Chapter XXII: Book VII: is not free from turgidity and extravagance, but it is the

greatest book of the poem, and describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalia as well as their fortunes in the culminating battle. With an outburst of enthusiasm, Lucan predicts the enduring power of his subject to engross readers:

’Mid tribes in far-off years, ’mid folks unborn,
Haply by fame alone to time bequeathed,
Or haply profited by such renown
As e’en my toiling pen can lend the great,
When men shall read of war, this tale shall still
Move hope and fear alike, or futile wish.
Spellbound each reader still shall fancy doom
Is yet to come, not past and gone, and so
Will favour thee, great Pompey, to the end.[891]

In the famous passage on Pompey’s dream, he is fancied to be once more receiving the plaudits of the Roman people in his own theatre:

In dreamland Rome seemed his. Break not that sleep,
O camp-watch! Ne’er let bugle strike his ears!
To-morrow’s ghastly night, sad to recall
The day, brings naught but deadly battle-lines.[892]

He awakes to realities. The Pompeians clamour for the fray and criticize their leader’s caution:

In Pompey’s camp “Pharsalia!” was the prayer.[893]

Unhistorically Cicero, who was not present, is introduced as urging him to give battle. He consents under protest and his men have their will; but

On many a face was paleness as of death
To come—a look most eloquent of doom.[894]

Amidst other presages of disaster, Lucan’s bias insinuates that Caesar sacrificed to the infernal powers. The harangue to his followers is, some of it plausible argument, some of it rhodomontade, but, by reason of its vigour, all very readable. Observing the disposition of Pompey’s troops (Lucan’s account of which does not agree with that of other authorities), and seeing his wish fulfilled in the enemy’s descent upon the plain, Caesar confidently addresses his soldiers as the true arbiters of his destiny:

No need for prayer: woo fortune now by fight,[895]

and continuing his alliterative rhetoric:

Wave but the blade and bring the whole world low.[896]

With corresponding alliteration, and not without bravado, Pompey’s speech to his army expresses his reasons for confidence:

Our better cause bids hope for help from Heaven.[897]

But in vain. Tyranny, in Lucan’s view, was triumphant at Pharsalia. Why did Rome ever know freedom, if she was to lose it?[898] Surely, the gods’ apathy had led through civil warfare to the creation of new deities and a new religion in emperor-worship![899] Refraining from details of individual horrors on the battle-field, Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey looking back upon lost greatness with Caesar, whose adversary is henceforward not Pompey but freedom,[900] and who to discerning eyes might well be an object of pity—“’twas worse to win” (_uincere peius erat_). The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was leader of the really guilty side, was hunted Orestes-like by avenging furies, callously surveyed the dead, and withheld from the rotting corpses that cremation which would not be refused (and here a piece of far-fetched Stoicism is dragged in) by the universal conflagration at the end of the world.

The main interest of Book VIII lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land: it is broken by reflections on and apostrophes to both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, alarmed at the rustle of woodland leaves in the wind,[901] the defeated warrior escapes in a frail craft to Lesbos, where he endeavours to console his swooning wife:

Thy husband’s woe alone may win thee praise.
Take heart: let thine affection strive with fate
And love me for myself, a vanquished man.[902]

He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his converse with the pilot upon astronomy. By the Levant he reaches Cilicia, the scene of his old victories over piracy, and holds council with his remaining supporters on the policy, cunning but unprincipled, of playing East against West. Why not entangle and weaken Parthia by inducing her to fight in Rome’s civil wars? This proposal of Pompey’s is scouted as dishonourable by Lentulus—why not rather, he argues, keep the conflict within the Roman world, and try Egypt, whose King, Ptolemy, owed his throne indirectly to Pompey? So he sails to meet the death prepared for him by Ptolemy’s cynical adviser Pothinus, whose contention is that expediency must be preferred to right and that it is wisdom to side with the conqueror:

Freedom in crime protects a hated sway....
Who would be good must quit a royal court:
Virtue and sovereign power do not accord.
Blush to be cruel and you’ll always fear![903]

In the offing at Pelusium, overmastering fate secured that Pompey should be enticed from his high-sterned vessel into a small boat, where, within sight of wife and son, he was stabbed by the traitor Septimius. Achillas, that “Pharian satellite,” claimed the right to carry the victim’s head to the young king. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his besetting passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Virgil’s dignity of sorrow, or beauty of simile, we have the repulsive details of the still gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid cross-wise on a boat-thwart to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins to cut; there are bones to break; it all takes time (_diu_); for the art of whirling off the head at a single blow, Lucan remarks (with his thoughts perhaps on Caligula), had yet to be developed—_nondum artis erat caput ense rotare_.[904] Such realism is rendered superfluous by what follows:

To let the curséd boy prince know the dead,
Yon manly wealth of hair by kings admired,
The locks which graced that noble brow, were seized,
And, while the features lived and sobbing breath
Yet moved the lips to murmur, while the eyes
Unclosed were glazing, on a Pharian spear
Was fixed that head whose word for war had rung
The knell of peace, the head that swayed our laws
In _campus_ or from _rostra_ eloquent.
This face, O Roman Fortune, pleased thee once!

The headless body is recovered from the sea in the moonlight by Cordus, one of Pompey’s Roman attendants, and, after an incomplete cremation, for which the material has to be supplied by the somewhat ludicrous device of theft from a conveniently deserted funeral pile, it is buried hastily; for the dawn has surprised Cordus at his ceremonial. But the lonely grave on the beach cannot confine one so illustrious:

The Roman name and the wide realms of Rome
Mark the true boundary of great Pompey’s tomb.[905]

Imprecations upon Egypt follow—futile, because Lucan’s curse of barrenness, if it could have been fulfilled, would have closed the chief granary of Rome. With further wild rhetoric on the burial-place the book ends.

Pompey’s apotheosis begins Book IX:

Not in Egyptian ashes lay his soul:
A little dust held not so great a shade.
Spurning the tomb and quitting limbs half-burned
And the unworthy pyre, it makes for Heaven.

The lamentations of Cornelia, her announcement of her husband’s injunction that unceasing war must be waged for liberty against Caesar, the vengeance on Egypt threatened by Pompey’s elder son when he learns of his father’s murder, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminary to the chief theme of the book—the heroism of Cato. He will have none of the argument that continuance of war is criminal, now that Pompey is dead. Expostulating with reluctant Pompeians, he sarcastically declares that Caesar will believe they did him an intentional benefit by running before him at Pharsalia—here and in other passages erroneously called Philippi. As their next objective is Juba’s kingdom, Lucan is enabled to describe the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes, a storm that imperils Cato’s fleet, and the swamps of Triton which most of the ships reach in safety. The resolution to march across the desert to Mauretania occasions a digression on Libya as well as passages recounting Cato’s marvellous endurance[906] of thirst, and his refusal to consult the oracle of Hammon (whose misplacement is one of the not uncommon geographical blunders in Lucan). Labienus would have the will of Jupiter ascertained by this austere captain of men:

The laws above have ever ruled thy life,
And thou dost follow God. Lo! now the leave
Is thine to speak with Jove. Ask of the doom
That waits accursed Caesar, and hold search
Into thy country’s future character.[907]

Cato, however, in tones worthy of the oracle itself, scouts the idea, criticizing it on Stoic principles:

What should be asked? Whether I’d rather die
Free, arms in hand, or look on tyranny?
Whether a life is naught, e’en when prolonged?
Or if years make a difference? Or if
A good man can be hurt by any blow?
Does Fortune drop her threats when Virtue fights?
Is it enough to wish what merits praise?
Does right ne’er grow by gain? All this we know:
Jove cannot plant it deeper in our heart.[908]

Cato’s inspiring fortitude during the march with his soldiers is almost smothered beneath the mass of irrelevance expounding the origin of serpents in Africa, and catalogues enumerating not only various species of serpents but also various sorts of death from snake-bite. Late in the book Caesar reappears on a voyage which brings him to the ruins of Troy; and Lucan’s confidence in his own literary immortality prompts an apostrophe to poetry as conferring eternal renown:

Hallowed and mighty toil of bards empowered
To rescue all from fate and grant the gift
To mortal nations of eternity!
Grudge not, O Caesar, fame to heroes old—
If Latin poësy may promise aught,
Then, long as Homer’s honours shall endure,
Peoples to come will read both thee and me;
For my _Pharsalia_ will live, and time
Shall ne’er damn Lucan to obscurity.[909]

Caesar’s veneration of his ancestral gods at Troy would have received more sympathetic treatment from Virgil. Lucan is content to record his coasting voyage along Asia Minor and his crossing by Rhodes to Egypt, where, amidst his hesitation whether to land, one of Ptolemy’s courtiers comes aboardship with the head of Pompey. To Lucan his grief over his rival’s murder is hypocrisy: now that he had ocular proof of the crime and thought it safe to be a good father-in-law (_tutumque putauit iam bonus esse socer_),

Some tears he shed that fell not of freewill,
And forced his moanings from a mirthful heart.