Pharsalia: Difference between revisions

''Pharsalia'', or ''Bellum Civile'' (''The Civil War''), is an [[Epic Poem]] by the first century AD [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] poet [[Lucan]]. It covers the Roman Civil War between [[Julius Caesar (Creator)|Julius Caesar]] and [[Pompey the Great]], from the former's crossing of the Rubicon to his seduction by Cleopatra. It was still in progress when [[Author Existence Failure|Lucan was forced to commit suicide]] for conspiracy to kill Emperor Nero. This gave it the mother of all Classical cliffhangers, with Caesar in the midst of a sword fight with Ganymede, a partisan of Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy.

What makes the ''Pharsalia'' special among epics is Lucan's decision to depict the gods as dead. Other Roman poets had attempted to portray relatively-recent history, such as the Second Punic War, as world-historical events on par with the Trojan War. All they succeeded in doing was producing knockoffs of ''[[The Iliad (Literature)|The Iliad]]''. Lucan abandoned the Homeric trope of human conflict as a family feud among the Olympians. Every bad thing that happens can be ascribed entirely to [[Humans Are Bastards|human leaders]], with the issue of ''why'' these particular men had power being ascribed to the Stoic concept of "fate."

Despite its unfinished status, the epic was a huge success and remained a popular school text as long as Latin was the language of instruction, though never enjoying universal use like ''[[The Aeneid (Literature)|The Aeneid]]'' and ''[[The Metamorphoses (Literature)|The Metamorphoses]]''.

* [[Death By Irony]]: Lucan himself. The epic was cut short by his involvement in a failed conspiracy against Nero, to whom the poem begins with a fawning dedication.