin.

While the impersonality of epic precludes the _Pharsalia_ from yielding details about Lucan’s life, yet from it alone sure influences could be drawn as to his training in literature, rhetoric and philosophy, his anti-Caesarism, his self-confident and impetuous spirit. We are not, however, without definite biographical sources. There are two lives of importance, one imperfect and inimical, manifestly the basis of Jerome’s entry[849] regarding the death of Lucan, and, since the days of Joseph Scaliger, concluded with justice to come from Suetonius’s _De uiris illustribus_; and the other life a fuller and appreciative one, assigned to Vacca, a grammarian of the sixth century. Statius and Martial were admirers of Lucan and joined with his widow Polla in keeping his memory green; hence the _Genethliacon Lucani_ of the former and several short pieces by the latter poet supply additional information.[850] The record of Lucan’s connexion with the Pisonian conspiracy is in Tacitus, who also in the _Dialogus_ ranks Lucan as already a classic alongside of Horace and Virgil.[851]

M. Annaeus Lucanus[852] (A.D. 39-65) was born, about the year of his grandfather Seneca’s death, at the “Patrician Colony” of Corduba, itself for generations a centre of intellectual importance in Spain. The infant, when eight months old, was brought to Rome; for it was natural that his father Mela should migrate in response to the lure of the great city, where already his own father and brother had made their mark. Later, there are interesting references by the philosopher Seneca to the child. In the _Consolatio_ addressed to his mother Helvia he writes about a nephew, who must be Lucan, as a winning boy whose merry playfulness and talkativeness would keep anyone amused (_ad cuius conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia ... cuius non lacrimas illius hilaritas supprimat?_)[853] and an epigram of his prays that one day this prattling child (_dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit_) may rival his uncles in eloquence.[854] His education under the best teachers was directed towards the realization of that very wish. Grounded in literature and in the traditionally wide range of learning subsidiary to “grammar,” he proceeded in due course to the study of rhetoric and philosophy. His declamations in Latin and Greek were of astonishing ability, eclipsing the efforts of his fellow-students, if not of his masters, and commanding the applause of his hearers. Such brilliance was at once a result and a cause of self-confidence: and the habitual desire to win attention confirmed him in many artificial conceits inseparable from the rhetorical system. Some philosophy he derived from his uncle; but he had at least one other famous Stoic teacher in Cornutus, at whose lectures, if we may trust Probus, he met Persius.[855] For Persius’s poetry Lucan expressed cordial admiration—a noticeable tribute from one whose precocious fertility had led him to compare himself favourably with Virgil.[856]

Quite early in his reign[857] Nero had his attention drawn by Seneca to a nephew so talented. Little is known precisely regarding the development of his relations with the emperor; but we read of a visit paid to Athens from which Nero recalled him to join his _entourage_, and of honours conferred, such as the quaestorship before the regular age of twenty-five, and an augural priesthood. In A.D. 60, when twenty-one, he achieved his first public literary triumph in his _Laudes Neronis_ at the quinquennial festival of the _Neronia_, then newly established, and at this date Nero and his youthful panegyrist were evidently on the best of terms. But Lucan’s position became insecure as Nero’s dislike for Seneca grew pronounced. It was perilous to vie with a clever and conceited imperial egotist prone to arrogate a principate in arts as well as in state, and an award of the prize to Lucan in a competition where he had the hardihood to enter against Nero rankled in the ruler’s heart. Suetonius implies that the final breach arose from Lucan’s sensitive fancy that Nero’s attitude towards his recitations was deliberately insulting, and from the poet’s unbecoming ridicule of the emperor’s verses. Vacca ascribes the quarrel to Nero’s jealousy of Lucan’s powers, and declares that he was forbidden further poetical production or forensic pleading. Thus silenced, except for covert satire, his passionate and wounded genius was driven into the bypaths of Piso’s conspiracy, in which he took a prominent part,[858] indulging, according to Suetonius, in ferocious threats against the tyrant and in rapturous praises of tyrannicide. When, however, this over-ripened intrigue was unmasked, disaster revealed the weakness of his character; for, oblivious of his professed Stoicism, he descended to abject entreaties, and, in anxiety to save his life, made confessions involving among his accomplices his apparently innocent mother. That at least is what Suetonius records.[859] But pusillanimity did not capture Nero’s indulgence. Lucan was ordered to die; and after a sumptuous repast had his veins opened. Then he recollected, and recited as his last words, a piece of his own about a soldier similarly bleeding to death. This dying quotation, although Tacitus’s words[860] might very well suggest that it belonged to a separate poem, has been sought for in three[861] different places in the _Pharsalia_, and by some[862] identified with a passage from the ninth book:

His tears were blood; and, where the ooze can find
An outlet, wells abundant gore; the mouth
And open nostrils stream: his sweat comes red:
And every limb is drenched from teeming veins.
So the whole body is a single wound.

Thus, when “the mad despot’s crime” (_rabidi nefas tyranni_) cut short the poet’s career, his epic was incomplete and only in part published. “Why doth cruel allotment debar greatness from old age?” asks Statius in his tribute to Lucan’s memory.[863]

Thirteen of Lucan’s lost works were known to Vacca, and five of these are alluded to by Statius, who adds the _Adlocutio ad Pollam_.[864] Suetonius, who confirms the other two authorities regarding the _Laudes Neronis_, mentions also a lampoon on Nero. The sagacious Vacca is clear that his thirteen are minor works compared with the epic on the civil war, but still “not all to be disdained”;[865] and one might guess that the most important are those common to Vacca and Statius—the _Iliacon_ from the Trojan cycle, the _Catachthonion_, a descent into the underworld, the _Laudes Neronis_, and the _Orpheus_. Naturally, although in all likelihood less important, the _Adlocutio_ to Lucan’s wife Polla is mentioned by Statius in his poem addressed to her in widowhood; but we do not know whether it was in prose or verse, unless its inclusion immediately after the _De Incendio Vrbis_, the one prose composition in Statius’s list, raises a presumption that it likewise was in prose. The remaining items in Vacca’s list are the _Saturnalia_, on the gaieties of December,[866] ten books of miscellaneous _Siluae_, the unfinished tragedy of _Medea_, fourteen _Salticae Fabulae_,[867] _Epigrammata_;[868] and in prose (besides his account of the Great Fire at Rome) a series of _Epistulae ex Campania_ (which, if they had survived, ought to have proved a fascinating addition to our specimens of ancient letter-writing) as well as a speech for and one against Octavius Sagitta. These _orationes_ suggest that Lucan in A.D. 58, perhaps filled with the detective instinct characteristic of not a few literary men, seized upon one of the most exciting murder trials of the day[869] as material for two clever rhetorical show-pieces in proof of what a versatile genius could say on both sides of a case complicated by cross-swearing and by an innocent freedman’s self-accusation.

The number of these works would be reduced by one on the suggestion which has been made[870] that the _Catachthonion_ and _Orpheus_ may be identical. But this seems impossible. True, both concern the underworld and are in hexameters;[871] but Statius makes separate allusions to them, and they are mentioned at different points in the _Life_ by Vacca in the sixth century, when Lucan’s works were, as his words imply, still extant.

The ten books of the _Pharsalia_,[872] on the war which broke out in 49 B.C. between Caesar and Pompey, amount to over 8000 hexameters, but do not complete the poet’s design; for the tenth book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.