Reading Lucan's Civil War (Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture) by Paul Roche

Author:Paul Roche [Roche, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2021-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

10

Book 10

The Living End

PAUL ROCHE

Lucan’s Caesar slackens in intensity after his victory at Pharsalus. This impression may in part be an effect of Lucan’s narrative attention to Pompey in book 8 and to Cato in book 9, but there are clear signs of new, nonmilitary interests and broader horizons for Caesar in the closing two books of the epic. The center of the battle line at Pharsalus had shown Caesar at the extremity of his characterization as an overreacher: an elemental force embodying the frenzy and madness of civil war (cf. esp. 7.557–85). When we first encounter him after his breakfast amid the carnage at Pharsalus and his march away from the killing fields amid a rain of human gore and rotting body parts (7.786–846), he is described as “satiated with the slaughter of Emathia” (9.950), a line that answers to 7.802 “with his anger not yet glutted by the slaughter.” Although we are told that he is intent upon his son-in-law (9.952), we are almost immediately shown a more discursive pursuit. Caesar quickly diverts to the site of Troy. Here, accompanied by a local guide, he wanders amid the ruined topography of Iliadic myth (9.959–99). In undertaking this detour, Caesar is walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, who in 334 B.C.E. had toured this site at the outset of his eastern campaigns. He, too, had viewed the sights of the city accompanied by a local guide, and he had offered sacrifice at the Altar of Zeus Herkeios, the remains of which Caesar inadvertently disrespects at 9.977–79.1

For all its relevance to the foundation myth of Rome and its importance to Lucan’s place in the epic tradition going back to Homer—for all its symmetry with Lucan’s narrative of destruction and his thematic attention to the life cycles of cities and states—Caesar’s interest in the site is unrelated to his ambitions in the poem. We are told that he filled his sight with “revered antiquity” (9.987); his prayer at 9.990–99, while self-glorifying and asserting a personal claim on the state-gods of Rome, has been read as reflecting a newfound understanding of a sight he had previously ill comprehended.2 The whole episode is inessential to his drive toward sole power and is motivated rather by curiosity: he goes to Troy as a mirator famae (9.961 “an admirer of renown”) and leaves the site concerned to make up for the diversion (9.1002 auidus . . . | Iliacas pensare moras, “keen to compensate for his delays at Troy”). This less severe, more indulgent version of Caesar—accommodating his intellectual pursuits and showcasing encounters with models from revered antiquity—will find more detailed and explicit exposition in book 10.

When he first arrives in Alexandria, Caesar is fearful of the barely muted hostility of the Alexandrian people (10.11–15), and this highly unstable political situation is reiterated when we are told that the wrath of the people is allayed by Ptolemy, whom Caesar keeps “as . . . ​[a] hostage in the Pellaean court” (10.54–56) in order to be safe.

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