Concrete poetry Book

Civil War is the only surviving work of Lucan, a Roman writer from the 1st century. Written during the reign of Nero, Lucan's Civil War was arguably the last great epic poem written in antiquity (at least in the West). The poem as we have it is unfinished (Nero ordered Lucan to commit suicide at the age of 25), but what's left is a fairly complete story of the war between Julius Caesar and Sextus Pompey, all the way to its grisly end.


"They all bought, but he sold Rome." IV. 824

The Oxford World's Classics edition argues that Civil War "stands beside the poems of Virgil and Ovid in the first rank of Latin epic." I would not go quite that far. Civil War is a bit of a controversial classic - the poem has a few quite glaring turnoffs, and has earned its share of detractors over the centuries. Even classical scholar Moses Hadas, who considered Lucan to be worth reading, described his vices as "shrieking and easy to find." Two of his faults in particular may test the modern reader. The first is Lucan's passion for the grotesque, which is almost absurd. The poem dwells on horrible, repulsive situations with a kind of morbid glee. Here are a few examples that I found to be particularly memorable:

[I]n the naval battle the sword achieves the most. Each stands leaning from his own boat's stronghold to meet the enemy's blows and none when killed fell in his own ship. Deep blood foams in the water, the waves are choked by clotted gore and the ships, when hauled by iron chains thrown on board, are kept apart by crowds of corpses. Some sank, half-dead, into the vast deep and drank the sea mixed with their own blood…"

Etc., etc. It gets worse:

Catus fights, boldly holding on to Greek post, at one moment he is pierced in his back and chest alike by weapons shot together: the steel meets in the middle of his body and the blood stood still, unsure from which wound to flow, until at one moment a flood of gore drove out both spears…"

One more for the road (not for the squeamish):

"That day a unique form of hideous death was seen, when a young man in the water by chance was transfixed by the beaks of converging vessels. The middle of his chest was split apart by such tremendous blows, the bronze of the beaks resounding; from his crushed belly the blood mixed with entrails spouted gore through his mouth. "

Gross. For what it's worth, this obsession with the grotesque is simply a reflection of the taste of his day. Seneca the Younger (Lucan's uncle) displays a similar lean towards the lurid in his tragedies. But that doesn't make it incredibly fun to read. Fortunately, Lucan calms down a bit in the poem's second half and largely spares us these horrors by the time we get to Pharsalus.

The other potential turnoff is the poem's bombastic and rhetorical style. Lucan regularly imposes strained, artificial speeches on his protagonists, often at the most unlikely times. This is the nature of the genre, to some degree, but Lucan stretches it to the limit. Much more so than Virgil or Ovid's epics, Lucan's poem feels like it's about 2,000 years old. This is not helped by Lucan's frequent, enthusiastic, and unintelligible digressions into astronomy, geography, zoology or whatever other subject catches his fancy.

So the poem has its problems. But there are plenty of things working in its favor. Lucan writes with fire and conviction, and his fervor can be contagious when he's at his best. Unlike the great epic poems before it, Civil War deals with actual human beings participating in a historical conflict. There's no real hero of the poem: Caesar is presented as a bloodthirsty warmonger, Pompey as the lesser of two evils. The closest the poem comes to a moral hero is Cato, who's very much off in the wings. The lack of an infallible, superhuman protagonist is refreshing and makes the poem more interesting. The relationship between Pompey and his wife Cornelia gives the poem an emotional hook, and the Battle of Pharsalus (which I was a bit nervous going into, given Lucan's love of slaughter) is a suitably epic set piece. While Lucan has had plenty of critics, he's had plenty of fans too; Dante ranked Lucan with Homer, Virgil, Horace and Ovid in his own epic over 1,000 years later.

Ultimately the best thing about Lucan may be that he didn't try and simply copy Virgil. Civil War adopts some of the scenes and key themes of its genre, but it is very much an original work. That's more than can be said for any of Lucan's epic-writing contemporaries from the death of Augustus onward. While the poem has its faults, at least it is trying to do something a little different. Fans of the classics are encouraged to give this poem a go, but with reservations. 3 stars.