Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes 9780801466878

Citation preview

CORNELL STUDIES IN CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY EDITED BY

FREDERICK M. AHL * KEVIN C. CLINTON JOHN E. COLEMAN * JUDITH R. GINSBURG G. M. KIRKWOOD * GORDON R. MESSING ALAN NUSSBAUM * PIETRO PUCCI WINTHROP WETHERBEE

VOLUME XLVII

Momentary Monsters Lucan and His Heroes by W. R. Johnson Epicurus’ Scientific Method by Elizabeth Asmis The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets by Gian Biagio Conte, edited by Charles Segal Seneca’s Hercules Furens: A Critical Text with Introduction and Commentary by John G. Fitch From Myth to Icon: Reflections of Greek Ethical Doctrine in Literature and Art by Helen F. North Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad by Pietro Pucci

THE TOWNSEND LECTURES

Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes by Michael C. J. Putnam

Also by W. R. Johnson Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil*s Aeneid From Actium The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry

MOMENTARY MONSTERS LUCAN AND HIS HEROES

W. R. JOHNSON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA

AND

LONDON

Copyright © 1987 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published in 1987 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2030-X Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-5442 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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For Mike Perkovich and in memory of May L. Seitz, who taught five decades of Sacramentans to read Caesar

All these, and more, the cloud-compelling Queen Beholds through fogs, that magnify the scene. She, tinselled o’er in robes of varying hues, With self-applause her wild creation views; Sees momentary monsters rise and fall And with her own fool’s colours gilds them all. Alexander Pope

Was ist Hogath und alle Karikatur anderes, als der Triumph des Formlosen iibcr die Form? Johann Wolfgang Goethe

poscentes vario multum diversa palato Horace

Contents

Preface

ix

1.

Erictho and Her Universe

i

2.

Cato: The Delusions of Virtue

35

3.

Pompey: The Illusions of History

67

4.

Caesar: The Phantasmagoria of Power

101

Bibliography

135

Index

143

[ «'«•/]

Preface

Much literary criticism nowadays reads like the fragments of the pre-Socratics in a poor fourteenth-century Latin translation as edited by one of Nietzsche’s lesser disciples. Why, in the second half of our century, literature has be¬ come ever more the handmaiden of philosophy is a ques¬ tion that future historians of culture will have to ponder. My personal response to this situation of discourse is to be¬ come a militant aesthete. Poets are not theologians or phi¬ losophers or historians. They do not quite think thoughts, they do not quite deliver messages. They see their own feelings and the feelings of their contemporaries, and from what they see they fashion dreams of reality (as Nabokov put it, “the facts of fiction”). These dreams, even when they are horrifying, proffer us a certain kind of pleasure, and this special pleasure, in turn, gestures us toward a certain kind of knowledge (as Aristotle and Schopenhauer told us), which is as vivid and useful as it is elusive and obscure, which works on our memories slowly, erratic¬ ally, and imperceptibly (as Dr. Johnson told us), and so prompts us to think for ourselves about hoia an genoito. In these pages, then, it is the pleasures of Lucan (the beauties of Lucan) which chiefly concern me. What those pleasures point to and what they grew from engage my at¬ tention only insofar as these questions help define the na¬ ture of Lucan’s pleasures, and my speculations about these questions are offered only of necessity and with consider-

Preface able diffidence. I am also interested, of course, in challeng¬ ing various allegorizations of Lucan which cause his rich pleasures to dwindle into venerable platitudes. Art gives pleasure (and with it, a map for reflection). For infor¬ mation, logic, and opinions we turn, or should turn, elsewhere. Lucan’s poem has three (if you count, as I am tempted to, Erictho, four) heroes, none of whom is quite up to car¬ rying his poem for him (this does not make them antiheroes, it only makes them funny heroes). This radical in¬ adequacy in the poem arises both from necessity and from design. The Pharsalia is, in Santayana’s word, omnimodal: it has no privileged center except for the energetic, bitter, and witty skepticism that devotes itself to demolishing the structures it erects as fast as it erects them; Lucan’s heroes lend their zestful assistance to this demolition, and that is their chief function. Not people, not allegories, but symbols, the chief characters of the poem suggest in their different ways — by the various angles of vision they pro¬ vide and by the refractions of sentiment that they incar¬ nate— the vast confusion and the ineffable terror of the poem’s materia: the effects of a civil war fought in the not so distant past on Roman intellectuals who lived in a city where terror had once been, and was again becoming, a way of life; the resentment and anger of freedom frus¬ trated, a love of freedom that can define itself only as hatred of tyranny; an elusive, unthinkable fear that Rome will lose herself in the process of losing her empire or will be transformed beyond recognition into a new and alien state. In short, a welter of wrath and weeping and despair, a jagged configuration of feelings so irrational that within its circumference it is not possible for Lucan to imagine a release from danger, much less the uses of freedom. The poem’s material, then, is violently intractable, and that Lucan had the temerity and the courage to confront it

Preface and to master some of it is the proper measure of his great¬ ness. In any case, in trying the impossible, Lucan found himself reinventing his genre from the ground up, found that he had no more need for conventional heroes than he had for conventional gods or conventional narrative patterns. Great men and rational theology and rational causality have no place in a poem about inhuman forces in history which seem as malevolent as they are alien and inscrutable. For such a poem, the hero, here wittily multi¬ plied in a wilderness of mirrors, can be only ironic orna¬ ment, an ornament essential to the poem’s dissolving de¬ sign. In that time and that place, rational history could seem only absurd, and Lucan accomplishes his version of that absurdity by his caricatures of great men. Although it is commendable to seek out what was sane in the policies and administrations of those lurid Julian emperors (Nero chief among them) whom the historical novel, Hollywood, and television have fed on with such relish, the historian who attempts to reclaim these rul¬ ers entirely for rational historical purposes, by explaining away what is sinister and grotesque in their reigns and by ascribing lucid purpose to them with lavish hand, pursues an aim that is as sentimental (in its way) as it is futile. Nor, of course, should we succumb here to the temptation of supposing that the content of the writers who lived and wrote in these and later reigns can best be understood in terms of literary conventions that excessive rhetorical training (is there such a thing?) and a mysterious passion for being decadent had ripened to rottenness. Pondering their nation’s past and present, lacking the precious hind¬ sight and apparent dispassion that help today’s historians in their unwritings of Tacitus, the great post-Augustan writ¬ ers tended to see their Rome and its history as terrifying and incomprehensible (though they were valiant in their efforts to comprehend it), and their unforgettable lmagina-

[xi]

Preface tions of the terror of history cannot be charmed away by the historian’s or the rhetorician’s appeal to decorum and coherence. Beyond even Tacitus, Lucan, in his angry, des¬ perate wit, is least susceptible of all the imperial writers to the demands of sweet reason. A depressing poem, then, as depressing as it is hilarious. And a poem not easy to live with. But the tolerant reader who surrenders to its superb tirades (both those spoken by Lucan’s symbolic caricatures and those spoken by Lucan as vates), to the ferocious vitality of this unique Latin, and to the enormous intelligence and feeling that nourish the poem’s words and pictures, will probably find not only abundant thrills but also abundant food for thought. At the very least, as poets as diverse as Dante, Marlowe, and Swift recognized, there is nothing else like Lucan in Western literature. The chapters that compose this book are based on the Martin Lectures I gave at Oberlin in November 1984. Al¬ though those lectures have been extensively reworked for this book, their central arguments and central design have survived the transformation from lectern to printed page. Prudence, perhaps abetted by indolence, counseled me to resist the temptation to expand on my original treatment. I am sorry to bypass the sea battle in Book 3 and, especially, Caesar in Egypt, but there was no point in obscuring with new problems, however entrancing they might be, a pat¬ tern that is already sufficiently complex. I looked forward to my week at Oberlin with excite¬ ment and trepidation. The trepidation vanished instantly in that genial place, and the excitement blossomed into a steady pleasure I will never forget. Serene vitality is not common in contemporary life, but it thrives at Oberlin, and I was shamelessly spoiled there with good food, good times, and good arguments, with unfailing kindness and [ xii]

Preface warmth. In short, I am deeply grateful to Marcia Colish, Nathan Greenberg, James Helm, Susan Kane, and Thomas Van Nortwick for memories of an experience which are no less delightful than the experience itself. I am also deeply grateful to the faculty of Classics at Oberlin for the sus¬ tained and very welcome encouragement they have given me in the preparation of this book. Finally, I offer hearty thanks to my several anonymous readers. Their corrections, suggestions, and admonitions were uncommonly painstaking and generous, and my final revisions owe them a very great debt. W. R.

Johnson

Chicago, Illinois

[x Hi]

MOMENTARY MONSTERS

Erictho and Her Universe

But when the planets In evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixture? Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

i.

This outrageous, sour, impossible poem — why, ex¬

cept to still the rumblings of antiquarian appetites — why should we bother with it at all? The Pharsalia has no hero, or too many. Its narrative is obscure, irritating, botched. It flouts epic conventions, or ignores them, or bungles them. Its central themes are scrambled by radical ambivalence of thought and feeling into what often seems not distant from gibberish. Lucan’s was an interesting, small talent that, through a mixture of indolence, vanity, and hysteria, ended by squandering itself on hopeless ambitions and ab¬ surd materials. So it may have seemed in the century previous to ours and even in much of this century as well. But the Pimp of Fashion, who is as absent-minded as he is capricious and powerful, sometimes finds himself the sudden partisan ol

Momentary Monsters what he has previously scorned. A marked shift in taste, not dissimilar to the ones that have rescued for us from the dungeons of High Classicism not only Euripides but also Ovid and Seneca, has, in recent decades, begun the task of freeing Lucan from his long near oblivion.1 About the time that Robert Graves homogenized both Apuleius and Lucan into his extraordinary version of Basic English2— an effort that was perhaps a symptom of this change in taste but hardly among its causes—students of the Pharsalia3 began learning not to apply conventional, classical cri¬ teria to this violently counterclassical poem; began to try to search out the criteria that Lucan himself, working with what his times gave him, shaped for the poem he wanted and needed to write. My aim in this book is to describe what I find attrac¬ tive in this peculiar poem and to sketch both what I think Lucan was trying to do and what I think he may have achieved beyond his intentions.4 Some writers put into

1. See Sanford, 239-41, for a description of J. C. Scaliger’s tiresome slander and its eventual, rotten aftermath. For the springs of the recovery in this century, see Fraenkel, 19-24. Good summaries of “the revival of interest” are made by Tucker and by Rutz (1970), 4-5, and (1985), 1457-1578. 2. What droll demon prompted this master of several exquisite prose styles to eviscerate the two Latin authors least suited to his prose? See Dilke’s dry, funny thanks to Graves for “making Lucan available,” 107—

8. 3. For a good discussion of the problems with the title, see Ahl, 32632.

4. Like other critics of the poem (some of whom will not acknowledge it), I am in part a creature of my time. The unique contours of one’s times open some vistas that were previously closed and close some that were previously open. I am not arguing tor relativism: one opinion is not just as good as another; some opinions are, for various reasons, better than others. No opinion is perfect. The brand of pluralism I am here espousing has received classic formulations from Samuel Johnson, 196-200; Santa¬ yana, 267; and Popper 1943, 2:267-68. For a charming cartoon of the plu¬ ralistic interpreter, see O’Hara, 35-36.

Erictlw and Her Universe their work almost precisely what they intend to put there (Horace was such a writer, I think, and Goethe also; so Montaigne and Nabokov); many writers—such is life and art — put into their works rather less than they intend; and some, Lucan, I believe, among them, put into what they write rather more than they intend. Not to be in complete control of one’s poem is doubtless an artistic shortcom¬ ing, but, in Lucan’s case, in addition to the trying circum¬ stances of the poem’s composition and its author’s youth, the difficulties of his central themes and the audacity of his experiment should win for him considerable indulgence.5 Bearing in mind the obstacles to its composition and mak¬ ing allowance for the fact that its composition was sadly terminated in an obscure web of political events, we can, I think, begin to approach the poem without excessive prej¬ udice, without demanding of it the perfect execution of its imperfect yet magnificent donnee. Undistracted by its pos¬ sible flaws, we can begin to see something of its greatness, can begin to experience something of the energy, the violent beauty, and the strong craving for truth that made Dante admire it and prompted Marlowe to begin its translation. Perhaps the best way to close with the challenge of Lu¬ can’s troublesome originality is to examine the first and one of the most persistent criticisms of his epical strategy, the moment in the Satyricon where Petronius causes his Eumolpus, that sly and venemous practitioner of literary criticism, to object to the absence from Lucan’s poem of the usual divine paraphernalia, deorumque ministeria. Ho¬ mer’s gods enter zestfully into the epic struggles of his hu5. It should be stressed that Lucan is, in a way, the author of a poem that is the “involuntary expression of a collectivity” (see Said, 156). But it is Lucan’s conscious and perhaps in part unconscious resistance to conflicting collectivities of which he was part that gives his poem its special flavor and strength.

Momentary Monsters mans (though the spiritual machinery of the Odyssey is notoriously sparer and more elegant than that of the Iliad); even Vergil, for all his ironic transformations of epic, makes copious, if deliberately eccentric, use of the divine. But Lucan does not, or so we are told. Look again. What is actually missing from the poem are only the Greek Olympians, or rather, their Italianate siblings. They are absent from Lucan’s poem because, as the poem shows, by Lucan’s time they have ceased to exist. What replaces them, what in fact displaces them violently from the poem, is an obscure, frightening evocation of strange gods, of nameless powers whose spheres of action and whose relationships with the human world are unknown and indeed unknowable but whose capacity for interven¬ ing in human affairs is as fearful as it is manifest.6 We might suppose that Lucan’s penchant for exotic, mysterious religions and for macabre spirituality stems only from his willingness to supply kinky ornament and delicate frissons for his depraved audiences but that, fully intact beneath the facade of his grotesque divine machin¬ ery, stands the firm, familiar solace of Stoic orthodoxy. If then he uses the words superi and fortuna and fatum rather casually, even capriciously and recklessly, that is only because he wants to give jaded ears the thrill of caco¬ phonies and thus relieve what would otherwise be the bor¬ ing, wholesome monotony of Stoic rationalities.7 The 6. See Liebeschuetz, 118 and 147; Le Bonniec, 167-70. 7. SeeTremoli, 71-75; Piacentini, 12-18; Sullivan, 146. The problem of presenting these “ideas” (they are feelings except when some philoso¬ phers and theologians think about them) poetically can be handled with¬ out exposing, as Lucan does, their complexities and imponderabilities, e.g., Vergil’s breathtaking and casual and magnificent sandwiching, For¬ tuna omnipotens et ineluctabile Fatum (Aeneid 8.334), or Horace’s sly tact in a biedermeier phrase for a deceptively biedermeier poem, fata donavere bonique dei (Odes 4.2.38). Lucan is interested in disrupting both the unveiling of the monument and the quiet family picnic that follows it.

[4]

Erictho and Her Universe problem with trying to explain away Lucan’s evocations of the irrational in this fashion is that Lucan does not offer the grotesque by way of contrast to the rational; it is not a part of a dialectical pattern from which a sane cosmos emerges in triumphant Hegelian synthesis. It is rather a ubiquitous presence that haunts the entire poem and grad¬ ually consumes it. It is not madness here, but reason, that is mere appearance. The reality is madness. 2.

A crucial and representative example of Lucan’s way

of imagining the role of the supernatural in the shaping of Rome’s fate is to be found in the prelude to Book 2, which opens just after Caesar has crossed the Rubicon on his way through Italy to Rome. At the very close of Book 1 we were treated to a wild medley of prophecies; from an Etruscan seer, from the venerable Nigidius Figulus, the neo-Pythagorean sage, and from an anonymous yet ex¬ tremely vociferous mantic matron. While our minds are still humming with this rich variety of deorum ministeria, Lucan begins Book 2 by offering us this theological obser¬ vation: iamque irae patuere deum manifestaque belli signa dedit mundus legesque et foedera rerum praescia monstrifero vertit natura tumultu indixitque nefas. cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi, sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam, noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades? sive parens rerum, cum primum informia regna materiamque rudem tlamma cedente recepit, fixit in aeternum causas, qua cuncta coercet se quoque lege tenens, et saecula iussa ferentem fatorum inmoto divisit limite mundum, sive nihil positum est, sed fors incerta vagatur fertque referque vices et habet mortalia casus, sit subitum quodcumque paras; sit caecae futuri mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti. [2.1-15]

[5]

Momentary Monsters Since it is little read today, I give, for this passage, the spir¬ ited, reasonably accurate translation, much admired by Samuel Johnson, of Nicholas Rowe.

Now manifest the wrath divine appear’d. And nature through the world the war declar’d; Teeming with monsters, sacred law she broke, And dire events in all her words bespoke. Thou, Jove, who dost in heaven supremely reign. Why does thy providence these signs ordain, And give us prescience to increase our pain? Doubly we bear thy dread-inflicting doom, And feel our miseries before they come. Whether the great creating Parent-soul, When first from chaos rude he formed the whole, Disposed futurity with certain hand And bade the necessary causes stand, Made one decree forever to remain, And bound himself in fate’s eternal chain; Or whether fickle fortune leads the dance, Nothing is fixed and all things come by chance; What’er thou shalt ordain, thou ruling Power, Unknown and sudden be the dreadful hour: Let mortals to their future fate be blind, And hope relieve the miserable mind.

Here, in small, is what is left of the epic gods and their conventional wrath. At this early stage of the poem, guided by epic convention and misled by it, as Lucan in¬ tended we should be, we naturally take these dei for the tra¬ ditional gods of epic (and at this point in the tradition, Vergil’s gods are, of course, dominant), who constitute a complex yet intelligible (Vergil had begun to tamper with this intelligibility) and satisfyihg distillation of the gods of the state, the poets, and the philosophers. So far, so good. But then, in an apostrophe to Jupiter (Lucan is extremely

[-5]

Erictho and Her Universe fond of addressing his characters and his abstractions — so fond, in fact, of warning, chastising, and pitying them, that he comes finally to seem like one of the characters in his own poem),8 9 the poet asks why mortals were given omens and prophecies and divination, which serve chiefly to augment the terror that fills their yet unverified premo¬ nitions: Cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi, / sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam, / noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades (2.4-6) (Why, ruler of Olympus, did it seem good to you to add this worry to anxious mortals — that through fearful omens they should have knowledge of coming disasters?). This complaint is hardly orthodox Stoicism, but more in¬ teresting than the poet’s small heresy here is the studied in¬ coherence of his closing prayer to Jupiter to let the future remain hidden from mortal sight: “Whatever you are get¬ ting ready for us [paras], let it come upon us suddenly—let the minds of men be blind to fate, let those possessed by dread, let them at least have hope.” Whether, says the poet, the Stoic version of the universe is the correct one, and eternal purpose rules the structure and the processes of reality through an unbreakable, irre¬ versible, and foreseeable chain of events, or, on the con¬ trary, the Epicureans are right and nothing is ordained and there is no plan for things as they are and were and will be, and multiple, simultaneous contingencies (what the vulgar call chance) are what rule reality—however things work, please don’t let us know the good news or the bad news before what happens happens, because, for humans in the grip of fear, slim or even false hope is better far than the certainty of disaster.1' Clearly, this prayer and the argu¬ ment that supports it are rather peculiar. If Jupiter, who is 8. See von Albrecht, 289-92; Cizek, 343-44; Williams, 234; Marti, 82-89. 9. For a stimulating discussion of this section of the poem, see Narducci 1979, 66-71.

[7]

Momentary Monsters apparently both the rector Olympi and the Stoic parens rerum here, has set up the unalterable law of which Lucan is un¬ certain, then Lucan’s prayer would make some sense, for what may have been ordained, may, if the ordainer so de¬ sires, be revealed. But if it is fors incerta that determines what does and does not occur, then Jupiter cannot reason¬ ably be called upon to predict a future that he is ignorant of (an ignorance that the ironic paras underscores). Which is it then, design or chance? Lucan does not bother to tell us what the structure and events of his poem will plainly re¬ veal, namely, the blatant absence of any design. Has Lu¬ can’s notorious taste for rhetorical elaboration run away with him again and lured him into constructing a cute paradox, a jejeune antinomy? Or is he, as is in wont, hav¬ ing a little sinister fun with his genre, his material, and his audience? In this passage, fate and fortune are opposed to each other in such a way as to be mutually exclusive.10 Else¬ where in the poem they are sometimes all but interchange¬ able, as they also are, or seem to be, in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass; but in that amazing novel, what seemed to its naughty, silly, charming hero to be good luck, then bad luck, is finally revealed to be fate, which turns out to be in fact the providential love of Isis for her creatures. In Lucan there is, so far as I can discover, no trace of such an evolu¬ tion from whirligig fortune to bedrock, loving destiny. (Nor do I think it likely that the harakiri at Utica would have adumbrated such a transformation.) Instead, as the passage before us shows in small, there is throughout the poem an erratic, violent feeling that oscillates between the two poles of fortune and fate and finds no equilibrium. As elsewhere in the poem, the hectic energies are almost con¬ tained in an austere, mosaic style: the great, powerful Latin

io. See Pratt, 51; Liebeschuetz, 142-43, 148.

Erictho and Her Universe nouns are slipped into strict patterns, the high abstractions are carefully controlled by neutral verbs and muted adjec¬ tives." The spare design of the passage, on one level, re¬ calls in its density something of the strategies, something of the terse clarity of Latin prose at its best; on another level, a subtle discord, fitful echoes of Lucretian, Vergilian, and Ovidian music, lets Epicurus and Zeno collide and shatter. What generates this passage and the poem itself (what generates most if not all epics) is divine anger, but Lucan’s version of divine anger (iarnque irae patuere deum) does not shape this passage or this poem. In Homer and, mutatis mutandis, in Apollonius—even, in a way, in Vergil — di¬ vine wrath, however mysterious at its core, is part of the cosmos; if it is not wholly susceptible to explanation (or, as Milton has it, of vindication), it is nonetheless not wholly unintelligible. But in Lucan’s poem this is not the case. Lucan’s reality, his world, is not a divine machine con¬ trolled in part by gods, some of whose intentions we feel can be explained by an allegory of anger (so Homer, so the allegorizing Stoics, so, in a way, even Plato as fabulist); nor is it a divine machine that contains gods who in no way control it and that can be so perfectly explained by rational discourse that anger and its allegories (and poetry itself) are utterly unnecessary (so the Sophists, Socrates, and Epi¬ curus). The alternatives that Lucan posits in his ironic prayer to Jupiter are precisely what he rejects from his poem. His universe is not divine or rational. It is demonic and subrational. Suppose there is an eternal machine—we will be look¬ ing at such a machine presently in a slightly different ii. Aspects of Lucan’s style are well described by both Fraenkel, 2931, and Mayer, 19. Heitland observes the stylistic (and narrative) manner of Lucan — and then uses his admirable observations to condemn the poet and to pity him, lxiii-xciv.

[p]

Momentary Monsters context—that may be said to manifest or, more loosely, to make things according to some mad, mysterious logic of its own, to churn them out automatically, almost flaw¬ lessly, in order to mash them up, and then to start up again, modeling and mutilating. Creation and destruction, in this scheme, become an all but identical process, one with vague laws and causalities, but one wholly without purpose or meaning. Imagine, then, a machine (though it is not purposeful, it is supremely intelligent) that never ceases to function but that is never (from the human stand¬ point) in good repair. Imagine a machine for which mak¬ ing is the same as breaking, a machine that manufactures ruin. All that it can or wants to do is break and make, make and break. It is the Stoic machine gone mad. Accepting, for the purposes of argument, this Lucanian model of the universe, we see that it is quite possible to predict the future: things will always get broken. All pre¬ diction tells us is which things and when, in what order. (This is, by the way, all that history can tell us about the past.) There is nothing more to know. Seen in this light, the anger of Lucan’s gods recalls the chilling passage at the beginning of Tacitus’ history of the aftermath of Nero’s reign (Histories 1.3): “Besides the manifold misfortunes that befell mankind, there were prodigies in the sky and on the early, warnings given by thunderbolts, and prophecies of the future, both joyful and gloomy, uncertain and clear [laeta tristia, ambigua manifesto]. For never was it more fully proved by the awful disasters of the Roman people or by indubitable signs that the gods care not for our safety but for our punishment [non esse curae deis securitatem nostram sed ultionem].”'2 This remark is rhetorical embroidery, perhaps, but it is embroidery furnished by powerful sub¬ terranean intuitions, by religious fear become obsessive. 12. The translation is that of Clifford H. Moore (Loeb, 1929).

Erictho and Her Universe Epicurus, then, was wrong: the gods are not indifferent to us because they are powerless over us; they are not in¬ different and they are very powerful. But Zeno, too, was wrong: the gods, though very much concerned with mor¬ tals, do not want to lead us to happiness, they want us annihilated. Gods, nature, fate, fortune—these are words, words that dimly and inaccurately signify an inscrutable, omnipotent malevolence at the heart of history, of human experience. In the age of Nero, these words, these allego¬ ries masquerading as facts, are useless. Liceat sperare timenti, indeed!13 I am not, of course, suggesting that Lucan consciously entertained this theological position. Rather, it seems to me it was a feeling, an archaic thought, that came to per¬ vade his poem, a persistent mood that he perhaps sought to exorcise as he composed his poem by composing his poem. Pondering the past century of Rome, looking about him at Nero and Nero’s Rome, he was led by his disaster, I think, to shape a poem that he did not want, had not intended, to write. The poem that he had wanted to write was, I think, to have been shaped by other intuitions, by other thoughts and moods. We can glimpse something of his initial inspi¬ rations toward the beginning of Book 4, where the two ar13. See Narducci, 1979, 70, for “perfidious fate.” One is not surprised to see Seneca the Elder saying these black things {sive fato quodam, cuius maligna perpetuaque in rebus omnibus lex est ut ad summa perducta rursus ad infimum, velocius quidem quam ascenderant, relabantur [Preface, Controversiae, 7]); but when one finds Cicero, as he explains the origins of the civil war before Caesar, striking much the same note (however disingenuously), mice dance up and down one’s spine: “fato sumus nescio quo rei publicae misero funestoque compulsi” {pro Marcello, 13). To mark this statement as a topos (that of malignant, inscrutable destiny), as a convention (in this passage in Cicero, or in Lucan’s poem), answers nothing. Only less than mediocre writers grab their topoi willy-nilly. To select a cliche carefully, for a given context and purpose, is usually to transform it—which is what both Lucan and Cicero do with this one. See also Demosthenes, Phil. 3.54.

Momentary Monsters mies in Spain, that of Caesar and that of Petreius, enjoy a brief truce:

nunc ades, aeterno conplectens omnia nexu, o rerum mixtique salus Concordia mundi et sacer orbis amor: magnum nunc saecula nostra venturi discrimen habent. ... [4- 189-92]

(Now be present, O thou that gatherest all things into an unend¬ ing fabric, O Harmony, savior of things that are, of this mingled world, O divine love of the world. For at this moment in time we face a great crisis whose outcome will mean much for the fu¬ ture. . . . )

Another prayer—a sublime prayer — and another apostro¬ phe. To make it, the poet himself journeys back in time almost a hundred years to his native Spain, to the place where the two armies are, for a brief moment, at peace. Kin greeting kin, they lay aside their arms, relax, and en¬ joy each other’s company. This is a fully Stoic moment. Concordia and amor are aspects of pneuma, of sympnoia, the breath and fire and mind that unite all things. The sublimity of this prayer, however, quickly dissolves into poignancy, then into bitter tragedy and a sardonic refutation of the very spirit that had inspired prayer. Lucan imagines himself present at this moment of hostility tem¬ porarily suspended by the reunion of kinsmen (