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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Shadi Bartsch. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. x + 224 pages.
For Dante (and his guide Virgil) the epic poets Lucan and Statius were a major part of the glory of Rome and the western European tradition. But their fame has not survived like that of the Aeneid, and the so-called "Silver Latin epic" has been seen for many generations as an eccentric taste even for professional Latinists. Indeed Lucan's epic is an extreme case, since both the Aeneid and Thebaid are set in the heroic period of myth, whereas Lucan's narrative dealt with recent history which was still politically dangerous material. It could be claimed that all three poets wrote about civil war: but Aeneas's reluctant war with the Latins was civil only in the sense that Virgil's contemporaries saw all of Italy as one people, and the impiety, or "wrongness" of this war comes primarily from its origin in treaty violation in opposition to the fate that was Rome's manifest destiny. In contrast, Statius's Theban war was driven by the inhuman mutual hatred of Oedipus's sons, the tyrant Ereodes, and the exiled Polynices, leading an allied army against his own brother and his own city. But Lucan, whose war happened in the full light of history and had been narrated both by its protagonist Caesar and the Augustan historian Livy, could also call his war "worse than civil," since Caesar, the aggressor, was warring against forces led by his own son-in-law, Pompey.
What does civil war evoke for us? For Americans the bitter conflict of North and South, states originally independent and independently governed with different economic bases. This war is already further in the past than the century between Caesar's death and Lucan's poem. The English civil war was ideological--an attempted revolution against a corrupt monarchy, driven by religious dissent and regional disparities: even the Spanish civil war of the nineteen-thirties was based on ideology, sending idealists like George Orwell to fight for the elected communist government against reactionary forces backed by foreign powers.
Rome's civil war was something else again. There was talk of liberty on both sides, but no vision of society was involved. Caesar's motive was as much fear of prosecution, once he dismissed...
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