CLAS 355
February 16, 2023
Lucan, Civil War (cont.)

L: Julius Caesar riding roughshod, with the world in his hands; R: Head of Pompey (1st century BCE)


Response #1 Topics (due, Friday, February 24, 11:59pm)


Port of Brundisium (Brindisi, southeast Italy)

Civil War 3 summary: Pompey flees Italy; Caesar in Rome; Mediterranean world drawn into civil war ("To make sure / Everything fell to fortunate Caesar, Pharsalia / Gave the whole world to conquer in a single stroke", 3.318-20); Caesar leaves Rome for Spain; sacred grove & seige at Massilia/Marseilles (old Greek colony & ally of Rome) in summer of 49 BCE

• "horror" of civil war: Pompey's nightmare as he leaves Italy ("he dreamt of Julia's dreadful shade. / Bristling, she raised her head from the yawning earth / and occupied her pyre's flames like a raving Fury", 3.9-11)
  
  Civil War 3.12ff. (ghost of Julia, d. 54 BCE, appears to Pompey)
  "Civil war's begun," she said "and now I'm dragged
  From the Fields of the Blest and dropped
  Amid Stygia's guilty shades . . .
  . . . Hell is swelling its borders for the coming haul,
  And try as they might, the Fates aren't up to the task
  Of snapping so many threads. Magnus—
  When I was your wife, you led such happy triumphs.
  But your fortune changed along with your bed:
  Cornelia is cursed to drag her husbands forever [Cornelia, Crassus's (d. 53 BCE) widow; Pompey's 5th wife]
  Into ruin—that whore beside a warm tomb—
  Let her hang on your standards for all I care,
  And follow you on land and sea, so long as
  I'm the one who breaks your troubled dreams, so long
  As no time's ever free for you to love. Let Caesar
  Hold your days and Julia your nights. Mindless Lethe's
  Banks have not erased the memory of my husband,
  And the Lords of the Dead have granted me permission
  To track you down. Wherever you wage war
  My ghost will follow, stalking through the ranks,
  Never letting you forget you're Caesar's son-in-law.
  Your sword-arm severs our wedding vows in vain:
  For civil war will make you mine."
  
  
  
  
• 2nd half of Book 3: Caesar at the sacred grove ("'Chop the grove and know the crime is mine' . . . Caesar's / Anger now outweighed the wrath of the gods . . . Yet Fortune guards the guilty / And the gods reserve their rage for an unlucky few", 3.463ff.)
  
  
  
• Mediterranean world at war: seige towers & gruesome naval fight at Marseille between Massilians/"Greeks" and Romans (grotesque/inverse parody of Fall of Troy on water): severed limbs, crushed, punctured & mutilated bodies, human projectiles
  
  Civil War 3.797-802 (the HTVT aftermath on shore)
  Then, what a great flood of tears filled the city.
  How loudly the cries of mothers carried down the shore.
  Many wives embraced Roman corpses by mistake,
  Believing their bloated features belonged to husbands.
  Wretched fathers wrangled over headless bodies
  Near lighted pyres . . .

Civil War 6 (48 BCE): armies finally assemble in Thessaly (delay), Greece, land of witches; Sextus Pompey consults Erichtho at midnight (not oracles & gods of upper world) > necromancy (cf. the epic's heroic katabasis): civil war as supernatural, dystopic disordering of world & cosmos!


*GROUPS*

Civil War 7: preliminaries; battle of battles at Pharsalus/Pharsalia (Thessaly); narrator's crises of meaning (lost liberty/Roman Republic, indifference of gods); long-delayed battle; civil war as intergenerational cultural trauma

R: Ides of March silver denarius minted by Brutus, 43/42 BCE