Chapter XX: Book I: , though in many respects powerful, might have had more epic force,

had it plunged at once into the narrative. As it is, the action is delayed by the announcement of the theme, a remonstrance on the iniquity of civil warfare, the comforting reflection that but for that warfare Rome would have had no Nero, the fantastic picture of the emperor as a god, and a fawning address to him as sufficient inspiration for the poet without need to invoke Apollo or Bacchus. The ensuing sketch of the causes of strife omits the burning question between the Senate and Caesar concerning Caesar’s command, but contains a vivid glance at the motives and characters of the two protagonists, spurred by rival claims (_stimulos dedit aemula uirtus_):

Caesar could brook no man in front of him,
Pompey none by his side.[873]

Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent campaigning, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age.[874] Now a man of 58, he was only six years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds us, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death rendered the breach between them more likely. In Pompey the poet, warmly though he espouses his cause, discerns a man over-confident in his previous record, who

Finds not new strength, but trusting much past luck
Stands there the shadow of a mighty name.[875]

The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn with force, though not with sympathy:

His manhood knew
No rest—his only shame to lose a fight.
Keen and untamed, where hope or anger called,
He turned his hand, nor quailed to stain his sword ...
To make a path by havoc was his joy.[876]

Strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage of the Alps (l. 183), bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon—the antithesis in adjectives is Lucan’s—to be confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance:

The waters of the little Rubicon
Were won, when, in the general’s sight, arose
The mighty Phantom of his land, dismayed,
Clear through the darkling night, most sad of look,
Letting her grey locks stream from head that wore
A crown of towers: so, with her tresses torn,
Bare-armed she took her stand hard by and spoke
Words blent with groans: “Men, whither press ye on?
Where bear my standards? If with right ye come,
Or if as citizens, thus far ye may.”

Then thrilled a shudder through the general’s frame,
Stiffening his hair, and on the river’s brim
Curbing his march a languor held his steps.
Forthwith he prayed: “O Thou, that lookest forth
From the Tarpeian Rock down on the walls
Of our great city, O Thou Thunderer,
And Phrygian Home-Gods, ... Vestal Fires, and peer
Of highest Godhead, Rome, bless my design!
Not thee do I pursue in frenzied arms.
Lo! I am Caesar, lord on land and sea
O’er all the world, and with thy leave e’en now
Thy champion.”[877]

The Rubicon crossed, Ariminum is taken; Caesar is met by Curio and other tribunes expelled from Rome. A summons sent for troops from Gaul gives occasion for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides and Druids: then a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of prodigies and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amidst presages of disaster. Lucan, it will be noted, while he removes from his historical poem the conventional gods of epic, supplies their place by the supernatural, as represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophetic second sight of both an astrologer and a matron so weirdly possessed that she has power to behold Pompey already lying dead.

A hesitant note of philosophy opens Book II. Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed knowledge of future woes through omens? Then, with a transient departure from Stoic dogmatism, he speculates on the operation of cause in the world. Is it the outcome of law or chance? Yet he clinches this old debate with the Epicureans by uttering the prayer,

Thy will be done forthwith: let human thought
Be blind to coming doom: grant hope mid fear![878]

Mourning, as at a death, falls on Rome: men pray for the peril of foreign attack in preference to internecine strife. It is a passage typically rhetorical in the tumid declamation of its earlier portion and the argumentative point of its close:

Make Rome the foe of all the nations, but
Spare us a civil war! Let Dacians hem
Us here and Getae there: one rival should
Meet Spain, the other turn his standard ’gainst
The quivers of the East. And let thy hand,
O Rome, have no relief from toil! Or, if,
Ye Gods, ye will to blast th’ Italian name,
Then let all ether, fallen into fire,
Crash manifold in lightning on the earth!
O wrathful Father, in one instant smite
Both sides, both leaders, ere they yet have earned
Their doom! From such a crop of novel crime
Seek they to prove which shall be lord at Rome?
Scarce had it been worth while to stimulate
A civil war, if neither were to rule.[879]

The chief incidents of the book are the remarriage to Cato of his former wife, Marcia, widow of Hortensius; the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius (pointedly introduced because an ancestor of Nero) and the driving of Pompey southwards to Brundisium and thence overseas to Epirus. What Heitland frankly calls “padding” consists in digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The figure of Cato is of significance in relation to Book IX, where he plays a commanding part. In Lucan’s eyes Cato is the incarnation of virtue, hitherto guiltless of his country’s blood, but now, as Brutus tells him, drawn perforce into the struggle:

Thy virtuous past shall have this one reward—
War makes thee guilty as it finds the rest:
(_Accipient alios, facient te bella nocentem._)[880]

Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly depicts his Stoic ability to combine a self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims,

To keep the Mean and hold due boundary,
To follow Nature, spend a life for Rome,
Deeming his birth was for the world, not self:
His feast to stifle hunger, and his Gods
To ward the storm from roof-tree: richest garb
For him to draw i’ the old way round his limbs
The Roman burgher’s shaggy gown.... But ne’er
Did selfish joy creep in to steal a part
In Cato’s deeds.[881]