Reviews for Lucan, Civil war VIII

The average rating for Lucan, Civil war VIII based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-17 00:00:00 Jeanmarc Buffa An Anti-Caeserian Account of the Civil War 24 August 2011 - Lausanne Lucan was a contemporary of Nero, and in fact died at the age of 25 when he slit his own wrists after he was discovered involved in a plot to overthrow the emperor (it seems as if this was a dignified way to die in the early empire). As such Lucan's poem regarding the civil war between Caeser and Pompey remains unfinished. It is clear from the text that Lucan does not like Julius Caeser, and that the translator of the version I read (Robert Graves) does not particularly like Lucan. So, if the translator does not like the writer, why does he bother translating the book. Well, he answers that question himself: because of its historical value. The Pharasalia does give a good outline of the civil war, right up to Caeser's arrival in Egypt and his seduction of Cleopatra, however it is questionable as to whether this is what would be termed revisionist history. Considering that the other source of the civil war is from Caeser's own hand (and further sources, such as Suetonius and Plutarch, were written a lot later), there can be an argument that Caeser's account could be somewhat biased. However, it is clear that Lucan is quite biased as well as he does not paint Caeser in a particularly appealing light. Now, interspersed amongst the text are a lot of stories relating to mythology, as well as some pseudo-scientific theorising (and I say pseudo-scientific because it seems that Lucan attributes a lot of things to the gods). There are also some interesting accounts, such as Caeser rowing across the Adriatic Sea in a row boat (and it is interesting how Lucan says that it is when he makes landfall that he regained his empire, suggesting, and there is a lot of truth to it, that while he was in the middle of the Adriatic in a rowboat he was no longer master of his own destiny, nor was he master of Rome, but then considering that he was in the middle of a civil war, he wasn't master of Rome anyway). The other story was that of Cato's march through the desert to visit the oracle that Alexander of Macedon had visited. The story of how Cato refused water, and marched alongside his troops, gives a lot of credence to his character. However, since Cato was originally on the side of Pompey, and that Lucan is an admirer of Pompey (as well as a barracker for Caeser's assassins), it is not surprising that he paints him in a really attractive light. After Pompey's defeat, and his assassination in Egypt, Lucan raves for quite a while about how undignified a death it was, how he was denied proper burial rights, and how such a great man deserves many more honours than what he received. However, it should be remembered that Caeser was just as horrified at Pompey's undignified murder as was Lucan. However Lucan is writing very much a 'what if' book, believing that all of Rome's current troubles are the result of this one civil war, and he lays all of the problems faced by Rome squarely on Caeser's shoulders. He does forget though that Ceaser did turn down the crown, and that he had also seen major flaws in the Republican system of government, yet even though his murderers, who were appalled at the idea of a single ruler, ended up moving Rome further to the Imperial State by killing Caeser. Further, they forget Sulla, who established himself as dictator, and then stepped down once his reforms had been completed. The other thing that is forgotten is that Caeser did not proscribe (that is mark for death) any of his enemies, and it is because of this that he ended up meeting his fate. The time that Lucan wrote in was a much different time than the one that he writes about. It was about 100 years after the events in his poem, and Rome had changed. There was no freedom, and Nero ruled the empire with an iron fist. If you disagreed with Nero, you pretty much kept your mouth shut because there was no freedom of speech. It is in a sense why the Pharasalia was Lucan's way of criticising the current regime, however he ended up not simply keeping it in his poem, but attempted to act it out in his own life, which resulted in his suicide. At the end of the poem (or at least what he wrote of it) he seems to describe it as lasting for as long as the story of Ceaser lasted, however why this particular piece of literature was kept in the absence of other works is beyond me. I can't read Latin so I cannot comment on it's poetical value, though it does provide us with an interesting, if somewhat biased, view of the ancient world.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-25 00:00:00 Leslie Gutierrez 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.