Symptoms of Disaster: Plague and Famine in Lucan’s Pharsalia 6.80–117”

Lucan’s Pharsalia reads as an extended pathology of rabies civilis, or civil madness, in which individual disasters are symptomatic for the larger disaster that is civil war (Fratantuono 2012). For his only plague account, Lucan draws on Caesar’s Commentaries to stage the disasters of plague and famine at the siege of Dyrrachium in Book 6, thereby undercutting the lessons from its intertextual predecessors, especially Virgil’s Georgics, and crushing the hopeful prospect of regeneration and redemption. In the poetics of disaster, the collapse of boundaries brought about by plague and famine is symptomatic for the destabilizing madness that has infected the Roman world (Bartsch 1997; Henderson 1988).

Caesar’s ambitious circumvallation of Pompey and his army at Dyrrachium (6.29-63) sets the stage for Lucan’s brief plague account in the Pharsalia (6.80-117), one that has received little scholarly attention (cf. Gardner 2019; Sklenář 2003). In the passage, Lucan engages the long tradition of plague descriptions that has contaminated Latin literature since Lucretius, but subsumes the plague under the larger catastrophe of civil war. The plague becomes a symptom of the ultimate disease that terrorizes the Roman body politic (Dinter 2012): rabies civilis (6.63), or civil madness. Seen in this light, Lucan delivers a decidedly more negative diagnosis than his intertextual predecessors, whose plague accounts offer lessons for healing and redemption. Lucan’s use of the tropes of the collapsing horse, the rotting carcass, and the role of fames (famine, hunger) introduces a series of paradoxes and variations in the plague narrative that stays true to the theme of his epic (“worse than civil wars,” 1.1) and to the historical background as provided by Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil War (Zissos 2013).

While taking its cues from Caesar’s description, the plague passage is also a clear product of the “textually transmitted disease” (Slaney 2009) that wasted away Lucretius’ Athenians (Freudenburg 1987; Gale 1991), Virgil’s Noric cattle (Gardner 2014), and Ovid’s Aeginetans (Heerink 2011). By the same token, Lucan’s description of famine draws on both the Commentaries and other siege accounts in the Pharsalia, and on Ovid’s portrayal of Fames, to show how the ensuing transgression of boundaries is equally symptomatic of madness. I show, then, that at the siege of Dyrrachium, Lucan recasts plague and famine (cf. λοιμός and λιμός, Jouanna 2006) as symptoms of civil madness that wreak havoc on the body—a transgressive madness characterized by the total collapse of boundaries. While Lucan may not offer any remedies and the prognosis may seem grim, it is perhaps the poetics of disaster itself—and this is where we may find particular relevance today—that can neutralize the destabilizing madness of the Roman world by bringing it into the bounds of comprehensibility once again