Thunder and Lament by Timothy A. Joseph;

Author:Timothy A. Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.2. “Well-known spots” revisited and reversed

A concurrent and equally cataclysmic arc of Roman reversal runs through Books 4 and 9, where Lucan crafts the failures of Curio and Cato in Africa into stories of the undoing of Roman maritime reach and prowess. As Italy and Rome on one side of the Mediterranean are lost to Hannibal in the person of Caesar, earlier Roman successes in expeditions to Africa are dashed and undone in Curio’s and Cato’s ventures there.

Let us recall that Naevius’s Bellum Punicum and Ennius’s Annales both narrated Rome’s launch across the Mediterranean. From surviving fragments we can determine that each poem zeroed in on primal moments of launch, contact, and conflict. The Bellum Punicum, covering the first conflict with Carthage and the corresponding debut of Rome’s fleet, naturally had an authoritative claim to the narration of this “first-ness.”52 Though Cicero (Brut. 76) tells us that the Annales did not treat the First Punic War with narrative fullness,53 Ennius does seem to give close attention to the war’s beginnings (Ann. 216–19) and in particular the emerging Roman navy’s exercises (Ann. 218–19). In a fragment that editors have placed in Book 9 at the time of Rome’s successful direction of the Hannibalic War across the sea, Ennius writes artfully of the Straits of Gibraltar: Europam Libyamque rapax ubi diuidit unda (“where the rapacious sea divides Europe and Libya,” Ann. 302 = Cic., Tusc. 1.45 and Nat. D. 3.24).54 The Annales charted this uncertain and perilous crossing into the land described elsewhere as “Africa, rough land, trembling with terrible tumult” (Africa terribili tremit horrida terra tumultu, Ann. 309 = Cic., De or. 3.167). Integral to Ennius’s narrative was, to be sure, the figure of Scipio Africanus, who crossed over the sea and defeated Hannibal at Zama. Though no surviving fragments of the Annales make specific mention of him, Cicero speaks in the Pro Archia (22) of the personal closeness between the general and the poet and of the belief that a marble image of Ennius was included on the Tomb of the Scipios.55 Moreover, the surviving fragments of Ennius’s Scipio (fr. 29–34 Courtney) make clear the work’s laudatory quality.56 Scipio the sea-crosser and conqueror of Africa was surely a central figure in the Annales.

The Roman launches overseas in the Bellum Punicum and Annales, though bold and uncertain enterprises, are ultimately successful: the Rome of Naevius’s and Ennius’s poems wins, Africa horrida terra is defeated. When Caesar’s ally Curio and, later, Cato retrace these expeditions to Africa in the Pharsalia, the outcome is just the opposite. And these episodes of reversal include cues toward landings on African terrain in earlier Latin epic. The passages have the quality of palimpsests, with the narratives of successful Roman arrivals made to lie beneath—be replaced by—Lucan’s tales of faltering and failed landings. The fundamental precariousness and fragility, indeed erasability, of those earlier maritime and poetic ventures are realized in the Pharsalia’s disastrous reversals in these palimpsestic geographical and textual spots.

The first of these comes at the outset of Lucan’s African narrative in Book 4.

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