Thirty Years’ War: Lucan’s Cato since 1988
By Tim Stover
This paper has two aims: to offer a review of the approaches to Lucan’s Cato in the thirty years since Henderson 1988 and to add my voice to those who view Lucan’s Cato as a character that brings a glimmer of light to a sea of darkness.
Pompey’s Groan: Collective Heroism in Lucan’s 'Bellum Civile'
By Andrew Zissos
Lucan’s Bellum Civile has long bedeviled critics with vexing questions concerning its unity and coherence. Chief among these questions has been that of its chief protagonist. Does the epic have a hero, and if so who? Arguments have been put forward for Caesar, Cato and Pompey, for the three of them as a group, and much more besides, including abstractions such as Libertas.
The Remains of the Day. A Reading of 'Bellum Civile' 8
By Martin Dinter
Lucan’s civil war epic accounts for the unmaking of Rome. Mirroring in format its chaotic subject matter, it has resisted easy analysis and interpretation due to its deliberate openendedness, episodic structure and lack of teleology (Henderson 1988; Masters 1992). Recent scholarship has moved away from ideological interpretations and suggested reading the Bellum Civile in an alternative way by considering imagery, stylistics and leitmotifs as ways to bind together Lucan’s meandering verses.
Empedoclean Echoes in Lucan: The Dialectic of Love and Strife in the Proem of the 'Bellum Civile'
By Giulio Celotto
One of the central theses of the deconstructionist interpretation of the Bellum Civile is that the poem lacks a conventional teleology. Picking up on the identification between the epos and its subject proposed by Johnson (1987), Henderson (1988) and Masters (1992) argue that the poem is a civil war itself, and Lucan is a schizophrenic poet, who resembles Caesar in his ambition of writing an epic about nefas, and Pompey in his remorse. For this reason, the narrative flow is constantly interrupted and delayed.