CLAS 355
Lucan's Civil War (conclusion)
February 21, 2023
Mortimer, Sextus Applying to Erichtho, 1776
*Response #1 due Friday (2/24, 11:59pm, D2L Assignments)
*US House Member calls for "national divorce" between red and blue states: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/marjorie-taylor-greene-calls-national-divorce-liberal-conservative-sta-rcna71464
*Cassius Dio, Roman History (3rd century CE) 40.27.3 ("And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery")
Lucan's Civil War (cont.)
- Sextus Pompey consults Erichtho re his fortune, rejects upperworld oracles & gods ("the wretch / Clearly saw that Heaven's powers had no clue . . . The place itself fed his cruel and empty rage, / As did the cities full of witches beside the camp", 6.454ff.)
Black metal band Occultus's "Erichtho", 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuSMvcb28vA
- reanimated corpse's report: civil discord among Roman dead, class struggle of senatorial "optimate" heroes, e.g. Cato the Elder, vs. "populist" demagogues, e.g., Marius ("I saw only Brutus / Rejoicing . . .", 6.839ff. = first consul of Roman Republic, 510 BCE); "An hour is coming to level all Rome's warlords . . . Only this is uncertain— / Whose tombs the Nile or the Tiber will touch" (6.856ff.)
Reconstruction of Theater of Pompey in Rome, 55 BCE
Civil War 7: opens with Pompey's nostalgic dream (7.9ff.) of theater & narrator's lament for Pompey's lost public funeral; gruesome omens; pre-battle speeches by warlords (Pompey slow to act; Caesar, "Even if you see parents / In the enemy's ranks, mutilate their sacred faces / With your steel", 7.342-4); battle of battles at Pharsalus/Pharsalia in Thessaly, Greece
- narrator's despair: bleak vision of Rome's future & intergenerational cultural trauma
Civil War 7.419-425 (catastrophic battle to commence)
And so the armies rush forth, moved by equal rage,
One side loathing tyranny, the other praying for it.
Their sword-hands will accomplish the unthinkable.
They'll inflict
wounds that no future age can heal,
Though it be free from war forever. Their battle
Will bury unborn races, sweeping aside an entire
Generation of people yet to be born to the world.
- civil war the reversal of Roman imperialism & freedom's end ("And everything the wandering stars looked upon / Belonged to Rome. But Pharsalia's fatal day / Undid it all, reversing your destiny forever", 7.465-7); despair in Olympian gods (Republic > Empire)
Civil War 7.491ff. (human revenge for gods' indifference)
Without doubt we have no gods . . .
. . . No—the gods don't care about mortal affairs!
Yet we'll get our revenge, as much as we can,
Civil war will make emperors equal to gods above,
And Rome will deck out the dead with halos,
Thunderbolts, and stars, and will swear oaths
On Caesars' shades in the temples of the gods.
- narrator's horror/trauma at his (unspeakable) task
Civil War 7.687ff. (anti-epic carnage at climax of battle)
When the whole world is dying, it's shameful
To waste tears on countless deaths, to follow
individual fates and ask through whose guts
Each death-stroke passed, or who trampled
His own entrails as they spilled on the earth;
Who looked his foe in the face and thrust
Sword from throat with his dying breath;
Who toppled when stricken, and who stood tall
As his limbs fell about him. It's shameful
To seek whom spears passed through, and whom
They fixed to the plain; whose blood burst
From veins into air and drenched the arms
Of his enemy; who hacked his brother's breast
And cast his severed head away to plunder
The corpse; who mutilated his father's features
With brutal rage to convince his watchers
That he hadn't just butchered his parent.
No death alone deserves its own lament,
And we don't have time to mourn individuals . . .
. . .
Not soldiers,
But whole nations died. Here blood streamed
From all Greece and Pontus and Assyria—
Before a huge flood of Roman gore stopped it
From scabbing over the plains. This battle
Wounded mankind
worse than any one time
Could take. And more than life and safety died.
The entire world was made prostrate forever.
These swords damned every later age to slavery.
- Pompey flees rout (Lucan's spin of senate's "lost cause"
, "And once you left the war / The dying Senate showed it had fought for itself,", 7.781-2; "It was worse to win", 7.792)
- Caesar's morning-after Breakfast of Champions after ghostly night (cf. wolves, lions, bears, dogs, vultures)
Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, (Robert Duvall), "I love the smell of napalm in the morning . . . it smells like victory", Apocalyspse Now (1979): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k26hmRbDQFw
Civil War 7.881ff. (Caesar on the battlefield the next morning; narrator begs for a holocaust)
Caesar's eyes were glued to the deathly fields.
The look of the place doesn't stun him. He sees
Rivers rushing with gore and massed corpses
Piled high as hills. He watches the heaps settle
Into corruption, counting Pompey's allied people.
And a place is set for his breakfast from where
He can note the faces and features of the dead.
He likes not seeing Thessaly's lands, and scanning
With his eyes fields buried beneath the carnage.
He sees his fortune and his gods in the blood.
And loathe to lose his crime's pretty spectacle,
He refuses, in a fit of rage, to grant the wretched
To the pyre's flame, and thrusts the sight of Thessaly
On guilty heaven . . . His rage still hasn't savored
Enough slaughter, and he remembers the dead
Were fellow citizens. O Caesar! It's not single pyres
We're after, or separate graves. But grant one fire,
At least. Let nations burn with indiscrete flames.
- Civil War 8: plotting in Egypt, Ptolemy XIII, king (63-47 BCE) of Egypt + Achillas (general & assassin) & Septimius (Roman accomplice)
*death of Pompey in HBO's Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3buhlYVLOs
- Lucan's Stoic rehabilitation of Pompey in defeat & death; Cornelia witnesses execution
Civil War 8.709-25 (Pompey's beheading & final violation of the body politic)
Thus she spoke, collapsing
Into
the arms of her servants, as her panicked ship fled.
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
Silver denarius minted by Julius Caesar, 47-46 BCE [L: Venus; R: Aeneas & Anchises]
- Civil War 9: Caesar, tourist at Troy (Lucan's invention), land of memory & story ("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)
Civil War 9.1006-1012 (poet’s "pledge" of immortality, the power of poetry as testimonial to HTVT)
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 the Head of Pompey, ca. 1740
- Caesar's empty promise to gods to build a "Roman Troy" (9.1026), unaware of fate/history
- Caesar's crocodile tears in Egypt: presentation of Pompey's head
Civil War 9.1071-1080
. . . 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.
- Caesar pardons Ptolemy posthumously & orders tomb for head; Egyptians unconvinced (9.1142-6)
*display of Pompey's head in HBO's Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY2Cr_7_BIU
L: Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963); R: Cleopatra VII, ca. 40-30 BCE
Civil War 10: imperiled Caesar in Egypt (civil war), alliance with Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE); lost 2+ books of epic; 25 yr. old Lucan's forced suicide, 65 CE; defeat of remaining forces of Pompey (46-45 BCE); Caesar assassinated in 44 BCE
Camuccini, The Death of Caesar, 1804