MARCUS ANNAEUS LUCANUS (47)

Born AD 39 Córdoba, Spain.

Grandson of the elder Seneca and nephew of the younger, poet and republican patriot.

His historical epic the Bellum civile better known as the Pharsalia because of its vivid account of that battle is remarkable as the single major Latin epic poem that eschewed the intervention of the gods.

Trained by the Stoic philosopher Cornutus and later educated in Athens, he attracted the favourable attention of the emperor Nero because of his early promise of genius as a rhetorician and orator. Shortly, however, Nero became jealous of his ability as a poet and halted further public readings of his poetry. Already disenchanted by Nero´s tyranny and embittered by the ban on his recitations Lucan became one of the leaders in the conspiracy of Piso (Gaius Calpurnius) to assassinate Nero. When the conspiracy was discovered he was compelled to commit suicide by opening a vein. While he was dying Tacitus records "he remembered a poem composed by himself in which he had told of a wounded soldier dying by the same kind of death. He repeated the lines and that was his last utterance".

The Bellum civile, his only extant poem, is an account of the war between Caesar and Pompey, carried down to the arrival of Caesar in Egypt after the murder of Pompey, when it stops abruptly in the middle of the tenth book.

Lucan was not a great poet but he was a great rhetorician and had remarkable political and historical insight though he wrote the poem while still a young man. The work is naturally imitative of Virgil though not as dramatic. Although the style and vocabulary are usually commonplace and the metre monotonous, the rhetoric is often lifted into real poetry by its energy and flashes of fire and appears at its best in the magnificent funeral speech of Cato on Pompey. Scattered through the poem are noble sayings and telling comments, expressed with vigour and directness. As the poem proceeds, the poet´s republicanism becomes more marked, no doubt because as Nero´s tyranny grew, along with Lucan´s hatred of him, he looked back with longing to the old Roman Republic. It has been said that Cato is the real hero of the epic and certainly the best of Lucan´s own Stoicism appears in the noble courage and endurance of his Cato in continuing the hopeless struggle after Pompey had failed.

Lucan was popular poet during the Middle Ages.
Christopher Marlowe translated the first book of the Bellum civile (1600).
Samuel Johson praised Nicholas Rowe´s translation (1718) as "one of the greatest productions of English poetry".
The English poets Southey and Shelley in their earlier years preferred him to Virgil.
His work strongly influended Corneille and other French Classical dramatists of the 17th century.
A.E. Housman´s Lucan (1926, reissued 1950) is one of that scholar´s most outstanding works.