CLAS 353
November 1, 2023

UNC Greensboro Expandable Map of the Ancient Mediterranean World

• plotting in Egypt: Ptolemy XIII, king (62-47 BCE), brother of Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), Pothinus (eunuch advisor), Achillas (general & assassin), Septimius (Roman mercenary)
  
  Pompey (70-60 BCE)
  
  
• tragic ("This is how outliving success breaks the spirit", 8.28) & Stoic rehabilitation of Pompey in defeat/death
  
  Civil War 8.673-79 (Pompey's final thoughts; imperviousness to Fortune)
  ". . . They can rend
  And scatter my limbs, but still—gods!—I'm happy.
  And no deity can ever take this away from me.
  Life changes prosperity, but death can't make
  Men wretched. But Cornelia is watching this murder,
  And young Pompey, too. Thus, pain, stifle
  Your groans. If my wife and son admire me dead,
  They'll love me more."
  
  [death of Pompey in Rome]
  
  Civil War 8.711-25 (Pompey's beheading & final violation of the body politic)
  But as the sword-stroke rang against the back
  And breast of Magnus, his reverent features' sacred
  Beauty never faltered. And though he grimaced
  At the gods, death's last moment changed nothing
  Of the man's noble bearing—or say those
  Who saw the severed head. For brutal Septimius,
  Committing the crime, invented a crime much worse.
  Ripping back the cloak, he laid bare the holy face
  Of half-dead Magnus. He seized his breathing head
  And stretched its drooping neck across a bench.
  Then he cut the veins and muscles, hacking long
  And hard at knotted bones. To spin heads quickly
  Was not yet an art. But after the severed neck
  Broke free from the trunk, Achillas claimed the right
  To carry it in hand.
  
  
• Pompey's head embalmed ("brutal shores batter Pompey, a headless / Trunk tossed here and there in shallow waters", 8.750-1; Cordus's pyre & meager monument/epitaph, hic situs est Magnus ("HERE LIES MAGNUS"), 8.852; narrator chastises Rome for not retrieving Pompey's ashes, 8.895ff.
  
  
• Lucan's/poem's motivations – nostalgia, revolutionary icon?
  
  
  Civil War 9 summary: soul of Pompey’s journey across cosmos and into Brutus & Cato (". . . demigods, gathered as soul / For eternal spheres, dwell in open distances / Between the earth and moon. Fiery virtue / From pure lives enables them to endure the low heavens", 9.7-10); shift to Libya (Cato, Cornelia, Pompey's sons); Cato's mixed eulogy for Pompey, 9.194ff. (e.g. "Though he ruled the Senate, the Senate still ruled", "now that Pompey's gone, even freedom's fiction / Has perished"); emergence of Cato as Republican leader with principled cause; events in Libya & Lucan's excursuses (Sandbars, poisonous snakes, inhospitable climate); shift to Caesar the tourist at Troy, Caesar in Egypt
  
  Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, The Death of Cato (1795)
  

• Cato, reluctant Stoic superhero: un-centered hero of unheroic epic or a Stoic parody (cf. Cicero, Letters to Atticus 2.1.8, "Cato speaks as if he's in Plato's Republic, not Romulus' cesspool")?
  
  
• Cato: idealized Stoic, leader of lost cause
  
  Civil War 9.25-9 (Republican & Stoic cause after Pompey's defeat)
  . . . He revived the nation's trembling limbs,
  Restoring swords abandoned by cowardly hands
  And waging civil war without lust for power
  Or fear of slavery. He attempted nothing for himself:
  After Magnus' end all men fought for freedom.
  
  Civil War 9.618-22 (Cato as martyr)
  Here's the real father of the fatherland, Rome
  A man more worthy of your altars. To swear by him
  Would cause no shame. And if you ever rise up,
  Now or later, and break the yoke from your neck,
  You'll make him a god.
  
  L: Chrysopelea ornata ("flying/gliding snake"): R: Böcklin, Medusa (1878)
  

• Cato's Libyan march/test: narrative delays, e.g. Medusa & Perseus, catalogue of grotesque snakes/spectacles of death, e.g. iaculus ("flying snake"), "Straight into Paulus' head and out his temples. / Poison played no part, for death was in the wound", 9.839-40, Aulus bitten by the dipsas ("thirst snake"), ". . . Opens his swelling veins to swill his own blood", 9.774; Lucan's gothic epic of horror
  
  Civil War 9.577-99 (rationalist Cato rejects Ammon's (Amun's) prophecy; the Stoic test)
  Cato unleashed from his breast a response worthy
  Of the oracle: "What, Labienus, do you bid me ask?
  Whether I'd rather die free in arms or look on tyranny?
  Whether it matters one bit if our life is short or long?
  Whether violence can ever harm a good man?
  Or if virtue can withstand the threats of Fortune?
  Or if noble intentions are themselves enough?
  Or if man's integrity ever increases with success?
  We know these things already, and Ammon can't plant
  The answers deeper inside us. We're all joined
  Close to the gods, and if this shrine falls silent,
  We still do nothing without their will. Real divinity
  Needs no words. Our Creator told us at birth
  Everything we're permitted to know. Did he choose
  Barren sands to sing to the few? Did he bury his truth
  In the desert? Is there any seat of god besides
  The earth and sea and air and aether and virtue?
  Why do we seek heavenly powers beyond these
  When everything you see and do is Jupiter?
  Oracles are for men who always doubt, afraid
  Of unknown futures, but death's certainty, not prophecy,
  Makes me certain. Both the timid and the brave
  Must die. This is Jove's word—and it's enough."
  
  [Sulprizio, "Why is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment? (mindfulness, presence, gratitude, etc.)]
  
  
  Charles Le Brun, The Suicide of Cato the Younger (ca. 1660)
  
  Silver denarius minted by Julius Caesar (47-46 BCE) [L: Venus; R: Aeneas & Anchises]
  

• Caesar, tourist at Troy (". . . he sought . . . the dead who owe so much to former poets", 9.985ff.; “Now nothing more than a memorable name", 9.990; "Even the ruins have perished", 9.995); Lucan's invention; Caesar's behavior? (promise to gods to build a "Roman Troy", 9.1026)
  
  Civil War 9.1006-12 (poet’s "pledge" of immortality, the power of poetry)
  O great and holy work of poets!
  You rob death of everything, granting eternity
  To mortal men—but don't envy their sacred fame,
  Caesar. For if Roman Muses can promise anything,
  As long as honor endures for Smyrna's Homer,
  The future will read you and me, and our Pharsalia
  Will live, not damned to darkness by any age.
  
  Tiepolo, Caesar Contemplating Head of Pompey (ca. 1740)
  
  
• Caesar's crocodile tears in Egypt
  
  Civil War 9.1071-80 (presentation of head by Pothinus)
  But once he trusted the crime
  And thought it safe to play the loving kinsman,
  He poured false tears, forcing fake lamentations
  From his happy breast. He could hide his delight
  No other way, and so demolished the king's
  Monstrous favor, preferring to mourn a severed head
  To owing a debt. This man had trampled
  The Senate's limbs with a slate-blank face,
  And stared dry-eyed at Pharsalia's carnage,
  Yet you alone, Magnus, he didn't dare not grieve.
  
  
  Delivery of Pompey's head to Caesar (Florence, ca. 1450)
  
  
• Caesar laments lost opportunity to bestow "civil war's sole prize" (clementia, 9.1102), pardons Ptolemy and orders tomb for Pompey's head; performance of grief & mercy fails to convince Egyptians (9.1142-6)
  
  [display of Pompey's head in Rome]
  
  
  
  Cleopatra VII (ca. 40-30 BCE)
  
  Civil War 10: imperiled Caesar in Egypt; lost 2+ books of epic (Lucan's forced suicide, 65 CE)

• Caesar honors tomb of Alexander the Great: narrator's tirade, 10.21ff., e.g. "an indiscriminate thunderbolt", "If Liberty ever returned to the world, he'd provide / A no-good example", "Nature alone / Imposed limits on the mad king"
  
  
  
• Cleopatra: exile in Egyptian civil war; alliance with Caesar; ekphrasis of luxurious royal dining hall (10.119ff.; cf. Nero’s Golden House & Aeneid? ("Tyrian purple", "Her breasts shined in Sidonian thread"); "Orientalism" (Egypt an inverted un-Roman world of eunuchs, incest, powerful women, decadence, etc.); Acoreus on the Nile (10.201ff.; cf. Iopas's astronomical song, Aeneid 1.740-7) at Caesar's prompting ("like countless tyrants / And kings before you", 10.280-1)
  
  
• plotting of Pothinus: Caesar on defensive ("Now this man hides for safety inside a house— / Like a captive woman or a helpless boy", 10.456ff.)
  
  
  
  
• Scaeva (cf. Civil War 6) reappears > late 48 BCE
  
  )
  
  Civil War 10.556-64 (Caesar hemmed in at Pharos)
  . . . Then and there,
  Without routed armies or massive heaps of carnage,
  Without bloodshed at all, Caesar could have fallen.
  Trapped in place, he hesitates, stalls, uncertain
  Whether to fear or pray for death, then catches sight
  Of Scaeva in the tight throng—fierce Scaeva,
  Who'd earned eternal glory on your fields, Epidamnus,
  Where all alone, with the battlements breached,
  He guarded the ramparts being trampled by Magnus.
  
  Camuccini, The Death of Caesar (1804)
  
  
• ending of Lucan's Civil War: (1) Cato as nostalgic martyr of lost Republic & libertas—suicide of Cato @Battle of Thapsus (N. Africa, 46 BCE)? (2) Battle of Munda (Spain, 45 BCE)? (3) Caesar named Dictator in perpetuum & assassinated in Rome (Ides of March, 44 BCE)?