Adams: Lucan's Clash of the Titans

Lucan's Clash of the Titans

Ethan Adams

Loyola Marymount University

The incipit of Lucan's poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos, pinpoints rather imprecisely the Emathian plains of Thessaly as the geographical center and culmination of the Pompeian plot in the battle of Pharsalos. I will argue that this geographical imprecision (Pharsalos is not quite on the Emathian plains) is not poetic license, but rather a pointed and polemical dislocation which reconfigures the civil wars as a mythologized gigantomachy. By shifting Pharsalos to the Emathian fields, Lucan rewrites the wars between the Olympians and the Giants, the original Emathian wars, with Caesar and Pompey as the new warring deities. In this sense, the wars are more than wars between citizens, for Caesar and Pompey are more than human: the antagonist Caesar would transform into Divus Iulius and Pompey would be immortalized into the spirit of the dead Republic. Lucan thus does not dispense with divine machinery at all so much as bring it down to earth.

I look first at the metaphysical topography of Emathia, namely the poetic meanings it had accrued by Lucan's era. Pharsalos had long been connected with Emathia, especially as a locus of strife: Catullus 64, which narrates the disastrous marriage of Peleus and Thetis and ends with the eerily Lucanian song of the Parcae, takes place in Pharsalos, and anticipates the destructive Trojan war and the ascent of the bloodthirsty Achilles. Likewise, in Ovid's Metamorphoses 5 the daughters of Pieros —who are also called Emathides—sing a Gigantomachy in their contest with the Muses, and invest the region with antiOlympianism. It is arguable, then, that the words Bella per Emathios immediately coordinate historical and mythological conflicts.

In addition to the war between gods and Giants, the evenly matched cognatas acies, eagles, and javelins of BC 1.4-7 also, I argue, summon up the theomachy in Iliad 20-21. Alluding to the cataclysmic thundering of Iliadic gods in conflict, Lucan invests his Roman demigods with added epic force. Usually considered an 'historical' epic, Lucan nevertheless arms his poem with the full epic panoply: featuring extended ecphrases, similes, catalogues, dreams, epic councils, battle narratives, storms, apostrophe, and prophecies, Lucan's poem fulfills generic expectations while at the same time bold


	Lucan's Clash of the Titans Ethan Adams Loyola Marymount University The incipit of Lucan's poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos, pinpoints rather imprecisely the Emathian plains of Thessaly as the geographical center and culmination of the Pompeian plot in the battle of Pharsalos. I will argue that this geographical imprecision (Pharsalos is not quite on the Emathian plains) is not poetic license, but rather a pointed and polemical dislocation which reconfigures the civil wars as a mythologized gigantomachy. By shifting Pharsalos to the Emathian fields, Lucan rewrites the wars between the Olympians and the Giants, the original Emathian wars, with Caesar and Pompey as the new warring deities. In this sense, the wars are more than wars between citizens, for Caesar and Pompey are more than human: the antagonist Caesar would transform into Divus Iulius and Pompey would be immortalized into the spirit of the dead Republic. Lucan thus does not dispense with divine machinery at all so much as bring it down to earth. I look first at the metaphysical topography of Emathia, namely the poetic meanings it had accrued by Lucan's era. Pharsalos had long been connected with Emathia, especially as a locus of strife: Catullus 64, which narrates the disastrous marriage of Peleus and Thetis and ends with the eerily Lucanian song of the Parcae, takes place in Pharsalos, and anticipates the destructive Trojan war and the ascent of the bloodthirsty Achilles. Likewise, in Ovid's Metamorphoses 5 the daughters of Pieros —who are also called Emathides—sing a Gigantomachy in their contest with the Muses, and invest the region with antiOlympianism. It is arguable, then, that the words Bella per Emathios immediately coordinate historical and mythological conflicts. In addition to the war between gods and Giants, the evenly matched cognatas acies, eagles, and javelins of BC 1.4-7 also, I argue, summon up the theomachy in Iliad 20-21. Alluding to the cataclysmic thundering of Iliadic gods in conflict, Lucan invests his Roman demigods with added epic force. Usually considered an 'historical' epic, Lucan nevertheless arms his poem with the full epic panoply: featuring extended ecphrases, similes, catalogues, dreams, epic councils, battle narratives, storms, apostrophe, and prophecies, Lucan's poem fulfills generic expectations while at the same time bold