University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

ABANDONING THE CITY: MEANING AND IDENTITY IN LUCAN’S ROME

PHILIP C. COOK

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2016

To my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express my gratitude to my parents who instilled in me early on a love of books and a desire to learn. I am grateful to the Classics department at the University of

Florida for the opportunity to continue to study, and especially to Dr. Jennifer Rea for her patience and encouragement throughout the process of writing. All of my professors at UF have been excellent and I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to them for my experience over the past few years, especially to those on my committee. I appreciate all the input and suggestions from Drs. Van Steen, Smocovitis, and Eaverly.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

2 ROME ABANDONED AND USURPED ...... 15

Panel A: Rome and the Rending of Society ...... 16 Panel B: Mytilene and the Usurpation of Roman Values ...... 24 Panel C: Alexandria and the Descent into Nothingness ...... 31

3 PLACE AND IDENTITY: PLUNDERING THE TEMPLE ...... 38

Context ...... 39 Leges Amissae ...... 43 Libertas Lost ...... 49 Mores Parcorum Avorum ...... 55 Identity Abandoned ...... 63

4 PLACE AND POWER: THE SENATE IN EPIRUS ...... 69

The Speech Itself ...... 71 Dissonance ...... 75 Other Romes and Roman Identity ...... 84 Nero’s Rome and the Exercise of Power ...... 90

5 PLACE AND THE PAST: LIVY’S ROME AND LUCAN ...... 96

Livy’s Rome ...... 99 Rome’s Champions ...... 104 Lucan and Livy’s Vision ...... 109

6 PLACE AND THE FUTURE: ABANDONING NERO’S ROME ...... 119

Apostrophe I: Connecting to the Audience ...... 121 Apostrophe II: Authorial Judgment ...... 130

7 CONCLUSION ...... 143

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 151

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 162

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

ABANDONING THE CITY: MEANING AND IDENTITY IN LUCAN’S ROME

Philip C. Cook

December 2016

Chair: Jennifer Rea Major: Classical Studies

A thematic study of the abandoning of Rome and the loss it entails in Lucan’s

Bellum Civile, this dissertation traces a trajectory of devastation as it moves from the actual account of the abandonment of the city in book one to a complete disintegration of Roman values and identity which are dependent on the city. Within this trajectory, a triangulation of place, power, and identity can be discerned which constitute a horizon of meaning for the poet whose loss leads to annihilation.

A second tier of understanding in the poem lies in the poet’s vatic posture of engagement with his audience which seeks to involve them in the abandonment of the city and the loss which follows. Through the repeated apostrophe to Rome, the poet keeps the city at the forefront of his audience, and through his indefinite addresses, he ties their engagement both to the abandonment of the city and to attempts to supplant

Rome with other centers of power and identity. This proleptic stance combines with consistent similarities between the events of the civil war and Nero’s Rome to allow the poet to project abandonment and loss into his own compositional context. In this way,

the poet succeeds in guiding the audience’s reflection on their own relationship to the city and expressing a reproach and lament for the consequences of its abandonment.

This thematic thread within the poem responds to wider anxieties about the status of Rome, shifting centers of power and authority, and expanding identities for the governing elite during the principate of Nero. Lucan’s poem represents a traditionalist voice decrying social and political changes regarding place, power, and identity under

Nero, using the historical events of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar as a vehicle. In his poetic vision, these changes lead to annihilation and death.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The Roman poet M. Annaeus Lucanus, whose poem on the civil war serves as

our object of study, died by his own hand in 65 CE, specifically because of his

involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the emperor Nero and replace him with a

fellow senator named C. Calpurnius Piso.1 This Pisonian Conspiracy ultimately failed,

and Nero lived another three years until 68 CE when he, in turn, killed himself outside

Rome. Among other charges against Nero, the conspirators alleged murder, the

diminution of senatorial power, and the attempted destruction of the city of Rome.2

These charges were all reflective of a deeper dynamic of changing power structures and shifting identities under the Julio-Claudian emperors which Lucan addresses in his poem.

The advent of Augustus, the first princeps, and the death of the old Republic over eighty years before the accession of Nero in 54 CE inaugurated a new age and stimulated a sweeping array of social and political changes which reverberated down to

Nero’s principate and beyond. These changes necessarily impacted the governing elite centered in Rome who had effectively exercised power for over five hundred years. With

Augustus’ victory at Actium in 31 BCE, the princeps became a new source of power and authority whose evolving role restructured not only traditional (republican) seats of

1 Tac. Ann. 15.70. Tacitus does not specify the manner of Lucan’s death, only that it was ordered by Nero. The biographical tradition contributes the fact of suicide. Tucker (1987) suggests that Lucan was in fact executed based upon a reinterpretation of this passage in Tacitus. All abbreviations for Latin authors and their works follow the conventions of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (henceforth OLD).

2 Tac. Ann. 15.51 and 15.67. See also Griffin (1984) 166-170. On the destruction of Rome, Tacitus specifically quotes the military tribune, Subrius Flavus, accusing Nero of arson in the burning of the city, odisse coepi, postquam parricida matris et uxoris, auriga et histrio et incendiarius extitisti. For all references to the Annales of Tacitus, the text is Fisher (1906).

power, like the Senate to which Lucan belonged, but also redefined traditional

abstractions like liberty, law, and other values of the mos maiorum which were central

to Roman culture and identity.3 The expansion of Roman control throughout the

Mediterranean further led to an expansion of the sense of patria, homeland, beyond

simply the Urbs, the city of Rome. The governing aristocracy formerly rooted exclusively

in Italy likewise expanded to an aristocracy of empire by integrating within itself

provincial elites.4 Accompanying these changes was a continued extension of Roman

citizenship, a process which had characterized the Roman state since its origins in the

7th Century BCE, but which had proceeded fitfully and uneasily.5 All of these changes

created anxieties among those whom they impacted, especially anxieties about the

place of Rome within an expanding empire and the exercise of power once reserved

exclusively to the Senate and Roman people. These anxieties in turn elicited a

perceived need among traditional segments of elite society to reassert the centrality and

primacy of Rome, both as a physical reality and as an idea.6

Exacerbating these anxieties was the arbitrary rule of emperors like Nero, whose

principate brought about the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.7 His rule has been

3 Vogel-Weidemann (1979) 95-6; Wirszubski (1968). For a case study on the appropriation of libertas under the principate, see Gallia (2012) 12-46.

4 Hopkins (1983), especially 124, 184-7.

5 Osborne (2010) 244; Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 443-7; Dench (2005) Chp. 2.

6 Osborne (2010) 241-3. On identity and the city of Rome, see Wallace-Hadrill (2008) Chp. 6 and Spencer (2005) 53-4.

7 Griffin (1984), still the authoritative biography of Nero, maintains that Nero’s excessive desire for popularity, extravagances in spending and display, as well as an intolerance of perceived rivals exacerbated fractures inherent in the system which Augustus established, leading to the downfall of the Julio-Claudians. Champlin (2003) is more sympathetic to Nero without glossing over the more egregious aspects of his rule. Shotter (2008) is a conventional portrayal which emphasizes Nero’s arbitrariness and contradictory policies.

characterized by the loss of an Augustan balance between princeps and the enjoyment of liberty, the debasement of senatorial dignity, offensively liberal tendencies toward the eastern half of the empire, and an exercise of power marked by fear and humiliation.8

Of course, this characterization arose almost exclusively from elite quarters which were universally hostile to Nero.9 The depth of this negative posture was further highlighted

by an abrupt shift in policy under Vespasian, who after a year of chaos following Nero’s

suicide, came to power in late 69 CE. This “Vespasianic thaw” marked a departure from

Nero’s stance and sparked a renewal of good relations with the Senate and a return to

the proper exercise of law and order.10 The conspirators’ charges against Nero

represented one elite response to a dynamic of change initiated by the Augustan

settlement which reached a flashpoint under Nero. Given these tensions as the

Augustan program was transformed or redefined by successive emperors, identity

increasingly became an issue, and closely linked to identity, was the question of

meaning.11

Against this backdrop of escalating anxiety over the status of Rome, shifting structures of authority, the abuse of power under Nero, and the concomitant evolution of identities during the period, Lucan chose to write an epic poem on the civil war of 49 –

48 BCE between Caesar and Pompey, the Bellum Civile. While certainly familiar to

8 For a loss of balance, see Hammond (1963) 98; the debasement of the Senate, Chastagnol (2004) 193; liberalization of views toward the East, Devreker (1982) 495, 509; and on fear and humiliation as tools of the principate, see Hopkins (1983) 122.

9 Non-elite perspectives, while more difficult to gauge, may have been more favorable to Nero or perhaps largely indifferent. See Champlin (2003) 9-28. Lucan displays a traditional contempt for non-elites. Martindale (1984) 75.

10 Mellor (2003) 69, 81; Chastagnol (2004) 193; Rudich (1993) 204.

11 Rhetoric about threatened identities typically accompanies social change. Jenkins (1996) 5-6, 109-110.

Lucan’s audience,12 the topic was nevertheless a dangerous one.13 Lucan was

consciously engaging the principate by treating the war which gave birth to it, and he

was doing so at a time when freedom of expression was severely curtailed by the

sensitivities of the princeps.14 What emerges from his narrative of the civil war is a

caustic attack on Nero himself and on the institution of the principate primarily through

his portrayal of Julius Caesar, the chief antagonist and one of the leading figures of the

poem. For Lucan’s Caesar is the prototype of all Caesars,15 and his descendants, the

entire Caesareae domus series of 4.823, represent tyranny itself.

As a genre, Latin epic poetry typically engaged the contemporary concerns of its

audience.16 Our study follows one thread within the fabric of the poem which Lucan

uses to address the changing realities of his own time. This thread focuses upon the

abandonment of the city of Rome, whose centrality, nevertheless, is absolute and non-

negotiable in the poet’s vision. For inextricably bound to this place are the mechanisms

of power and the identity of the Roman people. The power of place and identity form a

matrix of meaning for the poet whose loss within the narrative results in complete

annihilation. Specifically, Lucan’s account of the abandonment of Rome before Caesar’s

hostile advance in 49 BCE, which inaugurated the civil war, initiates a trajectory in which

12 Fantham (2010) 207. Two poems about the civil war from the same time period are attributed to Seneca, Lucan’s uncle. See Roller (2001) 45 n50.

13 Masters (1994) 169.

14 In a catalogue of his uncle’s written works, Pliny the Younger states that his uncle, who lived under Nero, scripsit sub Nerone novissimis annis, cum omne studiorum genus paulo liberius et erectius periculosum servitus fecisset, (Ep. 3.5.5). Text is Mynors (1963). In fact, one reason given for the poet’s involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy was Nero’s prohibition against the recitation of his poetry. Tac. Ann. 15.49.

15 Roller (2001) 37-8; Ahl (1976) 55 n69.

16 Roller (2001) 62; Hardie (1993) xi.

place, power, and identity devolve into meaninglessness by the poem’s end. This thread of abandonment and loss assumes a metaphorical sense when the poet connects this trajectory to his audience, forcibly involving them in the abandoning of Rome and loss of meaning and identity in their own time. The poet achieves this effect through the trope of apostrophe, specifically the apostrophe to Rome and the indefinite potential subjunctive address which expand the texts comprising this trajectory to an extra-textual

relevance. Lucan uses the historical event of the abandoning of Rome from the civil war

of 49-48 BCE as a poetic image to address the changing realities under Nero, extending the trajectory of loss down into his own day.

A series of related passages from the poem constitute this ongoing process of

incremental, but devastating loss which begins with the actual account of Rome’s

abandonment in Book One of the poem. Chapter 2 of this study discerns a framework of

loss which connects this foundational text in Book One to the account of Pompey’s

arrival in Mytilene in Book Eight after fleeing Rome. These two texts in turn are linked

to the siege of Caesar in Alexandria which serves as the end point on the journey

toward annihilation. Chapter 3 anchors Lucan’s concerns about identity to the

topography of the city itself in the account of Caesar’s plundering of the Temple of

Saturn. The bond between place and the exercise of power is explored more fully in

Chapter 4 with an analysis of the consul Lentulus’ speech before the remnants of the

Senate gathered in Epirus in the East. Each of the primary texts in these three chapters

contains a reference or allusion to the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BCE which

Lucan uses as a backdrop or foil to the abandonment of Rome in his work. As a result,

Chapter 5 explores the canonical account of that event in Livy’s history and Lucan’s

subsequent response to it. Finally, Chapter 6 analyzes how Lucan addresses the

abandoning of Rome to his own context through an innovative, almost obsessive use of

apostrophe. The loss of Rome in the civil war which gave birth to the principate, then,

continues to fuel a loss of meaning and identity which the poet perceives in the

changing realities under Nero. In this sense, his poem is but one response from an elite

perspective to the anxieties prevalent in his own day.

The study of identity is notoriously difficult due in part to its fluid nature. Identities

are frequently overlapping, always socially constructed, and continually renegotiated as

change occurs. Thus they are difficult to pin down and define. In fact, most of the time

change is the catalyst to this renegotiation, and identity is more accurately understood

as a process. It is an evolving process of identification accompanied oftentimes by

uncertainty, fear, and even threat.17 Yet this process, which seeks to ground a people or

person to a particular time and space, ultimately provides a horizon in which meaning

might be formulated.18 The difficulties inherent in the study of identity are compounded,

however, when we turn to identity in the ancient world. The chronological distance

between our worlds, the paucity and selectivity of the sources which survive, the chasm

between pre- and post-modern perspectives, among other things, complicate an already

uneasy task. Nevertheless, the use of symbol and myth, especially myths of origin,

provide a window through which we might access ancient understandings of identity. In

particular, elite Romans seem to have expressed one understanding of their own

identity through topographical referents, like the Seven Hills, Troy, or the Tiber, which

17 On identity as a socially constructed and negotiated reality, see Taylor (2004) 2 and Jenkins (1996) 4-5 and 19-28. On identity as a process of identification, see Hall (1996) 2-4, 15-16. On Roman identities, see Wallace-Hadrill (2008) and Dench (2005).

18 On identity and meaning, see Jenkins (1996) 4, 113-114.

assumed a symbolic and mythical overlay.19 Drawing in part on landscape studies within

the field of cultural geography, our approach builds upon this Roman propensity in order to apprehend the significance of place and identity in Lucan’s poem.20

This study proceeds from a close reading of the text within its literary and historical contexts. Lucan presumes a knowledge of the events of the civil war among his audience.21 This presumption places an additional expectation or responsibility on

his readers or listeners whether ancient or modern to fill in the gaps which occur in his

narrative of the war, to note his omissions and his rhetorical embellishments, and to be attentive to subtle echoes or allusions in his language. Oppressive regimes inspire allusiveness, and Nero’s principate, while an era of surprisingly rich literary activity, created a climate of suspicion and fear in which allusion was frequently employed to striking effect.22 At each stage of the trajectory outlined in this study, we seek to

highlight parallels between the events of the civil war as Lucan appropriates them and

the dynamics of his own day. This approach helps to contextualize some of Lucan’s

manipulations of history and genre and to elucidate the layers of meaning which obtain

in his poetry.

19 Spencer (2010) 1-15, especially 4-5. On symbol and myth as a means to express identity in the Augustan age, see Zanker (1988) Chps 4 and 5.

20 A similarly strong sense of the symbolic, religious, or mythic significance of place is uncommon in our culture today. The only parallels easily apparent to me may be the cultural ties exhibited by many Native American peoples to a particular landscape, like the Muscogee Creek to Etowah and the mound sites of Georgia or perhaps the modern state of Israel whose founding declaration from May 14, 1948, begins “Eretz-Israel (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance….” Text from Hazony (2000) 341-343.

21 Masters (1994) 154.

22 On audience openness to and participation in allusion during the early principate, see Bartsch (1994) 63-97. On the literary productivity of Nero’s reign, see Conte (1994) 435-37 and Sullivan (1985).

CHAPTER 2 ROME ABANDONED AND USURPED

Three texts from Lucan’s great work Bellum Civile constitute a thematic frame for

the unraveling of Roman identity and meaning which begins with the foundational text at

1.466-522. At the mere rumor of Caesar’s advance across the Rubicon, Pompey,

Senate, and people abandon the city of Rome and flee toward the East in a trajectory

which will propel the poem toward its extant ending in Book Ten. Linked to this foundational account by a number of verbal and thematic similarities is Pompey’s arrival with the remnants of the Senate in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos after their ignominious defeat at Pharsalus. Elements from this text at 8.109-158 are, in turn, reflected in Caesar’s arrival in Alexandria at the end of Book Ten. Here the poem as we have it ends, paradoxically, in continued warfare and fiery destruction even after

Caesar’s ascendancy is assured with the death of Pompey in Book Eight and the disappearance of Cato from the narrative in Book Nine. Three cities in three episodes, when seen together, comprise a dramatic triptych of images which the poet employs in order to detail a loss which extends far beyond simply the death of the old Republic and the rise of Caesarism. For him, the loss which begins at Rome and extends through

Mytilene to Alexandria, is cataclysmic. It is caused by the Romans themselves, and it is total. This trajectory, anchored by these three texts, indicates a movement through time and space in which traditional Roman values are distorted, usurped, and ultimately lost.

The journey concludes at Alexandria with Caesar’s ascendancy. For the poet, Caesar’s victory is but the culmination of the disintegration and annihilation which begins with the abandonment of the ancestral city on the Tiber in Book One.

Building upon an East-West divide first enshrined in epic by Homer’s Iliad,1

Lucan’s narrative trajectory specifically responds to and reverses Aeneas’ foundational

journey from East to West in Vergil’s Aeneid.2 In that poem, Aeneas set out to establish

a city under the impulse of fate. His was ultimately a quest for safety, society, tradition,

and custom,3 which led him out of the ashes of Troy to the creation of the Roman state.

The city of Rome comes to represent and even incarnate these values of safety and

civilization. Conversely, Lucan’s epic trajectory from Rome to Alexandria contradicts

Vergil’s project, and the journey from West to East in Lucan leads not to foundation, but

to annihilation. Accompanying this physical journey eastward is a consequent

destruction of abstract values and identity. Vergil’s epic vision of hero and foundation,

then, forms a constant backdrop to which Lucan reacts in his artistic re-appropriation of

the fate of Rome.

Panel A: Rome and the Rending of Society

Appropriately enough, Lucan’s trajectory begins at Rome. The city’s

abandonment, presented in our foundational text at 1.466-522, is actually prefigured in

the narrative by two details which prepare the poem’s audience for Roman culpability in

the tragedy to follow. In a speech at 1.352-391, one of Caesar’s centurions named

Laelius, chaffing against a perceived delay in the beginning of civil war, demonstrates

his loyalty and his willingness not only to strike at fellow citizens, even parent or wife

(1.373-378), but also to plunder the city’s gods and fire its temples (1.379), an

1 Quint (1993) 24-31.

2 Reed (2011) 26. See also Roche (2009) 21 and Rossi (2000) on Pompey’s journey as a reversal of Aeneas’. For Vergil’s pervasive influence on Lucan in general, see Roche (2009) 20-24, Fantham (1992) 7-11, and Thompson (1968) which is fundamental.

3 On walls and cities as symbols of rule of law and civilization, see Jenkyns (2013) 57, 116.

eventuality realized in Book Three of the poem. At the conclusion of Laelius’ speech,

the narrative is interrupted in good epic fashion with a catalogue of hostile tribes who

are massing in northern Italy awaiting Caesar’s order to invade. Framing this catalogue

are notices of Roman soldiers abandoning their posts (deseruere at 1.396 and deseritis

at 1.465).4 Roman culpability exhibited in the war lust of Laelius and the willingness of

the soldiery to forfeit their duty combines with the vision of hated northern tribes poised

on the border to set the stage for the abandoning of the city itself.

Our text begins with the flight of Rumor over the city (with its dark Vergilian

antecedent)5 bringing the prospect of future disaster (cladem futuram, 1.470). Panic

ensues at Rome, the Senate urges flight, and the city is abandoned first by the Senate

(1.487-9), then by the people, the volgus (1.495-8), and finally by Pompey himself

(1.521). The entire episode culminates dramatically in a call for pardon, venia, by the

poet and an abrupt indictment of Pompey as he flees, Pompeio fugiente (1.522).

Fear dominates this foundational account. Verbs of fearing are used five times in

this passage and nouns of fear three times.6 Even the last word of this episode, falling

emphatically at the fourth foot caesura of the line before the tum indicates a shift to the

next episode, is timent (“they fear,” 1.522).

Various images rhetorically escalate this sense of fear. First among these is the

image of burning houses and buildings collapsing expressed in an indefinite second

4 Green (1991) 244. For the text of Lucan, Housman (1927) is utilized throughout this study.

5 Verg. Aen. 4.173ff. On Fama in Lucan and Vergil, see Thompson (1968) 9-10.

6 Verbs are paveo in 484, 487; timeo in 486, 522; and metuo in 490. Nouns are timor in 409, terror in 487, and pavor in 521. Boyle (2008) ad 65-7 identifies fear as the primary political emotion of the early principate.

person subjunctive address, one of only two in the poem.7 This image is standard in

literary descriptions of the wartime seizure of cities.8 Yet one traditional element of the

motif is omitted here, the slaughter of the defeated. The omission is significant, for it

signals a deliberate distortion of the history by the poet. In point of fact, the city was not

besieged by Caesar’s troops after crossing the Rubicon. Its citizens were not

slaughtered, its houses were not burned, nor did its buildings collapse. Historically, the

city remained untouched as Caesar bypassed Rome in his pursuit of Pompey toward

Brundisium. The city was abandoned, but contrary to Lucan’s portrayal where virtually

the entire city was emptied, only a relatively small number of the senatorial elite actually

accompanied Pompey eastward.9 The imagery and hyperbole are meant to evoke both

the destruction of Troy and the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BCE, the latter

impression reinforced by the description of the Gallic and Germanic hordes massed in

northern Italy from the preceding catalogue.10 For the poet, the abandonment of Rome

is a catastrophe of the same magnitude as the fall of Troy recounted in Vergil and the

sack of Rome detailed by Livy.11

A second image utilized by the poet in this foundational text is the Stoic

ekpyrosis, the final conflagration which in orthodox Stoic cosmology forms a necessary

element in the ongoing cycle of cosmic dissolution and regeneration. Derived ultimately

7 The other occurs at 8.147-8 in the second panel of our triptych.

8 On this urbs capta motif, see Paul (1982).

9 Shackleton Bailey (1960) debunks an older view that the majority of the nobility stood with Pompey during the war.

10 Loupiac (1998) 131 further suggests an allusion to the Gallic sack in the phrase nefandas faces at 1.493-4.

11 Livy’s account receives an extended analysis in Chapter 5 of this study.

from the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus and introduced to Rome through Cicero, the doctrine of ekpyrosis holds that pneumatic or aetherial bonds, foedera or conpages,

form a chain, series, which maintains the structure of the universe. Periodically, these

bonds are dissolved (ruere or solvere) in a fiery cataclysm which signals a return to the primordial chaos, ruina, out of which the universe is reborn.12 The classic formulation of

this doctrine in Lucan occurs at 1.72-80 in his first simile of the poem where

conflagration illustrates Rome’s descent into civil war. The image recurs several times

throughout the poem,13 but the Latinized vocabulary of the ekpyrosis is pervasive and is

especially concentrated in this text on abandonment. The imagery of fire and collapsing

houses from the indefinite address at 1.494-5, quatiente ruina/nutantes pendere domos

(“wavering homes were swaying, shaken by collapse”),14 comprise two traditional

elements of the ekpyrosis, and the word ruina (“collapse”) carries the Stoic connotation

of chaos. At 1.492, the fleeing hordes of citizens break out of the city, serie haerentia

longa (“clinging together in a long chain”) where series again alludes to the chain of fate

in traditional Stoic thought. In the simile of the ship master who abandons his ship even

before it has broken apart, the phrase nondum sparsa conpage carinae (“the fittings of

the ship not yet broken up,” 1.502) illustrates the condition of the city as its leaders flee.

But the word conpages (“fittings”) also reflects the bonds which bind the universe

12 For the introduction of this aspect of Stoicism at Rome, see Lapidge (1979) 346-350. For the Latinized vocabulary of the Stoic ekpyrosis and its incidence in Lucan, see Loupiac (1998) as well as Lapidge (1979).

13 Notably it occurs at 2.289-92, 5.632-6, and 7.812-15. See Lapidge (1989) 1406-1409.

14 All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.

together and are subsequently broken in the great dissolution.15 Following upon the

classic expression of the ekpyrosis earlier in Book One, the language in our text gives

the abandonment of Rome a cosmic dimension and heightens the event to the level of

universal catastrophe. The poet is linking the fate of the universe to that of Rome,

thereby implying that the destruction of the city effects the dissolution of the cosmos.16

One traditional aspect of the Stoic articulation of the ekpyrosis is lacking in

Lucan, however. Nowhere in the poem is there any evidence of regeneration or

restoration.17 The dissolution triggered by the civil war and reflected in the abandonment

of Rome is complete. The conflagration is total. In fact, the fire which consumes the city

in this first text reappears at Alexandria in Book Ten with Caesar’s presence in that city

and threatens to consume even him.18 The loss of the city leaves no room for hope or

renewal, and the poem ends in destruction.

The lack of any regeneration only emphasizes the dissolution, and this

foundational account is replete with the language of breaking or tearing. Comprising in

large measure Caesar’s invasion force in the narrative, the Germans and other northern

tribes are torn from their ancestral home, patria a sede revolsos (1.482), providing a

sharp contrast to the Romans themselves who burst forth (prorumpunt) from the city in

their haste to leave it at 1.493. Rumor (fama), on the other hand, bursts upon (inrupit)

the minds of the people at 1.469 and in indirect statement reports that the city has been

15 Roche (2009) ad loc. The verbs solvere at 1.472 and ruere at 1.474 of our text also contain shades of meaning reflective of the Stoic conflagration.

16 Dinter (2012) 125; Lapidge (1979) 359.

17 Roche (2005); Sklenár (2003) 6.

18 Loupiac (1998) 120, 144 observes that fire in the poem is characterized by its intensity and violence and repeatedly threatens anarchy.

ordered to be seized by a wild people, iussam feris a gentibus urbem…rapi (1.483-4), with a damning ablative absolute added, Romano spectante.19 Even in the simile of the

ship master mentioned previously, the mast of the ship is shattered (fracta, 1.500).20

More significantly, the breakage and tearing extend into the social fabric of the

city as well where family ties are not strong enough to stem the flight into war. In a

tricolon crescendo of relationships, the poet notes that the panicked flight of the people

shatters the bonds between parens and natum, then between coniunx and maritum

(1.504-6). These very bonds, according to ancient political philosophy again

represented at Rome by Cicero, comprise the foundation of the city and constitute the

nursery of the state.21

The last and most developed element of the tricolon of relationships is that with

the ancestral lares, aut patria dubiae dum vota salutis/conciperent, tenuere lares (“nor did the ancestral lares prevent them from leaving, while they prayed for a doubtful salvation,” 1.506-7). Technically, the lares were the tutelary deities of the house which, along with the penates, the gods of the storeroom,22 were frequently used by metonymy

for the house itself. Both lares and penates exercised great symbolic power since they blended together home, religion, and nation.23 Significantly, both lares and penates

19 The unspecified Roman, obviously Caesar, may also include others who do nothing to defend the city, namely the Senate and people.

20 This verb to break, frangere, is a favorite of Lucan. Matthews (2008) ad 5.606.

21 Cic. Off.1.17.53-4: id autem est principium urbis et quasi seminarium reipublicae. Text is Winterbottom (1994). On this doctrine of oikeiosis, see Dyck (1996) 83-4, 171.

22 Boyle (2008) 249.

23 Jenkyns (2013) 201-2. Interestingly, Tacitus Ann. 15.41 mentions that the state penates housed in the Temple of Vesta were destroyed in Nero’s fire of 64 CE.

were brought by Aeneas from Troy in his foundational journey.24 For Lucan, these

bonds of family, home, and gods are rendered impotent by fear since they fail to

exercise the proper hold over the citizens of Rome. As a result, the very foundation of

society, the ties which bind people to one another and to the city, are broken when the

people and Senate abandon Rome.

Before he concludes this episode on the flight from Rome, the poet notes that no

one lingers on the threshold, and after one last glance at the beloved city, the crowd

leaves never to return, ruit inrevocabile volgus (1.508-9).25 In a form of ring composition,

the verb desero, to abandon, frames this foundational text. As noted earlier, it occurs at

1.465 with Roman soldiers as its subject, and now again it occurs toward the end of this

episode in an apostrophe to Rome, tu tantum audito bellorum nomine, Roma,/desereris:

nox una tuis non credita muris (“You, O Rome, were abandoned after only the threat of

war was heard: one night was not entrusted to your walls,” 1.519-520). The framing use

of the verb and the enjambment in line 520 emphasize not simply flight, but

abandonment. Further, the effect of the apostrophe broadens the agents of the

abandonment to include not only the populace of the city who failed to trust its walls in

49 BCE, but also the audience of Lucan’s own day, the Rome addressed and listening

to his poem in the 60’s CE. The apostrophe imputes to them the failure to trust the city

as well. This aspect of the theme will receive greater attention in Chapter 6. Suffice it to

say here only that both the second person indefinite address and the apostrophe to

24 Thomas (2011) 75 notes that Aeneas did take his lares with him, though not in Vergil who mentions only the penates. The two are often synonymous as at 7.394: Albanosque lares Laurentinosque penates.

25 On love of city or homeland, see the expanded discussion in Chapter 5 of this study. The adjective inrevocabilis frequently contains a sense of finality, something that cannot be reversed or undone. OLD 3.

Rome in this passage indicate a particular relevance of the city’s abandonment to the poet’s own milieu.

What we have then in this foundational text is an historical kernel which, by means of imagery and hyperbole, the poet magnifies to the level of a cosmic catastrophe. The decision by Pompey and a number of the senatorial elite to withdraw from Rome rather than to defend it before Caesar’s advance becomes a cataclysmic event which rends the very fabric holding society together. The city in its abandonment is portrayed as if captured in war and consumed in a conflagration from which there is no possibility of renewal. Verbs of breaking or tearing within the text (rumpere, frangere, revellere, rapere) express a striking sense of dislocation and disintegration as the bonds between family members, between people and their gods, and finally between citizens and their city are shattered. Lastly, precipitated by fear, flight in the face of the enemy reflects an implicit breakdown of the Roman ideal.

Flight of itself is antithetical to virtus, courage, a key component in the Roman

value system and an epic expectation in the heroes of the genre.26 The lack of any

defense for the city, the omission of an aristeia, a martial display of excellence in

combat, by Pompey or any hero before the city gates, and the failure to charge the

enemy define abandonment in this passage and depict the loss of virtus among the

Romans. Everyone flees at the mere rumor of war, and the senatorial elite bears

primary responsibility for this breakdown of the ideal. For the Senate’s uncertainty leads

them to urge the people headlong into flight, incerti quo quemque fugae tulit impetus

urguent/ praecipitem populum (1.491-2).

26 Virtus and its rhetorical manipulation in Lucan is the subject of Sklenár (2003). On flight and virtus specifically, see pages 148-150.

In addition, Lucan’s flight leads into war. Whereas in Vergil’s poem, Aeneas’ flight from Troy, sanctioned by the gods, leads ultimately to renewal through the foundation of

Rome, in Lucan’s poem, flight leads only into war, sic urbe relicta/in bellum fugitur

(1.503-4).27 The paradox implicit in this portrayal of flight is developed later in the poem

when amid the battle at Dyrrachium against Pompey’s men, Roman soldiers flee into

death, hostibus occurrit fugiens inque ipsa pavendo/fata ruit (“fleeing, the soldiers press

to meet the enemy and by their fearing, they rush into death itself,” 6.298-9). For the

poet, flight indicates the absence of Roman virtue, and as a result, this flight is not

toward safety or sanctuary, but into war and ultimately death. This paradox underscores

an erosion of the Roman ideal due to the culpability of the Senate and people which is

developed in the account of Pompey’s arrival at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos.

Panel B: Mytilene and the Usurpation of Roman Values

The city of Mytilene had a number of historical associations with Pompey. After

the city had been sacked by Rome in 79 BCE because of its support for Mithradates VI,

Pompey freed the city, returning it to (the appearance of) self-rule.28 As a result,

Mytilene was a client state to Pompey and honored him, in typical Hellenistic fashion,

with the titles of savior and benefactor.29 Even Pompey’s theater in Rome, which figures

in Pompey’s dream at 7.9 of the poem, was said to exhibit the architectural influence of

theaters in Mytilene.30 So it is not surprising that after his defeat at Pharsalus, Pompey

and the remnants of the Senate would flee to Mytilene. Yet Lucan’s account of

27 Dinter (2012) 105-6.

28 Seager (1979) 60.

29 Syme (1939) 76, 263.

30 Croisille (2002) 154-5.

Pompey’s arrival in Mytilene at 8.109-158 consists of a remarkably dense accumulation of the traditional moral language of the Romans surprisingly applied to the

Mytilenaeans.31 The poet succeeds in linking the displacement of these traditional

values in Mytilene to the abandonment of Rome through a number of verbal and

thematic similarities between this account and the foundational text from Book One. For

the poet, the loss of the city necessarily results in a loss of these abstract values central

to Roman identity.

Our text begins with a welcome from the people of Mytilene (the volgus of 8.109).

The Mytilenaeans greet Pompey in a speech of seventeen lines, and Pompey responds in a speech of seventeen lines. The second of two authorial second person indefinite subjunctives follows before the focus of the passage shifts to Cornelia, Pompey’s wife who has been sheltering in Mytilene awaiting the outcome of events at Pharsalus. The episode ends with a reference to Pompey again, now conquered coniuge victo (8.158).

The narrative continues beyond this text when, after only one night (8.113-4), Pompey,

Cornelia, and his men continue the journey eastward. At first they contemplate the possibility of seeking refuge in Parthia, Rome’s ancient enemy, an option vehemently opposed by the senator Lentulus. In the end, they make for Egypt where Pompey will be killed tragically at the hands of a Roman in the service of the Egyptians.

At the beginning of their speech, the Mytilenaeans ask Pompey to accept their city and make it a place where his fate might be restored. The Mytilenaean lares, they say, are allied to him and their walls devoted to him by sacred treaty (8.112-3). The use

31 Coffee (2011) 420-1. Coffee’s analysis of this language serves to enhance his characterization of the three principal figures of the poem within the overall dissolution of Roman social values. My focus concerns the interrelationship between physical dislocation in the loss of Rome and the moral dislocation which results from this loss.

of devotos muros and sacro foedere in these lines hints at the distinctly Roman identification of the devotio whereby an officer, displaying his personal virtus, sacrifices himself in order to save another, usually his men or even the state.32 This sense,

appropriated by the Mytilenaeans, is reinforced later in their claim to have committed a

crime by their willingness to shelter Pompey and Cornelia within their walls (8.118 and

125), thereby risking themselves before Caesar’s potentially punitive onslaught as he

pursues Pompey across the Mediterranean.

Place assumes an importance in their speech which seems to be lacking in the events of the foundational text at Rome. Pompey is asked to make this a place revered by Romans (8.114-5). A great number of Roman leaders will gather here, certain of the place, procerum pars magna coibit/certa loci, where the enjambment of certa loci emphasizes both the sense of certainty and of place (8.119-120). These proceres are assuredly remnants of the Senate still following Pompey after the defeat at Pharsalus,33

even though the word senatus or its synonyms occur nowhere in this text. After

Pharsalus and in a foreign land, it seems, the Senate no longer identifiably exists.34

Place and identity are linked, and physical dislocation effects an ideological

dislocation.35

32 The paradigmatic account of the devotio is found in Livy 8.9.1-11 where P. Decius Mus devotes himself to the gods below and charges the enemy to save his men. On Pompey’s flight from Pharsalus as an inversion of this motif, see Leigh (1997) 128-48.

33 In his translation, Mayer (1981) even uses “senators” here for procerum, thereby flattening the effect of the substitution.

34 Proceres is a generic term used primarily for great men or chiefs. Originally it designated simply a division of the Roman people. Ernout and Meillet (1967) 537. It is used of the Senate also at 8.205 and 8.261-2.

35 The relationship between place and identity receives a much fuller treatment in Chapter 3.

Moved by the pietas and the fides of the Mytilenaeans (8.127-9), Pompey responds with a startlingly remarkable claim. Continuing with the emphasis on place,

Pompey states that not only is there no land (solum) in all the world more pleasing to him, but that here at Mytilene was his home, here was Rome to him, hic sacra domus, carique penates/hic mihi Roma fuit (8.132-3). The language is emotive and emphatic.

Pompey’s penates, with their religious and national resonance, are now found in a foreign city. Also the mention of Rome, this foreign Rome, falls in the middle of the entire episode, twenty four lines before and twenty four lines following. An important intertext which throws Pompey’s claim into high relief is provided by Aeneid 8.39 where the river god, Tiberinus, welcomes Aeneas to Latium in Italy with the words, hic tibi certa domus, certi…penates.36 What the god Tiber welcomes Aeneas to, Pompey

rejects in favor of Mytilene, and on his own initiative, Pompey recognizes his domus and

his penates as elsewhere than in Rome.

The tense of fuit in line 133 is significant as well. In the hyperbole of the poem,

Rome perished at Pharsalus, hic Roma perit, 7.634. One would expect Pompey to claim

Mytilene as his home now, his Rome in the present. Rather, the perfect tense implies that even before Pharsalus, Rome was linked, not to the city on the Tiber, but to

Cornelia who was waiting in Mytilene. Pompey physically abandoned the city, but he emotionally abandoned it as well in his overriding attachment to his wife and to this

foreign place in the East.

After remarking that his fate lies elsewhere (8.138) and he must move on,

Pompey concludes with an apostrophe to Lesbos, which neatly balances the

36 The text for all references to Vergil is Mynors (1969).

apostrophe to Rome from the foundational text. The second indefinite potential subjunctive of the poem, introduced by putares at 8.147, allows the poet again to connect this exchange of the homeland’s soil, mutare…patriae solum, to the audience

of his own time.37 But the trope also marks a transition in focus from Pompey to

Cornelia whom alone the Mytilenaeans call a citizen because of her traditional (Roman)

virtues of pudor, modestia, and probitas noted in the text (8.155-6). There is a certain

irony in naming Cornelia and not Pompey a citizen, an irony best illustrated by the

observation that Pompey’s devotion to his wife has interfered with his loyalty, his pietas,

to Rome and led ultimately to his death outside Alexandria. Whereas Aeneas left his

wife Creusa and broke off his relationship with Dido in his mission toward Rome’s

founding, Pompey clings to his wife and fails in his mission to protect the state.38

Cornelia merits citizenship because of her wifely virtues, while Pompey does not

because of his failure in manly virtues. Pompey ends up, in the last line of the passage,

as coniuge victo, conquered by Caesar and by Cornelia.

Even aside from the respective apostrophes to Rome and to Lesbos and the two indefinite subjunctive addresses, a number of shared or contrasting themes and verbal echoes link this text at Mytilene to the foundational text at Rome, establishing a relationship between them. The volgus at Rome (1.486) abandons their ancestral walls and lares (1.497 and 1.506-7) while the Mytilenaean volgus (8.109) offers their allied lares (socios lares, 8.113) to Pompey and “devotes” their walls to him (devotos muros,

8.112). The Roman Senate, patres or senatus in 1.487-8, while properly identified in the

37 As with the poet’s intrusion at 1.493, the particular relevance of these apostrophes will be developed in Chapter 6.

38 For this insightful analysis and its Vergilian antecedent, see Thompson (1984). See also the discussion of Pompey’s pietas in Coffee (2011) 422-3.

first text, is uncertain and doubtful (1.491), while in Mytilene they are identity-less

(procerum pars magna, 8.119), but become certain and sure of their place (certa loci in

8.120). In Rome, houses burn and collapse in ruin, nutantes ruina domos at 1.495, but

in Mytilene Pompey recognizes his home as sacred (sacra domus, 8.132), and wives

unable to hold onto their spouses in the conflagration at Rome, coniunx non revocare

maritum in 1.505, cling to their husbands, after having been saved in Mytilene (servata

coniuge, 8.135). The Senate and people failed to entrust one night to the walls of Rome

upon word of Caesar’s advance at 1.520, while Pompey and the same Senate gladly

(laetus…gaudens, 8.114 and 128) spend one night with the Mytilenaeans. Pardon must

be given in the one case at 1.521, while Pompey grants the occasion of pardon to the

Mytilenaeans in the other (materiam veniae committere vobis, 8.136). Lastly, both

episodes conclude with a caustic ablative absolute (Pompeio fugiente at 1.522 and

coniuge victo at 8.158), Pompey fleeing Rome and Pompey conquered in Mytilene.

Further, typical Roman values or idealizations which would be expected in the

foundational text are attributed to, or appropriated by, the Mytilenaean volgus in the

second text. They have pietas and fides, according to the poet (8.127-8) which are

lacking at Rome, and the suggestion of a heroic devotio is found in their community’s

loyalty to Pompey, while no one demonstrates loyalty at Rome by sacrificing themselves

in a charge against the enemy. Lastly, the only citizen to be found in either text is

Cornelia, the dutiful wife whose traditional Roman virtues make her a citizen no longer

of Rome, but Mytilene. The cumulative effect of all these shared or contrasting echoes

is to link the dislocation or misappropriation of Roman values to their loss in the

abandonment of the city itself.

Shadi Bartsch has noted that after the battle of Pharsalus in Book Seven, Rome

is a very different place. It now teems with the dregs of the world, Romam…mundi faece

repletam, and can no longer sustain a civil war since there are not enough citizens

remaining to give meaning to the term civil (7.404-7).39 Yet the loss extends far beyond

the loss of the governing elite or even the loss of the city’s citizens. For two dynamics

are at work in the poet’s portrayal of the scene at Mytilene. First, Pompey’s flight is

accompanied by a consequent flight of Roman values to non-Romans represented by the Mytilenaeans.40 These values, present among this eastern people, are no longer

Roman apart from Rome, but have become Mytilenaean. The abandonment of the city

entails also the abandonment of the Roman ideal. Secondly, there occurs an inversion

of Roman ideals by Romans themselves as embodied in Pompey and the remnants of

the Senate who attend him. The devotio and the virtus which it expresses are twisted

into flight, and the pietas due to gods and state is subordinated to a personal devotion

to one’s spouse, contrary to the founding impulse of Aeneas. This subversion of Roman

values is symbolized in the text by the transference of Pompey’s penates from their

ancestral seat on the Tiber to a foreign city. Thus even Romans separated from the city

which they have abandoned no longer embody the values of their own culture. These

two dynamics well illustrate the totality of the loss which occurs in the desertion of

Rome.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of loss has not yet come to an end. Pompey flees to

Egypt where he is decapitated by agents of Ptolemy XIII at the end of Book Eight.

39 Bartsch (1997) 44.

40 The presence of Roman values among non-Romans is a motif developed throughout the poem which receives greater treatment in our work on other Romes in Chapter 4.

Caesar follows in pursuit, and in Alexandria the abandonment of Rome reaches its apogee.

Panel C: Alexandria and the Descent into Nothingness

The entire poem ends, as we have it, in war, a continuing civil war among the

Egyptians between Cleopatra VII and her brother Ptolemy XIII, but with Caesar at its core. The subversion of Roman values and identity continues, and while there are a number of verbal links to the events in the two previous cities in this chapter, a new element is introduced in Alexandria. Here the trajectory ends in literal annihilation, a descent into oblivion.

The final two episodes of the poem find Caesar, now allied to Cleopatra, first besieged in the palace in Alexandria (10.402-485) and later beset on all sides by the enemy in the harbor (10.486-546). The Egyptian forces are led by Pothinus, the eunuch attendant to the boy king Ptolemy XIII and his military commander Achillas. Despite the fact that these episodes occur within a civil war among the Egyptians, the poet tells us from the beginning that the greatest constitutive part of the actors in these scenes are

Roman plebs (10.402-3). In fact throughout these texts, Alexandria and the conflict within it are presented by the poet in language evocative of Rome and Romans. If given the opportunity, Cleopatra would celebrate a Roman style triumph with Caesar as the captive (10.65). By trying to kill Caesar, the Egyptian Achillas is described as playing the part of a Roman (10.419). In both these instances, expected roles are reversed as the Egyptians Cleopatra and Achillas assume the function of Romans and the Romans

that of captives. More significantly, the descriptions of the palace in Alexandria (10.111-

125), the banquet within it (10.144-167), and even Cleopatra’s attire are cloaked in the traditional moralistic language condemning luxuria which fills Roman historical and

poetic accounts of the East.41 Even the palace itself, like Roman houses, has penates

(10.453), and according to several scholars, its size and opulence reflect the

contemporary imperial complex on the Palatine at Rome, the official residences of the

emperors.42 While the geographical setting is undoubtedly Alexandria, these episodes

are ultimately about Rome and Romans.

Alexandria is also textually tied to the descriptions of Mytilene or of Rome in the poem. Caesar’s penates reside in Alexandria (10.479, 483) just as Pompey’s did in

Mytilene. While Pompey happily stayed one night in Mytilene, one night is also granted to Caesar in Alexandria (10.432) in which he escapes assassination to live another day.

Like the Romans who did not trust the walls of their own city in Book One, Caesar does

not trust the walls of Alexandria (10.439-40), but seeks refuge from the siege of the

palace in the nearby harbor. Lastly, the fires at Rome reappear here in Alexandria when

Caesar’s attempt to burn the ships rages out of control and nearby houses catch fire

(10.498-9).43 Once again because of Roman and specifically Caesar’s culpability, cities

burn.

The resulting physical disaster (cladem, 10.500, repeated from cladem futuram in

1.470) reflects a moral disaster as well in which Roman values are not simply appropriated or subverted, but cease to exist altogether. The poet notes that the

Romans fighting in Egypt for the Egyptians are seized by an oblivion of the mind (tanta

41 For these descriptions and eastern luxuria, see Turner (2010) 207 and Spencer (2005) 64-68.

42 Spencer (2005) 64. Croisille (2002) 153-4 is more specific, seeing the description of the palace as a reflection of Nero’s building program.

43 The similarity in language between the two accounts reinforces the imagery of the universal Stoic conflagration here at the end of the poem. In Alexandria, tecta…rapuere ignem (10.499). In Rome, tecta nefandas/corripuisse faces (1.493-4), where corripio is a compound of rapio and frequently used in incendiary contexts. OLD 1d

oblivio mentis, 10.403) as their values are corrupted into foreign values, in externos corrupto milite mores, 10.403-4).44 Three lines later the poet remarks that there is no fides and no pietas among them (10.407), for they are fighting under foreign leaders against their own people. These same two virtues of pietas and fides, while at least recognized among the Mytilenaeans (8.127-9), now no longer exist in Alexandria.

More surprisingly, Caesar himself is uncharacteristically enervated in the midst of

battle in Egypt. He is struck by a sudden fear of war (10.536), and like the Senate in

Rome from the foundational text, he is filled with doubt (10.542). He is uncertain

whether to be afraid to die or to choose to die (10.542-3). Lastly he recognizes that in

the midst of this civil war in which Romans play such a large part, surrounded by fire in

a foreign land, there is no path toward salvation. There is no courage nor any hope of

an honorable death, via nulla salutis,/non fuga, non virtus; vix spes quoque mortis

honestae (10.538-9).45 There is nothing. It is a dismal end to a dark story.

Alexandria, then, is the endpoint of a trajectory of loss in which Roman cultural

values and ideals are first torn apart through abandonment at Rome, later absconded

by a non-Roman people in Mytilene, and finally negated in a fiery cataclysm of unending war in Alexandria. This rending and subversion of values is accompanied by or embodied in the increasing enervation of the primary actors in the poem, whether

Pompey, the Senate, or even Caesar whose victory is characterized paradoxically by

uncertainty and fear. Their own Romanness seems to ebb the farther they are from the

city. This incremental dissolution of values, expressed in a movement from West to

44 At Sil. 13.555, the phrase oblivia mentis is used of the dead in the Underworld.

45 See Sklenár (2003) 148-150 on the ending of the poem and the negation of virtus.

East, is found in its embryonic stage at Rome whose abandonment initiates an abandonment of everything Roman.

Interestingly, the similarities between Lucan’s depiction of Alexandria and the imperial Rome of his own lifetime noted previously are echoed elsewhere in Book Ten.

Caesar’s interest in the sources of the Nile which serves as the topic of conversation during the banquet in the palace has been interpreted as reflective of Nero’s own interest in the same subject,46 and some have seen the dynamic between the boy king

Ptolemy XIII and Pothinus in the poem as representative of the relationship between

Nero and his praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus.47 It is well known that Nero had a long standing fascination with and regard for Alexandria, even going so far as to shower privileges on the city during his principate.48 Further, Nero is reputed to have desired to

settle in Alexandria at the end of his life.49 If indeed points of contact between the two

cities are intended by the poet, then Caesar’s presence in Alexandria as the cause of

such loss and devastation contains a veiled criticism of Nero’s principate, and

specifically his posture toward the city. In Book Ten, such coincidence is merely

suggestive, yet as we hope to demonstrate, Nero and his reign seem to shadow each

stage in this literary trajectory, sometimes rather dimly as here, at other times rather

brilliantly.

One last dimension of this triptych of cities contributes to the sense of

annihilation with which it ends. The abandonment of Rome and the trajectory which

46 Turner (2010) 205; Rossi (2005) 252.

47 McCloskey (1968).

48 Champlin (2003) 174-5; Ceausescu (1976) 92-5.

49 Dio 63.27.2. Champlin (2003) 82.

follows is set within a much broader panorama of devastation. Throughout the poem, cities repeatedly appear ruined or empty beginning with the prologue itself. In that programmatic text, the civil war has left Italy a wasteland, prefiguring the Rome of our foundational text, at nunc semirutis pendent quod moenia tectis/urbibus Italiae lapsisque ingentia muris/saxa iacent…/rarus et antiquis habitator in urbibus errat (“but now in the cities of Italy, the walls are wavering in half-ruined houses and massive rocks lie where walls have collapsed and only the occasional inhabitant wanders in ancient cities,” 1.24-7). Later the town of Luca is abandoned (desertae moenia Lucae, 1.586).

Cato imagines the funeral pyre of Rome at 2.300-1. In Cornelia’s vision from Book Five,

Lesbos has been emptied (vacuis locis, 5.783). Caesar finds only the ruins of Pompey’s camp in 6.280-1. The town of Phaselis has been depopulated (rarus incola, 8.250-4),

and Gnaeus Pompey the son, wishing for vengeance, sees Egypt’s fields lying fallow

with no farmers to work them (vacuos cultoribus agros, 9.162). Even the ruins of Troy

themselves have perished (etiam periere ruinae, 9.969).

In the narrative account of Pharsalus, which many see as the dramatic center of

the poem,50 the poet details the cosmic effects of the battle in a passage reminiscent of

the one from the prologue just cited above which also enumerates the devastation

caused by civil war. In this text placed immediately before the actual account of the

battle, the towns of Gabii, Veii, and Cora are described as dust-covered ruins (7.392-3),

and the countryside is emptied because no senator would want to live there willingly

(7.395-6). The Latin name will be just a fable, omne Latinum/fabula nomen erit (7.391-2)

and significantly, empty cities become a citizen’s crime, crimen civile videmus/tot

50 Roche (2005) 66; Feeney (1991) 276, 296.

vacuas urbes (7.398-9). This litany depicts a landscape of desolation in which urban life has ended, and the world lies in ruins.

Lucan’s vision of urban annihilation is accentuated when set beside Vergil’s vision of foundation. Cities again feature prominently in his poem. In Book One, Aeneas comes upon the construction of the city of Carthage, which is described in terms reminiscent of Rome with its Senate, its theater, its columns, its boundary marked by a plough (Aen. 1.421-9).51 The city-building motif recurs throughout the work, and Aeneas

himself is depicted at least four times initiating the construction of a city in the poem.52

The last of these depictions concerns the initial settlement in Italy toward the end of

Aeneas’ journey, which is variously called a castra, camp, or an urbs, a city, in the text.

This ambiguity allows the settlement on the Tiber to prefigure the city of Rome which will culminate and conclude the founding of a series of cities on Italian soil foretold by

Jupiter at 1.270-2.53 As befits a foundation story, the Aeneid is about the building and

growth of a civilization most evident in the rise of one divinely mandated city.

In Lucan, the abandonment of Rome and the loss of the Roman ideal which follows directly challenge the nationalistic optimism of the Vergilian vision.54 Rather than

51 Lucan’s account of the abandonment of Rome occurs at roughly the same position in his poem as does this scene in Vergil’s, perhaps constituting a deliberate response to Vergil’s Carthage/Rome.

52 On this theme as a leitmotiv of the poem, see Morwood (1991). Aeneas as city-builder is found at 3.17 in Thrace, 3.132 in Crete, 5.755-7 near Mt. Eryx, and at 7.157-8 on the mouth of the Tiber. Morwood (1991) 216.

53 Hardie (1994) 11-12. The cities are Lavinium, Alba Longa, and Rome, even though the actual foundation of Rome does not specifically occur in the Aeneid.

54 Thomas (2001) maintains that the later reception of Vergil’s poem has unduly promoted an Augustan optimism which has obscured an ambiguous or even subversive reading which Vergil intended. According to his thesis, Lucan succeeds in teasing out or extending a subversion already present in Vergil. See pp. 83-92. If so, Lucan is nevertheless reacting against an established vision which he inherits both generically and historically, whether that vision is transmitted through an Augustan reception which has become normative by Lucan’s time or not.

building and growth, Lucan portrays the collapse and fall of civilization encapsulated in the humanly willed destruction of one city. This loss begins with the rending of the very fabric of human relationships at the core of society and expands to the dissolution of the cosmos itself.

Many of the issues introduced in this overarching trajectory are developed in the texts to follow. In Chapter 3, Caesar enters Rome after Pompey and the remnants of the

Senate successfully escape his grasp and leave behind Italy in their flight toward the

East. Caesar’s rapaciousness is on full display as he seeks to plunder the riches of the

Temple of Saturn, and the extent of the loss of the city continues to unfold.

CHAPTER 3 PLACE AND IDENTITY: PLUNDERING THE TEMPLE

The abandonment of the City continues explicitly with Caesar’s successful

plundering of the Temple of Saturn, the location of the treasury of the Roman state, in

Book 3.97-168. As in the previous, foundational text, Lucan begins with an historical

template of the events of March/April 49 BCE1 and expands it through his poetic craft to

a cataclysmic level. In a careful analysis of the text, we see Lucan convey through the

agency of Caesar and the complicity of the Senate a violent loss of laws and rights, the

subversion of libertas, and finally the plundering of the ancestral ways, the mos

maiorum. These abstractions, tied to the physical reality of the abandoned city in the

narrative, form constitutive elements of elite Roman, specifically senatorial, identity.

In Lucan’s poetic vision, the city of Rome anchors and even safeguards this

identity which is constructed around a nexus of place, people, and values. Thus, we will argue that the surrender of the city of Rome before the hostile advance of Caesar constitutes for Lucan a surrender of Roman values and identity. This process toward

annihilation extends even to Lucan’s own day and reflects in poetic fashion a deep

seated anxiety about the place of the city of Rome amid the radical changes under the

principate.

Multiple verbal and thematic links bind this text with the foundational text of the

Chapter 2. Among these links, abandonment is first and foremost. Immediately before

describing Caesar’s entry into Rome, the poet puts the rhetorical question into the

mouth of Caesar as he addresses the city from a nearby hilltop , tene, deum sedes, non

ullo Marte coacti/deseruere viri? (“Have men abandoned you without a fight, O seat of

1 Unsurprisingly, Caesar scarcely alludes to these events in his own account. See Civ 1.33.3-4.

the gods?” 3.91-2). Later in our selection, the tribune Metellus, while taunting Caesar

toward violence against himself, declares, deserta stamus in urbe (“We stand in a

deserted city,” 3.129). Fear and fire (3.98, 100) are present here as in the first text, and

again in a continuation of the urbs capta motif from Book One, there is a belief (similar

in the activity of Fama in Book One) that Caesar would seize the city and scatter her

gods, creditur…rapturus moenia Romae/sparsurusque deos (3.99-100). Both turba2 and

curia reappear, and the rending (revello) used of the Germans torn from their ancestral

abode in Book One here applies to the temple itself, torn open with great effort, ingenti

Saturnia templa revelli/mole (3.115-6).3 Lastly and significantly, there is an authorial apostrophe to Rome in this text (3.159) as in the first text at 1.519, both occurring at emotionally evocative high points in the narrative. These connecting similarities in theme and vocabulary indicate a continuation of abandonment from the first text and signal a development in the further unraveling of the fabric of Rome and its institutions.

The abandoning of the city is being played out as the civil war progresses and beyond.

Context

At the beginning of Book Three, Caesar arrives outside Rome with his army after

Pompey has succeeded in escaping his grasp at Brundisium and fleeing to the East.

Caesar apostrophizes the city as sedes deum (3.91), the only real acknowledgement in this text of the sacral nature of the city. He remarks that the city has been abandoned without a fight and left vulnerable to an eastern madness (Eous furor, 3.93-4), incarnated in the Sarmatians, Pannonians, Dacians, and Getes. Caesar then exclaims

2 Turba is disparaging again as in 1.495, but here it is used, significantly, of the remnants of the Senate still in Rome.

3 Hunink (1992) ad loc. understands mole as a ram or siege machine, but it may also be rendered as effort or exertion, OLD 8, as in haud magna mole Piso…in sententiam trahitur. Tac. Ann. 2.78.

how fortunate Rome is that this war is a civil war only, without the threat of invasion by a foreign (eastern) people. This mini catalogue of hostile eastern tribes is echoed and developed with a very elaborate catalogue of eastern peoples (3.169-297) who come streaming to the assistance of Pompey immediately following our target text. This concern for the East, typical of Lucan’s ethnography4 and apparent also in Chapter 2,

here frames the account of the plundering of the temple, sets up a contrast between

Caesar and Pompey, and heightens a sense of loss and crisis at the center in Rome.

Curiously, abandonment also features in this catalogue as the various places in

the East are emptied of their people who come to join Pompey’s doomed cause:

Parnasos desertus (3.173), veteres Silloe terras liquerunt (3.180), Thracius Haemus

linquitur (3.197-8), Strymon deseritur (3.199), Orontes desertus (3.214), and nemus

Tauri deseritur (3.225). The image is of a world depopulated by the Roman civil war and

destined to be annihilated in the conflict between Caesar and Pompey. Typically, Lucan

ends his catalogue with a sharp sententia, vincendum paritur Pharsalia praestitit orbem

(“Pharsalus offered the world to be conquered all at the same time,” 3.297).

The account of the plundering of the temple itself can be divided into smaller

segments or scenes which culminate in the actual pillaging (rapina) of the temple. Fear

predominates at the beginning as the remnant of the Senate is illegally summoned from

their hiding places, e latebris suis (3.105).5 The seats of the consuls are unoccupied, however, the praetor is absent, and the curule chairs have been removed (3.106-8).6

4 On Lucan’s ethnographical interest, see Coffee (2011) 419-421 and Hodges (2004).

5 Another disparaging swipe at the senators who chose to remain behind in Rome and deal with Caesar, latebra has the additional meaning of a hole or lair for wild animals. Cf. 2.153, latebrae cepere ferarum.

6 Vacuae loco cessere curules. Vacuus also conveys the sense of having no defenders or unprotected, OLD 8b.

The consuls and most of the Senate have fled. Lucan succeeds in conveying a sense of emptiness and desertion even though many senators, while no longer legally functioning, are still present in the city.

Liberty personified calls forth only one champion in her anger,7 L. Caecilius

Metellus, a tribune of the plebs who stands before the doors of the temple and confronts

Caesar, addressing him as raptor (3.125). Metellus’ sacrosanctity as tribune, however,

does not restrain Caesar from considering further violence, and in the next scene

Caesar responds to Metellus in a short angry speech of six lines. At this point, L.

Aurelius Cotta, himself a senator,8 intervenes and in a speech characterized by

defeatism and despair accedes to Caesar, who is already named victor by the narrator

twice in this text, 3.122 and 133. In a single line, Metellus is led away, and all resistance

crumbles. At the climax of the scene, the temple is plundered (3.154-168). Lucan

concludes the entire pericope with a damning sententia, pauperior fuit tum primum

Caesare Roma, (“For the first time Rome was poorer than a Caesar.”) The pointed

juxtapositioning of Caesar and Rome, as though enemies, closes the entire episode.

Out of the material which the poet has inherited concerning this incident in the

civil war, Lucan has chosen to emphasize certain aspects and, conversely, to

deemphasize others in order to create the meaning he intends.9 Strangely, the temple

building does not receive much descriptive attention and the god who dwells within it

7 Housman (1927) has exit in iram per unum virum. Shackleton Bailey (2009) has exciet iram. For the argument, see Shackleton Bailey (1982) 93.

8 On Cotta’s identity and rank, see Fucecchi (2011) 238 n.5 and Hunink (1992) 92-3.

9 By Quintilian’s time, the plundering of temples had become a rhetorical topos. See Rutledge (2007) 181 n.5. On Lucan’s compositional method in this regard, see Masters (1992) 45.

receives none.10 The only explicit acknowledgement that this is a sacred place is found

in the mouth of Caesar when he refers to the city as the sedes deum mentioned above.

Ironically, this very acknowledgement is undermined by Caesar through the act of

sacking the city. Of the temple itself, only the doors are noted (3.117 and 141) which

themselves seem to resist their forced opening,11 and, of course, the treasures

preserved within.

What is considered holy (sacer), interestingly, is the consul’s chair (sacrae

sedes, 3.105-6) and the tribune’s blood (sanguine sacro, 3.124). Throughout the poem,

Lucan has a tendency to elevate certain people with this adjective to a level on a par

with the sacred. Unsurprisingly, altars of sacrifice and the threshold of an unspecified

temple are holy (1.608 and 2.31 respectively), the penates are holy (1.240), Mt

Parnassos is sacred to Phoebus (5.73), and the laws of the gods are sacrae (10.198).

At the same time, Cato’s voice and Cato’s heart are holy (2.285 and 9.255), the white

hair of aged senators (7.371), Pompey’s head (8.677), and the poet’s work (9.980) are

holy.12 It is evident that the poet’s use of sacer is along partisan lines. Those who resist

Caesar, including the consuls who have vacated their chairs at his coming and the

tribunes who were forbidden by law from leaving the city overnight,13 are aligned with

10 A temple was quite literally the dwelling place of the deity. Jenkyns (2013) 226-7. My interpretation of this text differs in important ways from that of Fantham (1996). In contrast to Vergilian usage, Fantham sees Lucan here denouncing a loss of true religio and reverence toward the numen in Rome. I do not believe Lucan is concerned anywhere in this text with numen or religio. The word religio does not appear at all in the poem, and the poet is nowhere trying to create a sense of reverence lost or violated. Lucan’s focus is exclusively on the violation of law and custom rather than the supernatural, as will be demonstrated. Further, a “secular” reading is more consistent with Lucan’s overall posture toward the gods and divinity in the poem than Fantham’s thesis would indicate.

11 Hunink (1992) ad 117 suggests that fores nondum reseratae aedis expresses resistance.

12 All using sacer. Sanctus does not appear in the poem.

13 Ramsey (2003) 245.

what the poet considers to be holy. In our text, then, the magistrates14 receive an

emphasis which the temple building and certainly the gods do not. The poet is more

concerned with the desecration of the Senate, its laws, and the plundering of the

treasures than with the violation of religious taboo.

Leges Amissae

Law and legal language are pervasive in this passage. Within roughly seventy

lines, lex and ius occur three times each15.as well as other legally significant words as

testis, testor, experior, vindex, and damnum. Given the emphasis on the Senate and

magistrates, this concern with law is unsurprising, but essential16 and serves to illustrate

the ramifications of Caesar’s entry into Rome unmolested and to bind the loss which

Lucan envisions to the topography of the city.

In an authorial parenthesis as Metellus is introduced into the narrative, the poet

contrasts the loss of laws without any struggle to the loss of wealth in the impending

plunder which does cause significant strife, pereunt discrimine nullo/amissae leges

set…/certamen movistis, opes (3.119-121).17 The insertion of this moralizing comment

here in the text complicates the tribune’s motives in defending the treasury, implicitly

ascribing to him an inordinate concern for wealth. Caesar, however, does not seem to

notice, perhaps blinded by his own quest for plunder (rapina, 3.121), for when he

14 Tribunes were originally not magistrates. By the principate, however, they were regarded as such. Although not part of the traditional cursus honorum, they did attend sessions of the Senate, could make a relatio, and in theory could veto an act of a magistrate. In this sense, they have been called promagistrates. See Talbert (1984) 185 n.6, 186, and 235.

15 Lex occurs at 3.106, 120, and 140, while ius occurs at 3.104, 113, and 151.

16 Roche (2009) 103 has already noted a pre-occupation with legal authority, especially in book one of the poem.

17 When used with an abstract object, amitto carries the connotation of giving up or abandoning. OLD 5. Cf. Tac. Ann. 14.26: ipse legionibus citis abire procul ac spem belli amittere subegit.

responds to Metellus’ speech with his own, he explicitly acknowledges Metellus’ attempt to save the law and his own attempt to destroy it, ut non, si voce Metelli/servantur leges, malint a Caesare tolli (3.139-140). Wealth (opes), even the common wealth of the state, entices both the legal tribune and the illegal Caesar. The last appearance of lex in this

passage applies to the absent praetor who is described as next to the consul by law

(3.106).

Interestingly, in this same speech to the tribune, Caesar refers to Metellus as the

vindex or champion of liberty, te vindice tuta relicta est/libertas? (“Has liberty been left

safe with you as its champion?” 3.137-8). In Roman law, the term vindex originally

referred to one who took the place of an accused person as his bail and, thus, referred

to his champion or protector.18 Later, the word and its cognates became highly

politicized, especially in the phrase in libertatem vindicavi, as first Caesar19 and then

Augustus20 manipulated it to support their claims of power, claims which ironically

entailed a restriction on liberty. Lucan’s Caesar again is made to undermine the very term which he historically claimed by brushing aside this protector of liberty in order to

acquire the treasury.

Closely related to law (lex) and interwoven throughout this text is the word ius.21

When the remnants of the Senate are summoned at the beginning of this episode, they

are summoned illegally, nullo cogendi iure (3.104).22 Shortly later, Libertas personified,

18 Hammond (1963) 95.

19 Civ. 1.22.5.

20 Res Gestae 1.1. For discussion, see Cooley (2009) 107.

21 In Roman religious contexts, it is the ius divinum which determined what was sacer. Cancik (1985) 251.

22 Cogere senatum or convocare senatum are the technical terms for summoning a meeting of the Senate. See Dyck (2008) 161.

when calling forth Metellus the champion, questions whether right can resist might, viribus an possint obsistere iura/…Libertas experta (3.113-114).23 Metellus, the

champion, will be led away without violence, while Caesar, the victor with his army

(agmina Caesaris, 3.116) will succeed. Right, ius, cannot stand before might and win in

Lucan’s world. The last occurrence of ius in this text is found in one of two sententiae

with which Cotta concludes his defeatist speech persuading Metellus to yield to Caesar,

damna movent populos siquos sua iura tuentur (“Loss affects those whose own rights

protect,” 3.151). To be sui iuris, of course, in Roman law is definitive of being free, as

opposed to alieni iuris, under the dominance of another, i.e. a slave.24 Elsewhere in the

poem, to be sui iuris is broadened from the individual in order to encompass the entire

state and again is associated with freedom.25 In the paradox of Cotta’s statement, loss26

only affects people who have something to lose, in this case rights and laws to protect

them. Caesar’s armed presence in the city and the absence of the Senate implies, in

Cotta’s reasoning, that there is no longer anything to lose. Ius has been lost already.

Metellus, then, is guarding only a shadow, servaveris umbram (3.146), not the laws

themselves (servantur leges), as in Caesar’s estimation above.

23 Experior contains the judicial resonance of going to court over or going to trial, OLD 2b, especially in conjunction with the upcoming references to calling witnesses, testatur, in line 122. While utilizing this text, Ahl (1976) 200 characterizes Caesar as embodying the phrase might over right, a stance irreconcilable with the rule of law.

24 Justinian Dig. 1.6; Boyle (2008) 107; Wirszubski (1968) 1-2. Cf. 8.612: perdiderat iam iura sui, where Pompey has lost his freedom and self-rule as he is led by fate to his death.

25 6.301-2: felix ac libera regum,/Roma, fores iurisque tui. See the discussion of this text in Chapter 6.

26 In addition to referring to military loss, damnum can have the juridical sense of a loss unlawfully caused. OLD 1c.

Of course, ius is a constitutive element in the construction of the state and distinguishes a genuine res publica from a false one.27 According to Livy, Romulus

founded Rome vi et armis, while King Numa re-founded the city, iure eam legibusque ac moribus de integro condere (“he established it anew on right, on laws, and on ancestral customs,” 1.19.1)28 Further leges and iura appear linked together very frequently,29 and their presence together here only reinforces the poet’s concern with rule of law in the face of Caesar’s aggressive disregard for law.

As Caesar stands almost unopposed before the temple doors with the consul’s sacred chair empty and the tribune’s sacrosanctity violated, the ramifications of the forsaking of the city are damningly evident. Law is abandoned (leges amissae) or destroyed (tolli), right yields to might, and the state of legal independence (sui iuris) is lost, hinting at an incipient servitude. Caesar is threatening the very foundation of the state,30 and there is no one to resist him. The city is abandoned by its would-be

defenders.

The legal language continues in the text, however, but with a slight shift in focus.

The appearance of witnesses (testis/testor) in a city without Senate and people ties

Lucan’s concerns to the topography of the city itself. While Metellus adjures (testatur)

Caesar before the temple blocking him from plunder, prohibens rapina, 3.122, the

27 According to Cicero Rep. 1.39.1: res publica res populi…coetus multitudinis iuris consensu. Text is Ziegler (1969).

28 The addition of mores to Livy’s list is pertinent to our analysis, as will be shown below. The text throughout this study for the first pentad of Livy is Ogilvie (1974).

29 Cic. Catil. 1.28; Leg. 1.35.9; Livy 4.15.3; Hor. Ep. 1.16.41; Sil. 1.303 are but a few, representative texts.

30 Of course, the coming of the principate will destabilize law and order as well. See Wirszubski (1968) 130-136, Princeps Supra Leges, for a brief survey of the decline of a constitutional basis for the principate in the early Empire.

Tarpeian rock witnesses (testatur) the opening of the doors of the temple, rupes Tarpeia sonat magnoque reclusas/testatur stridore fores, 3.154-5. The use of the same verb

meaning both ordering/adjuring and witnessing/attesting not only conflates both these

distinctions in meaning, but also connects their subjects. Metellus and the Tarpeian rock

both function as witnesses to Caesar’s actions and as agents of resistance to him.

Mention of the Tarpeian rock is significant. Not only is it physically situated next

to the Temple of Saturn, looming over it and could conceivably echo (sonat) the clanging or screeching of the doors, but it also evokes a whole range of associations for the Romans. Even within the poem itself, reference is made to the Tarpeian seat of

Jupiter, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Tarpeia sedes, 5.27 and 5.306), the

Tarpeian citadel, the original fortress of the city (Tarpeias arces, 7.758) and the

Tarpeian gods, presumably the Capitoline Triad whose shrines comprised the Temple of Jupiter (Tarpeis deis, 8.863), all of which were located on the rock or hill. Caesar himself invokes Jupiter who looks down on the city from the Tarpeian rock, qui moenia prospicis urbis/Tarpeia de rupe Tonans, 1.195-6,31 before he crosses the Rubicon.

Thus, the Tarpeian rock carries with it resonances of Roman religious and political

significance. Even beyond the poem in the cultural landscape of the Roman people, the

rock is connected with the ritual of the Triumph, Romulus’ asylum which was located on

the hill, and the story of Tarpeia, who betrayed the city to the Sabines early in Roman

history.32 These myths of origin and place are extremely important in defining and

31 Jenkyns (2013) 1-53 has an intriguing meditation on the perspective of looking down on the city from its hills in Latin literature.

32 According to Varro L. 5.41.6 – 5.42.1: hinc mons ante Tarpeius dictus a virgine Vestale Tarpeia, quae ibi ab Sabinis necata armis et sepulta: cuius nominis monimentum relictum, quod etiam nunc eius rupes Tarpeium appellatur saxum. Text is Goetz (1910).

expressing identity33 and, in some ways, succeed in saturating the topography of the

city with layers of accumulated meaning.

Strikingly, the use of rupes reinforces the connection to place. The word sedes

with its multiple associations with the gods, especially Jupiter, would fit as a

replacement to rupes in the text, easily occupying the same metrical position (sedes!) within the hexameter. But the choice of rupes, rock or cliff, emphasizes topography. The land itself witnesses Caesar’s violation and resists it, but also witnesses to the entire span of Roman religious and cultural history reaching back to the city’s very foundation.

So too is the curia a witness to Caesar’s actions, privatae curia vocis/testis adest

(3.108-9). Again the language is suggestive. The curia, framed, perhaps even beset by

Caesar’s voice, noun and epithet on either side, is present, while the actual Senate and magistrates are absent, having fled. Caesar is identified as a private citizen, i.e. not holding public office,34 and thereby having no legal authority. The impression is one of a

shell, a senate house with no Senate and a former magistrate with no legal standing.

Legitimacy has abandoned both.

Later in this text, Metellus urges Caesar to violate tribunician sacrosanctity,

noting that Caesar need not fear any crowd to witness his crime, neque enim tibi turba

verenda est/spectatrix scelerum, 3.128-9. For the city is deserted, deserta stamus in

urbe, 3.129. In the absence of magistrates and people, the Tarpeian rock and the doors

of the temple offer resistance and, coupled with the curia, constitute the only witnesses

to these scelera. These are topographical sites redolent of the religious, historical, and

33 Dench (2005) 137.

34 On privatus, see Hunink (1992) ad loc. The curia here must refer primarily to the structure or building, as in 1.487 and 5.32, though without excluding the body or institution of the Senate. Those senators who are present, like Cotta, are summoned illegally and do not constitute a sanctioned assembly for the poet.

legal dimensions of Roman society. It is as if the city itself is a living entity which perceives its own pillaging.

The density of juridical language in this text, even before we get to the actual temple, conveys the enormity of the crime. The protections provided by law which surround the treasures to be found in the temple are destroyed both by Caesar and by the weakness of the magistrates represented by the vindex, Metellus whose own motives are suspect, and by Cotta whose illegitimacy and defeatism actually facilitate

Caesar’s aggression. The destruction of law, witnessed and resisted by the city itself,

extends to impact the freedom of the state.

Libertas Lost

The establishment of the principate by Augustus necessarily shifted (or

unbalanced) the exercise of power under the old Republic and entailed ipso facto a

limitation on the freedom enjoyed by republican elites.35 As a result, the idea of libertas

became an obsession among the ruling class at Rome during the 1st Century CE and

one very much reflected in the literature of the period,36 as the permanent reality of the

principate came to be recognized and accepted. There was a general sense that prior to

Nerva, who ruled from 96 to 98 CE, liberty and principate were incompatible,37 despite

propagandistic efforts by individual emperors to foster an identification between the two

whereby the emperors portrayed themselves as defenders of liberty.38 The full extent,

35 Wirszubski (1968) 124-159; Hammond (1963) 96.

36 Dench (2005) 305. For libertas and Tacitus, see Mellor (2010) 78-92 and Wirszubski (1968) 160-167. For libertas and Lucan, see Martindale (1984) and Tucker (1977).

37 Vogel-Weidemann (1979) 93.

38 Hammond (1963) 98-101. Consider also the phrase vindex libertatis discussed above.

however, of the loss of freedom by the ruling, senatorial elite under the principate became clear only during the reign of Nero,39 precisely when Lucan was writing.

Already in our text, the loss of rights and abandonment of law have impinged

upon liberty, and Libertas personified40 has appeared in defense of the treasury, only to

be swept aside before Caesar’s advance. Lucan goes further, however, and paints a

stark, barren picture of what the loss of liberty actually entails.

Before Caesar has even acted on his impulse to plunder the temple, when

rumors are still circulating as to his intentions, Caesar is portrayed as without any

restraint, velle putant quodcumque potest (“People think that he wants whatever is

possible,” 3.101) The poet prefaces this observation with the comment that this is the

measure of people’s fear. Fear and loss of liberty are related in the poet’s telling. A

similar sentiment is expressed later in Cotta’s defeatist exhortation to Metellus to step

aside, venia est haec sola pudoris/degenerisque metus, nullam potuisse negari (“This alone is the excuse of our shame and our ignoble fear, that nothing was able to be denied him,” 3.148-9). This latter line seems to instantiate what was originally just a

fearful thought by people in the first. The change in tense from present (putant) to

perfect (potuisse) and the repetition of possum suggests that the fears of the people

have become actualized through the actions of the Senate, and that Caesar has indeed

garnered unrestrained power.

Two additional lines, again in Cotta’s speech, further illustrate the loss of libertas

through the abnegation of individual free will. Cotta informs Metellus that he is

39 Johnson (1987) 131.

40 This is Libertas’ second appearance in the poem. In Housman’s text, she appears only twice, here and at 2.203. In Shackleton Bailey’s text, she appears six times as a character in the poem, here and at 2.303, 7.432, 7.696, 9.30, and 10.25.

safeguarding only a shadow if he wishes whatever he is ordered to do, si quidquid iubeare velis (3.147). The implication exists that anyone whose will is joined or subsumed to the will of one who orders them possesses not liberty, but only its shadow,

umbram (3.146). There is a hint here of the distinction between sui iuris and alieni iuris mentioned previously and a creeping enslavement. In the very next line of the text,

Cotta acknowledges that they have already surrendered their will, tot rebus iniquis/paruimus victi (“Having been subdued, we have been obedient in so many unjust things,” 3.147-8).

The poet, then, articulates two dimensions to the loss of freedom precipitated in this text by the armed arrival of Caesar before the temple and the subsequent surrender of legal rights. On the one hand, Caesar is unopposed. He is restrained neither by the law nor by its defenders. He is denied nothing or as the poet himself bluntly observes, omnia Caesar erat (“Caesar was everything,” 3.108). On the other hand, there is a

general submission to Caesar’s will, voluntary in so far as there has been no armed

resistance. Such surrender to another is a first step on the road to slavery.

Significantly, three of these insights (3.147, 148, and 149) are placed in the mouth of the senator, Aurelius Cotta. By remaining behind in Rome after the Senate has fled, by his successful persuasion of Metellus to step aside, and by his own acquiescence before Caesar, Cotta participates in his own loss of freedom and implicates the rest of the Senate in doing so.41 Further, the magistrates in this text have

been remarkably passive. The senators who stayed in Rome, the turba patrum, were

drawn out of their hiding places, e latebris educta suis (3.105) and summoned illegally

41 In this regard, I strongly disagree with Lounsbury (1976) who attributes to Lucan a desire to exonerate the Senate from culpability in the fall of Rome, especially in Book Seven of the poem.

to their meeting place, the Temple of Palatine Apollo, Phoebea Palatia.42 Even Metellus,

the vindex whose own motives are tainted by wealth, after his initial show of resistance,

is led away without a sound, abducto…Metello (3.153), seemingly convinced by Cotta’s

words. The submission, defeatism, and passivity here displayed in educta and abducto contributes to the sense of senatorial impotence and culpability which we saw first in the foundational text of the last chapter. Libertas is lost not solely due to Caesar.

Lucan’s liberty is elsewhere expressly identified with the Senate and, importantly, with the city of Rome. In our text, Metellus’ attempt at preserving what Cotta realistically notes as only the shadow of freedom and law (libertate…cuius servaveris umbram,

3.146) echoes a previous passage from Book Two where Cato chooses to enter the struggle of the civil war even when facing certain defeat. Responding to Brutus, Cato declares, te conplectar, Roma; tuumque/nomen, Libertas, et inanem persequar umbram

(“I will embrace you, O Rome; I will follow your name, O Liberty, even your empty shadow,” 2.302-3). Roma and Libertas form a kind of hendiadys, as Fantham notes,43

suggesting two dimensions of one unified reality. Liberty is tied to the idea of the city of

Rome and together they stand or fall. The abandonment of one has serious

ramifications on the survival of the other.

To these two dimensions, Rome and Liberty, a third dimension, the Senate, is added, most explicitly in Book Seven, which is widely considered to be the central book

42 There has been some debate on the exact identity and location of this temple. Croisille (2002) 152 n.16 maintains that it refers to a shrine to Apollo near the Circus since the Temple of Palatine Apollo had not been built yet. Feeney (1991) 295 and Hunink (1992) 78-9 both claim that it is a deliberate anachronism by the poet intended to suggest the servile conduct of the imperial Senate, which did meet regularly in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, physically connected, significantly, to the imperial house.

43 Fantham (1992) 135.

of the poem. In it, the poet depicts the battle of Pharsalus.44 In the thick of the battle,

Caesar dramatically directs his men to attack primarily the Senate,

in plebem vetat ire manus monstratque senatum:/ scit cruor imperii qui sit, quae viscera rerum,/ unde petat Romam, libertas ultima mundi / quo steterit ferienda loco…(7.578-581)

Caesar forbids his troops to go against the plebs and he points out the Senate: he knows who is the life blood of empire, what is the viscera of the state, he knows whence he might attack Rome, where stands the last liberty of the world to be struck…

It is a rather startling admission which the narrator puts into the mouth of Caesar. The

liberty of the world subsists in the Senate, which is the heart of the state and (here) the

pathway to occupy Rome. The Senate stands as the embodiment of liberty which

Caesar intends to destroy,45 a fact only partially visible in our text in Book Three where

Metellus is Freedom’s vanquished defender.46

What we see in this analysis so far is the beginning of a triadic structure of

meaning in the poem. Place, here Rome, combines with a valued ideal or abstraction

like law or liberty and a people or group as in the Senate. These three elements are

critically important in the definition and expression of identity or meaning in Lucan’s

vision and will be developed in the pages to follow.

A corollary to Liberty’s destruction at Rome is its flight elsewhere, specifically to

the East. Again in Book Seven, the poet details the cataclysmic effects of the upcoming battle. Foreign powers no longer fear Rome, and the consul will not lead captive

44 On Pharsalus as the center and climax of the poem, see Roche (2005) 66 and Feeney (1991) 276, 296.

45 Lounsbury (1976) 221-2.

46 Roller (2001) 249 n.60. Not incidentally, Nero is also said to have willed the dissolution or destruction of the Senate. Suet. Nero 37.3: saepe iecit ne reliquis quidem se parsurum senatoribus, eumque ordinem sublaturum quandoque e re publica ac provincias et exercitus equiti R. ac libertis permissurum. Text is Ihm (1907).

peoples into the forum in triumph nor will he establish new colonies abroad, and liberty fleeing civil strife withdraws beyond the Tigris and the Rhine never to return, quod fugiens civile nefas redituraque numquam/libertas ultra Tigrim Rhenumque recessit

(7.431-2). Place again is significant, and the Tigris and the Rhine function as a foil to

Rome. As the Senate abandoned the city, so too did libertas, who now resides among non-Roman peoples and potential enemies. As we have seen, the East is almost constantly on the horizon in Lucan’s poem, either as a threat or a reproach.

The alignment of Liberty and Senate in the text assumes an added resonance when set beside Lucan’s own status as a senator and his death in the Pisonian

Conspiracy of 65 CE. This conspiracy was designed to replace Nero with C. Calpurnius

Piso, another senator and a descendant of the old republican nobility.47 Senatorial

freedom, senatoria libertas, a phrase used by P. Clodius Thrasea Paetus during the

principate of Nero,48 was a flashpoint in the relations between Senate and princeps. It

meant essentially maintaining an honorable place for the Senate in the governance of

the state alongside the princeps and respect for individual senators.49 The deterioration

of the relationship between the Senate and Nero marked by an increasingly adulatory

posture by the Senate parallels Cotta’s and Metellus’ acquiescence to Caesar in the text

and signals the abandonment of law and the loss of freedom evident in Lucan’s own

time. In the poem, however, this loss extends beyond law and senatorial prestige to

include also the loss of the ancestral mores and subsequently the loss of identity.

47 On the conspiracy itself, see Rudich (1993) 87-93; Griffin (1984) 166-170.

48 Tac. Ann. 13.49. On Thrasea Paetus, see Rudich (1993) 76-81.

49 By Nero’s time, the phrase did not mean a restoration of republican freedom nor a return to the power of the Senate prior to Augustus. Cf. Vogel-Weidemann (1979) 101-103; Hammond (1963) 98-101.

Mores Parcorum Avorum

This entire episode in Book Three of the poem culminates in its final scene, the actual plundering of the temple itself. Located in the forum, the Temple of Saturn occupies a unique place in Roman history and government. The dedication of the temple site to Saturn dated all the way back to the earliest days of the Republic, when the first temple structure was consecrated to Saturn by the consuls Aulus Sempronius and M. Minucius in around 497 BCE.50 The temple had been rebuilt several times over

the centuries, and significantly for our analysis, it was one of the last large temples to be

rebuilt and rededicated by someone other than a member of the imperial family when it

was renovated and vowed by L. Munatius Plancus with plunder from his Alpine triumph

of 43 BCE.51

In addition to functioning as the dwelling place of the deity, Roman temples also

commemorated some historical event, like that of Plancus’ victory, and kept dedications

to the deity, often in the form of plunder from foreign conquest and objects of cultural or

historical significance for the state.52 These dedications and relics were sometimes

displayed to the public, especially on the festival day of the deity. Otherwise, the temple

was closed, apparently kept under lock and key.53

The Temple of Saturn, however, was unique in that it also housed the aerarium

sanctius, the official Treasury of the Roman state. Not only was the wealth plundered

50 Livy 2.21.1-2.

51 Claridge (1998) 81.

52 For the uses of Roman temples, see Stambaugh (1978). Among the objects stored in temples which Stambaugh mentions are the toga of Servius Tullius, the sixth king, in the Temple of Fortuna and the pearls of Cleopatra VII at the Pantheon.

53 Stambaugh (1978) 575.

from foreign peoples kept in the treasury, but also fines, gifts, and debts to the state. Its officials, originally quaestors assigned by the Senate, but later under the principate officials appointed by the princeps, tabulated all income and made payments authorized by the Senate in the form of salaries.54 Furthermore, copies of laws and senatus

consulta were deposited in the temple alongside the state’s financial records. In fact, a

law or senatus consultum could be nullified if the written record could be intercepted

before its physical deposition in the temple.55 As is clear, the temple was intimately

connected with law and Senate in the maintenance of the state.

Of the temple itself in the narrative, only the creaking resistance of the doors is

mentioned, as stated previously. The emphasis is entirely on what is described as deep

within the temple and untouched for many years, the treasure of the Roman people,

Romani census populi, (3.157). Here the use of census cleverly contrasts with its near

synonym, opes, both meaning wealth or property.56 Among the treasures in the temple

is the wealth of the East, Orientis opes (3.165), which becomes the common property of

the Roman people, census, when housed in the temple. Yet this same treasure reverts

to opes when it is sought by the privatus Caesar and the tribune Metellus, whose

motivation is clouded by the prospect of personal gain, opes in 3.125 and 3.121

respectively. For the poet, the pillaging of the temple entails the appropriation of the

public heritage of Rome, census, for private, illegal use or profit, opes.

54 Millar (1964) 33, 39.

55 Stambaugh (1978) 582; Millar (1964) 34.

56 Census, however, has the legal connotation of the property qualification made by the censors and the registration of citizens. Yet it is still used of abstractions. OLD 1 and 3c. Note also the echo here with the Senate’s role in issuing decrees, patres censere parati, 3.109. In his Epitoma 2.13 when detailing this same historical event of 49 BCE, Florus expands on census, saying that Caesar aerarium quoque sanctum, quia tardius aperiebant tribuni, iussit effringi, censumque et patrimonium populi Romani rapuit. Text is Malcovati (1972).

What follows in the narrative is a small catalogue of conquered peoples and places whose plunder constitutes the treasure, grouped into two sections of first five and then four historical events. The catalogue begins with the Punic Wars (3.157), followed by the defeat of King Perseus of Macedonia and his father Philip V (both in

3.158). The Gallic siege of the city in 390 BCE is emphasized, highlighted by an emotive authorial apostrophe to Rome (3.159) in which reference is also made to the defeat of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (regi in 3.160). The second grouping commences with the wealth of Asia represented by King Attalus of Pergamum who in 133 BCE actually bequeathed his kingdom to Rome (called tribute in 3.162). The conquest of Crete under a different Metellus (3.163) is followed by that of Cyprus by Cato in 58 BCE (3.164).

Two full lines (3.165-6) are devoted to all the wealth which Pompey had won for Rome in his campaigns in the East.57 Caesar’s accomplishments in Gaul, of course, are

omitted. The narrative resumes with a one line summation, tristi spoliantur templa

rapina (“The temple is stripped in tragic plunder,” 3.167) and the entire episode ends

with the sententious observation on the poverty of Rome before Caesar. It is a

remarkable litany of geographical expansion and victorious history (one shudders to

imagine all of the suffering involved). Almost all of the events mentioned occur in the

East and almost all of them due to military conquest, except for one striking exception.

Embedded in the very center of the catalogue separating the two sections of historical references to military plunder is the inclusion of the mos maiorum, quidquid

parcorum mores servastis avorum (“whatever of the frugal ancestors, you, mores, have

preserved,” 3.161). These mores comprise the only abstraction in the list and the only

57 For a fuller treatment of each event, see Hunink (1992) ad loc.

“items” internal to Roman society, i.e. not taken from other peoples or places, but still are carried off (egeritur) by Caesar.58 Among the treasures in the temple, then, are the

mores of the Roman people, elevated not only by their central place in the catalogue,

but also by the unusual apostrophe – the only apostrophe to mos/mores in a work

known for its widespread use of apostrophe. Their inclusion inside the physical structure

of the temple constitutes a relationship between the abstract and the concrete,59 an

intersection in which the concrete holds and safeguards the abstract, just as it does the

material collection in the temple. Thus the mos maiorum are anchored to a particular

place, the temple, in a particular city, Rome, which can be looted and lost.

“A word of deep and pregnant implication,” as R.G. Austin explains,60 mores was

a highly emotional concept intimately linked with law. Law was considered the

achievement of the ancestors and formed with mores two aspects of essentially one

reality, the written and unwritten bonds of society.61 As part of the moral vocabulary of

the Romans, mores comprised an essential element in the articulation of a cultural

identity which was heavily moralistic from the beginning.62

58 Hunink (1992) ad loc. specifies these mores as frugality, simplicity, and honesty without support. I prefer to leave them unspecified as a collective whole. In Silius’ Punica 1.617-629, another similar catalogue of military plunder displayed in a temple in Rome occurs with many of the same historical events, but excluding any abstractions.

59 Cf. Seneca De Vita Beata 7.3: virtutem in templo convenies, in foro, in curia, pro muris stantem, pulverulentam coloratam, callusas habentem manus, where Seneca is contrasting virtus and voluptas, which is found in fornices and popinae. See Jenkyns (2013) 119. Text is Reynolds (1977).

60 Austin (1986) on Aen. 6.852 where mos occurs in that key expression of Roman identity: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento/(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,/parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. Text is Mynors (1969).

61 Thomas (2011) 158 and multiple references included there; Dyck (2010) 174.

62 On the moral vocabulary of the Romans, see Roller (2001) 21 and especially the overview in Earl (1961) 5-27. On the moralistic nature of Roman cultural identity, see Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 34-5 and Dench (2005) 139.

Further, the importance of ancestors in elite self-fashioning at Rome made the mos maiorum a particularly aristocratic possession. They became the standard by which Roman elites defined and evaluated themselves and others.63 Vague, unwritten,

and fluid, the mos maiorum was easily manipulated and politicized, like Libertas, by

these same elites. Additionally, exemplary history, embodying mores and so

characteristic of the Romans, could be adapted to suit any of a number of rhetorical

aims, as Lucan himself does.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has delineated three broad rhetorical appropriations of

the ancestors and their mores among elite Romans.64 The first is a competitive contrast

between the achievements of one’s personal ancestors and another’s as an element of

elite self-definition. The second conflates everyone’s ancestors into a monolithic whole

and presupposes continuity between the past and the present. The third is similar, but

detects a rupture between the achievements of the past and present reality.

Commonalities exist among these three uses in that all attribute a unique status of

authority to the past which interacts with the present either by way of validating or

critiquing the present or some combination thereof. All three also assume a particular

relevance of the past to the present created by an agent in the present. The ability,

then, to manipulate mores contributes to their own evolving nature as each successive

generation or particular author redefines them in context.

By situating the mores avorum in the temple among the military achievements of

ancestral Romans (a number of whom are named, i.e. Fabricius and Metellus or are

63 Roller (2001) 20-22.

64 Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 218-231. I am particularly indebted to his analysis in what follows.

elevated to the ranks of the ancestors even though they are living characters in the plot of the poem like Cato and Pompey), the poet is aligning mores with Cato and Pompey who in turn are grouped with the great heroes of the past. At the same time, the poet is enhancing the crimes, scelera, inherent in Caesar’s desecration of the temple. Not only is Caesar plundering the gold and silver of ancient glory, but also a key element in

(elite) identity, fashioned over centuries of accomplishment.

Nevertheless, the positing of the mos maiorum in the temple would appear to be giving it a static, museum-like quality, firmly embedded in the past. Its plundering coupled with the overall nihilistic vision of the poet seems to present a terrible rupture between past and present. Yet as in the foundational text in Chapter 2, the poet’s stance toward time is more nuanced. The apostrophe to Rome and, especially, the unique apostrophe to mores shatter this perception by forming a temporal bridge to the audience’s present. Rome and the mos maiorum become realities made present before the eyes of the poet’s contemporaries and force them to engage both abstractions almost as living characters who transcend the original context of the civil war between

Caesar and Pompey.65 Mores, then, are not confined to the temple or to the past, and,

like Rome, have a special relevance to Lucan’s own day.

Of course, historically temples were plundered regularly and with impunity.66

While serving as consul, M. Antonius removed a staggering 700 million sesterces from

the Temple of Ops in Rome. Octavian looted the sanctuary of Diana at Aricia as well as

seized the state Treasury, like his father Caesar did, in order to pay his troops. Pompey

65 This function of apostrophe is developed more fully in Chapter 6 of our study.

66 Rutledge (2007) 195: “Roman respect for sacred sites existed at times more in the realm of the ideal than in actual practice.”

himself, just before he fled the city, tried to plunder the aerarium through the agency of the consul Lentulus but failed, another fact omitted in Lucan’s account.67 Of special

relevance, however, are the actions of Nero when he pillaged numerous sanctuaries in

order to help pay for the clean-up and rebuilding of the city after the great fire of 64 CE,

which he was reputed to have started.

Tacitus’ account of these actions reveals a perspective which correlates with

Lucan’s depiction of Caesar in the poem and specifically in this episode. Tacitus writes:

Interea conferendis pecuniis pervastata Italia, provinciae eversae sociique populi et quae civitatium liberae vocantur. Inque eam praedam etiam dii cessere, spoliatis in urbe templis egestoque auro quod triumphis, quod votis omnis populi Romani aetas prospere aut in metu sacraverat. (Ann. 15.45)

Meanwhile for the purpose of collecting money, Italy was laid waste, the provinces were turned out as well as allied peoples and those which are called free states. Even the gods were involved in this plunder, as temples in the city were pillaged and the gold which every age of the Roman people had consecrated in good times and in fear through triumphs and dedications was carried out.

Woodman (1992) has observed that throughout Tacitus’ account of Nero’s reign, the

princeps is portrayed consistently as an enemy aggressor attacking his own city.68

Woodman notes, in particular, the use of pervasto and spolio in the text just cited. In

both the tacitean and lucanian texts, spolio and egero, to carry out, occur (in Lucan,

templa spoliantur…egeritur, both in 3.167) as well as the shared idea of the wealth of

the Roman people accumulated over time through military victory. These similarities are

only suggestive of a reading of Lucan’s text in which Caesar represents a Nero who is

67 For M. Antonius, Cic. Phil. 2.93a; Ramsey (2003) ad loc. For Octavian at Aricia, Appian B. Civ. 5.3.24; Green (1994) 210 n.21. For Octavian and the Treasury, Appian B. Civ. 3.94.387; Syme (1939) 187. For Pompey and the Treasury, Caes. Civ. 1.41.1; Cic. Att. 7.13.1; Seager (1979) 154 n.17.

68 Woodman (1992) 185-6. On Nero’s plundering of temples, see Shotter (2008) 139-140; Rudich (1993) 87.

an enemy to the city of Rome and who plunders its riches. Lucan, of course, adds the mos maiorum, safeguarded by a Senate which is itself complicit. Other scholars have discerned an intended allusion to these same historical events of 64 CE, though reflected in different verses of our text (3.151-2).69 Whether these allusions are solid or not, Lucan’s consistent and obvious manipulation of time and concern for the future manifested in part in his frequent use of apostrophe indicates an engagement with his own contemporary world which encourages such a reading. Nero and the principate in general shadow Caesar’s role in the poem.

The scene of the plundering of the temple in the narrative, then, assumes a much larger significance in the poet’s telling than simply the removal of wealth to serve

Caesar’s aims in the civil war. The catalogue of Roman military achievements extending back to the distant past, the links between the aerarium and senatorial authority, the location of the mos avorum within the physical temple and their rhetorical alignment with the opponents of Caesar all add to the horror of Caesar’s crime. His portrayed rapaciousness destroys values central to Roman identity and, with the Senate’s willing

acquiescence, leaves Rome empty and impoverished, both physically and

metaphorically. Further the historical overlay and the apostrophes which connect it to

the text implicate Lucan’s own time, especially Nero who plundered the temples of

Rome in the aftermath of the fire.

In this analysis so far, the appearance of value-laden vocabulary, abstract

cultural ideals, and geographical sites of particular meaning to the Romans have

repeatedly raised the issue of identity. We have suggested already a triadic structure of

69 Brisset (1964) 187, following Grenade (1948) 273. Brisset (1964) 187: il ne paraît pas douteux non plus….I am not so confident.

place, values, and community/group as a way of understanding identity in the text.

Greater elucidation of this structure will yield a deeper understanding of Lucan’s aims.

Identity Abandoned

Cultural geographers and anthropologists among others have long understood

an intimate interrelationship between the physical, natural world and the cultural

landscape which is built around it, noting a unity formed from these two different

components.70 As a people come to identify a particular land or region as their own and

assert their control over it, they assign meaning to the visible features of the landscape

primarily through myths of place or origin which validate their claims to the land and

differentiate themselves and their place from others.71 According to this approach,

culture, meaning, and landscape are seen as a willed reality, i.e. created, by a people in

their interactions with the surrounding environment.72 In seeking to define and affirm

their identity, people give to the land a sense of place which, in turn, serves as a marker

of distinction for that people.

This interaction between people and place logically impacts the physical

landscape. Cultures express themselves in the landscape which they create and

inhabit,73 often in a symbolic manner. This process frequently manifests itself in the

production of monuments in the landscape to which symbolic and cultural meaning is

attached.74 As repositories of meaning, these structures can take on an emotional

70 Sauer (1925) is seen as seminal. Cf. Norton (2014) 47-49. Here I am following developments in the Landscape school of Cultural Geography.

71 Norton (2014) 280; Dench (2005) 137.

72 Norton (2014) 49; Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 27, 39; Sauer (1925) 46.

73 Norton (2014) 287.

74 Norton (2014) 293-298.

power and even authority which extends far beyond and far more deeply than a simple rational intentionality. They can assume a sacral, if not explicitly religious character at the heart of a people’s self-understanding. As Richard Jenkyns remarks, “Emotional force is immanent in the solidity of brick and stone.”75

Concomitant with the role which monuments play in the maintenance and

expression of identity is the place of memory in society, a role of particular importance

to the Romans. Memory of one’s history or origin as well as the social memory of a

people, like the mos maiorum, is a primary locus of meaning and identity and is

frequently embedded in monuments, such as inscriptions, grave stones, statues, etc. or

in memory institutions, like festivals for the dead, religious ritual, or spectacles.76 Even

individuals can at times embody the memory of a nation, as the figure of Cato is

frequently made to do in literary contexts.77 History and memory, then, are important to

identity and its transmission to subsequent generations.78

In this entire discussion of identity, a pattern emerges whereby the abstract is in

relationship with the concrete. Culture interacts with and shapes the physical landscape,

symbol and meaning are expressed in monument, and memory and history are

institutionalized in structure or ritual. This dynamic is at the heart of Lucan’s poetic

representation of the plundering of the Temple of Saturn.

The Tarpeian rock with its religious and historical associations both within the

poem itself and within the wider cultural framework of the Romans witnesses Caesar’s

75 Jenkyns (2013) 118.

76 Jenkyns (2013)53; Thorne (2011)369-371; Spencer (2005) 48-51.

77 Thorne (2011) 376-7.

78 On history and identity, see Bartsch (1997) 146-7.

crime in the absence of magistrates and people who have fled. The rock and the curia building by virtue of their witnessing and resisting seem to take on a living presence in the city, independent of its inhabitants. The temple itself, which houses the mores of the

Roman people alongside the memory of people and events considered treasures, safeguards the history and values, the wealth of a nation. These two physical sites of the landscape function as places of memory and meaning, central to an identity constructed around and localized in the city of Rome.

Abstractions, like leges, libertas,and mos, inextricably interwoven within the

Roman cultural milieu, all appear in this text, and either explicitly or implicitly, they are connected to the physical features of curia and temple. The city itself incarnates law and freedom, and ancestral custom.

Lastly in the poet’s elitist vision, the legally convened Senate occupies pride of place, whose absence in this particular text is symbolized also in concrete terms. The sacred seat of the consul no longer shines, and the curule chairs are empty and removed. A triadic structure of these elements, topography, moral wealth, and Senate forming a unified whole, constitute Roman identity in the text.

This dynamic within the poem must be set against the backdrop formed by the shift of power during the early principate and its impact on the physical site of Rome.

This shift surfaced anxieties about the integrity of the city and the changing relationship between princeps and the urban landscape.79 Under the Republic, the city was largely

the fiefdom of the Senate.80 With the advent of the principate, however, the city

79 Spencer (2005) 47, 53.

80 Ceausescu (1976) 91.

gradually, but inexorably submitted to the dominance of the princeps. Display and public honor, so valued among the republican elites, became confined largely to the private sphere during the empire, limited to homes and horti,81 while the public sphere was

taken over by the imperial family. As noted previously, the Temple of Saturn was one of

the last large temples in Rome to advertise its rededication by someone other than a

member of the imperial family. Subsequent public works were almost invariably

undertaken by the emperor or his household. Further as the Roman world expanded

under the Empire, the common urban geography could no longer be taken for granted,82

and knowledge of the city or participation in its institutions was no longer essential to

being Roman,83 given the far-flung locations of its citizens. The radical expansion of the

empire combined with a new power structure at its heart impacted traditional identities

and those who had previously determined them.

Nero’s own impact on the city was extensive and criticized. His building program

was widely seen as transgressive. Even aside from the great fire for which Nero was

held responsible by many, his love of ostentation, his inordinate involvement in and

promotion of games and spectacle, and his construction projects were changing the

visible fabric of the city and made him vulnerable to criticism and attack.84 Nero’s

Domus Transitoria, the predecessor of the Domus Aurea which was built after Lucan’s

death and greatly magnified the sense of transgression, connected the Palatine and the

81 Eck (1997) 78-9.

82 Dench (2005) 137.

83 Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 259-260; Dench (2005) 94.

84 See especially Tac. Ann. 15.37: publicis locis struere convivia totaque urbe quasi domo uti. Et celerrimae luxu famaque epulae fuere.

Esquiline hills, disrupting traffic and displacing many people. Quite visibly, it emphasized a more monarchical presence and conception of the principate.85 Nero’s

games, like the Juvenalia of 59 CE and the Neronia of 60 CE with their accompanying

banquets and festivals, turned Rome into a spectacle, what one scholar has termed the

Disneyfication of the city.86 In a real sense, Rome was perceived as the personal

playground of the emperor, his domestic space. Given the anxieties which pre-existed

among the aristocracy, Nero’s actions only exacerbated a sense of dislocation and loss,

especially in terms of a well-established identity, hallowed by centuries of tradition, at

least among a nostalgic, politically disenfranchised elite. So in Lucan’s poem a Caesar

is portrayed as a hostile force attacking his own city and plundering its treasures.

In Lucan’s vision, the city of Rome, its physical landscape and its structures,

represented in the text by the Tarpeian rock, the curia, and especially the Temple of

Saturn, becomes the repository of meaning and identity for the Roman people. To these

concrete geographical sites are linked rights and law, freedom, and the ancestral

traditions of the Romans, the mos maiorum. The city itself witnesses to these values

and, in some sense, safeguards them, along with a rightfully constituted Senate. Within

the rhetorical framework of the poem, law, freedom, ancestral custom, and Senate are

all facets of one cultural reality, anchored in the physical fabric of the city of Rome.

Together they form one whole which, when threatened in any of its parts, collapses into

loss and meaninglessness.

85 On the Domus Transitoria, see Champlin (2003) 127, 208-9; Griffin (1984) 128, 137. For a more positive reassessment of Nero’s building program, see Elsner (1994).

86 Spencer (2005) 57, 60.

Identity is constituted and expressed in and through the landscape and the people who inhabit it. Meaning is contingent upon matter, and the abandoning of Rome and its subsequent plundering by Caesar translates into a cataclysmic abandoning and plundering of meaning and identity. While Caesar is clearly the aggressor, the Senate

itself, by its flight or its collaboration, participates in the dismantling of this freedom and

identity.

Such a rhetorical manipulation of the city and the elitist identity built around it by

the poet serves a larger purpose than simply castigating Caesar in the civil war with

Pompey. It implicates all subsequent Caesars and, particularly, Nero whose own

posture toward the city and whose building program are perceived as destructive, even

of Roman identity, leading ultimately to slavery and annihilation.

In the next text under consideration, the poet’s gaze shifts from Rome to the East

where the remnants of the Senate gather in Epirus to appoint Pompey as commander of

the republican forces. Paradoxically, the centrality of Rome, its topography and its

monuments, continues, even in its absence after the city has been left behind and

plundered. Meaning and traditional identity continue to dissolve and disappear in the

rhetorical manipulations of the consul L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus.

CHAPTER 4 PLACE AND POWER: THE SENATE IN EPIRUS

After the city of Rome has been abandoned and its treasures plundered in Book

Three and after the tumultuous events in Spain and North Africa portrayed in Book

Four, the poet’s focus shifts to the East at the beginning of Book Five, where it will remain for the rest of the poem. The West is lost, and Caesar now occupies the empty homes and silent laws and closed fora of the city (5.31-2).

In a speech at the beginning of Book Five (5.1-65), L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus,

the consul of 49 BCE, summons the remnants of the Senate to a meeting in Epirus

opposite Brundisium in northwest Greece ostensibly to appoint Pompey as commander

of the republican forces in the continuing war against Caesar. In his speech, Lentulus

explicitly claims renewed senatorial authority and identity and the existence of another

center of power, an alternate Rome, precipitated by the loss of the ancestral city on the

Tiber. The poet specifically engages these assertions in this text, thereby creating a

dissonance between poet and character which ultimately undermines and refutes the

assertions placed in the mouth of the consul. In the end, we are left with a sense of the

ridiculous unreality of senatorial claims in the aftermath of the abandoning of Rome and

a decentralization which leads ultimately to death and annihilation in the East. The loss

of the physical, geographical homeland in the tripartite structure detailed in Chapter 3

entails the continuing dissolution of the people (i.e Senate) whose identity derives from

that physical place and the erosion of the Roman values and ideals linked to it.

The issues raised in Lentulus’ speech parallel concerns regarding senatorial

identity and decentralization in Lucan’s own day. As before in this study, by engaging

with these concerns in the poem, the poet is engaging them among his contemporaries,

lamenting or even condemning the changing identities of the senatorial elite and the changing place of Rome in the expanding reality of the Empire.

At the end of Book Four, the poet reflects on the death of C. Scribonius Curio at the hands of King Juba in North Africa while fighting for Caesar. Book Five opens with a shift toward the lands of Macedonia as the winter of 49 BCE signals the approaching end of the consuls’ term of office (5.1-6). The Senate gathers in Epirus, a foreign and foul place, peregrina ac sordida sedes (5.9) in order to demonstrate that the great man

Pompey is subordinate to them and not the other way around, docuit populos

venerabilis ordo/ non Magni partes, sed Magnum in partibus esse (5.14-5).

Without preamble, Lentulus is introduced as sitting on his lofty chair, e celsa

sublimis sede profatur (5.16), and we recall that the magistrates’ chairs in Rome are

empty (3.107). After thirty lines of high rhetoric, his speech concludes without any

debate from his fellow senators. With a happy shout, the Senate is described as giving

its approval to the appointment of Pompey as leader, and the poet resumes the

narrative with a series of honors which the Senate bestows on various allied and

eastern peoples, culminating with Ptolemy XIII of Egypt whose mention in the text is

preceded by the exclamation pro tristia fata (5.57), “O tragic fates!” The entire episode does not end cleanly at a customary half-line shift1 or terminal sententia as elsewhere,

but elides unexpectedly into the next episode concerning Appius’ consultation of the

Delphic oracle (5.68-236). Such enjambment indicates a thematic relationship or continuation between the two, geographically distinct scenes.2 The speech is bracketed,

1 We have seen such mid-line transitions in two previous texts, 1.522 and 3.97.

2 See Sklenár (2003) 35 for another such transition at 4.581 between two otherwise separate scenes.

then, by the poet’s voice which necessarily impacts and shapes its interpretation before the narrative moves on to events at Delphi.

The Speech Itself

Lentulus’ speech is obsessed with place, paradoxically while trying to deny its importance, in the wake of the loss of Rome. Only the last two and a half lines, 5.45-47, are actually devoted to the appointment of Pompey as commander and the furtherance of the plot of the poem. Historically, of course, Caesar’s possession of Rome gave him an appearance of greater legitimacy, a fact which he certainly used to his own advantage.3 This benefit for Caesar, however, is not explicitly mentioned in the poem,

and the immediate cause for Lentulus’ assertions lies in the republicans’ separation

from Rome and the need to subordinate Pompey to senatorial approval, thus

distinguishing him from Caesar.4

Appealing to the strength of their Latin character and their ancient blood,

indole…Latia…sanguine prisco (5.17), Lentulus urges these senators not to consider

the fact that they have been forced from their land and their houses in the captured

city,5 but to decree that they are still the Senate, non…cernite, sed…primum hoc

decernite, patres,/ quod regnis populisque liquet, nos esse senatum (5.20-22).

Wherever the Senate is, in Lentulus’ logic, power accompanies them as an attendant,

rerum nos summa sequetur/ imperiumque comes (5.26-27).

3 Civ. 1.35.1: Evocat ad se Caesar Massilia xv primos. Cum iis agit ne initium inferendi belli ab Massiliensibus oriatur: debere eos Italiae totius auctoritatem sequi potius quam unius hominis voluntati obtemperare. Text is Fabre (2006). Cf. Seager (1979) 163.

4 Leigh (1997) 145-6 maintains that in this text Lucan is alert to the problematic concentration of power in one man, whether Pompey or princeps, who represents a republican entity. Thus Pompey must submit to senatorial authority. The theme of the concentration of power in one man appears elsewhere in this same text, as we will see.

5 A continuation of the urbs capta theme from Book 3.99.

In good rhetorical fashion, Lentulus next appeals to a precedent in history, to the exemplum of Camillus who came from exile in Ardea in order to save Rome during the sack of the city by the Gauls in 390 BCE.6 Lentulus states Tarpeia sede perusta/

Gallorum facibus Veiosque habitante Camillo/ illic Roma fuit (“When Camillus was living

at Veii and the Tarpeian seat was burned by the Gauls, there was Rome,” 5.27-9). The

reference is complicated, as we shall see, but we are reminded of the importance of the

Tarpeian rock in the text from Chapter 3 and the parallel exclamation of Pompey upon

arrival in Mytilene from Chapter 2, hic mihi Roma fuit (8.133). The mention of Camillus

is followed by a concise statement at the heart of Lentulus’ argument. He asserts that

the Senate has never lost its rights/authority because the soil on which it stands has

changed, non umquam perdidit ordo/ mutato sua iura solo (5.29-30). The tight,

concluding chiasmus expresses the link between power and place, a link which

Lentulus denies.

After an acknowledgement that Caesar now occupies a city of empty houses and

silent laws, Lentulus’ argument continues with a surprising inversion of expectations.

The curia in Rome, according to the consul, houses the fugitive senators, for those who

are not in Epirus are the exiles, ordine de tanto quisquis non exulat hic est (5.33-34).

Several scholars have understood Lentulus to be saying, even if only obliquely, that the

patria of the Roman people exists either in Epirus or wherever the Senate is.7 At the

very least, Lentulus is implying either that Rome as the seat of power has moved to

Epirus or that Rome is irrelevant to the legitimate exercise of senatorial authority.

6 On the historical Camillus, see Cornell (1989) 302-306.

7 Rossi (2000) 580 n40; Barratt (1979) ad loc.

Lentulus gives no indication on what basis his inverted vision rests. He does, however, claim divine involvement, again obliquely, using a metaphor from the balance, en, totis viribus orbis/ Hesperiam pensant superi (“For all the strength of the world, the gods above weigh out Italy,” 5.37-38).8 Finally, Lentulus comments on the weaknesses of the

enemy and concludes by rallying the Senate to act and appoint Pompey as commander.

The appropriation of Rome or more broadly the state itself in order to impart

legitimacy or authority does have a grounding in the historical reality of civil war. Shortly

after Caesar’s assassination when both Brutus and Cassius had been forced to flee

Italy, both made claims similar to those implied by Lentulus in the poem. The historian

Velleius Paterculus, a senator during the principate of Tiberius, writes

profecti urbe atque Italia intento ac pari animo, sine auctoritate publica provincias exercitusque occupaverant et, ubicumque ipsi essent, praetexentes esse rem publicam, pecunias etiam, quae ex transmarinis provinciis Romam ab quaestoribus deportabantur, a volentibus acceperant. (2.62.3)9

Brutus and Cassius, after they set out from the city and from Italy with the same intention and mindset, had seized their provinces and army without proper authority and putting forth the pretext that wherever they were, there was the republic, they had even accepted monies which were being carried to Rome from overseas provinces from willing quaestors.

Livy, whose account does not survive in full, apparently shares Velleius’ bias against the

tyrannicides in this matter, calling their claim a pretext as well.10 Both of these

historians, writing early in the Julio-Claudian era years before Nero, are favorably

8 The scholiast clarifies, id est ut nos totum orbem possideamus, pro eo quod amisimus Italiam; sic dii metiuntur. Text is Endt (1909). Cf. Barratt (1979) ad loc.

9 Text is Watt (1998). See also Syme (1939) 119, 160 n9.

10 On Livy here, see Woodman (1983) 135.

disposed toward the Augustan principate. Cicero, however, who was a contemporary of these events, supported Brutus’ claims.11

Within a very different context and genre, Silius Italicus, another imperial author writing under the Flavian emperors after Lucan, uses Rome similarly. In his historical epic on the Punic Wars, Silius honors his hero, Q. Fabius Maximus, who finally defeated

Hannibal after facing criticism and hostility from the Senate in Rome for his handling of the war. Fabius’ lieutenant, M. Rufus Minucius, hails him saying, hic patria est, murique urbis stant pectore in uno (“He is our homeland, and the walls of the city stand firm in his heart alone,” 7.743). In Silius’ rhetorical framework, Fabius functions as a prototype

of the Flavian emperors and expresses a not-so-veiled support for their rule.12

It is evident that Rome is a mobile conception, appropriated both in history and

literature in order to legitimize or exalt a particular position or person. Where Lucan

differs from his fellow imperial authors (and republican antecedents) is that this

appropriation, employed by characters in his poem, is applied to place rather than

individuals. For Lentulus, Rome is Epirus or Veii in the allusion to Camillus. For

Pompey, it is Mytilene. Similar claims made of individuals occur elsewhere in the poem,

as we shall see in Chapter 5, but never by the poet himself.13 To make such an

11 Phil. 2.113 with Ramsey (2003) ad loc. Cf. Phil. 11.27: Nam et Brutus et Cassius multis iam in rebus ipse sibi senatus fuit. Text is Clark (1908).

12 Littlewood (2011) lxx. Text of Silius is Miniconi (2003). Note also Corneille’s Sertorius who tells Pompey at III.1.936: Rome n’est plus dans Rome, elle est toute où je suis.

13 The case has been made for the Senate itself as Rome in Lucan. Bexley (2009) 463-4. While this is certainly consonant with Lucan’s overall senatorial preference, ultimately even this claim is untenable in the poet’s unfolding vision, as this text will show.

identification for one man is precisely what Lucan rejects,14 in sharp contrast to Silius.

Lucan was not writing under the Flavians, but under Nero.

In short, then, the abandoning of Rome precipitates a crisis of identity and

authority for Lentulus and his view of the Senate. Some twenty-two of the thirty lines of

his speech are devoted to various arguments on the irrelevance of place, i.e. Rome, to

the recognition of senatorial authority. Yet the loss of the city necessitates an emphatic

reassertion of the identity of the Senate, nos esse senatum, and its authority, non

umquam sua iura perdidit, a phrase which implies freedom from the dominance of

others as we saw in Chapter 3. The appeal to Camillus whose place of exile becomes

Rome allows Lentulus to claim Epirus as Rome and those who remain in the city as the

exiles. Once the Senate’s identity and authority have been (re)established, it can now

appoint Pompey to continue the war. Lentulus’ speech represents one attempt to

appropriate Rome in the service of a characteristically republican and senatorial

perspective in the conflict, a perspective which the poet goes on to dismantle with the

dissonance he creates within the speech itself and his own surrounding commentary.

Dissonance

Lentulus’ speech exhibits a couple of anomalies which only become apparent

upon a close scrutiny of the text. When examined in detail, these anomalies

paradoxically serve to undermine the strength of the consul’s claims and weaken his

argument. The first of these anomalies is found in Lentulus’ appeal to the exemplum of

Camillus which differs in significant ways from the canonical version found in Livy.15

14 Pompey as an agent is completely absent from this episode. Masters (1992) 100-102 understands his absence as an attempt by the poet to curb Pompey’s power and ambition in the narrative.

15 See Rossi (2000) 581-582 for a systematic review of discrepancies in Lucan regarding Camillus.

According to that version, the Capitol did not actually fall to the invading Gauls nor was it burned as Lentulus maintains.16 Also in Livy, Camillus was residing at Ardea, not Veii,

when the Gauls attacked, while the people of Rome who fled the onslaught sought

refuge temporarily at Veii. Jamie Masters believes that by placing Camillus at Veii rather

than Ardea, Lentulus (or the poet in his analysis) is deliberately replacing the Roman

people with one man,17 a subtle blow to the republicanism represented in Lentulus’

efforts to subordinate Pompey to the mandate of the Senate and Roman people. This

suggestion is further reinforced by Lentulus’ use of the word comes immediately before

his appeal to Camillus where he states that imperium follows the Senate as comes

(5.26-7). By Lucan’s time, comes had become a semi-official term for a member of the emperor’s entourage.18 Such language gives an imperial tinge to the passage whereby

Lentulus’ Senate occupies the place of the princeps.

Additionally, the choice of Camillus is itself problematic within this context. In the

Livian account, Camillus argued forcefully and successfully against abandoning Rome

and moving the capital to Veii. Thus Camillus was portrayed as a champion of the city of

Rome and its central place within Roman identity. In the poem, however, the Senate did

actually abandon Rome and in this text, Lentulus is claiming Epirus as the seat of power

or empire. The dissonance between Camillus’ role in history and the actions of the consul and Senate in Book Five render Lentulus’ appeal empty, a fallacy which is

16 Skutsch (1953) alone maintains that this text and three references in Silius Italicus’ epic give evidence of an alternative tradition, now lost, in which the Capitol was captured and burned. Spaltenstein (1986) on Sil. 1.625 successfully argues from Silius’ text itself against this supposed lost tradition. Ogilvie (1965) 720 also maintains that the Capitol was never taken.

17 Masters (1992) 105.

18 Rudich (1997) 162. Haskins (1887) ad loc. actually glosses nos sequetur in this line as “will attend us.” Further, turba, which Lentulus uses of the Senate’s followers in 5.20, can be similarly used of the emperor’s entourage. See Jenkyns (2013) 172-3.

ultimately self-serving. Furthermore, Livy’s Camillus was the first to be acclaimed specifically as princeps, the title later adopted by Augustus and his successors,

although Camillus was a princeps who acted in accord with the Senate and Roman

people.19 This portrayal of Camillus, which was consonant with the Augustan regime

when Livy was writing, clashes strikingly with the Neronian principate.

Lentulus’ distortions of the tradition surrounding Camillus, then, serve to

undermine his appeal to the past and to weaken the validity of his claims to legitimate

authority. In fact, his argument on the irrelevance or mobility of Rome clearly contradicts

Camillus’ own insistence on the importance of Rome in the tradition. In addition,

Lentulus’ use of comes and turba, his suggestion that one man supplants the whole

nation, and the implication to be drawn from appealing to the first princeps creates a

subtle imperial undercurrent in a speech which is designed to counter Caesar’s grab for

sole power. The appeal to Camillus fails in Lentulus’ stated purpose and instead hints at

a contradictory, yet encroaching vision of an anti-republican exercise of power divorced

from the city itself.

A second anomaly lies in Lentulus’ concluding exhortation to the senators in

Epirus. In the wake of Caesar’s recent defeats in Book Four, he encourages them to

take up the standards and continue the course. Then in a curious phrase he prays,

fortunaque tantos/ det vobis animos quantos fugientibus hostem/ causa dabat (“let

fortune grant you courage as great as that which the cause gave you while fleeing the

enemy,” 5.42-4). As detailed in the foundational text of Chapter 2, the abandoning of

Rome is depicted as flight marked by fear and uncertainty. The crowd from that text

19 Hellegouarc’h (1970) 115, 122. See also our discussion in Chapter 5.

which fled the city headlong with frantic step, turba per urbem/ praecipiti lymphata gradu

(1.495-6) reappears here in Lentulus’ speech when the consul urges his fellow senators to acknowledge the appearance of their attendant crowd, sed vestrae faciem cognoscite turbae (5.20). Such flight, fugiens, is quite the opposite of the virtus or courage so highly valued in the mos maiorum of the Roman people,20 so much so that again in the

foundational text, the poet is moved to call for pardon, venia, for those who flee in fear,

if for no other reason than because their leader, Pompey, is afraid (1.521-2).

Scholars have noted Lucan’s consistent tendency to subvert traditional values in

order to demonstrate the madness of civil war.21 Here Lentulus is representative of such

subversion. That fortune should grant to these senators the same spirit with which they

fled the enemy in Italy is not a call to virtue or arms in the traditional ethos of the

Romans. It is, rather, a call to surrender their values, their ancestral mores, under the

pretext that flight is acceptable or even noble. Thus in Lentulus’ logic, the abandoning of

Rome is not the catastrophe which the poet presents it to be in bBok One, but rather an

acceptable move, irrelevant to the legitimate exercise of republican authority. The loss

of the mores of the Roman people plundered in the sack of the city continues even

among those claiming to adhere to the exempla of great Romans of the past, like

Camillus, who once saved the Republic.

These anomalies create an internal dissonance within the speech which

weakens Lentulus’ argument. His distortions or manipulation of Roman historical

precedent and the subtle subversion of traditional values undermine his claims. His

20 Sklenár (2003) 150.

21 On the subversion of virtus in the poem, see Leigh (1997) 158-190 and Johnson (1987) 57-59. On the theme of flight and its manipulation, see Dinter (2012) 105-107.

insistence on the mobility of Rome or its irrelevance and his claims to senatorial legitimacy are untenable. The poet’s construction of Lentulus’ speech contains these internal errors and a twisted logic which subvert the consul’s own attempts to subvert.

While this internal dissonance certainly weakens Lentulus’ position, the poet goes on to discredit the consul’s assertions entirely in his commentary surrounding the speech.

Many previous readings of this text from Book Five appear to conflate Lentulus and the poet narrator such that Lentulus’ argument is seen to represent the poet’s perspective.22 This approach is misleading. The poet and his characters are distinct,

and, in this text, the poet initiates a form of dialogue with the speech both in the

language he employs and in his depiction of the aftermath of the speech.23 Through

such a dialogue, the poet distances himself from the perspective of the character so that

he might ultimately refute it.

In the introduction to the speech and in the comments immediately following it, a number of verbal antitheses appear between the poet and Lentulus which not only distinguish the two, but also indicate contrasting viewpoints. These antitheses begin with the poet’s description of Epirus as a sordida sedes (5.9) and the Senate, identified by the generic term proceres (5.10), as hearing business in foreign houses, externis tectis (5.11). Lentulus commences his speech by dismissing the poet’s introduction, calling on this remnant Senate not to consider the fact that they sit far from the houses of the city, non…quamque procul tectis captae sedeamus ab urbis/ cernite (5.18-20),

22 See Edwards (1996) 66, Harrison (1978), and Lounsbury (1976) 211. Masters (1992) seems to equivocate. Compare his comments on pp 98 and 104-5.

23 Rolim de Moura (2010) has noted such a dialogical or agonistic relationship between narrator and character, especially in book seven, but does not develop his observations. His focus, rather, is on the relationships between paired speeches in the poem, such as between Pompey and Caesar before Pharsalus.

countering the poet’s use of sedes and tectis. The poet refers to the Senate gathered at

Epirus as an hospes curia (5.11), a foreign, alien, even non-Roman curia, while

Lentulus refers to the Senate in Rome disparagingly as illa curia (5.32-33).24 The

gathering in Epirus is a sad assembly in the eyes of the poet, maestum coetum (5.15),

but the houses back in Rome are sad to Lentulus, maerentia tecta (5.30). Finally, the

resulting bestowal of honors on various eastern peoples following the speech elicits the

exclamation pro tristia fata (5.57) from the poet, while the same word tristis is applied to the suspension of business back in Rome by Lentulus, iustitio tristi (5.32). This use of the same or synonymous vocabulary by both poet and character indicates a form of statement – rejoinder repartee between the two. For the poet, the reality in Epirus is sad, foreign, and sordid while to Lentulus the reality in Rome is dismissed as sad and foreign (in the sense of belonging to fugitives). Such a judgment-laden mismatch of perspective is only intensified by the poet’s presentation of the results of the Senate’s meeting in the lines that follow.

The immediate response of the Senate to Lentulus’ speech is one of acquiescence or joy as they impose on Pompey his own fate or death and that of the homeland, laeto nomen clamore senatus/ excipit et Magno fatum patriaeque suumque/ inposuit (5.47-9). Fatum is frequently a double entendre meaning both fate and death.

Here the sense of death is prioritized given the fact that this episode concludes with explicit reference to Pompey’s death at the hands of Ptolemy XIII (5.63), the sad fates mentioned by the poet above.25 Curiously, laetus can have the sense of acquiescence,

24 For hospes, see OLD 3 where this passage is cited. On ille as disparaging, see OLD 4c.

25 Masters (1992) 103.

as it does at Aeneid 10.15, a passage intentionally modeled on a meeting of the Roman

Senate, where Jupiter convenes a council of gods and encourages his “senators” to adopt a treaty of peace, placitum laeti componite foedus.26 Already latent in the

Senate’s decision, then, are intimations of the death of the homeland and senatorial

compliance toward that end. The poet narrator builds upon these intimations in the

subsequent lines before eliding into the Appius episode which takes place farther East

at Delphi.

Following approval of Lentulus’ proposal, the Senate proceeds to bestow honors

on various, mostly eastern peoples who support their cause, tunc in reges populosque

merentis/ sparsus honor (5.49-50). The action is unhistorical, curiously unconnected to

anything later in the poem,27 and does not contribute significantly to the advancement of

the plot or the development of one of its characters. In this sense, the granting of honors

by the Senate appears pointless and unrealistic. Its function is strictly literary. It serves

as a bridge leading to Ptolemy XIII who was contesting his throne with his sister

Cleopatra VII and whose agents would kill Pompey and bring about the final death of

the Republic in Book Eight. This bridge directly links the decision of the Senate to the

death of the Republic. The poet is explicit, donata est regia Lagi,/accessit Magni iugulus

(“The realm of Lagus was granted, the throat of Pompey followed along,” 5.62-3).

Through the Senate’s acquiescence to Lentulus’ proposal and the subsequent grant of

power to the Egyptian king, the Senate contributes to the destruction of the state which

26 Harrison (1991) ad loc.

27 Masters (1992) 103.

they are paradoxically fighting to save, thereby grievously undermining their exercise of power in the poet’s view.

A second intimation found in the Senate’s ready acceptance of Lentulus’ will is evident in the absence of any debate in this assembly in Epirus. Standard senatorial procedure included a relatio or proposal and an interrogatio or sharing of individual opinions (sententiae) on the issue before moving toward a vote.28 Even in epic

reconstructions of senatorial meetings, there is almost always some form of

interrogatio.29 Here at Epirus of course, the Senate is not the complete Senate, but one

comprised only of those who have abandoned Rome and are already aligned with

Pompey. It is a sham Senate in which only one voice, that of Lentulus, dominates. The

poet alone, from his privileged distance, offers any dissenting opinion. The dominance

of one voice and the lack of any debate, combined with the use of comes/turba and the

usurpation of the people by one man implied in Lentulus’ distortion of the Camillus

tradition, again signal an encroaching structure which uncannily resembles the

subservience of the imperial Senate under the later Julio-Claudians. While claiming

rightful authority, this Senate is operating outside its normal procedure in a manner

which later characterizes a body which has lost its own rights, sua iura, and its freedom,

libertas, subordinated to one man in the person of the princeps.

28 On senatorial procedure, see Talbert (1984) 221-289, especially 240-261.

29 Compare the speeches of Venus and Juno in Jupiter’s council of gods mentioned above (Aen. 10.16- 95). See also Sil. 1.630-694 where an embassy from Saguntum addresses the Roman Senate while Fabius and another Lentulus offer contrasting opinions, and again Sil. 2.270-390, where the Senate of Carthage, modeled on the Roman Senate, engages in a debate in which Hanno and Gestar represent two sides of the question. In prose, see the parodic interrogatio in Sen. Apoc. 8-11 where even the deified Augustus speaks on the matter.

One final dimension to the author’s narrative serves to complete the dismantling of Lentulus’ position and the Senate’s authority. The atypical enjambment of this geographically distinct episode in Epirus with the subsequent episode at Delphi indicates a connection between the two passages. In the latter pericope, Appius, a minor character who appears nowhere else in the poem, consults the famed oracle at

Delphi in order to ascertain the outcome of events. After an elaborate and lengthy description of Appius’ approach, the priestess’ frenzy, and the movement of the god

(5.65-193), we get a three line, typically ambiguous utterance before Apollo silences his priestess, and she dies. The oracle at Delphi ends, and Appius disappears from the poem. Scholars have rightly questioned the point of the episode.30

One line of thinking, relevant to our discussion, has viewed the Epirus and Delphi

episodes as deriving their meaning from each other.31 Epirus prefigures Delphi and

Delphi reflects Epirus. The seeming uselessness of the oracle mirrors the uselessness

of the Senate’s actions in granting honors to foreign peoples. The demise of the oracle

represents the demise of republican institutions, including the Senate, due to the

madness of civil war. Senatorial government is displaced from the center of power at

Rome, assuming a largely superfluous role, like that of the near defunct oracle which

once was the center of its mantic world. So the enjambment of these episodes allows

the poet to reinforce a sense of the uselessness and decline of the Senate in Epirus

through the mirror of the uselessness and demise of the oracle at Delphi. Amid these

30 Masters (1992) 134-5, O’Higgins (1988) 211, and Ahl (1976) 128.

31 See Bexley (2009) 463-4, Masters (1992) 91-117, and Feeney (1991) 291 for what follows.

developments and tied to them is a subtle critique of attempts to promote one figure, either Lentulus or Pompey or the Pythia, as the voice of the state.

Separated from Rome, the Senate’s attempts at legitimacy fail and Lentulus’ position becomes glaringly unrealistic, even groundless. The poet systematically refutes the consul’s assertions on the irrelevancy or mobility of the city and the continued authority of the Senate in a foreign place. He achieves this refutation first by the creation of an internal dissonance manifest in Lentulus’ speech through a distortion of historical precedent and a flawed, even twisted vision of flight. Secondly, the poet engages Lentulus’ assertions with contrary assertions of his own and illustrates the misguided, superfluous, even fatal results of senatorial decisions which lead directly to the loss of republican freedom. For the poet, Rome is essential to Roman identity and central to the legitimate exercise of power. Because the soil on which it stands has changed, the Senate has lost its identity and authority, sua iura, in the poet’s vision.

Without the city, there is only meaninglessness and death.

Other Romes and Roman Identity

Lentulus’ speech raises questions about the mobility of Rome and the existence of other centers of power as well as about a Roman identity linked to Latin character and ancient blood, indole Latia and sanguine prisco (5.17). These issues are of particular relevance in Lucan’s own day, and their treatment in the poem goes to the heart of the poet’s vision on the centrality of Rome and the catastrophic consequences of its loss for the Roman world. His rejection of Lentulus’ claims at the beginning of

Book Five is reinforced and graphically illustrated by the creation of other centers, other

Romes, in the poem which resemble the city either in their descriptions or because

values important to Roman identity now reside in them. These other Romes collectively act to reproach the city and its people or foreshadow its fate.

We have already seen characters in the poem explicitly claiming other seats of power, other Romes, Lentulus at Veii for Camillus or in Epirus for his own cause and

Pompey at Mytilene. Scholars have also discerned several other sites as centers of

power, resembling the city on the Tiber, which destabilize the poet’s world because of

civil war. A detailed examination of this scholarship is beyond the scope of this study,

but a much simplified summary and a look at some conclusions will add a further

dimension to our consideration of the abandoning of Rome.

Massilia in Book Three, Delphi in Book Five, Dyrrachium in Book Six, Ammon in

Book Nine, Alexandria in Book Ten, and of course, Troy in Book Nine have all been

identified as centers, reflecting or mirroring the city of Rome in some way in the poem.32

With the exception of Troy which we will consider shortly, all of these sites function in

one of three ways in the hands of the poet. Just as Mytilene exhibits pietas, fides, and a

form of the devotio as we saw in Chapter 2, so Massilia and Ammon are depicted as

embodying specifically Roman values. Massilia safeguards fides and iura, fighting for

these values which Rome ostensibly espouses while Ammon, the shrine of Jupiter in

Egypt, exhibits virtus and mores, ideals which those in the city have betrayed. The

presence of these typically Roman values among eastern peoples (the Massiliotes are

Greek in origin, even in the poem. See 3.355) serves primarily to emphasize their absence or loss in Rome by Caesar, the Senate, or populace. In this sense, these

32 My synthesis is derived on the whole from the following: Massilia: Saylor (1978), Ahl (1976) 51-53 and 315, and Rowland (1969); Delphi: Bexley (2009) 461-464; Dyrrachium: Saylor (1978) and Ahl (1976) 118; Ammon: Bexley (2009) 469-473; Alexandria: Spencer (2005). Troy is treated separately.

alternative centers stand as signs of reproach to those who have abandoned their own heritage.

A second function of these sites in the poet’s hands is to condemn Caesar.

Caesar’s attack on Massilia and his resistance at Dyrrachium with the subsequent famine are reflections on his aggression, his willingness to assault citizens, and his hostility against Rome itself, because of the similarities which the poet creates among these cities. Alexandria’s association with Alexander the Great, whose tomb Caesar visits, comes to represent the evils of imperial aspirations and the specter of a

Hellenistic-style monarchy which Caesar desires and which blatantly contradicts the strong republican traditions at Rome. These sites paint a damning portrait of Caesar and Caesarism.

Lastly and most importantly for our purposes, these sites are images of death and ruin. The demise of the oracle at Delphi, as we have seen above, the defeat of

Massilia where Caesar is depicted as a destroyer of cities,33 and the remnants of the

long past glory of Alexander’s empire at Alexandria as well as the fire which Caesar

incites in that city all foreshadow the decline and death of Rome. At a most basic level,

these sites are simply mirror reflections of the death of the city which the poet

consistently decries. They become alternative, poetic representations of Rome’s

ultimate fate.

Troy functions in similar ways, but with an added significance. Because of its

prominence in the foundation myth of Rome and in Vergil’s epic, Troy assumes a more

33 Coffee (2011) 421.

layered role in Lucan’s poetic response to Vergil through his poem.34 At the beginning of

Book Nine, Caesar makes an unhistorical stop at the ruins of Troy on his way to Egypt.

An unnamed local ends up guiding Caesar, who is described as ignorant, inscius

(9.974), as he walks over the nearly hidden landmarks of the city made famous in

Homer’s account. Invoking the gods of ash and the Lares of Aeneas,35 Caesar prays at

the end of his tour, restituam populos, grata vice moenia reddent/ Ausonidae Phrygibus,

Romanaque Pergama surgent (“I will restore this people, instead Italians will willingly

return walls to the Trojans, and a Roman Troy will rise,” 9.998-999).

In the poet’s vision, Troy becomes a symbol, a graphic depiction of abandonment

and lost glory. Its ruins allegorically express what Caesar is doing to Rome,36

unknowingly (inscius) creating a desolate landscape soon to be forgotten. Troy is both

the origin, die Urzelle Roms,37 the primordial cell of the city and its fated future. Caesar,

then, is the opposite of Aeneas. Instead of founding, he destroys.38 What distinguishes

Troy from the other Romes in the text lies in Caesar’s promise to build a new city in Asia

in the East, a Roman Troy.39 While this promise never finds fulfillment in the poem as

we have it, it is suggestive of the capricious power of Caesar. Caesar both destroys the

city and determines where it will be established again. Rome becomes entirely

34 On Lucan’s Troy, see Thorne (2011) 366, Spencer (2005) 52-56, Bartsch (1997) 131-134, Edwards (1996) 64-66, Hardie (1993) 107, Zwierlein (1986), and Ahl (1976) 209-222.

35 This is the only reference to Caesar’s ancestor and founder of Rome in the entire poem.

36 Hardie (1993) 107. See also Spencer (2005) 53, 55 and Ahl (1976) 218.

37 Zwierlein (1986) 471.

38 Zwierlein (1986) 470 and Ahl (1976) 221.

39 Ahl (1976) 221. See also Edwards (1996) 65. Spencer (2005) 53 disagrees that a Phrygian city needs to be in Asia, but does not suggest an alternate place.

dependent on his will, a movable reality subordinate to his hubris. This final point has resonances in Lucan’s own day in Nero’s posture toward the city.

Through his creation of these alternate centers in the poem, the poet addresses

the issue of decentralization. He demonstrates that he too can rhetorically manipulate

the idea of Rome as Lentulus attempts to do in his speech, but with one considerable

difference. The poet’s manipulations always refer back to the city on the Tiber and illustrate the disastrous effects of a movement away from that center. His focus is always on Rome. Any suggestion to establish Rome elsewhere, whether in Epirus or

Mytilene or Troy, leads to ruin and death. Necessarily accompanying such a movement in the poet’s eyes is the loss of critical values of the mos maiorum, which are physically anchored in the city itself. Their presence elsewhere serves only to heighten their loss among the Romans themselves, due to Caesar’s ambition and the emptying of the capital. Attention to these Roman ideals, a critical element in the tripartite structure articulated in Chapter 3, moves us toward a deeper reflection on Roman identity.

At the beginning of Lentulus’ speech, he appeals to his fellow senators, reminding them of their national character and ancient blood, indole si dignum Latia, si sanguine prisco/ robur inest animis (“If there is any strength worthy of Latin character or ancient blood in your minds…,” 5.17-18). Ironically, he then calls upon them to forget where they come from and consider only what to do where they are, an internal dissonance in his reasoning which we have seen before. Poetic usage of the word indoles, character, is rare. It first appears in poetry in the Augustan age, once in Horace and once in Vergil, and very often in both poetry and prose it is used in encomiastic

contexts,40 as it is at 4.814, the only other occurrence of the word in Lucan. As such, it

almost exclusively refers to individuals and frequently is associated with virtus, pietas, or other ideals of the mos maiorum.41 Much more rarely is the term applied to a people,

as in Lentulus’ speech. One such application which casts some light on our text is found

in Tacitus, Annales 11.23.10.

There in a celebrated move, the emperor Claudius presents to his advisors, his

concilium principis, a proposal to admit Gauls to the Senate. Unsurprisingly, his

proposal meets with resistance, and in the account of their objections, his advisors,

described by one author as le parti conservateur,42 appeal to the past, to a time when

they effectively ruled people related by blood to them, consanguineis populis. They

recall examples of courage and glory which Roman character brought forth from its

ancient mores, exempla quae priscis moribus ad virtutem et gloriam Romana indoles

prodiderit.43 Such a concern for indoles Romana, in the eyes of the opposition in

Tacitus’ account, does not simply elevate Italians over provincials, but more narrowly

focuses on Latium and the old ruling families of the Republic,44 the indole Latia and

sanguine prisco of Lentulus’ speech. What is illustrative is that at a time of significant

social and political change when formerly non-Romans are being admitted to the

40 Harrison (1991) on Aen. 10.826. Its occurrence in Horace is at Carm. 4.4.25.

41 It is associated with these and other ideals in both prose and poetry. Cic. Phil. 5.47.10 and Cael. 39, Livy 21.4.10, Sil. 8.406 and the two references in Vergil and Horace are representative.

42 Chastagnol (2004) 89.

43 Cf. Livy 9.6.12 where the same phrase, Romana indoles, occurs of Romans who have lost their character and their fighting spirit after the defeat by the Samnites, early in their history.

44 Quem ultra honorem residuis nobilium, aut si quis pauper e Latio senator foret? See the analysis in Griffin (1982) 406. In note 14, Griffin expresses the caveat that such a statement may reflect sentiments belonging to Tacitus’ lifetime rather than Claudius’.

highest ranks of society, Roman character expressed in blood ties and mores becomes an issue. Interestingly in a display of imperial power, Claudius goes on to bypass the opposition in his council and force the issue through a more compliant senate, although some compromise is made.45 These events occurred in 48 CE, during Lucan’s lifetime.

In fact, there is some evidence that Lucan’s uncle, Seneca, who was in exile at Corsica

at the time, shared the same views as the opposition on this issue.46

The abandonment of Rome and move to Epirus in the poem constitute a crisis of

identity which Lentulus tacitly acknowledges by countering with his claim to Latin

character and ancient blood. By doing so, Lentulus divorces Roman identity and Latin

blood from Latium and the city of Rome. Just as senatorial authority is no longer linked

to or dependent upon the city neither is Roman identity, an assertion which the poet

categorically refutes. The text from Tacitus provides an historical example at a time of

significant change where similar reasoning employing similar claims surface among the

senatorial elite in response. Changes in place and membership give rise to genuine

concerns in Lucan’s lifetime which are mirrored in the development of the poem.

Nero’s Rome and the Exercise of Power

The issues raised in Lentulus’ speech on the mobility of Rome and senatorial identity and power have correspondences to realities during the reign of Nero. These realities form a backdrop to the poem and, as we have maintained, are addressed by the poem through the temporal manipulation which the poet undertakes. As noted in

Chapter 3, there were persistent doubts about Nero’s posture or relationship to the city

45 Chastagnol (2004) 89. The ius honorum was limited at first only to the Gallic tribe of the Aedui.

46 Sen. Apoc. 3.3 and Ben. 6.19.2. Chastagnol (2004) 96 and Griffin (1982) 415-416.

of Rome.47 His philhellenism, his purported role in the Great Fire, even his preference

for the Greek island of Rhodes in his policies and as a place of withdrawal contributed

to these doubts.48 More relevant to our purposes here, however, were the persistent

rumors that Nero intended to move the capital to the East. Nero’s interest in Egypt, and

specifically Alexandria, cast him in a similar light as Julius Caesar and made him

vulnerable to charges of aspiring to monarchy along the lines of the Hellenistic

kingdoms which followed Alexander the Great.49 Such rumors were also tied to Nero’s

attempts to break from the Senate or at least to diminish its influence along the way

toward its actual destruction.50 These rumors effectively contributed to relativizing the

city, making it contingent on the will of the princeps. Rome no longer belonged to the

Senate and people, but became entirely dependent on the person, even whim, of the

emperor.51 By being tied to the princeps, Rome did indeed drift toward irrelevance as

the seat of power became more and more localized in one man rather than in one

place. Eventually, the capital did move to the East, to Constantinople, a city which was

renamed as a reflection of the emperor himself.52

47 Croiselle (2002) 157.

48 On Nero’s attachment to Rhodes in this regard, see Fabia (1896) 136-7.

49 On these rumors, see Ceausescu (1976) 92-97. We noted Nero’s interest in Alexandria in Chapter 2 of this study.

50 Ceausescu (1976) 104.

51 Bexley (2009) 473; Ceausescu (1976) 91.

52 Even after the capital had moved, however, Rome seemed to retain a symbolic role as a center of culture and identity. See, for example, Ammianus Marcellinus 16.3: Romam…imperii virtutumque omnium larem. Text is Galletier (2002). Nero likewise wanted to rename the city after himself, proposing Neropolis. Suet. Nero 55.

Interestingly in the prologue to the poem, Lucan directly addresses the relationship between Nero and Rome, but from a cosmic perspective. There he makes an appeal to the divinized Nero,

Iurisque tui natura relinquet/ quis deus esse velis, ubi regnum ponere mundi/ sed neque in Arctoo sedem tibi legeris orbe/ nec polus aversi calidus qua vergitur Austri,/ unde tuam videas obliquo sidere Romam./ aetheris inmensi partem si presseris unam,/ sentiet axis onus. librati pondera caeli/ orbe tene medio…(1.51-58)

The nature of your right will leave to you what god you wish to be and where to place your rule of the world. But do not choose a seat for yourself in the northern sphere nor where the hot pole of the opposing south wind is inclined, from which you would see your Rome from a sky aslant. If you weigh down one part of the vast ether, the axis will feel the burden. Hold the weight of heaven balanced in the middle part of the sphere…

The language is dense, and interpretations vary widely.53 Yet some have seen in this

passage a direct appeal to Nero to remain at the center in Rome.54 Given the reality of

the rumors to move East, the phrase ubi regnum ponere mundi assumes a particular poignancy. At a minimum, the passage indicates the poet’s wish that Nero and the city are aligned in the center, whether in a future apotheosis or in the present cosmos of the

poet. Balance in the world is effected by the alignment of emperor and city, and the

abandonment of the city has cosmic ramifications in the unhinging of the world, as the

narrative reveals as it unfolds in the dark vision of the books which follow.

The centrality of the city is affected as well by the changing role and identity of

the Senate during Nero’s principate. In fact, the Senate’s evolution under the Julio-

Claudians as a whole was quite radical. Augustus famously sought a conciliatory

relationship with the Senate, one in which the princeps continued to receive his powers

53 See the brief survey of interpretations in Roche (2009) ad loc. For the astronomical lore and its symbolism in the text, see Le Boeuffle (1989).

54 Croisille (2002) 157; Masters (1992) 98.

and titles from the Senate in an effort to maintain the appearance of republican authority. In this way, the Senate was seen to embody the mos maiorum as it had for

centuries.55 By Nero’s accession, however, the senatorial aristocracy had considerably

weakened while the princeps assumed control of the Treasury, the nomination of

consuls, and importantly, access to the Senate.56 Further, the principate created a

climate of fear and intimidation among the elite as these became the tools with which

emperors increasingly controlled that body.

One area in which Nero’s philhellenism revealed itself was in his appointment of

men from the East to membership in the Senate. This move was but a part of a growing

trend within the principate to incorporate local elites into the power structure of the

expanding empire, a move which began primarily with Claudius’ decree opening the

Senate to the Gauls in 48 CE. Nero is credited with the appointment of at least five,

more probably ten men from the East. As we saw in the debate surrounding Claudius’

decree in Tacitus’ account, there was considerable hostility toward acceptance of non-

Italians into the Senate, and bias especially attached to those from the eastern half of

the empire.57 These provincials naturally retained close ties to their hometowns and

provinces, as evidenced in their generosity toward them. The increasing numbers of

non-Italians in the Senate necessarily impacted the ties to and investment in the city of

Rome. A declining attachment to Rome was inevitable among the elite as the

government of the empire became more inclusive and representative of the entire

55 Chastagnol (2004) 10.

56 Chastagnol (2004) 93; Hopkins (1983) 122.

57 Devreker (1982) 495 on Nero’s eastern appointees and pp 500-501 on prejudice against them.

Mediterranean.58 The adlection of non-Italians combined with the appointment of novi

homines, men from new families unconnected to those of the old Republic, was

changing the face of the Senate in significant ways. No longer were Latium or even Italy

as important nor were blood ties among the old gentes as critical in the governance of

the state.59 Even the emperor Vespasian, soon to follow Nero after the tumult of 69 CE,

was from a relatively undistinguished, equestrian family.

Rumors of abandoning Rome in favor of Alexandria and the changing face of the

senatorial elite were realities in Lucan’s Rome. Tacitus’ account of the debate

surrounding Claudius’ decree and Lucan’s appeal to Nero in his prologue give evidence

of the contemporaneity of these concerns, which in turn are reflected in the vocabulary

of Lentulus’ speech. The poet is addressing his own milieu as much as he is telling the

story of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, and his message is one of

increasing powerlessness, ruin, and death.

The city has already been abandoned by this point in the poem and attempts to

reestablish it elsewhere or to assert its irrelevance meet with the poet’s rebuke. Roman

values tied to the city are lost, and their occurrence in other, non-Roman places serves

only to emphasize their loss at Rome. Legitimate authority exercised by the Senate, too, dissolves apart from the city and claims to assert that authority elsewhere are empty, leading only to ruin and death in Egypt. Lentulus represents a fallacy, a position which cannot stand on its own logic or in the face of the active criticism of the poet. In addition, he represents senatorial complicity in their own dissolution, just as his fellow senator

58 Chastagnol (2004) 161, 164; Eck (1997) 74, 97.

59 Blood descent was always important to Roman perceptions of identity, but never rigidly so. The myth of asylum, the integration of novi homines, and a Roman generosity with citizenship relativised such importance. See Dench (2005) 226-264.

Cotta did in Chapter 3. The dominance of his one voice and the hint of imperial terminology in his speech provide a frightening glimpse of the coming reality of the principate. Lastly, his position reflects issues current in Lucan’s own day which the poet refutes through his refutation of Lentulus’ claims. In this way, the poet fulfills his vatic responsibility which he adopts in the well-known sphragis of Book Nine.60 Rome is an absolutely necessary element in the triadic structure of identity and meaning for the poet. Without it, the other two elements, ideals and group, collapse into meaninglessness. The city on the Tiber is central, and its loss ends in an annihilation which the civil war of Pompey and Caesar graphically illustrates.

The abandonment of the city is a theme also in the Augustan age in the account of the Camillus tradition presented by the historian Livy. Each of the primary texts of the past three chapters has mentioned or alluded to the Gallic sack of Rome. The interplay between Livy and the principate in his time expressed in the events of Book Five of his

Ab Urbe Condita forms a backdrop to Lucan’s treatment of the theme in his poem from the age of Nero. In Chapter 5, we will consider Livy’s treatment in more detail and how

Lucan differs from and reacts to his Augustan predecessor.

60 Book 9.980-986. On this passage, see Wick (2004) 416-420, O’Higgins (1988) 216, and Johnson (1987) 120-121.

CHAPTER 5 PLACE AND THE PAST: LIVY’S ROME AND LUCAN

The first pentad of Livy’s great history Ab Urbe Condita culminates and concludes with the speech of M. Furius Camillus urging his fellow Romans not to abandon the city of Rome in the wake of the sack of the city by the Gauls. The speech represents a resounding endorsement of a Roman religious and political identity tied to the topography of the city at a time of crisis and anticipates the values and ideology which characterizes the Augustan age. Lucan is an heir to this literary and political vision which he in turn dramatically dismantles in his portrayal of Caesar’s seizure of

Rome in the civil war of 49 BCE. For Lucan, the founding ideology of the principate, based upon a relationship between power and place, collapses into meaninglessness and the loss of the homeland as civil war continues its destructive fury into his own time.

This chapter focuses primarily on Book Five of Livy’s history where the abandonment of Rome twice appears as a threat to Roman imperial identity. The book itself is neatly divided into halves by content, each linked by the presence of the hero

Camillus and separated by a digression (5.33.2 - 5.35.3) on the Gallic migrations. The first half details the capture of Veii by the Romans under the leadership of Camillus in

396 BCE. Immediately after the fall of Veii follows the first overt move to abandon Rome in favor of Veii, a town which is seen as more beautiful and richer than Rome (5.24.5-7).

This proposal by the plebs and their tribunes, which Livy calls a seditio (5.24.4), is not presented as a complete abandonment of the city, but rather the establishment of a second Rome at Veii where half the plebs and half the Senate would reside (5.24.8).

Representing the staunch opposition of the aristocracy is Camillus, who delivers his first speech on the matter in indirect discourse before the Senate (5.30.1). Immediately

afterwards, the tribunes’ motion is soundly defeated. In Livy’s moralizing vision, this agitation by the plebs is motivated by a desire for a greater share in the coming distribution of Veientine land, cast in simplified terms as a form of avaritia, greed. On the other hand, the response of the aristocracy is couched in deeply religious language, decrying the abandonment of their ancestral gods, including Romulus (5.24.11), and in

Camillus’ speech, the land of their birth as well, aris focisque et deum templis ac solo in quo nati essent (5.30.1).

The sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BCE and the dramatic intervention of

Camillus with a force from Veii to save the city occupy the second half of Book Five.

After the defeat of the Gauls while surveying the ruins of the city, the plebs and tribunes again press for abandoning Rome and migrating to Veii. Here Camillus, supported by the entire Senate (5.50.8), delivers a lengthy and elaborate speech before a contio of

his fellow Romans (Quirites in 5.51.1)1 whose purpose is to ensure that their homeland

might remain in its own abode, ut in sua sede maneret patria (5.51.2). The speech is

replete with religious fervor and divine approbation, love of country and nostalgic

sentiment for the city, and appeal to the ancestors. After roughly seven pages in the

Oxford text, the speech concludes emphatically with gods who are propitious and

favorable to those who stay, omnes propitii manentibus vobis di (5.54.7).2 Camillus’

words are reinforced with a sign of divine favor in the form of a centurion’s command to

stay put, and both Senate and plebs assent (5.55.2). Rebuilding the city commences

1 This speech comprises one of the most polished and most carefully written portions of the entire history, according to Luce (1971) 268.

2 The ring composition reflected in the repetition of maneo and the emphatic monosyllabic di concluding the speech successfully combine the two most important elements in Livy’s ideology in book five, the gods and commitment to Rome.

immediately. In the language of the narrative, Camillus’ role in preventing the abandoning of Rome is on a par with the saving of the city from the Gauls.3 The two

events are equally significant, and Camillus is doubly the savior.

Within Livy’s account, the entire episode is embedded in an ongoing dichotomy

between plebs and the senatorial aristocracy. Both sides are presented as monolithic

entities with no discordant voices, yet are at odds with each other. The plebs united as a

whole with their leaders, the tribunes, pine to leave Rome, while the Senate and

patricians with their leader, Camillus, vow to stay.4 But this episode is also cleverly

embedded in a dichotomy between Roman and non-Roman. Juxtaposed with each

impulse by the plebs to move to Veii are narratives in both halves of non-Roman

peoples who want to acquire what is Roman. In the first half, just after the capture of

Veii, the town of Falerii submits to Rome under Camillus. Impressed by Roman fides and Camillus’ iustitia, the Faliscans recognize that they would fare better under Roman

governance than their own (5.27.11-12). Again in the second half, the Gauls are

depicted as desiring Italy for its produce, especially its wine, and they marvel at the

wonders of the city itself (5.33.2 and 5.41.4 respectively), contrasting sharply with the

plebs who see Veii as the better location. By highlighting the city’s attractiveness in the

eyes of others, an attractiveness later expounded in Camillus’ speech, Livy emphasizes

the benefits of the site of Rome and expresses a reproach of those who would leave it.

Out of these opposing tensions, the one internal and the other external, Livy constructs

his ideology of the city and its primacy for Roman identity.

3 At 5.49.8: servatam deinde bello patriam iterum in pace haud dubie servavit cum prohibuit migrari Veios.

4 Camillus was of patrician status. Cornell (1989) 240.

Much has been written on the city as monumentum (5.30.2) in Livy, a type of sign system which serves to preserve memory and to construct meaning.5 While utilizing

such a perspective, my focus here is narrower. The story of Camillus and the proposed

abandonment of Rome highlight elements of the city which are essential to Livy’s

didactic vision. This vision with its particular image of the city becomes a significant part

of the founding ideology of the principate which, in turn, Lucan inherits at the end of the

Julio-Claudian dynasty. Livy’s Rome sets the stage for Lucan’s, and its characteristics

shape Lucan’s response.

Livy’s Rome

Book Five and especially Camillus’ speech present an eloquent and patriotic

portrayal of the city on the Tiber. Of the mass of material in the book, four images of the

city stand out as constitutive of Livy’s vision in the narrative: the city as patria, sedes

deum, urbs aeterna, and as caput mundi. These images serve to bind the power

structure of the empire to the city itself.

Three times in Book Five the patria, the homeland, is equated with what can be

seen of the city with the eyes.6 In the Senate’s response to Camillus’ first speech, they

point out the Capitoline, the house of Vesta, and the other temples of the gods as

constituting the patria (5.30.5). At 5.49.3, the Romans fight to defend the very soil of the

patria, the shrines of the gods, their women and children, all of which are in sight, in

conspectu. In Camillus’ speech itself, the hero refers to the soil of his country as his

motherland, haec terra quam matrem appellamus (5.54.2), and shortly later when

5 Feldherr (1998) 12-50; Jaeger (1997) 10-29; Miles (1995) 17-74. On Livy’s work itself as monumentum, see chiefly Jaeger (1997) 23ff.

6 On the importance of vision in Livy and physical contact generally, see Feldherr (1998) 1-50.

thinking of his patria, Camillus recalls the hills of the city, its open lands, the Tiber, and

the sky under which he was born (5.54.3). Elsewhere the native soil, solum patrium,7 is

associated with the penates (5.30.6).

Of course, the identification of the city with the nation or state is not surprising.

Rome began as a city-state, and the sense of Rome as the state perdured well into

Livy’s lifetime and beyond.8 What is unique here is the almost total identification of the

patria with the city, and specifically its landscape and its temples,9 when Italy had

already been well integrated with Rome by Livy’s writing. Full citizenship had been

extended to most of the communities of Italy by this time,10 and the Rubicon had

become the boundary delineating Italy from the rest of the empire. The patria was

expanding beyond just the city on the Tiber. Yet in the midst of this growth, Livy

maintains the city’s preeminence, even by divine mandate.

For the city, specifically the Capitol, is also the abode of the gods, the sedes

deum (5.39.12).11 Camillus states that the city is full of gods (5.52.2). The site of Rome

itself has been chosen by both gods and humans (5.54.4), and to abandon it is to

abandon those gods (repeatedly in 5.52.3-5), so closely are gods tied to place. Thus,

one’s commitment to the gods (one’s pietas) extends to the land in Camillus’

7 Etymologically, patria is linked to the adjective patrius, as in terra patria, coming from the father or related to one’s ancestors, with all of the social and cultural weight which attaches to that concept in Roman society. See Bonjour (1975) 42-46. As a result, pietas was owed to one’s patria as to one’s father. At 5.7.12, for example, the Senate is mindful of the plebs’ pietas toward the homeland.

8 Miles (1995) 128; Paul (1982) 146.

9 This identification is made by the senatorial aristocracy. Livy’s plebs are not so convinced. See Bonjour (1975) 19-20.

10 Syme (1939) 87-88 notes that this was a grant of citizenship primarily in name only.

11 Among Roman authors, the sense of the city as the residence of the gods is especially strong in Livy. Jenkyns (2013) 225.

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argument.12 According to Livy, it is this religious reasoning which finally moves the plebs

to remain at Rome and begin the process of rebuilding.

The final two images in Book Five are of particular import for their Augustan resonances. Rome is eternal in Livy. The sense of the permanence of Rome is found repeatedly in the account of the city’s early history.13 References to the city’s

permanence in Book Five, especially at 5.7.10 and 5.54.7, occur within the ongoing

conflict between plebs and aristocracy which characterize this book. As a result, the

epithet subtly responds to the threat of abandonment in the narrative. Further in Livy’s

work, the eternity of Rome is linked to his vision of the cyclical nature of history, a vision

of endless decline, death, and renewal which the historian embraces as his

framework.14 Thus the city’s permanence is ensured by the design of its history.

Lastly Rome is the caput mundi, the head of the world. At the end of his great speech, Camillus explicitly references the ancient myth of the head which gave the

Capitoline hill its name, hic Capitolium est, ubi quondam capite humano invento responsum est eo loco caput rerum summamque imperii fore (“Here is the Capitol where once a human head was found and it is said that in this place would be the head of the world and the height of empire,” 5.54.7). The connection between the Capitol and

an imperial vision of the Roman state is clearly articulated by Camillus.15 The Capitol

12 Bonjour (1975) 134-5.

13 At 1.55.3-5, in Camillus’ speech at 5.54.7, and again associated with Camillus at 6.23.7. The epithet aeterna used of the city occurs twice in the first pentad at 4.4.4 and at 5.7.10. The phrase urbs aeterna itself is generally attributed first to Tibullus 2.5.23, also of Augustan date. See the discussion of Murgatroyd (2002) 183.

14 On this vision of historical recurrence in Livy, see especially Miles (1995) 75-110.

15 Borgeaud (1987) has traced the development of the myth of the Capitoline head as an expression of Roman imperialism.

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and the citadel, the arx which had been established at its summit, dominate Book

Five.16 Out of the entire city, they alone survive the Gallic assault intact. One curious

episode early in the attack reveals this fact’s significance in Livy’s vision. When the

magnitude of the Gallic assault becomes clear, the people of the city send the sacred

cult objects of Vesta to safety in Caere outside of Rome and seek refuge for themselves

on the Capitol. But because the hill itself is rather small, the entire population would not

fit. So the painful decision is made that only the Senate and the young men of fighting

age would stay, and the old and those otherwise unable to fight would be sent away to

be captured by the Gauls. The thinking, according to the historian, is that if the citadel,

the Capitol, the Senate as caput publici consilii, “the head of public governance,” and the fighting men survive, then Rome would survive (5.39.9-13). Rome could lose everything except these places and these men, and still endure. Livy’s minimalist approach acknowledges that the plebs might object to such an arrangement, and so the old magistrates join the rest of the populace in the lower city as well to be captured or killed by the Gauls. What is absolutely essential for the survival of Rome and its empire, then, is the Capitol (place) and Senate (power).17

Because it survives, the Capitol then functions as a symbol, a monumentum, of

the eternity of Rome and the permanence of an empire with Rome at its center.18 Even

Romulus endorses Rome as caput orbis terrarum in a dream earlier in the pentad at

16 In Book Five, one or the other occurs at 30.5, 39.9-10, 39.12, 41.4, 44.5, 50.4, 51.9, and 54.7.

17 Jaeger (1997) 60, 74.

18 The name Capitol (from caput) contains within it and prolongs this imperialistic vision because of the myth of the head. Borgeaud (1987) 91.

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1.16.7. The Capitol becomes a focal point for continuity amid crisis and change,19 a

place given divine approbation as seat of the gods.

Accompanying these images, especially in Camillus’ speeches, is a strong

sentimental sense or nostalgia for the city. The Romans are moved by their fondness

for their own homes, caritate sedum suarum (5.42.1), and Camillus relates his own love

of homeland, caritas patriae (5.54.2). Twice Camillus speaks of the land of his birth

(5.30.1 and 5.54.3) as binding him to the city. Livy is well known for his interest in the

psychological aspects of his characters,20 and this nostalgic sense certainly elicits

sympathy and gives emotional depth to his narrative.21 But when coupled with the

attractiveness of the city in the eyes of even non-Romans like the Faliscans, this

sentiment transmits a potentially similar attachment to the city to the audience as well.

Cultural geographers have used the term homeland to describe the close bond

between a people and the physical landscape of the region they inhabit. Several

characteristics of this bond reflect quite closely the imagery and sentiment evoked in

Livy’s account. Love of birthplace, an emotional attachment to the land of one’s

ancestors, some degree of control over the region, and a landscape imbued with one’s

cultural values are constitutive of homeland in a technical sense.22 Livy uses this bond

rhetorically to reinforce the necessity of Rome in his vision.

19 Jaeger (1997) 59.

20 Ogilvie (1965) 716-718.

21 Gaertner (2008) 42. Nostalgia for Rome does feature in other authors, notably Cicero and the exilic poetry of Ovid. I think of Tristia 1.3.31-34, a text which focuses on the Capitol as well.

22 On homelands in general, see Norton (2014) 181-3. On national homelands, see Conzen (2001) 238- 271.

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In response to the external threat posed by the Veientines and the Gauls and the

internal threat reflected in the agitation of the plebs and their tribunes, Livy creates a

true homeland, one chosen by the gods and by the ancestors to be the center and head

of an empire. This homeland inspires a commitment to it among its leaders who are

willing to fight for its preservation. In this portrayal, these leaders contribute a model of

proper behavior and present an insight into the broader purpose of Livy’s history.

Rome’s Champions

Livy’s Camillus is largely his own creation. While certainly a historical figure,

Camillus’ association with the Gallic sack of 390 BCE comes relatively late in the

tradition, and his role in Book Five is quite contrived.23 He functions, according to one

scholar, as a moral object lesson rather than an actual character in the work.24 He is a person of virtue and loyalty, a mouthpiece of patriotic sentiment and commitment to the city as we have seen. He represents a proper deference to the Senate and acts in

accord with its wishes, even submitting to their orders. His display of religio and his willingness to fight for the patria provide an authentic model of Roman pietas.

Secondly, Livy’s Camillus is the prototype of the great statesman.25 He is the

fatalis dux, the leader by fate, who exists for the preservation of the homeland (5.19.2).

As dictator, he is attentive to inherited procedure and custom and operates only by

consensus with the Senate.26 He saves Rome not only from the external threat of

23 Cornell (1995) 316-7; Luce (1971) 292; Ogilvie (1965) 727. On the evolution of the Camillus legend, see Hellegouarc’h (1970) 117.

24 Vasaly (2015) 79.

25 Ogilvie (1965) 669-670.

26 Vasaly (2015) 79 and Jaeger (1997) 76. On consensus with the Senate, see Hellegouarc’h (1970) 122- 24, 129.

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conquest but also from the threat of abandonment. As a result, Livy elevates him to

Romulean status, Romulus ac parens patriae conditorque alter urbis haud vanis

laudibus appellabatur (“He was called Romulus, father of his country, and second

founder of the city with full praise,” 5.49.7).

Thirdly, from a literary perspective, Camillus acts to interpret the events of the

narrative for Livy’s audience.27 His carefully crafted speech, imitating the best of

Ciceronian oratory,28 moves and persuades Livy’s audience to align themselves with

him. He articulates both the reasons for staying in Rome and communicates the

emotional attachment to the city which Livy desires. In effect, he guides the audience in

their attempts to navigate the tensions raised by internal division or factional strife. In

Camillus, then, Livy not only provides a proper model for the ordinary citizen and for

leadership alike, but also a guide toward understanding the events of his day.

Closely associated with Camillus in the text and standing either parallel to him or behind him is the Senate. When Camillus first speaks against abandonment (5.30.1), he addresses the Senate, and the Senate as a body acts in tandem with his exhortation.

The second speech is given before a gathering of citizens, and the Senate stands united behind him in opposing abandonment (5.50.8). Consistently throughout the narrative, the Senate champions the city, while serving as a foil to the cupidinous agitation of the plebs to leave. In the darkest hour of the siege, the Senate stands on the Capitol as the last guardians of the state, and in the author’s portrayal, as a fundamentally constitutive element without which Rome would not survive. Along with

27 Vasaly (2015) 79.

28 Gaertner (2008) 42-5.

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the Capitol as the seat of the gods, the Senate gives importance to the city,29 and

together, they represent the core of Roman identity. The Senate, whose presence in

Roman historical writing typically signals the right side of tradition and moral rectitude,30

also symbolizes continuity amid crisis and change.

This account of the threat of abandonment and the response of Rome’s leaders, coming at an emphatic point in the history at the end of the first pentad, assumes a particularly poignant role within Livy’s work. Written at the very end of the civil wars which destroyed the Republic, but before the Augustan principate had fully taken shape,31 the first pentad appears at a time of significant change. Scholars have seen

the account of Rome’s abandonment in Book Five reflecting primarily the Social Wars of

the 80’s BCE which pitted many Italian communities against Rome and raised the

possibility of supplanting the city with a capital at Corfinium. More immediately, during

the conflict between Antony and Octavian, rumors circulated widely that Antony

intended to move the capital to Alexandria.32 Both events threatened Rome’s centrality

and its sovereignty. Accompanying these wars was a sense of moral decline, evident in

the perceived loss of ancestral values, factional strife, and internal corruption due to

29 Jaeger (1997) 63.

30 Goebel (1981) 86. Note Augustus’ boast that some 700 senators served with him in the fight against M. Antony. RG 25.3.

31 The date of composition is critical to understanding Livy’s political outlook and motivation. Burton (2000) 429. He dates Books Four and Five to the end of 30 BCE with a final revision appearing before 25 BCE. See pp. 444-6.

32 On the influence of the Social Wars, see Bonjour (1975) 470 and Ogilvie (1965) 742. On Antony and the rumors of moving East, see Ceausescu (1976) 87-8.

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wealth.33 The city itself suffered in this turmoil as its physical appearance and its

infrastructure were sorely neglected and fell into disrepair or obsolescence.34

Into this state of affairs, Livy injects his vision of a city which is the sedes deum and caput mundi, preeminent as the homeland of the Roman people. His history has been described as literary state-building, an artistic effort at the regeneration of moral virtue embodied in past figures like Camillus.35 Significantly, Camillus’ great speech

elicits the immediate rebuilding of the city in the narrative. His title of second founder, conditor alter (5.49.7), communicates the rejuvenation of the eternal city. At the core of this moral renewal stand the Capitol and Senate as emblems (monumenta) of continuity with the past and foci of Roman religious and political identity.

This vision of city and leader has striking parallels with the program of Augustus and the ideology which he fostered, especially as expressed in his Res Gestae. The city and Augustus’ efforts at rebuilding it feature prominently in that document, especially in chapters 19 – 23. Augustus’ pietas is manifested toward the gods through his work in

building or restoring their temples, especially on the Capitol.36 In this way, Augustus

respects and promotes traditional religious practice like Camillus. He further celebrates

his own pietas and iustitia not only in his punishment of his father’s murderers, but also

on the shield which was given to him inscribed with what would later be called the

imperial virtues: virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas (RG 2 and 34.2 respectively).

33 Vasaly (2015) 122-123; Miles (1995) 108. It was a common perception that the Republic failed because of the abandonment of virtue and loss of ideals. Gorman (2001) 265 and Earl (1961) 51-58.

34 Favro (1992) 69; Zanker (1988) 19-21.

35 Vasaly (2015) 125-8; Stevenson (2000) 39.

36 RG 19.2, 20.1, and 20.4. In the Ab Urbe Condita, too, Livy describes Augustus as the templorum omnium conditorem (4.20.7) where the epithet conditor links him to both Romulus and Camillus. On the Capitol in the Res Gestae, see Cooley (2009) 188-192.

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Lastly, Augustus presents himself as consistently acting at the behest of the Senate, in

deference to the Senate, or receiving titles and honors from the Senate.37 Such efforts

at consensus ostensibly mirror Camillus’ practice in this regard, and like Camillus,

Augustus was acclaimed pater patriae (see RG 35.1) for saving the state in the

aftermath of the civil war.

These similarities and others have raised questions among scholars about the

exact relationship between Livy and Augustus.38 It seems probable now that both

historian and princeps are relatively independent of each other, while sharing similar

concerns and ideals in response to the devastation of the civil wars.39 Both are about

rebuilding the state through a return to traditional religion and concord among the

various factions or divisions in the Roman political arena. Further, many of the images

of the city highlighted here from Book Five echo in other Augustan writers as well.40

Livy’s history is part of a broader concurrence of themes and imagery linked to the

princeps which constitute a recognizably Augustan ideology.41 This ideology as

reflected in Livy focuses upon the renewed preeminence of the city whose centrality as

37 RG 1.2-3, 6.2, 10.1, 20.4, and 34.1. Sometimes the Senate is combined with the Roman people as at 5.1 and 8.1.

38 This question is highly contentious. See the survey of scholarly opinion at Stevenson (2000) 37 and Feldherr (1998) 49 n152.

39 This is the position of Stevenson (2000) 38 and Edwards (1996) 50.

40 Livy’s images of the city appear in various forms especially among the poets. For patria/natale solum, Hor. Carm. 3.4.63, Ov. Am. 2.16.38 and Met. 7.52. For urbs aeterna or similar, see Tib. 2.5.23 and Verg. Aen 9.448. For caput mundi/Capitol, Hor. Carm. 3.30.7-9, Ov. Am. 1.15.26, Met. 15.434-5, Tr. 1.3.31-34 and 1.5.70, and Verg. Aen. 9.448. The secondary literature on Rome in the Augustan poets is vast. See in particular Muecke (1995), Hardie (1992), Morwood (1991), Mellor (1981) 1005-1008, and Pratt (1965).

41 This is not to suggest that Augustan authors were monolithic in their posture toward the Augustan regime. The age was one of great creativity and innovation, and these authors represent widely differing approaches to the political milieu. In this regard, see Galinsky (1996), especially pp 229-237.

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homeland anchors an imperialistic vision with Senate and princeps at its head. It is with

this ideology that Lucan contends.

Lucan and Livy’s Vision

Lucan’s Bellum Civile engages and responds to a vision of the city and its power

structures which was formulated to a great extent by Livy’s history. Livy’s work

achieved a canonical status early on and quickly became central to the Romans’ own

understanding of their city.42 Additionally, Livy’s influence on Lucan has long been

detected, although that influence is nuanced and selective.43 Through his poetic

portrayal of Caesar’s onslaught, the contrived abandoning of Rome and subsequent

loss of identity, Lucan dismantles Livy’s imagery of a Rome reborn and collapses the

ideology built upon it.

As Caesar approaches the Rubicon about to cross into Italy in the poem, the

image of the Patria, trembling and sorrowful, appears before him and challenges his

intent (1.183-211). This apparition of Patria is the only divine or semi-divine figure to act

as a character in Lucan’s famously nihilistic poem.44 Caesar’s initial response is fear,

but he stops his advance only momentarily. Upon recognizing the Homeland he is about

to attack, Caesar significantly addresses the gods in prayer, first among them Jupiter

the Thunderer,45 the penates, the Vestal hearth, and, surprisingly, the goddess Roma.

42 Edwards (1996) 45.

43 Pichon (1912). More recently, see Roche (2009) 42-3. The many and significant divergences between the two authors indicates that Livy’s influence was limited, however. See, for example, Pichon (1912) 107-8.

44 Ahl (1976) 211. Patria in Lucan frequently refers to the city of Rome as well. See for example 3.73 and 5.270.

45 At 1.196, Tarpeia de rupe Tonans. The mention of the Tarpeian rock links this text to the plundering of the temple at 3.154, rupes Tarpeia.

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For Lucan’s Caesar, patria is identified primarily with Jupiter on the Capitol and the gods

of home and hearth. Scholars have noted the anachronism in Caesar’s prayer in that

these deities are associated with the Julio-Claudian emperors, and the deified Roma,

the personification of the state, is particularly Augustan.46 Lucan has in mind the

principate, a sense which is reinforced by a subtle shift in focus and status revealed in

Caesar’s prayer. While acknowledging the gods, Caesar applies to himself the ritual

formula en, adsum (1.201), which often announces the epiphany of a divine figure in

epic.47 Also, Caesar’s words tuus (liceat modo, nunc quoque) miles (1.202) directly

contradict the injunction of Patria, si cives, huc usque licet (“if you come as citizens, you

are permitted only here,” 1.192).48 Caesar is implicitly elevating himself to semi-divine

status on a par with the homeland, the Patria. He disregards the injunction of Patria as

well as Jupiter on the Capitol, and, like a lion about to attack (1.205-212), crosses the

Rubicon. In the application of the lion simile, the Patria becomes the prey which will

eventually be killed and devoured. Thus, the homeland is not only rendered impotent

and irrelevant, destined to be destroyed, but it is replaced by a semi-divine Caesar.

Further, the failure of familial and religious bonds to tie the Senate and people to Rome in the foundational text of Book One and the insignificance of the native soil in Lentulus’ speech at 5.30 contribute to the apparent irrelevance of the concept of homeland. At the

end of this episode of epiphany in Book One, Caesar himself claims to be abandoning

46 Roche (2009) ad 195-203 and Feeney (1991) 293. On Roma as Augustan, see Mellor (1981) 1005-9.

47 For example, the phrase introduces Bacchus’ appearance at Verg. Aen. 7.454. Roche (2009) ad 201.

48 Elsewhere, too, Caesar directly challenges the gods, sometimes implying that the gods even serve him. Note the episode at the sacred grove in 3.399 ff and especially in his speech during the storm narrative of 5.578-93. See Matthews (2008) ad loc.

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peace and law by crossing the river (1.225), while shortly after, Pompey and the Senate

abandon the city and its gods, the Penates and Lares.

As we have seen primarily in Chapter 3 of this study, Rome is acknowledged

frequently in Lucan’s epic as the dwelling place of the gods, despite his rather muted

theology. The Tarpeian rock is almost always identified as the seat of Jupiter or the

gods.49 Even Caesar, when making his final approach to the city, addresses it as the

sedes deum (3.91),50 and the people of the city are fearful that his intent is to seize the

walls and scatter their gods, rapturus moenia Romae/sparsurusque deos (3.99-100). As previously noted, Caesar actually undermines this conception by plundering the Temple of Saturn shortly later.

The only other application of the phrase “abode of the gods” in the poem is not to

Rome, significantly, but to Alexandria.51 As Caesar arrives in that eastern city amid

questions whether he is about to subject the Ptolemaic capital as well (10.4-13), he

tours the city surveying the superum sedes et templa vetusti/numinis antiquas Macetum

testantia vires (10.15-16), “abodes of the gods and the temples of an archaic deity

which testify to the ancient strength of the Macedonians.” Caesar’s presence in the city,

his association with Alexander the Great whose tomb he is about to visit, and the threat

to the Capitol posed by Cleopatra in the text (10.63) all combine to suffuse this

49 At 1.196, 5.27, 5.306, and 8.863. Lucan’s use of this phrase parallels most closely Livy’s vision of the Capitol as the religious and political center. Of the five occurrences of Capitolium in Lucan, by contrast, all but one (at 10.63) are associated with the Triumph, chiefly Pompey’s. The one exception will be noted shortly.

50 Fantham (1996) 139 sees here a direct echo of Camillus’ speech in Book Five of Livy.

51 The phrase sedes dei (in the singular) occurs at 9.578 in Cato’s speech before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt. There, too, the phrase is robbed of meaning in Cato’s logic since Jupiter does not have a particular abode, but can be found anywhere, Iuppiter est quodcumque vides, quodcumque moveris (9.580).

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transference of the phrase to Alexandria with new significance. The seat of the gods is

movable. It follows Caesar, and Alexandria then becomes a rival Rome, a pattern we

explored in Chapter 4. The site of Rome and its divine mandate are relativized in

Lucan’s text. They become dependent on Caesar’s will.

Lastly, the poet explicitly engages the imperialistic image of Rome as caput

mundi. Both instances of the phrase occur in Book Two, each within a context of civil

war. The first (2.136) decries the threat to the city posed by the war with Marius’

supporters and the possibility of moving the capital either to Gaul or to Corfinium.52 The

second characterizes the rapaciousness of Caesar who is not content with capturing the

city, described as ipsa, caput mundi, bellorum maxima merces (“the head of the world,

the greatest reward of wars,” 2.655).53 The claim to be head of the world is undermined,

not by an external threat like the Gauls, but by internal strife, especially embodied in

Caesar.

Further, the variant caput orbis, also found in Livy’s first pentad (1.16.7) and

synonymous with caput mundi, appears twice in Lucan, but with a semantic shift

reflective of the principate. Usually applied to the city beginning with Livy,54 in Lucan it is

applied to individuals, although not by the poet himself. At 5.686, Caesar’s men refer to

their leader as caput orbis, head of the world, while at 9.123-4, Gnaeus Pompey the

younger inquires whether his father, Pompey the Great, the caput orbis, is still alive

(ironically at this point in the narrative, he has already lost his head in Egypt). This shift

52 Book 2.136-7: tum cum paene caput mundi rerumque potestas/mutavit translata locum.

53 The phrasing here and in the next line links Caesar to Marius and Sulla and thus to the previous text at 2.136. Fantham (1992) ad 655.

54 Matthews (2008) ad 686.

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from place to person, from city to individual, is consistent with the growing dominance of

Caesar in the narrative and the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the

princeps in history, detailed earlier in this study. Rome is no longer the head or center of

the world. Power has shifted from a place, chosen by the gods as their seat, exclusively

to a person.

The irony found in Gnaeus’ inquiry about his father at 9.123 assumes a much

greater poignancy when viewed against the relentless references to decapitated heads

or headless bodies which pervade the poem.55 While this theme is certainly intended to

mirror and amplify Pompey’s manner of death, it also impacts the poet’s use of the

image of caput mundi/caput orbis. Chronologically in the narrative, Rome is abandoned

in Book One. Amid a striking density of references to decapitation in Book Two, the

city’s status as caput mundi is threatened by civil war, first by Marian leaders and

second by Caesar himself. The application of caput orbis to Caesar by his men in Book

Five is followed by Caesar’s conjuring of his own possible decapitation in a speech to

his soldiers before Pharsalus (7.305). A gruesome description of Pompey’s beheading

beginning at 8.663 precedes Gnaeus’ appellation of his father as caput orbis at 9.123.

The two chief antagonists in this civil conflict link the image of caput orbis with

decapitation, either actually in Pompey’s case or potentially in Caesar’s. Combined with

the loss of Rome, the caput mundi repeatedly threatened by internal wars and the

preponderance of other references scattered throughout the poem, these associations

signal a redeployment of the imagery of head in the poet’s hands. They suggest the

55 I count fourteen references, only two of which specifically apply to Pompey. They are: 2.112, 2.123-4, 2.125, 2.150, 2.160, 3.760, 6.566, 7.305, 7.628, 8.11-12, 8.436-7, 8.673-691, 9.214, and 10.100.

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decapitation of the Roman state, begun with the abandoning of Rome by its leaders.56

This redeployment may also signal the increasing dependence of the state upon the

head of an individual whose decapitation leaves the state a lifeless corpse.

As a result, the images of the city propounded in Livy’s vision, Rome as patria, sedes deum, and caput mundi, are each gutted of its meaning in Lucan, relegated to irrelevant impotence or subverted and appropriated by Caesar. The template which Livy provides is dismantled in Lucan’s telling by Caesar’s aggression and the subsequent desertion of the city by its leaders.

Decapitation and headlessness, especially when associated with both Caesar and Pompey, further highlight for Lucan’s audience the lack of any leader or defender of

Rome in the epic. There is no Camillus figure in Lucan’s poem. Camillus is referenced

several times, and except for the distorted appeal to his example in Lentulus’ speech,

he is regularly portrayed as an exemplar of republican virtue,57 consistent with Livy’s

presentation. Yet Lucan typically plays with this inheritance, and the distance between

Livy and Lucan is dramatically revealed when the cadaver raised from hell by the

demonic powers of Erictho in Book Six reveals that the strife of civil war has reached even the glorious dead in the Underworld. There, the corpse relates, Camillus weeps

over the fortune of Rome (6.786).58

The only possible candidate for defender of the city in the poem is Cato, who, in

a clear echo of Livy’s Camillus, is acclaimed, ecce parens verus patriae, dignissimus

56 Most (1992) 397 similarly suggests that Pompey’s decapitation is a symbol for the decapitation of divine providence from the body of the universe, a Stoic formulation.

57 Roche (2009) ad 168-9.

58 The corpse states: vidi Decios natumque patremque/…flentemque Camillum.

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aris,/Roma, tuis (“behold the true father of his country, most worthy of your altars, O

Rome,” 9.601-2). Earlier in the poem, he is hailed as father and husband to the city

(2.388), yet significantly, he is a defender whose cause is doomed to failure. Despite the

openly encomiastic posture toward Cato and his incredible aristeia in the bizarre

episode against the Libyan snakes of Book Nine, Cato’s efforts and his virtue impact the

fated outcome of the war not at all, and he quietly disappears from the narrative at

9.949.59 Moreover, he is the flattest, least engaging of the three major characters in the

poem. Unlike Caesar or certainly Pompey, Cato appears as primarily a symbol of loss

and even noble futility in the face of tyranny, whose presence serves only to ensure that

the republican cause is not simply fighting for one tyrant (i.e. Pompey) instead of

another.60 He is an idea instead of a human being.61 As parens patriae, Cato embodies

an impotence before the madness of civil war to such an extent that his portrayal in the

poem has been called one of “radical ambivalence,”62 a far cry from his predecessors of

the same title.

Further, the Roman Senate, traditional guardians of the mos maiorum and

staunch defenders of the city against the agitation of the plebs in Livy, is fractured in

Lucan. They are initially portrayed as united, but united with the plebs in abandoning

Rome in Book One. Those who stay behind, however, are either tainted by acquiescing

to tyranny, like Cotta before the doors of the Temple of Saturn, or motivated by the

59 The poem is incomplete as we have it. Stover (2008) and Gorman (2001) 284-88 have postulated that the poem would have ended with Cato’s suicide at Utica in April of 46 BCE.

60 See the fatalism in Cato’s logic at 2.284-325.

61 Ahl (1976) 274.

62 Johnson (1987) 66.

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avaritia which corrupted Livy’s plebs, like Metellus in that same text. Those who flee the city, like Lentulus and his crowd, turba, also contribute to the destruction of Roman identity paradoxically by seeking an alternate Rome apart from their ancestral abode, by manipulating traditional values, and by distorting the proper exercise of power – all contrary to Livy’s vision. They increasingly move from being senators to being proceres, chieftains, the farther they are removed from the city. Whether they remain or flee, the

Senate has compromised itself through its submission to one man, be he Caesar or

Lentulus. The state has been decapitated.

In the final analysis, the most basic and most obvious fact is the most critical in what Lucan has done to Livy’s vision. In Livy, the Capitol and Senate survive intact.

Rome is saved, and the city begins to rebuild, paralleling the renewal brought by

Augustus. In Lucan, the city is abandoned, in defiance of the actual history, and Senate and people flee. The loss of the homeland is presented as a fait accompli in the poem, and its loss is total, encompassing law, liberty, mores, and meaning itself. There is no resurgence and no rebuilding. Just as Lucan is selective in his use of history, so is he selective in his Stoicism, and the ekpyrosis which the foundational text in Book One employs has no aspect of regeneration, a necessary element in its traditional formulation. The city, once eternal, now collapses in flames.

Interestingly, the theme of abandoning the city recurs also in Silius’ Punica

10.420-445. There just after the defeat at Cannae, the lowest point in the war against

Hannibal, the people of Rome seek refuge in the citadel on the Capitol fearing an assault on the city, and the Senate is explicitly described as doing its duty (10.592-3). A certain Metellus begins to clamor for abandoning Rome. Scipio Africanus surfaces as

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the hero to meet this challenge, and, like another Camillus, he squashes the impulse to

leave in a resounding speech. As in Lucan, the centrality of Rome as caput terrarum is

at the forefront of Silius’ epic.63 In contrast to Lucan, however, Silius is writing under the

emperor Vespasian in the years following the tumultuous civil wars of 69 CE. Silius’

Scipio comes to represent Vespasian, and his optimism reflects the benevolence of the

early Flavians. His work marks a rejection of Lucan’s dark vision of the principate.64

Between the two poles of Livy and Silius Italicus, Lucan is the anomaly in his

treatment of the abandonment of the city. All three authors rhetorically employ Rome as

an abstraction in their works, and for Livy and Lucan in particular, the city figures

prominently in an ideology built upon a relationship between place and power. But

whereas Livy is writing at the dawn of what would be proclaimed a Golden Age, when

power flowed from and was committed to an image of a consecrated homeland, and

Silius during the optimism of the beginnings of Flavian rule when his own political career

would flourish, Lucan is writing under Nero,65 when he saw the relationship between

place and power severed, when Rome burned, and power was absorbed and abused

by one man. For him, the ideology of the principate has failed, and the world collapses

into meaninglessness.

Just as Livy’s history is tied to the Augustan age and its ideology, so too is

Lucan’s poem intimately tied to the Neronian principate. Lucan’s depiction of civil war

63 Silius 1.7-8: quaesitumque diu, qua tandem poneret arce/terrarum Fortuna caput. Text is Miniconi (2003).

64 Littlewood (2011) liii. Unsurprisingly, Silius is heavily indebted to Livy as well. See Miniconi (2003) xxxix-xli.

65 Only under Nero did the full extent of the loss of freedom effected by the principate become clear. Johnson (1987) 131.

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continues and its effects reverberate into his own time. In Chapter 6, we consider how the poet manipulates time to create a sense of ongoing abandonment, and we explore more deeply Lucan’s poetic intent.

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CHAPTER 6 PLACE AND THE FUTURE: ABANDONING NERO’S ROME

Lucan decries and condemns the political reality of his own time. So it is that his

account of the city’s abandonment in 49 BCE and the loss which follows, including

primarily the plundering of the treasured values of the Roman People and the

abnegation of senatorial power through separation from the city, are not simply

historical events for the poet. The civil war between Caesar and Pompey becomes a

metaphor illuminating events in Nero’s Rome whose continued unfolding in the poet’s

vision leads to annihilation and death. The poet achieves this effect by continually

crossing the temporal boundary between past and present, primarily, though not

exclusively, through the trope of apostrophe. By repeatedly addressing Rome and

entangling his audience in the narrative of the poem, the poet implicates his

contemporaries as both agents and victims in its continuing abandonment. The events

of 49 BCE, then, are presented by Lucan as the prism through which elite Romans

living under Nero might view and interpret their own relationship to the city in the mid

60’s CE when the poet was writing.

Even a casual reader or listener of the Bellum Civile realizes from the very

beginning the relevance of the poem to the contemporary milieu of the poet.1 We have

already seen where much of the content of the poem reflects or parallels elite concerns

during the Julio-Claudian principate, especially an anxiety regarding the centrality of

Rome under Nero and concerns about the exercise of power manifested in questions of

citizenship, Latin character, and senatorial identity. The poem’s constant reference to

1 The prologue itself suggests that the events of the poem have been preparing for the coming of Nero. See 1.33-38.

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the future from the standpoint of its narrative content is, however, much more pervasive

and explicit. The poet achieves this sense through a number of techniques which have

been much analyzed by scholars. The teleological nature of epic in general is adapted

by Lucan to project his content into his own time, and Nero becomes the end point of

his poem as Augustus was for Vergil’s.2 The rather abrupt ending of the poem as we

have it has suggested to some a sense of the endlessness of civil war in which its

ramifications reach down to Lucan’s lifetime.3 Stylistically, the extensive use of the vivid

present, the presentation of enargeia by the poet, succeeds in making the past present

to the audience, creating a sense that they are eyewitnesses or even participants in the

events of the narrative.4 Further, the posture as vates adopted by the poet and a related

awareness of the audience which he and at least one of his characters demonstrate add

to the poem’s temporal blurring.5 This final element points to a fundamental

characteristic of Lucan’s work which distinguishes him to a great extent from any of his

epic predecessors.

The poet’s own voice intrudes into his narrative regularly, to the extent that he

appears to join his story as one identifiable character among all the others.6 In this

capacity, he offers a running commentary on the action of the poem as it proceeds,7

2 Roche (2005) 54-57.

3 Rossi (2005) 256-8 and Masters (1992) 247-259.

4 On enargeia in Lucan, see Leigh (1997) 10-21 and 311-324. On the sense of audience as eyewitnesses, see Narducci (2002) 92-100 and O’Higgins (1988) 219 n32.

5 For example, see 7.212-13 for the poet and 8.622-4 for Pompey. Ormand (1994) 41, 47-8 and O’Higgins (1988).

6 Masters (1992) 88 and O’Higgins (1988) 209. D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 7 estimates 197 instances of authorial intrusion in the poem, three times as many as Vergil.

7 Bramble (1982) 43-44 has suggested that Lucan is far more interested in moral commentary than actual narrative, in interpretation rather than history.

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seeking to guide the response of his readers or listeners and to trigger a reaction in

them.8 This intrusion frequently takes the form of a direct comment in the first person,

lending immediacy to his account and jarring his audience toward a greater

attentiveness to the events unfolding before them.9

Nevertheless, the poet’s intrusions not only draw the audience more deeply into

the narrative. They also allow the poet to speak to his audience in their own present and

to manipulate his story in order to comment on their context, a context external to the

poem. This proleptic stance is achieved primarily through the rhetorical trope of

apostrophe. By means of the indefinite second person address and the direct

apostrophe to Rome, specifically, the poet is able to straddle the boundary between

past and present and to link his audience to an abandoning of Roman identity which

began with Pompey and Caesar and continues with the Senate and Nero in his own

day. It is through a deeper analysis of this trope that we come to a greater

understanding of Lucan’s poetic intent and epic relevance.

Apostrophe I: Connecting to the Audience

Our understanding of Lucan’s use of apostrophe, that famously embarrassing

form, as one scholar puts it,10 has undergone a seismic shift in recent years. Once

considered a tiresome extreme11 or even the product of an unhealthy self-

8 D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 2-3; Block (1982) 7. Oftentimes the desired response is one of scorn or indignation. See Narducci (2002) 90.

9 Lounsbury (1976) 233-4. First person intrusions are very common. The following are simply representative: 5.386, 5.610, 7.398, 7.640-4, 8.459, 8.827, 9.598-9, and 10.49-50.

10 Leigh (1997) 310, quoting Culler (1981) 135.

11 Costa (1973) 153.

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consciousness,12 this trope has been reevaluated in more recent work and is now

understood to be an essential, though mannered element of Lucan’s poetic program.13

In general, apostrophe achieves a number of desired effects, all concerned with

erasing the chronological divide between narrative time and compositional time.14 This

device occurs repeatedly and very effectively at emotional junctures within the

narrative,15 thereby signaling the poet’s intense engagement with his subject matter.16 It often appears in exclamation or in the poet’s commentary surrounding a significant event or moment of heightened pathos.17 More relevantly, Lucan’s apostrophes often

function to highlight points of contact between an event in the civil war and the authorial

present in which the poet marks his intent to speak about concerns from his own

milieu.18 By seeking to guide his audience’s interpretation and even to align it with his

own, the poet reveals something of his poetic intent. While much work has been done

on the function of apostrophe in general, very little has been done on the two specific

forms of apostrophe which provide the basis of our study. Both the indefinite second

person address and the authorial apostrophe to Rome appear in our foundational text

from Book One. These two devices, which also occur elsewhere in the poem, are thus

12 Heitland (1887) lxxi.

13 For a survey of the scholarship on Lucanian apostrophe, see Faber (2005) 336-7 and Leigh (1997) 307-310.

14 Faber (2005) 337.

15 Block (1982) 8.

16 Faber (2005) 338.

17 So the extended authorial apostrophe to Pompey at 7.29-44 offers commentary characterizing Pompey on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus combined with exclamation.

18 D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 2-4.

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linked first to the abandoning of the city, and by means of them, the poet chooses to

connect that event to the lived experience of his Neronian audience.

The authorial indefinite second person address nearly always employs the

potential subjunctive of a verb of visual or mental perception whose subject is not

specified, but left open and inclusive, particularly of the reader or listener.19 It is this

open subject in the second person which reaches out to the audience and draws them

into the narrative, thereby transcending the chronological divide between past and

present. The device is rare in Lucan as it is in Vergil.20 It occurs in only two places, at

1.493 and at 8.147, both comprising independent clauses introduced by subjunctive

verbs of mental perception and followed by the resumptive sic, a similarity clearly linking

these two passages, as mentioned in Chapter 2 of this study.21 By its rarity, the device

signals not only the importance of these two texts, but also their emotional and

rhetorical potential in the poet’s hands. The content of each, the commentary which the

poet wants his audience to consider, is vital for understanding the texts themselves as

well as the relevance of these texts to the audience, since the poet chooses to address

them here in such a blatant manner.

19 Gilmartin (1975) 108. While the focus of her article is on prose historical works, she draws numerous examples from poetry as well.

20 In the Aeneid, it appears only three times in roughly 10,000 lines (at 8.650, 676, and 691). Lucan’s authorial interventions presuppose Vergil’s, as in many other areas of style and interpretation. See Narducci (2002) 89.

21 There are two other occurrences of the second person indefinite subjunctive in the poem. The first, locasses at 7.335, has no ms authority. While this conjecture by Grotius is accepted by Housman and even compared in his note ad loc. to our two texts, the reading does not fit the customary verb type, and its sense is clearly meant to be contrary to fact rather than potential, with no possible agent as subject. See the argument of Mayer (1979) 348. The second occurrence, velis and sequaris at 9.412, also does not fit the pattern, since those two verbs serve as a distancing technique by the poet in a conditional clause accompanied by the phrase si credere famae in 9.411. See Wick (2004) 159.

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In the account of the abandoning of Rome just after the fleeing Senate urges the

people to leave the city, the poet interjects a comment, credas aut tecta

nefandas/corripuisse faces aut iam quatiente ruina/nutantes pendere domos (“you

would believe that either unspeakable torches had consumed houses in flames or that

wavering homes were swaying, shaken by collapse,” 1.493-5). The imagery of fire and

collapse,22 which is designed to illustrate the flight of Senate and people from the ruined

city, disrupts the narrative with its novelty. It introduces these new elements of fire and

collapse into an account where they do not appear previously and are not automatically

associated with flight, thereby creating a dissonance between the events themselves

and the poet’s commentary. This dissonance suggests another reality of particular

relevance to the audience which the poet is linking to the abandonment of the city

through his address.23

While the imagery certainly reflects the urbs capta motif and the Stoic theory of

ekpyrosis already discussed, a more immediate reality for the audience and one

perhaps more impactful is the Great Fire of 64 CE which destroyed vast areas of the city and left an estimated 200,000 people homeless.24 Lucan was residing in the city at the time and may have actually witnessed the fire itself, certainly its aftermath.25 He is

known to have written a work in prose on that event before his death less than a year

later, the De Incendio Urbis. Further, a passage from the Octavia, dated with confidence

22 Corripio is regularly used of catching fire. See Verg. Aen. 9.537 and Sil. 4.695.

23 Block (1982) 15 has noted that Vergil’s use of this device often “stimulates the audience to bring to its interpretation of the scene depicted its own experience external to the poem.”

24 Champlin (2003) 180.

25 Croisille (2002) 150.

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to the early years of Vespasian’s principate and thus within a decade of the fire, seems

to reflect our passage in both sense and vocabulary. The unknown author of the drama

has Nero pray, mox tecta flammis concidant urbis meis/ignes ruinae noxium populum

premant (“soon may the houses of the city fall in my flames, may fires and ruin oppress

a guilty people,” 831-2).26 Clearly alluding to the fire of 64,27 this text speaks in the same

general terms as the text in Lucan, both describing the collapse of houses and the ruin

caused by fire, although the Octavia lays responsibility for the fire squarely on Nero.28

Additionally, burning cities appear repeatedly in the poem. At 2.300 amid his

simile of a father grieving the loss of his son, Cato imagines the funeral pyre of Rome.

At 2.542, Catiline threatens to torch the city and its houses, arsuras in tecta faces. In

Book Three, people fear that Caesar is about to attack the walls of Rome with fire (3.98-

9), and later in the same book, the citadel of Phocis burns (3.340). While describing the

cosmic effects of the looming battle of Pharsalus at 7.413, the poet speaks of countless

cities given over to fire and earthquake. Lastly at 10.498, the houses of Alexandria burn,

quae vicina tecta rapuere ignem, and we remember from Chapter 4 of our study that

Alexandria functions as an alternate Rome in the text. The repeated imagery of burning

houses and cities combined with the theme of ekpyrosis assumes a much greater

poignancy and rhetorical impact when seen in the context of the actual burning of

Rome, widely attributed to Nero, from the lived experience of Lucan’s audience.

26 Text is Zwierlein (1986)b.

27 Boyle (2008) ad loc.; Herington (1982) 34.

28 There is some evidence, tenuous though it may be, that Lucan also held Nero responsible for the fire. See Ahl (1976) 341-2.

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By means of the imagery in this apostrophe, then, the poet connects the abandonment of Rome before the advance of Caesar in 49 BCE to the destruction of the Great Fire of 64 CE and invites his audience to consider the fire of their own time as an equally destructive abandoning of the city, this time effected by Nero. Something similar is achieved with the only other occurrence of this device at 8.147 in the welcome which Pompey receives from the people of Mytilene.

Immediately after Pompey’s farewell speech to the Mytilenaeans, having resolved to continue his journey, he places his wife Cornelia on a ship heading toward the East (8.146-7). At this point, the poet intrudes upon his narrative with another indefinite address, cunctos mutare putares/tellurem patriaeque solum (“you would think that all the rest were replacing the land and soil of their homeland,” 8.147-8). Although earlier in this same text, we recall that Pompey had made the startling claim that

Mytilene was now his Rome, his Penates and his home (8.132-3), the poet’s intrusion again introduces a complication as the readers try to discern who exactly are the rest implied by the cunctos, which in the plural generally refers to all others, i.e. all with some exception implied.29 It must mean everyone except the Mytilenaeans and perhaps

Pompey, whose patria is now Mytilene, therefore all those who abandoned Rome in

Book One. The word cunctos, however, reflects cuncta earlier in the same passage where the Mytilenaeans request of Pompey, fac, Magne, locum quem cuncta revisant/saecula, quem veniens hospes Romanus adoret (“make this a place, Great

One, which all remaining ages might visit again, which a Roman coming as a guest might adore,” 8.114-5). The shift toward future ages reinforces the apostrophe’s innate

29 OLD 2

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bridging of past and present in order to project the replacing of the homeland into the

poet’s own milieu. The cuncti of the text, therefore, consists of those who fled Rome in

49 BCE especially the remnants of the Senate who accompanied Pompey, but also

those invited into the text by the indefinite subjunctive, those of the future, i.e. the

Romans of Lucan’s day.

Further, the language in the address recalls the language of Lentulus’ speech on

the irrelevance of the native soil, mutato sua iura solo (5.30), a position castigated by

the poet as we demonstrated. Through Lentulus’ historical exemplum, we also

remember the emphasis placed on the soil of the homeland in Camillus’ speeches in

Book Five of Livy. There, for example, in Camillus’ first speech before the Senate, he

states that nefas ducere desertam ac relictam ab dis immortalibus incoli urbem, et in

captivo solo habitare populum Romanum et victrice patria victam mutari (“it is

considered unspeakable that a city deserted and abandoned by the immortal

gods be inhabited and that the Roman People should live on captive soil and a

conquered country be exchanged for a conquering homeland,” 5.30.3). In all

three of these texts, in Lucan’s apostrophe, Lentulus’ speech, and Camillus’ speech,

there is a shared emphasis on soil, solum, and change, mutare. The mutability of the soil rejected by Camillus, but promoted by Lentulus, resurfaces in this apostrophe as particularly relevant to the poem’s hearers. The audience stands in a direct line, rhetorically constructed, which stretches all the way back to Camillus and the first debate on the place of Rome in the people’s history.

The poet is asking his audience to see in the move East by Pompey and Senate a mirror reflection of a similar movement East in his own time, a replacing of the

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homeland implied in persistent rumors that Nero would move the capital to Alexandria

compounded by the princeps’ philhellenism and the adlection of senators from outside

Italy, as previously discussed. This authorial comment, when seen in the light of the

poet’s injunction in the prologue that Nero remain in the center, again reiterates the

centrality of Rome for the poet and the destruction which follows from its abandonment.

The context at Mytilene, which Pompey has claimed as his patria, gives this apostrophe

an added urgency and point for the audience, forcing them to consider the place of the

patria in their own context.

Conflagration and loss of homeland are images which straddle the chronological

divide between the civil war and Nero’s Rome in the poet’s hands. The content of these

two indefinite addresses moves in two different directions as the poet guides his

audience in their interpretation of the events of both the war and their own time.

Comparison with the Vergilian usage of this same device serves to highlight Lucan’s

innovation in this regard and to emphasize the poet’s attempts to speak to his own

compositional context.

As with Lucan, the indefinite second person address in Vergil occurs at moments

of heightened emotional or patriotic awareness, principally during the ekphrasis of the

shield in Book Eight of the Aeneid.30 Three times in that extended scene, the poet

intrudes upon his description of the shield with an appeal to his audience. In contrast to

Lucan, however, Vergil’s appeals are more artistic rather than political and do not create

any dissonance or disruption to the narrative.

30 All three occurrences of the device fall within this scene. The indefinite nature of the address at 4.401, cernas, however, is debated. D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 30 sees that passage apostrophizing Dido. Contra Block (1982) 14.

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The first address falls in the fifth scene on the shield depicting Porsenna laying

siege to the city, where the poet intrudes illum indignanti similem similemque

minanti/aspiceres (“you would see Porsenna like one indignant and threatening,” 8.649-

50). The content of the apostrophe serves simply to characterize Posenna and expand his portrayal, providing a deeper insight into this enemy of Rome. The second is similar, totumque instructo Marte videres/fervere Leucaten (“you would see all of Actium seething with battle lines drawn,” 8.676-7). The image, here of Leucate the promontory

where Actium occurred, is merely illustrative, adding depth to an existing description.

The last occurrence falls toward the end of the ekphrasis at 8.691. The poet describes

Antony’s attempt to escape by sea after the defeat at Actium and interjects pelago

credas innare revulsas/Cycladas (“you would believe that the Cyclades islands, torn

from the sea, were swimming,” 8.691-2). The poet is employing hyperbole to enliven his

description of Antony’s flight. Each apostrophe highlights an enemy to Rome who

constitutes a threat, and each apostrophe invites the reader or listener to enter more

deeply into the ekphrasis at a particularly patriotic moment in the narrative. Further, the

entire episode of the shield is presented through the eyes of Aeneas as he beholds this

gift from his mother. The purpose of these apostrophes, then, is to invite the audience to

unite themselves with the hero Aeneas in pondering this description of Rome’s future,

thereby sharing in his wonder and awe.31 Vergil’s apostrophes are consonant with his

descriptions and reinforce a positive sense or even reverence before the panorama of

Rome’s achievements.

31 Putnam (1998) 127, 139; Block (1982) 15.

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Whereas Vergil draws the audience into his narrative and adds depth to his

vision by apostrophe, Lucan complicates his narrative by the addition of new or strange

elements which are not necessarily self-evident from the context, but which are

recognizable to his audience from their own experience. In this way, Lucan connects to

his own time and uses the temporal reciprocity of the device to add another layer of

meaning to his story which speaks to Nero’s Rome.

The second form of apostrophe to appear in our foundational text from Book

One, the authorial apostrophe to Rome, also serves to bridge the temporal divide

between narrative and audience, but additionally marks a shift in the poet’s intent.

Through this device, the poet explicitly pronounces a judgment on events and urges his

readers or listeners to reflect on their own relationship to the city under Nero.

Apostrophe II: Authorial Judgment

Caesar, Pompey, and Rome are the three most frequent objects of apostrophe

in the poem.32 Rome itself is apostrophized twenty times, spread rather evenly

throughout Books One through Nine.33 Of these twenty, twelve are authorial in the

sense that the author/narrator specifically turns aside (apostrephomai) to address Rome

in the midst of his own narrative.34 These authorial addresses to Rome are significant,

not only because of their frequency, but also because of the tensions which surface

from addressing a ruined city, depopulated by fear and fire within the narrative, and at

32 D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 179 n2.

33 Dinter (2012) 17 n37 omits 1.85 in his list and implies that all twenty are authorial. There are no occurrences at all in Book Ten.

34 Of the other eight, Caesar addresses Rome twice (1.200 and 3.96), Pompey three times (6.326, 7.91, and 8.322), Cato once (2.302), Figulus once in his prophecy (1.670), and the fighting men of Rome address the city once while marching off to war (2.56).

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the same time the living city of the audience’s experience, given the temporal flexibility

of the device and the inclusive nature of the idea of Rome. The poet is exploiting the

rhetorical potential of the trope in order to involve his listeners in judgment and in

lament.

In the prologue to the poem, the author addresses his fellow citizens from the

start and very shortly later addresses Rome for the first time.35 While these two entities,

citizens and Rome, are certainly related and explicitly comprise the addressees of

Lucan’s poem, 36 they are not completely synonymous. Rome is distinguished from its

citizens, while still encompassing them.37 By addressing Rome, the poet is including

and intending the city itself along with its inhabitants as well as the nuance of homeland

and state seen previously. The single address to cives at the beginning of the poem is

quickly subsumed into the more inclusive Roma a few lines later. This preference for

Rome keeps the city at the forefront of the poet’s engagement with his audience and

continues the emphasis owed to the city even after its abandonment in the narrative

toward the end of Book One.

Further, the use of Rome to mean the state is a characteristic associated with the

principate, as noted in Chapter 5, and thus anachronistic in the mouths of Caesar and

Pompey and others in the poem who address it. The standard Republican usage

35 At 1.8, the poet asks quis furor, o cives, quae tanta licentia ferri. At 1.21, the poet continues tum, si tantus amor belli tibi, Roma, nefandi…. The address to citizens here is one of only two in the entire poem. The other occurs in a speech by the Caesarian Scaeva to his men at 6.230.

36 Asso (2008) 164.

37 As at 4.807, where the poet exclaims felix Roma quidem civisque habitura beatos,/si libertatis superis tam cura placeret.

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preferred res publica or populus Romanus when referring to the state,38 while addressing Roma became very common only with the Augustan poets.39 The employment of Rome in these apostrophes in the text, then, is inclusive primarily of the principate, the Rome of the emperors.

One additional effect of these repeated addresses to the city is to present the city as one character among many in the poem. The city assumes a persona alongside the various personalities within the poem which the poet even makes sentient, a nuance seen previously in Chapter 3 where the Tarpeian rock and the curia building both witness Caesar’s aggression in plundering the Temple. Elsewhere in the poem, Rome seeks punishment (2.538), Rome can see (5.662, 6.320), Rome is afraid (3.298, 5.381),

Rome wishes (8.238 and 847), Rome can forgive (9.1104), and, of course, Rome dies

(7.634). Rome becomes a sentient reality, an entity which can be addressed as one character to another within a type of dialogue with the poet and audience.

In his study of this trope in Lucan, Paolo Asso has delineated a triangulation of apostrophe, three elements consisting of the apostrophizing speaker, the apostrophized entity, and the audience.40 According to his analysis, the use of apostrophe establishes a relationship among these three elements which encourages the audience to identify with the apostrophized entity. This is especially the case when that entity includes or encompasses the audience by definition, as does Rome. Yet as already stated, Rome includes more than simply its citizens. It encompasses the city itself as well as the homeland. Thus Rome becomes a sentient character in the same temporal plane as the

38 Feeney (1991) 294. Res publica and populus Romanus are nowhere apostrophized in the poem.

39 Thomas (2011) 141 on Hor. Carm. 4.4.37, however, notes an address to Rome as early as Ennius.

40 Asso (2008) 162-4.

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poet and audience in relationship to both. Through this device, the poet repeatedly reminds his audience of their ties to the city and subtly forces them to reflect on their identity as Romans, the people of Rome. What happens to Rome in the narrative is happening to them as well.

The twelve instances of the authorial address to Rome in the poem can be divided into two distinct categories, each determined by the relationship of the vocative

Roma to the verb and/or the action of the surrounding syntactical unit. The first category comprises four of the twelve occurrences where the apostrophized Rome is explicitly the agent of the action of the verb or the active element of the phrase. The second category, on the other hand, is determined when Rome is the passive element of the phrase, receives the action of the verb, and is acted upon by some other agent. Like any other character in the poem, Rome is either acting or being acted upon. Through this shift in voice, the poet maneuvers his address to Rome toward either reproach or lament.

At 1.21 in the prologue, Rome is addressed for the first time, tum, si tantus amor belli tibi, Roma nefandi,/totum sub Latias leges cum miseris orbem,/in te verte manus

(“If you have such a great love for unspeakable war, Rome, then when you have submitted the whole world under Roman law, turn your hand against yourself,” 1.21-23).

Rome is certainly the active element in the phrase as subject of both miseris and verte, while also exhibiting aspects of a living character who is able to love and who has hands. The possibility expressed in the conditional clause finds its fulfillment in the entire course of events to follow. Rome does have such a great love of war that it engages even in civil war. Interestingly this address is followed by a vision of Italy made

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desolate by such a love (1.24-32). The apostrophe points to an underlying cause for the

conflict and unmistakably constitutes a reproach by the poet.41 Rome itself is the cause

of her own ruin.

A similar theme is evident in the next apostrophe in this category where Rome is

again the active element. At 7.556 amid an intense description of the battle of Pharsalus

when the poet is heavily engaged in his material, he intrudes into the narrative, quidquid

in hac acie gessisti, Roma, tacebo, (“I will not relate whatever you have done in this

battle, O Rome.”) Of course, the poet goes on to detail Caesar’s exploits at some length

and the great evils which the battle produced. The force of the praeteritio, implying that

even the poet is hesitant to delve into the matter, simply magnifies the sense of

catastrophe. The poet is speaking here as a vates (me vate, 7.553), one of only two

places in the poem where the poet explicitly claims this role.42 The reproach implied in

the poet’s feigned silence is directed at Rome, not only the Rome of the past but

because of the vatic posture of the poet and the temporal ambiguity of the device itself,

the Rome of the future.

The last two instances in this active category of apostrophe are also related by an underlying thematic similarity. Toward the end of Book Eight after the death of

Pompey recounted in 8.577-711 amid an extended harangue against Egypt, the poet

interjects again, tu quoque, cum saevo dederis iam templa tyranno,/nondum Pompei

cineres, O Roma, petisti (“You also, O Rome, although you have given a temple already

to the savage tyrant, you have not yet sought out the ashes of Pompey,” 8.835-6). This

41 Roche (2009) 109-110.

42 The other occurs in the prologue at 1.63. See O’Higgins (1988).

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address falls in a passage where the poet is deeply engaged with his narrative following

the death of Pompey,43 and rebukes Rome for neglecting the remains of Pompey while

honoring Caesar with a temple.44 Futurity is again emphasized in the apostrophe itself

with iam and nondum and later when the poet commands Rome to remedy this error

now in the poet’s lifetime (nunc excipe, 8.838). The practice of deification alluded to in

the reference to Caesar is taken up by the poet in the last apostrophe of this category

as well, but applied paradoxically to Cato.

While different from the previous apostrophes in both form and context, this final

apostrophe to Rome in the active category nevertheless functions similarly. The only

apostrophe of the twenty to Rome to occur in an encomiastic context, this address falls

in the middle of a brief interlude of praise (9.587-604) directed at Cato before the

strange episode of the Libyan snakes. The poet intrudes, ecce parens verus patriae,

dignissimus aris,/Roma, tuis, per quem numquam iurare pudebit/et quem, si steteris

umquam cervice soluta,/nunc, olim, factura deum es (“behold the true father of his

country, most worthy of your altars, Rome, by whom you will never be ashamed to

swear and whom, if you should ever stand unfettered, you would now make a god,”

9.601-3).45 While latent in the previous reference, deification is explicitly claimed for

Cato in this apostrophe. The paradox lies in the anachronistic application of this

practice, so closely aligned with the principate, to Cato and Pompey, both of whom

fought and died for republican liberty and the rejection of one man rule. The paradox

43 Note the appearance of the poet in lines 827, 831, 834, and 842 of this text.

44 Augustus dedicated the Temple of Divine Julius in August 29 BCE within fifteen years of Caesar’s death, yet well outside the chronological limits of the poem. On the temple, see Claridge (1998) 98.

45 Cervice soluta literally means “with neck unfettered.” OLD solvo 5a. It belongs to the language of slavery and bondage. See Wick (2004) ad loc.

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implies that the honors given to Caesar and his successors are misplaced or inappropriate, since honor belongs instead to those who represent the opposition to such honors. Thus the poet is applying to Cato an element of the principate which he himself rejects.46 Herein lies the reproach of the principate, a system which has enslaved Rome and twisted the traditional criteria for honor. The poet is pitting Pompey and Cato against the successors of Caesar who have been so honored, while praising the former and castigating the latter.

In each of these authorial addresses, then, Rome is the active element, responsible respectively for war against itself, the carnage at Pharsalus, the failure to honor Pompey while raising Caesar to godlike status, and for accepting an enslavement which prevents the honor due to Cato. Consequently, each of these addresses elicits a sharp rebuke from the poet directed at Rome. Additionally, each of these active addresses focuses primarily on the poet’s own milieu. The first two (1.21 and 7.556) occur in texts where the poet explicitly claims the role of vates and aims his comments directly to his audience. The poet is rebuking the Rome of his audience. All four of the addresses in this category speak to conditions which still prevail at the time of the poem’s composition. Pharsalus gave birth to tyranny and ultimately to Nero, who is the telos of the poem. Pompey has no temple and Cato has not been deified due to the fact that Rome remains fettered and enslaved. The love of a war which is unspeakable continues in the subsequent damage to Rome and its freedom under the principate.

46 Wick (2004) 236: Lukan erkennt ihm somit jene Ehrungen zu, die er als Elemente des Kaiserkultes ablehnt. The application of the title parens patriae to Cato by the poet, a title adopted by Augustus in 2 BCE and by Nero in 55 CE, likewise undermines its use in the principate.

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The remaining authorial addresses to Rome, eight in all, constitute a separate category because of a shift in focus and function. Rome is no longer the active element in the phrase in which it occurs, but rather Rome is acted upon by some other agent in the narrative. Typically these apostrophes look more to the past, while still retaining a relevance to the present. For these apostrophes are primarily linked to loss.

Just after the prologue in Book One, the poet relates five causes of the civil war.

Among them, the poet apostrophizes Rome in what becomes the second cause, tu causa malorum/facta tribus dominis communis, Roma (“You, Rome, were made the common cause of evil among three masters,” 1.84-5). Rome is obviously the passive element, while the active role is assigned to the triumvirs. Nevertheless the city is the cause, identified as the praeda, the plunder (1.513), in the foundational text where another authorial apostrophe of this type occurs, explicitly on abandonment. There the poet states tu tantum audito bellorum nomine, Roma,/desereris; nox una tuis non credita muris (“You, O Rome, were abandoned after only the word war was heard; one night was not entrusted to your walls,” 1.519-20). The passivity of Rome in the face of active aggression and displayed in the city’s abandonment results in loss. This same dynamic is evident in the next two occurrences as well.

In the catalogue of treasures found in the Temple of Saturn from Book Three already considered, the poet includes quod tibi, Roma, fuga Gallus trepidante reliquit

(“what the Gaul left to you, Rome, when he fled in fear,” 3.159). This treasure, which

Camillus prevented from falling into the hands of the Gauls during their sack of the city, ended up plundered by Caesar. Of course as discussed in Chapter 3, this treasure is expanded by the poet’s apostrophe to mores in the same catalogue to include the

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achievements of the ancestors, both material and immaterial, which are lost to Caesar’s rapaciousness. In Book Four amid the account of the war in North Africa, the poet intrudes while commenting on the conduct of the Caesarian former tribune C.

Scribonius Curio, dum regnum te, Roma, facit (“while Curio converts you, Rome, into a tyranny,” 4.692). There is a subtle irony in the poet’s comment that Curio, a tribune elected to defend the people’s liberty, works to impose a tyrant on the city.47 In all of these references, Rome is portrayed as a victim, a sentient character who suffers loss at the hands of another aspect of itself. The city is subjugated by the triumvirs, abandoned by the Senate, plundered of its wealth by Caesar, and loses its freedom at the hands of Curio.

The remaining four apostrophes continue in the same vein. Two of them occur within the poet’s commentary following Pompey’s failure to exploit Caesar’s vulnerability in the siege sequence at Dyrrachium in Book Six, thereby allowing Caesar to escape and proceed toward Thessaly and continue the war. The poet laments felix ac libera regum,/Roma, fores iurisque tui, vicisset in illo/si tibi Sulla loco (“You would be blessed and free of kings, O Rome, and under your own authority, if Sulla had conquered for you in that place,” 6.301-3). The poet is suggesting that if Pompey were more like Sulla,

Caesar would never have escaped. After a brief exclamation on these sad fates (6.305), the poet mentions all the strife which would have been avoided had Pompey pressed his advantage, concluding with the comment ultimus esse dies potuit tibi, Roma, malorum (“That day could have been the last of your evils, Rome,” 6.312). These two apostrophes invite Rome to imagine an alternative reality, a past potential had events

47 Asso (2010) ad loc.

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turned out differently, but which is now impossible of fulfillment.48 The effect of this

contrast serves to emphasize the sense of loss which adheres for Lucan’s audience in

their own time because of the failures of the past. The implication is that the evils of

such a war ought to have ended at Dyrrachium with the defeat of Caesar. Yet these

evils, which are specified as the loss of good fortune, freedom from kings, and Rome’s

independence,49 continue to impact Lucan’s audience.

The final two apostrophes in this second category occur together in an extended

meditation by the poet on the cosmic effects of the battle of Pharsalus in Book Seven.

There the poet intrudes with a prolonged address to Rome occupying some twenty lines of text and framed by the vocative Roma. This address opens with

Fortuna…populosque ducesque/constituit campis, per quos tibi, Roma, ruenti/ostendat quam magna cadas (“Fortune…stations on the plains the peoples and generals through whom to show you in your fall, Rome, how mighty was your fall,” 7.417-9).50 The poet

concludes this extended apostrophe at 7.439, usque ad Thessalicas servisses, Roma,

ruinas, (“all the way up to the ruin in Thessaly, you should have been a slave.”)51 The entire passage is a lament on liberty lost which culminates with the bitter irony expressed in the wish to have never tasted freedom at all.

Through the apostrophes of this second category, the poet repeatedly portrays

Rome as a victim, a figure who has suffered great loss, specifically the loss of liberty

48 D’Alessandro Behr (2007) 44 detects a similar effect in Lucan’s use of the present and future tenses.

49 We discussed the significance of the phrase sui iuris more fully in Chapter 3.

50 Translation is from Braund (1992).

51 Dilke (1960) ad 646 identifies the verb servisses a subjunctive of past obligation. The sense is that it would have been better had Rome remained enslaved than to have been free and subsequently to lose that freedom.

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and independence, which surfaces in nearly each occurrence. By its nature, loss has both a past and a present dimension to it, reflected in the trope itself, as the losses of the past endure into the present.

Through this analysis, then, a pattern emerges which gives us a deeper insight into the poet’s overall intent. When cast in a passive role, the figure of Rome is linked to the narrative past and associated rhetorically with loss. Through these apostrophes, the poet chiefly laments the loss and destruction caused by the war. When Rome is cast in an active role, however, the city is linked to the compositional present and elicits the reproach of the poet for responsibility in the ongoing conditions of civil war. As both victim and agent, Rome is complicit in the work of its own enslavement under the

Caesars.

Of course, the past/present dichotomy is not absolute. The device of apostrophe itself bridges these two realities, and each occurrence not only draws the audience into the narrative, but also speaks proleptically to their own lived context outside the poem.

Lament and rebuke apply both to the events of the civil war of 49 BCE and to the events of Nero’s Rome in the mid 60’s CE. Admittedly there is a tension between rebuking

Rome as agent and lamenting Rome as victim at the same time. Yet this tension is reflective of the nature of civil war, when Rome is perpetrating crimes against itself. It is certainly consistent with Lucan’s overall stance toward a war which is itself a paradox.

Drawing upon Asso’s insight on apostrophic triangulation, we see that the poet is forcing his audience to reflect on their own relationship to the city and, by extension, their own identity as constituting Rome through these repeated addresses. Yet within the trajectory of the poem itself, these addresses to Rome are, after Book One,

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addressed to a city which has been abandoned and destroyed in a conflagration of

cosmic significance. By the time we reach Book Eight after accompanying this trajectory

eastward, this abandonment has clearly become a tragic loss of freedom and the

replacement of the homeland itself. This vision, in all its particulars revealed through this

epic journey, elicits the poet’s rebuke and lament. Because of the elite audience’s

involvement effected by the poet’s apostrophe, they become sharers both in the guilt of

abandonment as an agent and as a victim in the loss of the ancestral homeland.

As we have tried to demonstrate in each previous chapter, Nero’s Rome shares

an uncanny resemblance to the portrayal of Rome in the poem. Vasily Rudich has

detailed the climate which adhered among the political elite under Nero and the forces

which impacted those in public life at the time of Lucan’s writing.52 He asserts that

simply in order to survive, the members of Rome’s governing class adopted a posture of

dissimulatio, a mix of pretense and compromise necessary in order to navigate life in the world of deception and intrigue created by Nero’s exercise of power. The breakdown of fides, pietas, and other values of the mos maiorum, the favor shown by the princeps to delatores, informers, and the subsequent factionalization of the Senate made life uncertain and fear rampant in the city, where even withdrawal from public life or suicide could be interpreted as political attacks on the emperor.53 In this climate, opposition to

Nero arose almost exclusively from the Senate in Rome, but a Senate which itself was

divided in its stance toward the principate.54 Senators were constantly forced to tread

52 Rudich (1993).

53 On withdrawal, see Hammond (1963) 166-7 as well as the case of Thrasea Paetus in Rudich (1993) 171-6. On suicide, see Vervaet (2002) 187 n220.

54 Vogel-Weidemann (1979) 94, 102.

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carefully and exercise a great deal of circumspection in order to maintain their position

or even their lives. Participation in such a system required from them a certain level of

complicity or collusion in their own subjection to the princeps.55 As a result, life for the

elite became a constant renegotiation of power and place between Senate and

princeps, between the old and the new, and between factions within the Senate itself, all

of which constitute a form of civil strife reflected in Lucan’s poem.

Against this backdrop, the inversion of traditional values especially among the

leaders in the poem,56 the complicity of the Senate in the abandonment of Rome, the

acquiescence or clouded motivations of magistrates like Aurelius Cotta and Metellus before Caesar, the imperial hue given to Lentulus’ attempt to replace Rome, and

Pompey’s acceptance of Mytilene as his patria assume an added layer of meaning in the poem. In the poet’s manipulation of time, these events become a prism through which Lucan’s elite audience might reflect on their role in the exercise of power, the level of their own complicity in the tyranny of Nero, and their relationship to the city, their ancestral homeland. From the very beginning, Lucan suggests abandonment and loss of homeland as images guiding this reflection and characterizing this relationship.

55 Brisset (1964) 228-9 observes that the servility of the Senate encouraged despotism and constituted the greatest threat to the state, a republican sentiment Lucan would likely have approved.

56 Coffee (2011)

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

In Livy’s account of events from Book Five of his history, Livy expresses a marked concern for the relationship between place, power, and identity, and he uses the figure of Camillus and the sack of Rome from 390 BCE to address this relationship at the beginning of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. He articulates a traditional vision of aristocratic preference and commitment to the site of Rome amid both internal threat represented by the plebs and their tribunes and external attack by the Gauls. The historian constructs an ideology of the city and its primacy in which gods and homeland are tied to a particular divinely-mandated place, one whose eternity is guaranteed by history itself and by the efforts of a dictator allied with the Senate.

Lucan inherits this founding ideology of the principate and addresses this same dynamic of place, power, and identity also through an historical event, the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Yet in his worldview, the eternity of the city is shattered.

His vision of the abandonment of Rome and the subsequent trajectory of loss which he constructs, frequently at variance with the actual history, severs the dependence of power and identity upon place and details the tragic consequences of that rending.

While in Livy, it is a dictator and the Senate who save Rome, in Lucan, it is a dictator and Senate who destroy it.

Both Livy and Lucan perceive a profound assault on the interdependence of place, power, and identity within their own time. Yet each one’s response to that assault differs radically. Among the factors which account for this difference, compositional context assumes a primary role. Livy is writing when peace and order have been tentatively restored with the emergence of Octavian amid the chaos of internal strife.

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Yet the exact nature of this restoration remains unknown at Livy’s writing, for the constitutional basis of Octavian’s rule and the extent of his power have not yet been realized. In this reality of alternating hope and uncertainty, Livy injects his vision as an effort at literary state-building. His Camillus provides a guide toward a correct response to conflict and chaos in which loyalty to gods, Senate, and city form one unified locus of identity required for reconstruction.

Lucan, on the other hand, is writing when the experimental nature of Augustus’ rule has solidified into a governing system largely predicated upon the abilities and the weaknesses of each subsequent princeps. Senatorial prerogative, freedom of speech, membership in the traditional elite, and even the centrality of the city itself are all now conditioned by the emperor, as power shifts into the domain of one man. This radical relativization of traditional forms is exacerbated by the arbitrariness and personality of

Nero whose megalomania brings about the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. In this perceived de-evolution from a past idealization, Lucan presents a landscape of burned cities and plundered values. Caesar’s war lust and hubristic rapaciousness combines with senatorial weakness and even complicity to bring about the destruction of the homeland and the identity dependent upon it. In place of a Camillus figure, the poet himself assumes the role of guide to the interpretation of the events in his narrative. His voice is one of reproach before Roman culpability and of lament before the loss which follows.

The poet’s presence in his own narrative is a distinctive element of his poetic program, and his compositional context accompanies him with its peculiar attentiveness to his audience. The reality of the recitatio as a central institution in the literary culture of

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Lucan’s day and occupying a critical stage in the production of literary works ensured the importance of an active audience to the poem.1 Lucan’s repeated use of apostrophe and first person involvement in his text consistently acknowledges his audience and seeks not only to communicate with them, but especially to involve them in his narrative.

Specifically, the frequent apostrophe to Rome serves to keep the city at the forefront of his story as well as to constantly remind his audience of their identity as Romans, i.e. citizens of Rome. The catastrophe which befalls the city, then, uniquely impacts this audience, and by means of the two emotive second person potential addresses, involves them in both the conflagration of the city and the move to exchange the soil of the homeland. These two images are intended to guide the audience in their understanding of events from their own context. This involvement, in turn, elicits the poet’s rebuke and lament, as the reality of abandonment continues from the time of the civil war into the audience’s milieu.

A second dimension of the recitatio at work in Lucan’s presentation lies in a heightened sensitivity to allusion characteristic of imperial audiences.2 It is a feature of the 1st Century CE that audiences were particularly attentive to polyvalent readings of political texts like the Bellum Civile, and the detection of allusion or mediated comment by an audience or emperor is attested throughout the Julio-Claudian era.3 Nero himself recognized the potentially allusive nature of Lucan’s poem and is said to have walked

1 Leigh (2000) 188. On recitation in general, see Markus (2000) and Dupont (1997). On a narratological analysis of the importance of audience in the poem, see Ormand (1994).

2 On this aspect, I am indebted to Bartsch (1994) 63-97.

3 For the idea of mediated comment within an oppressive regime, see Leigh (2000) 185-6.

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out of a recitation of the Bellum Civile.4 Shortly after Nero’s death in a poem commissioned by Lucan’s wife Polla Argentaria, Statius acknowledged the anti-

Neronian sentiment in Lucan’s poem, and even placed Lucan in Elysium far from the abode of the guilty in hell where he might see Nero (Silv. 2.116-119). Such attentiveness by audience and emperors meant that a text presented for recitation potentially lost any semblance of political neutrality.5 The reality of a repressive regime,

Lucan’s known political stance, and the transparency of probable allusion within the work make any polyvalent reading inevitable.6

So the abandonment of Rome amid conflagration and the loss of the soil of the homeland acquire a metaphorical sense, an added layer of meaning in the poem whose relevance is reflected in similarities from the audience’s lived experience. The rhetorical image of ekpyrosis is much more impactful for an audience who has witnessed the

Great Fire of 64 CE, and the comment from the foundational text in Book One that the lares of the city were unable to prevent the people’s flight from Rome assumes greater significance when the actual penates/lares of the city were unable to protect the city because they were destroyed in that fire. Similarly the destructive trajectory eastward in the poem from abandonment to Alexandria in flames constitutes a framework which the poet uses to deconstruct Vergil’s vision of foundation. But the polyvalence of the framework not only allows the dismantling of the Augustan program reflected in Vergil, but also condemns Nero’s own philhellenism and obsession with Alexandria. The presence of other Romes in the text combined with the poet’s appeal in the prologue to

4 Bartsch (1994) 242 n45. On Nero’s rebuff, see Suet. Vita Lucani in Heitland (1887) xiii.

5 Dupont (1997) 48.

6 On the factors which create the potential for allusive or mediated comment, see Bartsch (1994) 97.

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keep emperor and city aligned in the center responds to persistent rumors under Nero to move the capital east, threatening an exchange of the homeland.

This metaphorical sense which the poet creates extends beyond a concern for place to his portrayal of characters in the poem as well. Figures such as the consul

Lentulus whose speech uses imperial terminology to suggest an aspiration toward sole rule and the senators Metellus and Cotta who accede so readily to Caesar’s will parallel the fractured Senate of Lucan’s time. There Calpurnius Piso seeks to replace Nero as princeps, and a climate of dissimulatio encourages informers to collude with Nero in order to advance their own positions. The ready acquiescence of Lucan’s Senate to

Lentulus’ assertions on Rome’s irrelevance and the lack of any debate in their meeting uncannily resemble the subservience of the imperial Senate to Nero. Lastly, just as

Caesar plunders the temple of its treasures and later at Pharsalus intends the destruction of the Senate, so too does Nero plunder temples to pay for reconstruction after the fire which he allegedly caused and likewise seeks the destruction of the

Senate. The subtext created by these resonances ultimately convicts any subtle relocation of traditional power from place to person encapsulated in the idea of abandonment.

Because of this relocation, a profound loss of identity occurs. The city of Rome itself witnesses and safeguards the mores of the Roman people, the ancestral values constitutive of their identity. The abandoning of the city tears apart the very bonds of

Roman society, and Caesar’s plundering of its treasures destroys the legal foundations of the state and the freedom of its citizens. The flight of these values to non-Roman peoples indicates their subversion among the Romans themselves, leading to the

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marked enervation of their leaders. Even the twisted attempts to appeal to Latin

character and ancient blood while justifying the irrelevance of the city form a discourse

which the poet vehemently opposes because it threatens a true sense of traditional

identity. The language and notions employed in this discourse are reflective of the

debate from the reigns of Claudius and Nero over the adlection of non-Italians to the

Senate in increasing numbers and the subsequent diminution of an attachment to Rome

and the changing identities of power. Lucan represents a traditionalist voice decrying

these changes in the status of Rome and the evolving identities of its governing elite.7

By constantly addressing his audience, by suggesting images to guide their

interpretation, and by manipulating events in the poem to resemble their experience, the

poet succeeds in expressing a mediated condemnation of shifting emphases on place,

power, and identity under Nero. He reminds his audience of the absolute centrality of

Rome and graphically details the repercussions of its loss. The choice of civil war as a

topic, while dangerous, and the trajectory of abandonment and loss which the poet

constructs become a prism through which Lucan’s contemporaries might view and

comprehend the tragic reality of Nero’s principate.

Interestingly, the dynamic between place, power, and identity surfaces even

today in ideological conflicts over changes in our own society. Two recent examples

have featured in national and local news reports. The debate and ultimate decision to

remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia, South

Carolina, and similar efforts to relocate a monument of the Ten Commandments from

the grounds of the capitol in Oklahoma City both point to evolving identities and the

7 Statius explicitly locates Lucan’s audience among the equestrian and senatorial orders comprising Rome’s elite. See Stat. Silv. 2.7.46-7.

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symbolic importance of place in the exercise of power.8 The transference of the flag

from the statehouse to a museum not only alters the meaning of the flag, but also

significantly expresses a changed understanding of power and who exercises it as well

as articulates a more inclusive identification for the state. Moreover, the debate in

Oklahoma, while similar, is compounded by the overt religious dimension of the

monument which adds fuel to the evolving understandings of our identity as a state and

as a nation. The pattern in these two examples, however, fails to communicate well the

depth of the Roman association of place and identity evident in Livy and Lucan. Even

late in Roman history after Rome had ceased to be the political center of the empire, the

actual sack of the city by the Goths in 410 CE had widespread and devastating

repercussions on the elites throughout the Mediterranean and led Jerome to famously

exclaim that in one city, the entire world had perished.9 The imagined sack in Lucan

represents one (defeated) voice in an ideological contest between a new order and the

old, leading in his estimation to annihilation and death.

Lucan’s poem is a wonderfully complex and dark reflection on the conflict of power, its ties to native place, and its impact on meaning and identity. As poetry, it moves and befuddles with its series of confused impressions which leave us as audience with a sense of stunned emptiness at the end. We can feel the poet’s internal struggle and the force of his indignation as he engages and involves us in his outcry against tyranny. In this way, his efforts to transcend his own temporal limitations are

8 On the flag in South Carolina, see Fausset (2015). On the debates in Oklahoma City, see Hoberock (2016) and (2015).

9 In Ezechielem prophetam, I praef.: terrarum omnium lumen exstinctum est, immo Romani imperii truncatum caput: et ut verius dicam, in una urbe totus orbis interiit. Text from Patrologia Latina 25.15-6.3. On the impact of this event on Augustine, see Brown (2000) 285-296 and references there.

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successful, and his poem stands as an impassioned address in the face of tumultuous change and the crisis which it can trigger.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Originally from Tennessee, Philip C. Cook, OSA, attended Villanova University and graduated with a B.A. in Classics. He professed religious vows as an Augustinian

Friar in 1991 and completed a M.Div. from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago before being ordained to the priesthood in 1997. In 2007, he completed an M.A. in Classics from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and in 2016, he received his

Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Florida. Most of his professional life has been in teaching and ministry.

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