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''The victor's cause pleased the gods, but the vanquished pleased Cato.'' }}
'''''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 [[Gaius Julius Caesar|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]]''. 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 the Real Monsters|human leaders]], with the issue of ''why'' these particular men had power being ascribed to the Stoic concept of "fate."
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