The Hand of Caesar: Assigning Guilt in Lucan's Bellum Civile

Throughout his Bellum Civile, Lucan deploys imagery of violence against the self and against kin to convey the horror of civil war. From the opening lines, hands (manus/dextrae) that participate in this violence become a focal point for assigning or assessing guilt (1.3, 1.14, 1.23, 1.32). My analysis of the structured relationship between hand imagery and guilt in Lucan contributes to the debate on whether Lucan's narrator actively supports either party in civil war. (Ahl 1976, Masters 1992, Leigh 1992, Roller 1996, Bartsch 1997, Narducci 2002). This paper demonstrates how Lucanian hand imagery incriminates Caesar—despite his "hands-off" participation in battle—by associating Caesar's hand with self-violence and kin-slaying.

First, I demonstrate how Lucan's Caesar and the Narrator both look to hands as tokens of guilt for civil violence in the Pharsalus narrative. Before the battle, Caesar instructs his men that his fate is in their hands (7.253, 7.286), which will be judged guiltless only if Caesar is victorious (7.263). Caesar's own hand appears only in a support role, pressing wounds and passing weapons to his men (7.567, 7.574). Participation in civil conflict is tied to combatants' hands and weapons as Caesar watches for bloodied swords and trembling hands (7.560-565). The Narrator likewise evaluates culpability through hands: he attacks Crastinus' hands for throwing the first spear (7.472, 7.475), absolves hands whose weapons miss (7.487), and laments hands that commit civil war in Romana viscera (7.491).

Next, I show how Caesar's hand interacts with viscera to activate self-harm and kin-slaying imagery at Pharsalus. Before the battle, Caesar advises his men that without victory they will see him taking fate into his own hand by suicide, fodientem viscera (7.309). Hands that attack viscera are especially criminal throughout the epic, beginning with imagery of suicide of the state and violence against kin in the proem (1.3). The latter image is inherited from Ovid (Hines 2018) and is evident in Laelius' speech vowing to kill his family at Caesar's command (1.378) and the Vulteius episode (1.452) with its allusions to Ovid's kin-slaying Spartoi (Eldred 2002, Keith 2011). Though he watches more than he fights, Caesar nonetheless signals through the kin-slaying motif that his own hand is inclined to the same inward-turning civil violence he directs against Rome.

I conclude with a presentation of two other examples of Caesar's hand engaging this motif, arguing that Lucan uses the socer­-gener connection between Caesar and Pompey as a social microcosm of the larger conflict. First, in the locus horridus sequence at Massilia, Caesarian soldiers' hands tremble to strike a grisly oak tree—an image associated with Pompey through the oak and lightning simile at 1.135-43—and Caesar attacks the oak himself. Later, while Pompey steels himself for death, he imagines it is Caesar's own hand that strikes the blow (8.629). Though Caesar never actually smites Pompey, the invocation of his hand in these scenes activates the kin-slaying motif and suggests that Caesar remains guilty even when his hand is distanced from acts of civil violence.