Mēns Praesaga Malōrum: Ciceronian Lament and Disillusion in Lucan’s Pharsalia

The Pharsalia of the Neronian-era poet Lucan recounts the civil war waged by Gaius Julius Caesar against the Roman Republic between 49 BCE and 44 BCE. Writing under Nero, an emperor famous for the violence and depravity with which he reigned, Lucan picked a delicate topic, for Caesar’s victory in the war had laid the path for the transformation of the Republic into the Empire that Nero commanded. Although the poem was never finished, in it Lucan censures Caesar’s victory as an evil inflicted onto Rome. Scholars are not all in agreement about the complex relationships that exist between Lucan and Nero, between Lucan and the Empire, between Nero and the Pharsalia, and still other dyads thatinfluence the poem’s composition. This essay argues that Lucan wrote the Pharsalia as an expression of despair and disillusionment, which resulted from Lucan’s perception of the erosion of virtue and liberty under the Imperial social order. To support this claim, I examine the sentiments expressed by Lucan’s narrator as a distortion of the Republican statesman and philosopher Cicero’s views toward virtue and liberty.

The structure of this essay is as follows. I begin first with a summary of Lucan’s life, education, and career. Next, I discuss the relationship between Lucan, Nero, and the Pharsalia, and outline three of the scholarly views that seek to make sense of that relationship, the last of which I use as the basis of my reading. Finally, I use Baraz’s (2021) analysis of the narrative and rhetorical presence of Cicero in the poem to argue that the moral element of Cicero, embedded in the narrator’s voice, is temporally displaced and views the end of the Roman Republic and its mos maiorum from a perspective later than Cicero’s historical death. Cicero, contemporary to the civil wars and seditions, held fast to the ideals of justice, equity, and the good of the Republic, and worked tirelessly to realize its restoration, even in the final moments before his murder. Lucan, living in the aftermath of Rome’s internal strife and the Republic’s corruption, laments the futility of such efforts at all, and expresses his own disillusionment by instilling into his Ciceronian narrator a retrospective defeatism.

Biography

Born in 39 CE in Corduba, Spain (modern day Córdoba), Marcus Annaeus Lucanus hailed from a rather distinguished and quite wealthy family. His father was Marcus Annaeus Mela, a businessman and member of the elite knight class;[1] one uncle, the consul and proconsul Lucus Junius Gallio Annaeus;[2] the other uncle, the acclaimed Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and statesman Seneca the Younger. Their father, Lucan’s grandfather, was the historian and rhetorician Seneca the Elder. On his mother’s side, Lucan’s other grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a well-known writer and orator in his day.

Before he had turned one year of age, Lucan’s father brought him to Rome, where, befitting his family’s status and resources, he would receive an elite education, training in grammar, rhetoric, declamation, and philosophy. A gifted student, Lucan excelled in the breadth and depth of his studies, in literature, history, and mythology, among other disciplines. Like many young men in his position, he went to Athens to finish his education in the late 50s CE but returned prematurely to Rome when the emperor Nero (only two years older than Lucan) called for Lucan to join his inner circle of friends. Nero, himself a great lover of the arts, was likely drawn to Lucan’s intellectual and poetic prowess. It is likely that the two were acquainted for some time, for in 49 CE Lucan’s uncle Seneca had become Nero’s tutor and counselor, an appointment that may have accelerated the intimacy of their friendship. Regardless of the cause of their introduction, for a time the “actor emperor”[3] regarded Lucan as one of his closet associates.

Such a friendship with the emperor granted exceptional honors and privileges to Lucan. In 62 or 63 CE, Lucan was appointed to the political rank of quaestor while he was still one to two years below the traditional minimum age of 25,[4] and he also joined the College of Augurs, of which there were only sixteen members.[5] Despite the responsibilities of these public offices, Lucan found the time to be a prolific writer, with a remarkable output of works in various genres.[6] Nevertheless, only his unfinished epic on the civil war remains.

For writers of the ancient world, publication of a new work began with a public reading, for which the author was responsible for arranging a venue and inviting guests.[7] For someone of Lucan’s familial wealth, funding such events would have been no problem, and his place in the emperor’s inner circle guaranteed the attendance of guests, even if only to be seen as sharing in one of Nero’s interests, although tributes to Lucan by his contemporary poets point toward both his talent and his deserved success.[8] It seemed that Lucan enjoyed an enviable career of popularity, acclaim, and wealth.

During one of his public readings, however, Nero suddenly walked out, calling together a meeting of the Senate, in order to publicly embarrass Lucan (nullā nisi refrigerandī suī causā, with no reason except of freezing him out; Suet. Vita Lucani). In 64 CE, Nero banned Lucan from both public recitations of his poetry and from public speaking in the law courts. Their relationship had soured and would never recover. Deprived of his two means of engagement in public life, Lucan then joined a senatorial conspiracy headed by Gaius Calpurnius Piso to assassinate Nero and install Piso as the new head of state. When the conspiracy was uncovered in 65 CE, Nero ordered Lucan executed, by means of forced suicide. Lucan died on April 30, 65 CE, at the age of twenty-five.

Lucan, Nero, and the Pharsalia

The dissolution of Lucan’s and Nero’s relationship is central to an understanding of the Pharsalia. Analyses of the poem, however, are not all unified on the nature of that relationship. Complicating the matter is that the first three books of the Pharsalia were published while the two were still friends, or at least before Lucan’s ban in 64 CE, while the latter seven were published posthumously, with the final book unfinished. As Widdows (1988) says, “It would be neat and convenient to be able to say that the first three books were favorable to Nero and free from strong libertarian sentiments, and that the remaining seven were strongly libertarian and republican and openly offensive to the emperor. Unfortunately, there is no such clear division” (xii). O’Hara (2006) organizes the scholarly responses to this division into two camps, those of the Separatist view and those of the Unitarian view.[9]

The Separatist view argues in favor of the “neat and convenient” interpretation. This view argues from a historical and biographical approach that, because there is no indication of any strained relationship between Lucan and Nero in the period in which the first three books were written (that is, before Lucan’s ban), there is no reason that Lucan would have written a poem that disparages Nero, and the obsequious dedication of the poem to Nero is sincere. Braund (1992) argues strongly in favor of a pro-Neronian reading of the first three books, claiming that “there is no necessity to view Lucan as an enemy of Nero all his life” (xiv).

Indeed, Nero’s early reign may have appeared optimistic to the Romans and especially to the elite. Nero ascended to the principate in 54 CE, at the age of only sixteen years old. His first speech, prepared by his tutor Seneca, promised clemency and cooperation with the Senate, and Seneca at that point had a strong hand in the administration of the Empire (Tac. Ann. 14.53–56). Between the influences of Seneca and Nero’s mother Agrippina, the teenage emperor’s temerity was initially held in check. For this reason, Braund states that the dedication to Nero in Book 1 is “not to be seen as ironic, even if it is generous” (xv), referring to such lavish praises as,

Only in the latter seven books,according to the Separatists, do anti-Neronian and anti-Imperial sentiments appear, a result and reflection of Lucan’s joining the Pisonian conspiracy with the hope of assassinating Nero.

The Unitarian view, on the other hand, argues that anti-Caesarian sentiments, which do appear throughout the first three books, undermine the praises of Nero, and so Lucan’s hostility to the emperor is consistent from the poem’s beginning to end. Thus, the dedication to Nero must have been ironic. Indeed, as Lucan introduces the topic of his poem, it is not a flattering celebration of Rome’s history that he attributes to Nero:

Book 1 then ends with a powerful condemnation of the principate as a form of tyranny and denial of liberty, when an astrologer both predicts the future and hopes for its delay:

Roche (2009) rightly states that such anti-imperial sentiments in the poem itself argue against the Separatist view that uses the historical and biographical reconstruction of Lucan’s life to assert a pro-Neronian reading (6). These reconstructions must also take into account that, after an auspicious start to his reign, Nero later separated from his advisors and counselors. He murdered his own mother in 59 CE after several failed attempts (Suet. Ner. 34).He then grew increasingly more erratic, and after Seneca retired from public life in 62 CE, there were no restraints left to curb his debasement.[11] As Widdows says, “It is disconcerting to realize that [Lucan] remained on good terms with Nero long after most men of good-will had become disgusted with the emperor’s behavior” (xii). By making the case that Lucan’s praise ofNero was only ironic, the Unitarians are able to redeem Lucan, from Nero’s complicit friend to subversive Republican poet.

O’Hara, however, makes a compelling case against both the Unitarian and Separatist solutions (136–9). There are many negative characterizations of both Caesar and Pompey, of both the Republic’s defeat and its defense, all throughout the poem. To highlight some sentiments and suppress others, whether to claim that Lucan was initially pro-Neronian or entirely pro-Republican, is to simplify an ideologically ambivalent poem based on an incomplete biographical image. O’Hara instead concludes that the Pharsalia’s sentiments are not only inconsistent and conflicting, but they are also intentionally so, as the representational inconsistency within the narrative reflects Lucan’s own ideological uncertainty.[12]

The inconsistency of the Pharsalia is featured in a third interpretive strategy developed by Rudich (1993 and 1997). Like the Unitarians and Separatists, Rudich employs a historical approach to inform his reading of the Pharsalia. Unlike them, however, he does not attempt to fit Lucan himself into any particular ideological position but rather bases his approach in an assessment of the society in which Lucan lived. He characterizes the social climate of Imperial Rome as one marked by dissimulatio (dissimulation, or the “concealment of one’s true feelings by a display of feigned sentiments”; 1993, xix–xx) and ties this phenomenondirectly to the changing conceptions of virtus (virtue) and the mos maiorum (the customs of the ancestors) in relation to liberty under the Empire.

As Rudich explains, under the Republic, virtus entailed both pietas, selfless and dedicated service to the commonwealth of Rome, and dignitas, one’s status and esteem among peers in the social hierarchy. This coupling of pietas and dignitas was nearly identical to the Roman conception of libertas, the “freedom of political initiative and pursuit of public glory” (xvi). Stories of individuals who achieved great virtus were passed down in the tradition of the mos maiorum, in which Romans could find examples and models of admirable behavior to emulate. When the Republic transitioned to the Empire, however, the notion of virtus was fundamentally altered. As the emperor amassed more and more authority, and the Senate’s own waned, the emperor become recognized as the very embodiment of the government itself, and so acts of pietas which were formerly performed in service of the state became instead in service of the emperor himself. Under a tyrannical and debaucherous emperor like Nero, pursuing public pietas meant aligning oneself with Nero and becoming a complicit follower in his immorality, a position not unlike the Romans’ conception of servitium, slavery (Rudich 1993, xvii). Furthermore, servitude to the emperor divorced dignitas from virtus, as one’s social status was no longer determined by public deeds and accomplishments, but rather by Nero’s arbitrary favor and capricious whims. Rudich argues that this disjunction of the public and private components of virtus created the need for dissimulatio, as not only one’ssuccess, but even one’s survival depended on maintaining a façade of loyalty and deference, regardless of what one’s personal values and feelings may be.

Rudich then outlines a framework to examine dissimulatio through literature in a three-part structure (1997, 9). The rhetorical level concerns the form of the text and its relationship to other texts on the same theme. On the rhetorical level, the Pharsalia is a poem in the genre of historical epic with a particular style of language and dramatic structure. The non-rhetorical level considers the literal meaning of the text and its coherence. The Pharsalia is a civil war exemplum that raises questions of justice, liberty, and fate, with ambivalent sentiments displayed toward all sides. The counter-rhetorical structure addresses the subject matter’s immediate relevance to the author’s and audience’s circumstances. The Pharsalia, by its end,is a critique of Nero and the Empire. Rudich claims that the non-rhetorical and counter-rhetorical levels, by dealing with the subject matter directly and not with its form, present an unmediated view into the relationship between the text and reality. Thus the conflicting sentiments of the poem reflect the atmosphere of social uncertainty and moral confusion that pervaded under the constant practice of dissimulatio. With this broader historical view, Rudich, like O’Hara, sees the inconsistent sentiments in the poem as reflections of Lucan’s uncertain ideological views, suggesting as well that there is no reason to assume that Lucan, who died at only twenty-five years old, would have “succeeded in developing the coherent political, moral, or religious vision that we have a tendency to retroject upon him” (109).

Using Rudich’s framework of a historical approach to the Pharsalia, I argue that the deeply pessimistic and disillusioned sentiment of the poem, even in the first three books, is a reflection of Lucan’s engagement in dissimulatio and his perception of the decay of virtus between the Republic and Empire. Rudich notes that Lucan, despite being in Nero’s inner circle of friends, seemed to have held rather senatorial sensibilities (1993, 89; 1997, 110). In light of the perversion of virtus made obvious under Nero, Lucan’s early appointment to the quaestorship is less an honor than a reminder of that perversity and the loss of autonomous dignitas. Regarding the earlier discomforting fact that Lucan had stayed in Nero’s company past his descent to depravity, a dissimulated friendship in public could mask the moral despair and disillusionment that surfaces throughout his poem. Even if the poet did not feel a personal disapproval toward his friend Nero, the pervasiveness and perversity of Nero’s depravity, and especially the wantonness with which he wielded it, must have been a constant reminder that the comfort which Lucan enjoyed hinged entirely on the whim of an unstable tyrant. This state of existential contingency can be classed as a violation of the republican conception of liberty, sometimes referred to as a neo-Roman conception, as it draws upon the traditional Roman aversion to the rule of monarchies, an aversion held deeply by the senators with whom Lucan sympathized.[13] By this conception, liberty is not only to be free from arbitrary interferences and obstructions in one’s actions, as Lucan was before 64 CE, but not others; but rather it is to be free from even the possibility of such interference and obstruction, as no one ever was while under the principate. Republican liberty, this freedom from such a possibility, is thus defined as the status of non-domination, regardless of whether the dominator enforces their dominion or not. This realization of the republican liberty lost is manifest in the Pharsalia’s narrator as the defeatist attitude he takes toward the defense of the Republic. In the next section of this paper, I further identify this defeatist voice with Cicero, using Baraz’s analysis of Cicero’s presence in the poem.

Fragmented Cicero

Baraz argues that Lucan emulates an intertextual technique employed by Vergil in the Aeneid. This technique manifests in two parts: first, in the splitting of the traits from one source character into multiple different characters throughout the poem; and second, in the integration of different traits from multiple source characters into a single character in the poem (722–3). In the Pharsalia,the three protagonists Caesar, Pompey, and Cato are, respectively, a bloodthirsty warmonger, a hesitant and indecisive husk of his former self, and the exemplar of virtuous fortitude, but unable to effect that virtue into an external victory. These characteristics are all split from Vergil’s protagonist Aeneas, who is violent in the latter half of the Aeneid, hesitant and delaying in the first, and characterized by virtue throughout, and integrated into Lucan’s cast along with their historical aspects and other literary influences (Braund, xx–xxii).

Baraz uses this Vergilian technique to shed light on a peculiar facet of the Pharsalia’s cast. While Caesar, Pompey, and Cato were three of the major players in the civil war of which Lucan writes, there is a surprising lack in the poem of Cicero, often regarded as one of if not the most preeminent statesmen of the Republic and someone who was intimately connected to the events leading up to, throughout, and after the war. Indeed, Cicero appears for only a brief scene in Book 7, in the preparatory moments leading up to the titular battle at Pharsalus, the loss of which would cause Pompey to flee to and soon after be murdered in Egypt. Cicero gives a short speech urging the reluctant Pompey to yield to his soldiers’ clamor, to revivify the military might with which he made his fame for conquering enemies and nations, and to turn that revitalized command against Caesar.

Lucan’s scene is bizarre for a few reasons. First, the historical Cicero was not physically present with the Pompeian camp at Pharsalus; he had stayed behind in Dyrrachium, where the previous battle had ended in Pompey’s favor. Furthermore, the historical Cicero had made an interminable effort to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Although he supported Pompey, it was with reluctance, as the choice of the lesser of two evils. He believed that the victory of either over the other would spell disaster for the good of the Roman commonwealth and expressed his disappointment with Pompey in his private correspondence (Baraz, 738–9). Lucan’s Cicero bears little in common with his namesake, and his appearance has been described as rather a caricature of the historical person.

Baraz answers the question of this interpolated Cicero by tracing Lucan’s use of Vergil’s splitting and integrating tactics, examining the way in which Lucan redistributes traits from his source text into his own poem to create both intertextual and intratextual allusions. Lucan’s out-of-place and out-of-character Cicero is the result of integration from Lucan’s sources, one being the Latian orator Drances from Vergil’s Aeneid (whom, in an act ofintertextual telephone, Vergil seems to have based partly on the historical Cicero himself), another being the notion of Cicero employed in declamatory exercises in Roman education.[14]

The major source for Lucan, Baraz argues, which informs both the splitting and the integrating of Cicero in the Pharsalia, is the historian Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, an account of the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 BCE, in which Lucius Sergius Catilina conspired to assassinate the consuls and usurp Rome for himself. One of the consuls in 63 BCE was Cicero, and it was he who stopped the conspiracy upon its discovery and prosecuted Catiline and his followers. Two of Lucan’s principal characters were also connected to the events. Caesar was rumored to have supported Catiline, although he was not officially implicated in the plot, while Cato as a member of the Senate was present and spoke at the trials. The historical affair was documented by Cicero in his written speeches and letters, in which he portrayed himself as the protagonist of Rome’s defense and elevates the prevention of the conspiracy as his crowning achievement in public service.

It is notable, then, that Sallust as well omits Cicero heavily from his historical account. Baraz explains that Sallust is primarily interested in the thematic contrast between Caesar, the power-hungry populist and instigator, and Cato, ever the epitome of traditional Roman morals (724). In the juxtaposition of those two, Sallust, like many Roman historians, is interested in tracing the conflict between virtue and vice and the corruption by the latter of the former. He therefore has no space to include Cicero as a central character and even references to him become more and more sparse as his account progresses.

Just as Sallust pits Caesar and Cato as contrasting forces, Lucan too arranges his characters to be thematically opposed. The Caesar–Cato foil exists in the poem as well, but to a lesser extent,[15] while the main antithesis is between the brash, young agitator of social discord and the old, feckless vestige of former glory. With both Cato and Pompey to provide thematic contrast to Caesar, Lucan has no need to introduce a fourth principal character and crowd the poem. Rather, he follows Sallust’s lead in prioritizing thematic clarity over historical exactness, through the forced absence of Cicero. As Rudich says, Lucan has an “apparent lack of interest in truth and falsity” (1997, 109).

While Cicero’s physical presence is largely denied in both Sallust’s and Lucan’s works, the events of the Late Republic cannot be entirely divorced from Cicero, who played a major role in advising the course of the Roman commonwealth. His moral and impassioned defense of the Republic against threats of treason are crucial to an account of Rome’s decline into an empire, and it is this affective trait that is split from the historical Cicero and distributed elsewhere in the literary adaptations of these events. In his speeches against Catiline, Cicero rails against his temerity, his subversive disregard for the good of the commonwealth. His first speech on the matter famously begins,

The series of rhetorical questions underscores Cicero’s abject horror in the face of such transgression by a Roman turned against Rome. The loss of such sentiment would deflate any attempt to convey the sensibility of the Republic’s struggle between virtue and vice, and so, Baraz points out, Sallust does not omit that indignation along with its speaker, but rather adopts it into his own voice in the narration.[16] Sallust as the narrator takes over Cicero’s role in Cicero’s own story, in order to retain the pro-Republican judgements without distracting from the moral and rhetorical conflict between Cato and Caesar in his history. Cicero’s pro-Republican attitude is thus split from his person and integrated, cloaked, in Sallust’s disembodied narrator.

In the Pharsalia, Baraz identifies Cicero’s distribution intoelements of the poem such as Cicero’s historical death that serves as the model for the scene of Pompey’s (734), Cicero’s disappointment with Pompey echoed in the narrator’s characterization of him, and other linguistic resonances between Cicero’s writings and Lucan’s text (738). I argue further that, just like Sallust’s, Lucan’s narrator is integrated with Cicero’s voice of moral indignance, with the amendment that, due to Lucan’s experience of dissimulation and the deterioration of the mos maiorum, the Ciceronian voice is madeto confront the failure of Republican virtue. In the next section of this essay, I first characterize Cicero’s pro-Republican morality and then examine how Lucan aims that offended morality not in defense of the Republic, but in opposition to the Empire.

Indignance Displaced

My two above claims are, first, that anti-imperial sentiments do appear in the initial books and are furthermore fueled by the dissimulated denial of republican freedom made unabashedly obvious by Nero’s depravity; and, second, that Cicero’s impassioned support for and defense of the Republic provides the model from which Lucan adapts his narrator’s anti-imperial laments. To clarify the latter point, I mean that while Lucan laments the immorality of the Empire and its inherent denial of liberty, he does not strongly espouse that the Republic could or should be restored as a solution to the Empire. These sentiments do escalate and become more brazen in the latter books, as Lucan has less reason to dissimulate loyalty to Nero once he had been banned, but I maintain that Lucan expresses dissatisfaction with the state of Rome from the beginning, in spite of his proximity to Nero and the consequential danger. For even if one subscribes to Separatist approach, that there was no enmity on Lucan’s part toward Nero until his ban in 64 CE, it would nonetheless be foolhardy for Lucan to suppose that Nero — who followed the murder of his own mother with an unrestrained procession of both private killings and official executions, of rivals, friends, and family members alike, for minor, perceived, and even invented slights — would be contented to hear such sentiments recited by a member of his inner circle as:

I claim that the Pharsalia’s narrator is anti-Imperial rather than pro–Republican; however, there is one moment of ardor for the Republic that requires attention. In Book 7, just before the Battle of Pharsalus, the narrator surveys the scene, and resting his eyes on the Pompeian camp, sings their praises with adoration, and hopes that, in what way he can, he might help their cause:

This encomium is a revision of the initial dedication of the poem, where the narrator had claimed, “You are all that is needed to give strength to Roman songs.”[17] The two dedications differ not only in their dedicatee, but also in the purpose they intend for the poem itself. In the original dedication, the narrator’s stated purpose is to write that story of how Nero came to be in power. In the later dedication, the purpose is that the story be read for the purpose of this moment, that it be known to all posterity that Pompey and the greatest of humanity stood for liberty. In this precipitous moment, on which hinged the idea of freedom as non-domination, the narrator looks past his earlier criticisms. It matters not that Pompey was slow to react to the danger, that he himself had a role in inciting Caesar, that he lacks the moral excellence of Cato. That he was here in this critical moment to defend the Republic in its final hour is enough to inspire those who learn of his story. In this moment, Lucan allows the narrator to hope that the Republic, even in its fall, may be of some good to the world.

As fervent as this moment is, though, it is for only a moment. The address to Pompey is a eulogy, both in a bare definitional sense of a public praise, and in its contextual sense of a tribute to the deceased, as Pompey, whose historical death narratively impends, will soon be. Shortly after, when the armies are facing one another and the fighting imminent, the narrator lets forth his longest lamentation on the futility of freedom (7.385–459). He catalogs the ills begot from its illusion: among others, cities destroyed, swathes of populations dead, Rome dwindling in shambles, and the disgrace that the status of Roman now bears. In his despair, he supposes it better never to have had the illusion at all:

The wish to avoid the disillusionment and restriction of liberty by means of its existential denial, expressed most strongly here, is prevalent throughout the poem,[18] and a necessary consequence of that rejection is a denial of the value of the Republic. But such an idea would be anathema to Cicero, who fashioned himself the Republic’s most staunch defender, and whose voice would hardly lend itself to espouse such a wish. With his life devoted in service to the commonwealth, even his murder had been politically orchestrated by Marcus Antonius, whom, in a series of speeches to the Senate after Caesar’s assassination, Cicero denounced as another grave threat to be removed for the good of the Republic that he still sought to be restored.

A few months after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, Cicero began writing another work of philosophy, which, completed in under a month, resulted in the Dē Officiīs, three books of philosophy addressed to his son Marcus, who, like a proper young Roman, had gone to be educated in Athens (6). Newton (2016) argues convincingly that the title, usually translated as On Duties, is better understood as On Appropriate Actions, as, in the books, Cicero seeks to advise his son on the most proper way to live in accordance with both honor and necessity, and how to assess actions when different honors and necessities conflict with one another (6–8).

It is a work of both political and moral philosophy, in that Cicero’s foundational precept is that what is best for the individual is what is good for the community, and therefore the counsel and guidance of the public is the most honorable and praiseworthy service an individual can perform, but only so long as that service is performed in the pursuit of justice and equity for the public, and not of honor and praise for any individual. His faith in the virtue of the Republic is resolute, fortified, even, by the recent assassination of Caesar:

He would still have preferred, however, even if he thought the Republic could survive such an injury, that the injury would not be done in the first place. In the opening to Book 2 of the work, in which he discusses how to approach and pursue things of advantage to oneself in an honorable manner, he laments to his son, “Would that the commonwealth had remained in the state in which it had begun, and had not fallen into the hands of such human beings longing not so much to change as to overturn everything!”[20] It is this same type of bemoaned, unfulfilled wish that is scattered throughout the Pharsalia. Comparison of Cicero’s wish and Lucan’s most emphatic and climactic wish in Book 7, however, reveal a chiastic difference. Cicero’s wish is directed toward an unfulfilled past condition, but is about an act of the recent past, the consequences of which Cicero is presently watching unfold; for he provides this wish about the past to explain why had to temporarily withdraw from public life and devoted himself in the meantime to the personal study and writing of philosophy. Conversely, Lucan’s narrator expresses an unfulfilled condition in the present moment, but about a fact that spans back to Rome’s origins, that is, he wishes right now, in vain, that Rome’s entire history were something else entirely.

Cicero and Lucan both wish that history had turned out differently than it did, but their different views on the civil war’s relation to Rome’s history, that Cicero views the conflict as distinct and separable from the Republic and Lucan views it as an inherent to Rome’s condition, reveals that Lucan’s narrator is not so straightforwardly adopting the split-off voice of Cicero as Baraz shows that Sallust had done; but that the Ciceronian voice is further integrated with Lucan’s own knowledge of the full extent of the civil war’s outcome, knowledge that Cicero did not have, knowledge that all of his efforts and labors and even his life forfeit were in vain to preserve the commonwealth and the good of and for humanity. Just as Cicero’s historical murder is transferred into the scene of Pompey’s death, Pompey’s historical death, which for Lucan symbolizes the entry into Rome of the domination by tyrants, is transferred into the moral voice of Cicero in the narrator, causing the indignance which the historical Cicero brandished on behalf of the Republic to turn against itself. The corrupting force of this knowledge is unavoidable, with this temporally displaced Cicero virtually an answer to the narrator’s rhetorical question, “What wonder is it that the peoples whose final day awaits them panic with frenzied dread, when a mind that can predict evils was given to humanity?” (quid mirum populos quoslux extrema manebat / lymphato trepidasse metu, praesaga malorum / si data mens homini est?; 7.185–7). Where Sallust fuses his narrator with Cicero to study the conflict between virtue and vice, Lucan does so to admit vice’s victory.

Conclusion

It is unclear what exactly fomented the rift between the poet and emperor, whether it was Lucan’s distaste for Nero’s unbridled depravity, Nero’s jealousy for Lucan’s artistic talent, or another matter between the two, but regardless of the cause, the sense of disillusionment and disbelief in virtue suggest Lucan’s bleak view of Rome under Nero’s reign. Using Rudich’s and Baraz’s frameworks, I have argued for an interpretation of Lucan that attempts to bridge the historical and cultural situation of its composition with the dispirited sentiments within. Living in an age in which it seemed that, in the struggle between virtue and vice, vice had won out thoroughly, Lucan infuses his narrator with a Ciceronian love for liberty, but, burdened by both the experience of living in Neronian Rome and the knowledge of what hope used to look like, they can only look upon the events of the civil war with despair, disillusioned by the victory of crime and the loss of what it has so far seemed to mean to be Roman.

[1] This class, the equitēs, ranked below only the aristocratic senatorial class, although the effectualpowers of the Senate were greatly diminished under the Roman Empire.

[2] This is the same Gallio who, as governor of Corinth, dismissed the charges of religious disturbance made against Paul the Apostle (Acts 18:12–17).

[3] While the arts were astandard part of the Roman education, Nero’s passion for performance had been deemed too excessive for someone of his status, whence Pliny the Younger’s reference to him as the scaenicus imperatōr (Plin. Pan. 46.4.2) and Suetonius’ criticism of him as too greatly preoccupied with popularity and jealous of anyone else who could excite the crowd (Suet. Ner. 53).

[4] The lowest rank of the Roman political offices, quaestors helped to manage the state treasury,although their powers and responsibilities also diminished under the empire.

[5] Augurs, practitioners ofaugury, ceremonially interpreted the gods’ will through omens such as birds signs and weather phenomena.

[6] Joyce (1993), xi, lists some of the lost works, among which are several books of occasional poetry, multiple tragedies, pantomimes, epigrams, and literary speeches and letters.

[7] For a fuller account of public readings in the ancient world, as well as Lucan’s contemporary literary reception, see Joyce (1993), xii–xiv.

[8] Statius compares him to a Roman Orpheus (Stat. Silv. 2.7.43–47), and Martial makes a joke about the bookseller’s approval of him because of his books’ sales (Mart.14.194).

[9] 133–4. O’Hara borrows theterms from their use in Homeric criticism regarding the question of whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were each composed as complete works of asingular author (the Unitarian view), or the two epics are comprised of earlier poems by various unknown poets edited together into their extant forms (the Separatist view). In Lucanian studies, the two camps are not entirely homogenous in their arguments and conclusions, but this present paper treats the two based on their major commonalities.

[10] All translations, except of Cicero, used throughout are my own.

[11] Suet. Ner. 34–37catalogs a long list of murders and executions.

[12] 140–142. O’Hara againdraws from Hmeric criticism, citing Nagler, M. “Ethical Anxiety and Artistic Inconsistency: The Case of Oral Epic.” Cabinet of the Muses: Essays in Classical and Comparative literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, edited by M. Griffith and D. Mastronarde, Scholars Press, 1990, 225–39.

[13] Carter (Spring 2022 Edition), 3.2.

[14] For Baraz’s full explanation of the integrative nature of Cicero’s Book 7 appearance, see pp.725–731.

[15] Cato first appears in the first book of the Pharsalia, but is then largely absent until Pompey’s death, after which he takes up the role of Caesar’s foil.

[16] “Cicero has not been written out so much as he has been overwritten by Sallust.” Baraz (2021), 724.

[17] See n.15.

[18] See the above quotation of Book 1, lines 248–53, for an early example in the poem.

[19] Newton (2016), 95 and Cic.Off.2.23–24. All translations of the Dē Officiīs used are Newton’s.

[20] Newton (2016), 87 and Cic.Off.2.3.

Bibliography

Baraz, Yelena. “Lucan’s Cicero: Dismembering a Legend.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2021,pp. 721–740.

Benjamin Patrick Newton, translator. On Duties. By Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cornell University Press. 2016.

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O’Hara, James J. Inconsistencyin Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Rudich, Vasily. Dissidence and Literature Under Nero: The Price of Rhetoricization. Routledge, 1997.

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