Julia Mebane (Indiana University)
In Book 9 of the Bellum Civile, Lucan interrupts his narrative of Caesar’s visit to Troy to acknowledge the literary shadow cast by his epic protagonist. Addressing Caesar as a rival narrator of civil war, he promises that future generations will read their texts side-by-side (venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra/ vivet, 9.985-6). Although Lucan invites readers to interpret his poem as a response to Caesar’s prose, the intertexts between these two works remain understudied (Zissos 2010; Rambaud 1960). This paper identifies the Battle of Dyrrachium as a key locus of intertextual competition between Lucan and Caesar. Using the twin threats of famine and plague to collapse the boundary between the Caesarians and Pompeians, Lucan insists upon the civil war that his predecessor seeks to deny.
Caesar’s Bellum Civile is a text that famously declines to narrate its purported topic (Batstone and Damon 2010). In the place of strife between kin is a populus Romanus united in opposition to the domination of the few (factio paucorum, 1.22). Nowhere is the absence of civil strife more pronounced than when Caesar and Pompey finally meet on the shore of the Adriatic Sea in Book 3. Using the wall that separates the two armies as a symbol of their moral difference, Caesar contrasts their responses to physical hardship. When confronted with the prospect of famine, his troops scour the fields for edible plants, transform wild cabbage into bread, and thrive (at Caesaris exercitus optima valetudine, 3.49). When the Pompeians are faced with a pestilence, however, their unfamiliarity with hard work only exacerbates their illness (ipsos valetudine non bona…cotidianis laboribus insuetos operum, 3.49.2). Caesar uses their divergent health outcomes to obscure their shared Roman identity and the internecine context within which the siege operates.
When Lucan re-tells this story in Book 6 of the Bellum Civile, he undoes Caesar’s careful work by stressing the shared symptomology of pestilence and famine (Gardner 2019). He characterizes both as dehumanizing forces capable of transforming Roman soldiers into animals. This theme emerges in his discussion of the plague’s origins, which are blamed on inadequate horse fodder (ore nouas poscens moribundus labitur herbas, 6.86). Equine hunger produces human sickness (inde labant populi, 6.93), exposing the interconnection of fames and pestilentia. The same elision of the animal and the human occurs in Caesar’s camp. As soldiers crazed with hunger lower themselves to the ground in their search for food, they assume the role of cattle (in pecudum cecidisse cibos et carpere dumos, 6.111). They then consume poisonous plants that bring them to the brink of death (letumque minantis/ uellere ab ignotis dubias radicibus herbas, 6.112-3). Diverging from the historical record to magnify the Caesarian famine, Lucan locates the same physical suffering on both sides of the wall (Saylor 1978). He uses the symbolic resonance of pestilence to collapse the two armies into a single heap of corpses (Girard 1974). Putting civil war back into the Battle of Dyrrachium, he corrects the sanitized narrative of his predecessor.