The Lucan trilogy: 1 — Lucan, Stoic poet

[image: Lucan of Cordoba, modern bust, Wikipedia]

Next week I will be traveling to Marshall University in West Virginia, for my first work-related trip since the beginning of the pandemic. My last trip of this kind took place on March 4–8, 2020 in Boston, to present a paper at the Northeast Modern Language Association on Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man in Full. This time I will facilitate a workshop on Stoicism for veterans and their families, followed by a public lecture later the same day.

In preparation for the workshop, I read a lot about Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, better known as Lucan, a first century Roman poet and the nephew of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the playwright, philosopher, and senator who is one of our most important ancient sources concerning Stoic philosophy.

The reason to talk to veterans about Lucan is that he wrote an incomplete poem, Pharsalia, or De Bello Civili, which tells the epic story of the the civil war between Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate, which ended in the defeat of the Republican forces and essentially represented the last step before Empire. (Caesar, as is well known, was then assassinated in 44 BCE, but his nephew, Octavian, took control of things and became the first emperor, Octavian Augustus.)

I intend to write three posts inspired by my visit to Marshall. In this one we will take a look at Lucan’s life and the general import of his poem from a Stoic perspective. In the other two we will examine the figure of Caesar as a “Stoic fool” and then go a bit deeper into the topic of Stoic politics, from Zeno to Seneca.

Lucan was born in Cordoba, Spain, in the year 39 CE. He grew up under the tutelage of his uncle, Seneca the Younger, and was therefore exposed to Stoic ideas early on. He was initially well regarded by Nero — of whom his uncle was the personal advisor — and in fact won a prize at the Laudes Neronis in 60 CE. The early books of De Bello Civili were circulated with the imprimatur of the emperor.

However, at some point things went south in the relationship between Nero and Lucan, though different sources disagree on the initial reasons for the conflict. Be that as it may, Lucan openly criticized Nero in a poem entitled De Incendio Urbis, on the fire of Rome (which took place in July 64 CE), where he wrote “unspeakable flames of the criminal tyrant roamed the heights of Remus.”

Moreover, Lucan produced additional books of Pharsalia that became increasingly pro-Republican and just as clearly anti-imperial in tone. The logical endpoint of this progression was that Lucan took part in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero in 65 CE, and as a result was ordered to commit suicide by the emperor — just like his uncle. Tacitus tells us that on his death bed “[Lucan] recalled some poetry he had composed in which he had told the story of a wounded soldier dying a similar kind of death and he recited the very lines. These were his last words.”

The alternate title of the poem, Pharsalia, refers to the battle of Pharsalus, which took place in 48 BCE, and which saw the Republican forces headed by Pompey vanquished by the Caesarian army. Lucan lived to write ten of the likely twelve intended books. Here is a brief summary of the existing material, to set the tone for the rest of our discussion.

Book I tells us how, ignoring the pleadings of the Spirit of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed the river Rubicon with one legion, thus for all effective purposes declaring war against the Senate. This is when he famously said the words “alea iacta est,” the die is cast, meaning that his decision was now putting him on an irreversible collision course with the Republic.

In book II, Cato the Younger, the Stoic role model so admired by Seneca, explains to Brutus — the future chief conspirator against Caesar — why they have a duty to take up arms to fight against tyranny. Meanwhile, Caesar attempts to blockade Pompey’s army at the southeastern Italian port of Brundisium, but fails. The Republicans regroup across the Adriatic sea, in Greece.

Book III features a dream of Pompey in which he is visited by his dead wife Julia, who was Caesar’s daughter. We also find a description of how Caesar plundered Rome before heading to Spain to fight the Republican forces there, in order to eventually be free to turn his full attention to Pompey.

Caesar succeeds in taking control of Spain in book IV, although simultaneously one of his lieutenants, Curio, is defeated in Africa by King Juba, who allies himself with the Republicans.

The action shifts back to the other camp in book V, and we are told that the Senate, in exile, confirms its support for Pompey as defender of Rome. Caesar at this point crosses from Brundisium to Greece, to go after the Republican army.

The next episode, in book VI, features Pompey’s son, Sextus, talking to a witch who reanimates a dead soldier, one of the few instances in the entire poem in which a supernatural act is featured. The temporarily reanimated soldier predicts both Pompey’s defeat and Caesar’s assassination.

In book VII we see that Pompey, now facing the Caesarian army, is hesitant at the idea of engaging in battle. But Cicero, who has sided with the Republicans, convinces him to take the field. The result is the Pharsalus disaster, and therefore the beginning of the end for the Republican cause.

Pompey escapes after the battle and, in book VIII, makes it to Egypt, where he thinks he has friends who can shelter him and help him regroup to fight another day. Instead, he is betrayed and decapitated as soon as he steps off his boat. Thus ends the life of one of Rome’s most illustrious generals and statesmen.

Book IX sees a major change in the Republican ranks, with Cato now taking charge of what is leftover of the army and marching it through the desert in order to join forces with Juba. At the same time, Caesar arrives in Egypt and pretends (according to Lucan) to be horrified at the death of Pompey, his former friend turned enemy.

Caesar remains in Egypt, and in the course of book X he becomes enamored of Queen Cleopatra while also escaping more than one attempt against his life.

We don’t know what Lucan had planned for books XI and XII, but scholars agree that the poem would have ended with the famous episode of Cato’s suicide, after the final defeat of the Republican army at the battle of Thapsus in 46 BCE.

There are a number of reasons why De Bello Civili is an important poem, beginning with the simple fact that it is a splendid example of Roman Imperial poetry, filled with echoes from Virgil’s Aeneid. More innovative is the fact that Lucan rarely invokes the supernatural, ascribing instead the various events he recounts to human agency and motivations. Indeed, we are told that civil war is a horrible thing, not at all a noble enterprise to be celebrated:

“Wars worse than civil on Emathian [Macedonian] plains,
and crime let loose we sing; how Rome’s high race
plunged in her vitals her victorious sword.”

Accordingly, the various battles are described by Lucan not as glorious events but in horrifying details, to bring the reader to reject any sentimentalism about the war and face it for what it really was. Along the same lines, most of the characters are deeply flawed — including both Caesar and Pompey — and not meant to elicit sympathy.

Of course, the glaring exception is Cato, the Stoic who becomes a martyr to the cause of freedom:

“Victrix causa deis placuit
sed victa Catoni.”
(The victorious cause pleased the gods
but the vanquished one pleased Cato.)

Pharsalia features a number of Stoic themes that are relevant to our understanding of the Stoic attitude toward politics. The most obvious one is that Cato represents the Republican fight for freedom against the tyranny of Julius Caesar. This should put to rest any modern criticism of Stoicism as a quietist and politically uninvolved philosophy. Not only did the Stoics openly criticize emperors, they literally took up arms against what they perceived as injustice.

Of course, “freedom” here needs to be understood in the proper historical context. The Roman Republic was hardly a democracy in the modern sense of the term. Its economy relied heavily on slavery, and women had basically no rights (a situation that — ironically — improved, to some extent, during the Empire). Nevertheless, Rome at the time was an interesting experiment in a mixed aristocratic-democratic system, with the Senators being chiefly picked from ancient families (with exceptions, such as Cicero), and Tribunes elected by the people to represent them and legislate on their behalf. So, yes, what Caesar was proposing was certainly a step away from liberty and toward tyranny.

Another obvious Stoic theme is that of the role model, again impersonated by Cato. Seneca writes a lot about Cato, and his fame has reverberated across the centuries. Of course, the man was more complex (and flawed) than the legend allows, but he was nevertheless famous even in his own time for his integrity and courage. If anything, his main problem — according to Cicero — was that Cato was too idealistic and refused to accept the reality of Roman politics:

“As for our friend Cato, you do not love him more than I do: but after all, with the very best intentions and the most absolute honesty, he sometimes does harm to the Republic. He speaks and votes as though he were in the Republic of Plato, not in the scum of Romulus.” (Letters to Atticus, 2.1.8)

A third Stoic theme is that of the fool, impersonated by Caesar, who is depicted as being in the thrall of passions, his life devoted entirely to the pursuit of externals like fame and glory. I will devote the next installment of this series to this particular sub-theme.

Pharsalia also presents us with an implied judgment of the limits of non-Stoic philosophies, such as Aristotelianism. The key figure here is Pompey who, though he probably didn’t think of himself as a follower of Aristotle, attempted to live a life in which both virtue and externals played a crucial role. From the Stoic perspective, he failed not because he was defeated (so was Cato, after all!), but because he really thought that fame and glory were necessary ingredients of a good life. The difference with Caesar — again according to Lucan — is that the latter did not care one iota for virtue, while Pompey, in his flawed way, did.

The last identifiable Stoic theme in the poem is that of oikeiosis, the notion that we have a natural kinship with all of humanity, and that we should actively cultivate such kingship, resulting in the Stoic conception of cosmopolitanism. While the reality of Rome — both Republican and Imperial — was certainly far from such an ideal, the Romans always saw themselves as acting on the basis of the same motives that (allegedly) animated Alexander the Great: not conquest for its own sake, but conquest as a way to unify mankind into one big polis. While this ideal was antithetical to the civil war initiated by Caesar, it was ironically at different moments during the Empire that Rome came closest to truly being a cosmopolis: first in the course Augustus’ long lasting Pax Romana, and then during the reign of the five “good emperors,” from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius.

In the end, however, the Stoic role model, Cato, is defeated and commits suicide. What good, then, was his sacrifice? Here we get a very good answer not directly from Lucan but from the second century Stoic Epictetus, who refers his students to the figure of Helvidius Priscus, a Senator who openly opposed both Nero and Vespasian, and who was first exiled and then killed on Vespasian’s orders:

“What good, you ask, did Priscus achieve, then, being just a single individual? And what does the purple achieve for the tunic? What else than standing out in it as purple, and setting a fine example for all the rest?” (Discourses I, 2.22)