Probably composed around 150 BCE, the epitaph for the early Latin poet Gnaeus Naevius laments his death as the end of a literary era, the moment ‘the Romans forgot how to speak the Latin language’ (obliti sunt Romani loquier lingua Latina). A similar claim is found in Cornelius Severus’ verses on the death of Cicero:
Abstulit una dies aeui decus ictaque luctu
conticuit Latiae tristis facundia linguae.One day took away the glory of an age, and struck by mourning
the eloquence of the Latin tongue grew quiet in its sadness.Cornelius Severus 10–11 (preserved in Sen. Suas. 6.26)
For the late Augustan poet, a single day and its act of triumviral violence cut short the eloquence of a Roman—of all the Romans—and put an end to the Republic. At line 15 Severus underscores the point: publica uox saeuis aeternum obmutuit armis (‘the people’s voice was forever silenced by cruel arms’). In both texts, the ends of authors and of literary traditions interlace with the passage of time and its historical periodisation.
This is the thematic nexus that animates Timothy Joseph’s stimulating exploration of Lucan and his epic predecessors. Joseph’s readings suggest that Pharsalia[1] is ‘the carmen Romanum for the end times’ (p. 17). The apocalyptic phrase points to more than the climactic battle and its impact on Roman history. It captures Lucan’s relationship with his precursors, whose innovative works opened generic and ideological possibilities that Pharsalia endeavours to end, to subsume, and to transform.
According to Statius’ muse, Calliope, Lucan will quickly surpass the epic poets of old (Silv. 2.7.42, discussed at pp. 1–6). Her list begins with Ennius, and it is Homeric verse and the early Roman epics (of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and especially Ennius) that anchor Joseph’s study. For Joseph, Pharsalia looks to the genre’s beginnings, to its entanglements with certain topics and historical moments, and then proceeds to close off openings, to end epic itself. That Calliope’s poem is also a song of lament—for the end of a poet and of an era—highlights another major component. While there is room for a form of Homeric lament in Pharsalia, space is lacking—indeed, ever shrinking—for Roman expansion and heroic sea voyages. If the Republic ends at Pharsalus, and the battle/poem ushers in a new imperial world generated by civil war (‘here Rome dies’, 7.634), Lucan’s finis concludes a certain strain of Roman song. Such big claims are captivating, important, and in many cases persuasive. At the abrupt, jagged end of the fragmentary Book 10, and in the warm waters of Lucan’s final (blood)bath, begins a time when obliti sunt Romani loquier lingua Latina.
One thing that distinguishes Joseph’s approach is that he often reads Lucan’s interaction with, say, Ennius in terms of a dynamic programme of engagement with ‘broader constitutive motifs’ (p. 10): think Conte’s modelli-codice, as well as scenes, topoi, imagery. For example, if the Annales show Rome to be a cosmic entity expanding in space (imperium sine fine etc.),[2] then Lucan’s constriction, restriction, and closing of space[3] is the inverse of Ennian advancement: weapons point inward not onward, and Ennian epic is occluded by the self-consuming civil war. For the verbal links Joseph does propose with Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius, I do wonder if more exposition might have been in order, or even an appendix of possible references (Joseph’s ‘intertextual anchors’ via Farrell).[4] I usually bristle at criticisms of this type, but Joseph’s proposals for Lucan’s interaction with early Latin epic do gain traction in the aggregate (see e.g. Joseph’s signposting at p. 104). On another note, by viewing Lucan as rewriting and closing off specific epic models, the book does drift toward binary readings.[5] Joseph interrogates passages defined by multiple reference and is sensitive to intertextuality’s fluid potential, but to show Lucan ending Naevian themes, for example, inevitably entails looking closely and at times exclusively at a literary relationship between two texts.
There are many notable claims in each learned chapter, of which I can mention a select few. Chapter 1 makes a convincing case for Lucanian programmatic engagement with epic predecessors and for the inward turn of civil war as reversal through collective destruction. It ends at the Rubicon, with a reading of Caesar’s rejection not only of Patria and the law, but also of epic continuity. The analysis here builds on the opening line’s intertextual relationships with Homer, Livius Andronicus (esp. 42–43), and Ennius (35ff.). The section devoted to Caesar’s sojourn at a dead, ruined Troy is a success (e.g. pp. 24–31). Joseph also shows how his preferred title Pharsalia and the work’s geography signify the movement of Roman epic’s focus away from Rome: both title and space gesture toward Rome’s/epic’s abandonment and death.
Violence defines the second chapter, which treats Lucan’s revision of familiar loci, especially his thematisation of them in new ways to draw out closural elements. Homeric and Ennian topoi (sacred groves and their violation; the body and its mutilation, esp. Marius Gratidianus or Scaeva with his densam…siluam of spears/sources in Book 6) emerge differently in Lucan’s iteration of the genre. Self-destruction is key and is also metapoetic (p. 62). Joseph’s reading of Lucan’s grove makes some unexpected and fruitful moves—difficult given the number of scholarly opinions on the episode. Lucan’s line-end fronde carentes at 3.443 set against Ennius’ famous spondaic line-end siluai frondosai signals that the branches of the generic tradition, once flourishing, are now bare ruin’d choirs. On Ann. 222 and the severing of Gratidianus’ nose, Joseph left me sceptical but cautiously intrigued. That this metapoetic scene (Joseph sees it as a mise en abyme) of slaughter and lament also marks, in some ways, the halting of the Republic itself is a compelling claim (pp. 71–73).
Although fragmentary poems challenge interpretive certainty, the master trope of expansion that defines the Annales in chapter 3 is by all accounts quite important to the Republican epic. Discussing the Annales in contrast to the Aeneid, Joseph calls it (p. 104) ‘the story of the advance toward global domination of the collective populus Romanus.’ That Lucan’s plot, people, and world close in on themselves is clearly the case, which can be read in stark opposition to this understanding of the Annales. But the view the quotation represents also suggests that Lucan’s version of Ennius is not (or at least not always) the complex multivocal author whose Ilia, for example, suffers the violence (sexual and imperial) of ‘the global advance of the populus Romanus’ (p. 105).[6] One important aspect of the chapter is its treatment of the one day, the summa dies that ended it all (cf. Severus’ unica dies above). Joseph’s attention to temporal and spatial features is notably subtle in these readings, and his introduction of the Annales’ augury scene to interpretation of the reluctant dawning of the day of battle is a nice touch (see pp. 95–101). The shock of Pharsalus rolls back the spatial/imperial ‘progress’ of centuries, which Joseph often reads in generic terms as distinctly Ennian. Lucan’s epic thus offers a vision of imperium cum fine. Joseph concludes the chapter with a consideration of the poem’s fragmentary (?) ending in light of Lucan’s focus on (en)closure and aperture: the epic is a carmen cum fine in as much as it is sine fine.
The fourth chapter journeys deeper into the Republican literary past, taking up Lucan’s engagement with Livius Andronicus and Naevius. Joseph’s reading builds on scholarly appraisals of early Latin epic as inextricably linked to and in dialogue with Roman naval experience and expansion on the Mediterranean during the era of the Punic Wars.[7] Lucan’s engagement with that tradition is one of thwarted journeys that reverse the accomplishments of earlier epic/historical ages and of shattered (metapoetic) ships, especially in Book 3’s sea battle off Massilia, Vulteius’ suicidal raft in Book 4, and the shipwreck off the Syrtes in Book 9. Some of the intertextual relationships are stronger than others (consider, e.g., the putative links at pp. 172–78). Joseph also has productive things to say about Lucan’s deep interest in the shadows and ruins of Carthage in North Africa and beyond. Various characters, especially Caesar, are Hannibalic, and their participation in civil war erases the gains of the Punic Wars (and their earlier epics) by spilling Roman blood with Roman swords. Lament also emerges as a more significant force in these readings.
Nostos, the idea of homecoming (redire) for heroes, soldiers, and for epic poets journeying through a tradition, fills the pages of chapter 5. This is a satisfying study (a ‘prequel’ to chapter 4) that shows Homeric and Roman epic texts at work in Lucan’s shaping of a poetic vision of a dislocated, if not lost, R/home. I thought at several times of Basil Dufallo’s new monograph, which contains some nuanced thinking about literary conceptions of travel and homecoming in the Republic.[8] For Joseph, Cato, Pompey, Caesar, and the populus Romanus itself are denied their homecomings. Women in the epic receive more attention at this point in the study (Penelope, Marcia, and especially Cornelia, the fida comes Magni, 5.804). Cornelia returns later in chapter 5 as a powerful figure of lamentation. Odyssean themes loom large as Homeric and Andronican anti-models, and Lucan opens the closural posture of nostos, which even in the Odyssey was both effected by civil war (the slaughter of the suitors) and then nearly undone by it in Book 24.
In chapter 6, scenes of Homeric lament (threnoi and the prominent gooi) are transformed into mourning for more than the battlefield dead. Lucan as narrator, whose constant apostrophe, metalepsis, and first-person plurals are at times read into this feature, laments alongside his characters (living and undead) the end of the Republic (of the Roman world itself?) from a Neronian vantage point—a striking move under a Caesar. Their lament ends the poetic project initiated by Homeric epos. The gendered dimensions of lament come out in Joseph’s readings and add layers to the Homeric presences in Pharsalia. Lament is complicated, offering praise and demonstrating love (“thunder and lament,” after all). In it we find Lucanian visions of the (lost?) greatness of Rome and of epic.
The brief conclusion makes some big claims. Lucan kills off epic via its foundational elements and master tropes, yet his epic survives. Joseph’s Lucan has his zombie cake and eats it too (or maybe it is vampire cake?—see p. 267). His epic is like the corpse resurrected by Erichtho to speak of Roman war, or Scaeva who reappears in Book 10 despite surely dying in Book 6. His poem (cf. 9.985–986) will ‘live on, perpetuating the genre it has ended and now contains, carrying with it the foundational themes launched in the epics of Homer, Livius, Naevius, and Ennius—but now subverted, collapsed, closed off, wholly transformed’ (p. 269). The final pages deal more explicitly with the Neronian present than elsewhere: Pharsalia is as much an Ennian or Homeric epic as the current Caesarian autocracy is a restored Republic.
In the end, Lucan’s push toward finality is far from Roman epic’s finis. The transformative power of his engagement with earlier epic produced new models and anti-models. In Pharsalia Roman epic lives on, although it will never be the same, a fact felt strongly when encountering Lucanian elements in his Flavian successors. The book itself is well produced. The type is clean and there are few errors. Bibliography is current, although the absence of some relevant items is felt. While certain readings push the limits, and the metapoetic focus can weary at times, Thunder and Lament is a major contribution to the study of Lucanian poetics. It is a smart and engaging work of Latin literary criticism, from which all scholars and students of Lucan, Roman epic, and Latin literature will profit.
Notes
[1] He prefers this title, which I will employ in the review for clarity. See pp. 31-35.
[2] See discussion in Elliott, J. 2013. Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales. Cambridge; Ibid. 2014. ‘Space and Geography in Ennius’ Annales’, in M. Skempis and I. Ziogas eds. Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic. Berlin: 223–64
[3] Rimell, V. 2015. The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics: Empire’s Inward Turn. Cambridge.
[4] Farrell, J. 2005. ‘Intention and Intertext.’ Phoenix 59: 98–111. The notion that Lucan alludes to Ennius in the first place is not without scholarly disagreement, of which J. is aware (see p. 7n19). For appendices, Goldschmidt, N. 2013. Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid. Oxford; and Nethercut, J. S. 2021. Ennius noster: Lucretius and the Annales. Oxford.
[5] See Elena Giusti’s review of Joseph Farrell’s Juno’s Aeneid in Mnemosyne (forthcoming).
[6] At p. 107 (and p. 114) Lucan’s Ennius seems to align for J. with Conte’s ‘Latin epic norm’, in which early epic is pro-Roman. For Conte the ‘polycentric’ Aeneid deviates from that norm, one J.’s Lucan ultimately breaks. Again, the fragments can suggest early epic was more complex. Similarly, consider the treatment of Ann. 156 as exemplary at pp. 125 and 130.
[7] Leigh, M. 2010. ‘Early Roman Epic and the Maritime Moment.’ CP 105: 265–80; Biggs, T. 2020. Poetics of the First Punic War. Ann Arbor.
[8] Dufallo, B. 2021. Disorienting Empire: Republican Latin Poetry’s Wanderers. Oxford.