Arts, Faculty of
Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Hilliard, Emma Caitlin
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
In the world of Greek and Latin epic poetry, supernatural apparitions loom large. Traditionally these episodes are sorted into three major topoi: the epic dream topos, the ghost or haunting topos, and the divine messenger topos. However, such categorization denies the complex and highly syncretistic model of ancient thought on supernatural beings. I propose a new “apparition topos” as a more flexible means of interpretation, one which allows space for different types of manifestation more clearly to inform one another. This thesis represents a focused application of the apparition topos. It provides a close reading of the two apparition scenes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile: Julius Caesar’s vision of Roma at the Rubicon (1.183–205) and the haunting of Pompey the Great by his wife, Julia (3.1–35). Central to the study is Lucan’s complicated relationship with Virgil, Latin literature’s most important epicist, and the interplay between Lucan’s specters and the ghosts and gods of the Aeneid is the primary concern of the text. Special attention is given to features of language, such as sentence structure and syntax, diction, and parallels of phrasing (both intratextual and intertextual). The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of Lucan’s epic and demonstrate the merits of applying a new, holistic way of looking at epic apparitions, subsuming ghosts, dreams, and gods as related phenomena worthy of close comparison.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EPIC: A CLOSE READING OF THE APPARITION TOPOS IN LUCAN’S BELLUM CIVILE by EMMA CAITLIN HILLIARD A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Classics) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May 2016 © Emma Caitlin Hilliard, 2016 ii ABSTRACT In the world of Greek and Latin epic poetry, supernatural apparitions loom large. Traditionally these episodes are sorted into three major topoi: the epic dream topos, the ghost or haunting topos, and the divine messenger topos. However, such categorization denies the complex and highly syncretistic model of ancient thought on supernatural beings. I propose a new “apparition topos” as a more flexible means of interpretation, one which allows space for different types of manifestation more clearly to inform one another. This thesis represents a focused application of the apparition topos. It provides a close reading of the two apparition scenes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile: Julius Caesar’s vision of Roma at the Rubicon (1.183–205) and the haunting of Pompey the Great by his wife, Julia (3.1–35). Central to the study is Lucan’s complicated relationship with Virgil, Latin literature’s most important epicist, and the interplay between Lucan’s specters and the ghosts and gods of the Aeneid is the primary concern of the text. Special attention is given to features of language, such as sentence structure and syntax, diction, and parallels of phrasing (both intratextual and intertextual). The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of Lucan’s epic and demonstrate the merits of applying a new, holistic way of looking at epic apparitions, subsuming ghosts, dreams, and gods as related phenomena worthy of close comparison. iii PREFACE This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Emma Caitlin Hilliard. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... ii. PREFACE ....................................................................................................................................... iii. TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................... iv. LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................. v. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. vi. DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ vii. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: ROMA ........................................................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER 3: JULIA ......................................................................................................................... 37 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................... 56 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 58 v LIST OF TABLES TABLE 1: APPARITION TOPOS CHART ............................................................................................. 5 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to my graduate advisor, Dr. Susanna Braund, who first introduced me to my love of Lucan. Her wisdom has fundamentally shaped not only this thesis, but my broader understanding of and appreciation for the Latin epic genre. I would also like to thank the other members of my thesis committee: Dr. C. W. Marshall, who has been a constant source of support and good spirit throughout my time at UBC, and who pushed me to approach every aspect of my thesis with precision and intellectual rigor, and Dr. Leanne Bablitz, for her insightful edits and candid positivity. Thank you to Graham and Marshall, for the late afternoon debates. Finally, I am grateful to my family and to Justin, for always being here with me, though far away. vii FOR MR. SULLIVAN gaudeamus igitur 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. SYLVIA PLATH, “OCEAN 1212-W” In the world of Greek and Latin epic poetry, supernatural apparitions loom large.1 The epic genre is equipped with its own lexicon of topoi: councils of the gods on bright Olympus, the clash and din of heroes in aristeiai, eerie groves, funeral games, and storms on the loud-sounding sea. Supernatural encounters, too, are familiar set pieces for the reader of epic. Apparitions enter the landscape as unnatural visitors, emissaries from the world beyond. They approach in liminal spaces and times—in the ambivalent hours of dusk and dawn, at the crossroads of wakefulness and sleep—bringing wonder and terror to those whom they visit. From their hazy origins in Homer’s Patroclus to the more terrifying ghosts of Statius and Silius Italicus, apparitions are a universal element in Greco-Roman epic. Scholarly interest in epic apparitions is as ubiquitous as the apparitions themselves. Traditionally, such analyses makes heavy use of the favored instruments in the classicist’s toolkit: rigorous subdivision and categorization. Epic supernatural episodes are generally divided into three major topoi: the epic dream topos, the ghost or haunting topos, and the divine messenger topos. The epic dream topos deals with supernatural visions in sleep; the haunting topos explores general visitations of ghosts to the living; finally, the divine messenger topos concentrates on epiphanies, episodes in which immortal beings reveal themselves to humans. 1 A brief note on the title of this paper, “A Spectre is Haunting Epic: A Close Reading of the Apparition Topos in Lucan’s Bellum Civile”. While I have used Americanized spelling throughout the thesis, I have retained the European spelling “spectre” here, reflecting the standard translation of the opening line of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. 2 While scholars writing on their topos of choice do make passing references to the related topoi, scholarly examinations of each subject are often developed in relative isolation from one another. However, this differentiation between dreams and ghosts and gods is a distinctly modern preference. A brief study of Greek and Latin words for apparitions reveals few functional distinctions in ancient thought between different types of supernatural entities, as reflected in shared words to describe all manner of supernatural activity.2 The Greek words δαίµων, φάσµα, and εἴδωλον can refer variously to ghosts, gods, and supernatural beings. Latin displays the same flexibility: monstrum can refer to religious portents, prodigies of nature, or ghosts, and imago can refer not only to spirits of the dead, but also to false “phantoms” of humans fashioned by the gods. This is not to suggest that these terms are interchangeable, but rather that this intersectionality of meaning reveals a complex and highly syncretistic model of ancient thought on supernatural beings. Scholarship too should take a holistic approach to the study of apparition events, directly comparing scenes of all three types to reach a fuller understanding of the passage in question. In this thesis I propose a new and broader “apparition topos” which embraces all of the above. This unification allows space for different types of manifestation more clearly to inform one another. To illustrate this point on a literary level, I will briefly address problems with previous attempts to categorize the Bellum Civile’s Roma apparition episode (1.183–205) into one of the three previously established topoi, and demonstrate that my proposal offers a solution. The action of Lucan’s epic opens with an apparition scene: a personification of the city of Rome appears to Julius Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon and begs him to go no further.3 This vision is the focus of my discussion in Chapter 2. One representative view of this scene is 2 D. Felton briefly raises this issue in the introduction to her book on Greek and Roman hauntings. Felton (1999), xii. 3 The action actually begins at line 183, after lengthy preliminaries by Lucan. 3 that of M.P.O. Morford, who has suggested reading Roma as “a waking vision which functions as a dream.”4 I suggest that Morford’s reading rests on a large leap of logic, one which ultimately renders his observation inadequate. This is a “dream” sequence in which Caesar is not asleep. Furthermore, if the passage were meant to function as an epic dream, and if Lucan intended to represent it as such, he would have had plenty of historical sources to accommodate a dream sequence. Indeed, the raw material would allow him to tackle the scene in striking fashion. In his account of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, Plutarch mentions that on the night before Caesar made the fateful crossing, he had “an unnatural dream: he thought, namely, that he was having incestuous intercourse with his own mother” (Plut. Caes. 32). Suetonius attributes a similar dream to Caesar while he served as a quaestor in Spain, to which an interpreter of dreams tells him that his mother represents the Earth, the universal parent, who was to become subject to him (Suet. Div. Jul. 7). It would have been easy for Lucan to portray Roma visiting the sleeping Caesar in a dream—Roma, symbolic both as his motherland and his own mother—if an epic dream had been Lucan’s intention. Morford’s assignation of Roma to the dream topos also denies the scene’s most crucial point of characterization for Caesar: he makes the decision to commit an act of incredible sacrilege while he is awake. His conscious insistence on proceeding with the ultimate nefas, the violation which will begin the war, is critical both to the poet’s portrayal of Caesar and to the narrative as a whole. Neil W. Bernstein offers another approach and assigns the Roma episode to the haunting topos, categorizing Roma as one of epic’s ghostly apparitions. “The imago Patriae,” he concedes, “is not, strictly speaking, the ghost of a formerly living individual. However, both the presence of a Virgilian model scene and the multiple references in Lucan’s epic to the death of the Patria (2.21–28, 293–303; see Fantham [1992] ad loc.) license the reading as a ghostly 4 Morford (1967), 75. 4 epiphany.”5 But Bernstein’s reading, again, in its efforts to make Roma fit an established topos, denies a key aspect of the scene: Roma is not a ghost. A ghost is formerly a flesh and blood human being, often a relative or loved one of the spectator.6 Lucan’s Roma certainly does function as a ghost in certain narrative respects—to be explored further in the Roma chapter—but she is inarguably not the shade of a formerly living individual.7 It is my task, therefore, to resist this trend of compartmentalization and argue that the many shared elements of the three topoi justify the creation of a broader umbrella topos, one which encompasses all its subsidiary topoi and encourages close comparison between them. My thesis will not seek to revolutionize this area of study; indeed, it ultimately supports many of the conclusions of both Morford and Bernstein’s readings of the Roma scene. However, I suggest that it is unnecessary and unhelpful to differentiate between the three previously established topoi because the dichotomies separating them—such as wakefulness versus sleep, ghost versus god—are subsidiary to the strong linguistic and thematic elements which unite them. I have modeled my project in some respects on Monica Matthew’s work on the epic storm topos (2008), especially in the creation of a topos chart, which breaks down the apparition scene and lists its core elements. The table below shows the eleven elements of the epic apparition topos which I suggest had become standard by Lucan’s day. The left column presents references to eight major apparition scenes in Greek and Latin epic prior to the Bellum Civile to establish the pattern and provide examples; each scene chosen for inclusion on the topos chart exhibits at least four of the topos elements identified. References to earlier epics are not intended 5 Bernstein (2011), 216 n. 18. 6 In this thesis, the word “spectator” is used to refer to the individual who perceives the apparition. 7 As a sort-of intermediary between Morford and Bernstein stands Paul A. Roche, who toes a more moderate line: “Significant … is the use of language that helps blur the distinction (here and at 3.9–12) between dream visitation and waking vision.” Roche (2009), 205. However, Roche’s statement still assumes the fundamental dichotomy of epic dream versus epic vision. 5 to be comprehensive, but rather illustrative. The right column explores Lucan’s treatment in his two apparition scenes in the Bellum Civile (Roma 1.183–205 and Julia 3.1–35). TABLE 1. THE APPARITION TOPOS CHART ELEMENTS L.’S TREATMENT OF ELEMENT 1. The specter’s approach: the apparition appears at night or while the spectator is asleep (Il. 23.62–64; Od. 6.15–19; Aen. 2.268–270; Aen. 2.621; Aen. 2.754; Aen. 3.147; Met. 11.650–652; Met. 15.21). Roma appears to Caesar in the darkness of night—L. situates the crossing of the Rubicon at night to accommodate the topos, despite this being an unusual military action (1.187); Julia appears to Pompey while he is asleep, but curiously during the day—Pompey had just watched Italy fade out of sight on the horizon, an action which requires daylight (3.8–9). 2. The specter’s approach: the apparition appears “before the eyes” of the spectator; language is used related to vision (Aen. 2.270; Aen. 2.589; Aen. 2.773; Aen. 3.150). 3. The specter’s approach: apparition described as “perfectly clear” (clara), despite potential difficulty with seeing due to darkness (Aen. 2.589–592; Aen. 3.150–152). Despite the darkness of the night, the vision of Roma is clear (1.86). 4. The specter’s approach: a physical description of apparition, often with details indicating the tone of the deity’s message (sad, angry, etc.) (Il. 23.65–67; Aen. 2.270–280; Aen. 2.591–594; Aen. 2.769; Met. 11.652–657). Roma appears in behavior traditional of mourning; it is unclear if her hair is white with age or with fright (1.186–190); Julia rises through the yawning earth and stands like a Fury on a pyre (3.9–11). 5. The specter’s speech: the apparition identifies itself and reinforces its personal relation to the spectator (Il. 23.69–70; Aen. 2.289–292; Aen. 2.594; Aen. 2.776–777; Aen. 3.156–159; Met. 11.658–660). Roma reminds Caesar that he bears her standards and claims to be her citizen (1.190–192); Julia reaffirms her status as Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife (3.20, 3.27–28). 6 ELEMENTS L.’S TREATMENT OF ELEMENT 6. The specter’s speech: the apparition announces the circumstances of its appearance (i.e. who sent it, why it has come) (Il. 23.64–74; Od. 6.25–28; Aen. 2.290ff; Aen. 2.594–618; Aen. 2.778–779; Aen. 3.154–155; Met. 11.661–662). Roma questions Caesar’s motivations in crossing the Rubicon, but is exceedingly brief in her address (1.191–192); Julia has been exiled from the fields of the Blessed, newly guilty for her role in fomenting civil war. The rulers of the dead have allowed her to return to haunt Pompey (1.12–30). 7. The specter’s speech: The apparition issues an order, often with a series of imperatives (Il. 23.71; Od. 6.25–31; Aen. 2.289–295; Aen. 2.619–620; Aen. 2.780–784; Aen. 3.160–171; Met. 11.661–670; Met. 25.22–23). Roma is rather weak in her address, issuing no direct prohibitive order to Caesar (1.191–192); likewise, Julia delivers no order, but instead promises to haunt Pompey’s nights as Caesar haunts his days (3.27). 8a. The spectator’s reaction: the spectator is stricken or amazed (obstipescere, Aen. 2.774; attonare, Aen. 3.172). Horror “strikes” Caesar (perculit horror, 1.192–193). 8b. The spectator’s reaction: hair stands on end (steterunt comae, Aen. 2.774). Caesar’s hair stands on end (riguere comae, 1.193). 8c. The spectator’s reaction: a cold sweat breaks out (gelidus sudor, Aen. 3.175). 8d. The spectator’s reaction: paralysis restricts motion or speech (vox faucibus haesit, Aen. 2.774). Caesar’s steps are checked (gressumque coercens languor … tenuit uestigia, 1.192–193). 9. The spectator’s reaction: the spectator addresses the apparition (Il. 23.94–98; Aen. 2.281–283; Met. 11.676). Caesar gives a long–winded reply, first addressing Jupiter, the Penates, and the “secret mysteries,” then Roma herself (1.195–203); Pompey does not respond verbally before Julia flees, but after her disappearance, explains the apparition away via a very Stoic rationalization (3.38–40). 7 ELEMENTS L.’S TREATMENT OF ELEMENT 10. The spectator’s reaction: the spectator attempts to embrace the their former lover, but fails (Il. 23.99–100; Aen. 2.792–794; Met. 11.674–675). Pompey attempts to embrace Julia, but fails (3.34–35). 11. The apparition withdraws (Il. 23.100–101; Od. 6.41–43; Aen. 2.621; Aen. 2.791). Roma does not withdraw—instead, it seems Caesar marches right through her (1.204–205); Julia flees Pompey’s embrace (3.34–35). While I have chosen to label the elements numerically for ease of reference (to be referred to henceforth with the § symbol), this should not suggest their order of appearance to follow a set pattern. Each poet molds the apparition topos to his own purpose, shifting the order of the features, including some, omitting others. No apparition scene includes all eleven elements, but if we were to imagine a perfect, “Platonic ideal” of the apparition scene, it would proceed as follows. The scene opens with the specter’s approach, which usually occurs in the darkness of night or when the spectator is asleep (§1). The apparition is described as manifesting “before the eyes” of the spectator, with language used related to vision (§2). The apparition is also described as “perfectly clear” (clara), despite potential difficulty with seeing due to darkness or gloom (§3). A description of the apparition is made, with physical details and actions revealing the tone of the deity’s message (usually the apparition displays signs of grief or anger) (§4). The apparition then makes its address to the spectator. It identifies itself, reinforcing its personal relation to the spectator; common roles include a patron god, a former lover, or a close relative (§5). The apparition then announces the immediate circumstances of its appearance, summarizing where it came from, who sent it, or the situation at hand (§6). It issues an order to 8 the spectator in the imperative voice (§7). The spectator first reacts to the apparition physically with surprise or fear (§8a–d), then responds verbally (§9). Sometimes further discussion occurs between the two characters; sometimes the exchange is limited to the apparition’s address and the spectator’s reply. The message delivered and the interaction complete, the apparition withdraws (§10, §11). While many of these elements find their origins in Homer’s apparition scenes, I contend the apparition formula was codified in Latin literature by Virgil, whose impact on later epic cannot be overstated, and to whom the Neronian poet Lucan is widely acknowledged to be directly responding.8 The close overlap between elements unique to Virgil and those included by Lucan—particularly in physical descriptions of fear reactions (see especially §8a–d)—underlines Lucan’s close attention to the Aeneid as inspiration. I have chosen to center my work on Lucan in part for this reason: he is situated relatively late in the epic tradition, and writes with great awareness of the epics which precede him. Epic is an essentially reflective genre. Philip Hardie summarizes: “As a product of the oral tradition epic has a set towards continuation; from these origins it also carries with it the habit of repetition, the repetition of verbal formulas, scenes, themes and structures.”9 It is one of the primary tasks of the ancient epicist to digest previous epics and refashion the stock elements of the genre in his own way. But in a reflective genre Lucan stands out as an especially reflective poet, utilizing what Gian Biagio Conte describes as “a polemical (or ‘antiphrastic,’ as it has been called) rehandling of Virgilian expressions and situations.”10 As a poet in Nero’s court, one with 8 For the best of many discussions on Virgil’s influence on Lucan, see generally Hardie (1993). “Lucan takes control of his predecessors’ material not as a respectful son entering into a father’s inheritance, but as a rebel.” Hardie (1993), 109. See also Ahl (1993), 125–142; Behr (2007), 16–32; Albrecht (1999), 236–243; Thomson and Bruère (1968), 1–21. It is unfortunate that no surviving Latin epic before Virgil contains an apparition scene; the vision of Homer to Ennius would be especially valuable for this study. 9 Hardie (1993), 14. 10 Conte (1994), 444. 9 an increasingly pessimistic attitude towards imperialism, Lucan actively inverts or perverts the treatments of epic topoi in Virgil’s Aeneid to undermine Virgil’s “deception” of Roman liberty under a principate.11 I suggest Lucan’s treatment of the apparition topos to mirror his treatment of other major epic topoi in the Bellum Civile.12 Much work has already been devoted to this aspect of Lucan’s modus operandi; I will only briefly outline the pattern to establish the groundwork for my study. The epic tree-felling topos centers on the chopping down of a grove by a crew of men, often for the construction of the pyre of a dead hero.13 It finds its origins, as do many epic topoi, in Homer’s Iliad, where the Achaeans fell wood for the funeral pyre of Patroclus (23.110–26). Ennius’s Annals features the scene’s earliest appearance in extant Latin epic, where trees are felled for the pyres of those slain at the battle of Heraclea (6.181–5).14 Virgil’s tree-felling scene also takes place in Book 6 of his Aeneid, where Aeneas and his crew chop down ash and oak for the funeral pyre of Misenus (6.176–184).15 Here Aeneas is at the forefront, primus among his men as he urges them on, an action Virgil frames as a mark of his leadership (6.183). Lucan, too, includes a tree-felling scene, as well he must according to the expectations of the genre (3.381–452). His treatment of the topos in Book 3 of the Bellum Civile reveals his close attention to Virgil’s treatment of the scene: Caesar shows similar initiative to Aeneas, striking the first blow on the pagan grove at Massilia as the charismatic leader of his men (3.433). But Lucan frames Caesar’s action not as noble, but sacrilegious, and Caesar not as a respectable commander, but a megalomaniac (3.433). The grove is felled not to construct a funeral pyre, a pious action 11 For a concise summary of Lucan’s complicated relationship with Nero, see Conte (1994), 444–445. See also Ahl (1976), 1–61; Grimal (2010), 59–68; Dilke (1972), 62–82. 12 For the definition and history of topos as a tool in philological criticism, see Curtius (1953), 70–1, 79–105. For the role and function of topoi in epic, see Hinds (1998), 34–47. 13 For an excellent exploration of this topos in epic poetry, see Braund (1992), xliv. 14 For an overview of scholarship on Lucan and Ennius, see Albrecht (1999), 233–236. Albrecht himself argues that Ennius’s influence on Lucan was likely indirect and mediated through the Aeneid (235). 15 The Aeneid also features a second tree-felling scene in Book 11 for the funeral of Pallas (11.133–8). 10 intended to commemorate life, but on Caesar’s whim, his wish to destroy life simply because it exists (3.426–428). Here we find an example of Lucan using an epic set piece scene but to a very different purpose, one which seems to respond to Virgil with a distinct tone of resentment towards the model.16 Perhaps an even more recognizable epic topos is the hero’s journey to the Underworld, or katabasis. Homer sets the standard with Odysseus’s journey beyond the River of Ocean to the gloomy land of the Cimmerians (Od. 11.1–640); subsequent epics follow suit, with Book 6 of the Aeneid standing as one of the most important moments in the epic, a vision both of the past and of Rome’s glorious future. Lucan’s perversion of Virgil’s Underworld has been exhaustively analyzed.17 Here Lucan inverts details in even the smallest particulars—I will sketch the contrast only in broad strokes. As Virgil placed his katabasis in Book 6 of his Aeneid, so Lucan places his Underworld experience in Book 6 of his Bellum Civile. But where Virgil’s seeker of arcane knowledge, Aeneas, is the picture of pietas, Pompey’s son Sextus is frightened, disloyal, and explicitly described as unworthy of his father (6.419–424; 589). Virgil provides a supernatural guide for Aeneas, the Sibyl, whom Lucan mirrors with the Thessalian hag Erichtho—however, instead of guiding the hero down into the Underworld, Lucan’s Überwitch drags the Underworld up to the surface by means of black magic, perhaps the most literal inversion of the Aeneid in the Bellum Civile. A pageant of the dead, good and bad, recalls the procession of heroes at the end of Aeneid 6 (6.785–796). And finally, while Aeneas’s journey to the world of the dead culminates 16 Jamie Masters identifies this scene as representing Lucan’s technique on metaliterary level: the act of desecration, “this hewing and carting of wood as material for a huge structure,” is an analogue for Lucan’s “plundering” of his epic predecessors’ material for his own poem. Masters (1992), 27. For more on the representation of sacred groves in Greek and Latin literature, see Leigh (2010) and Phillips (1968). Erysichthon, the impious axeman of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is also not to be overlooked as an influence on Caesar’s characterization in this passage (8.738–76). 17 See especially Masters on Erichtho’s relation to both Virgil’s Sibyl and Lucan’s own Phemonoe from the Delphic episode (5.120–197) (Masters (1992), 180–196); W. R. Johnson on Erichtho as the archetypal monster in Lucan’s discors machina, Virgil’s ordered universe turned on its head (Johnson (1987), 1–33); and R. Gordon on the Erichtho episode as representative of the reclassification of religious values in the Bellum Civile, with Virgil’s pietas supplanted by its inverse (Gordon (1987), 231–241). 11 in a meeting with his father and a clear vision of Rome’s future, Sextus Pompey’s oracle obliquely details death for Caesar and Pompey alike (6.802–820). I cite these two examples to posit Lucan’s similar treatment of the apparition topos, a series of accommodations and inversions which reveals a complicated and often subversive relationship with Virgil and the apparitions of his Aeneid. It is worth noting, however, that Lucan is not monolithic in his “anti-Virgilism”18 in the Bellum Civile as a whole, nor is he completely monolithic in his treatment of the apparition topos. He does accommodate many elements favored by Virgil, and shows deference not only to his most influential predecessor, but to others too, especially Homer and Ovid. However, the several points of deviation—points of deviation to be explored in this essay—will provide even further depth to Lucan’s complicated relationship with Latin literature’s most important epicist. Like the tree-felling and katabasis topoi, the apparition topos is well suited for illuminating Lucan’s attitudes towards Virgil, as this quotation from Emanuele Narducci will reveal: In Lucan … the antiphrastic allusivity is, in general, sustained by a tone of deep indignation. It is as if Virgil, with his poem, had perpetuated an illusion, covering with an idyllic veil a tragic and disconcerting reality: the end of Roman liberty is the transformation of the old res publica into a tyranny.19 Through the character of Cotta, Lucan even refers to the semblance of liberty under Caesar’s military rule as a “ghost” (umbra).20 In light of both quotations, the apparition topos is an especially qualified vehicle to explore Lucan’s frustration with “illusion” of Virgil’s epic. My thesis will aim therefore not only to define this new apparition topos, but to take stock of 18 Andreas Thierfelder (1970) gives an especially influential reading of the Bellum Civile, describing it as an “anti-Aeneid”. 19 Narducci (1979), 35. 20 “Libertas” inquit “populi, quem regna coercent,/Libertate perit; cuius servaveris umbram,/Si quidquid iubeare velis” 3.145–147; “He says: ‘The freedom of a people coerced by tyranny/perishes by freedom; its semblance you will preserve/if willingly you do whatever is ordered.’” 12 Lucan’s treatment of apparitions according to the formula and draw conclusions about how each scene reflects his attempts at situating himself in the epic tradition. My methodology is consciously eclectic. As my sample size is small (there are only two apparition scenes proper in the Bellum Civile as it survives), there would be little benefit in limiting my avenues of analysis, though I do, for the most part, attempt to limit my intertextual references to other works of epic. I will perform a close reading of select passages with a special attention to features of language, such as sentence structure and syntax, diction, and parallels of phrasing (both intratextual and intertextual). Valuable too are statistical studies of word use, especially when making such a close comparison between authors. The close reading I perform will also necessitate a study of the representation of fear in Latin epic. Excluding L.A. Mackay’s 1961 survey of fear vocabulary in Latin literature, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship on this topic, which is of utmost importance in gauging the color of the apparition scene and the character of the spectator.21 Consequently I will make a detailed examination of the language of fear in the apparition scenes of Virgil’s Aeneid and in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, tracking variances in diction and description of physical fear reactions, and the effects of these authorial choices on characterization. An added benefit will be a small contribution to the growing field of emotion studies. Classicists have become increasingly interested in the expression of powerful emotions in antiquity as of late; a close reading via the apparition topos will provide a focused spotlight on the expression of fear in poetry, an emotion which has been largely limited to scholars writing on prose thus far.22 21 Mackay (1961) provides a useful overview of fear vocabulary in Latin epic, but concentrates more on raw data and statistics than analysis. 22 For studies of fear in prose literature, see D.S. Levene’s work on Tacitus (1997), F. H. Sandbach (1989) on the Stoics, and many others. Francesca D’Alessandro Behr (1997) has done very useful work on emotions and passions in the Bellum Civile, but concentrates on these elements through a Stoic lens. She does not make a close examination of fear vocabulary in Lucan or in Latin epic more broadly. 13 From this will emerge insight into the large-scale thematic and narrative structure of the Bellum Civile, especially as Lucan relates it to previous epics. Here, Stephen Hinds’ reflections on allusion and intertext (1998) will be of special significance as a theoretical model. Commentaries on Lucan Books I and III will also be studied closely, and particular attention will be given to Robert J. Getty (1940, reprinted 2001) and P. A. Roche on Book I (2001), and Vincent Hunink on Book III (1992). My thesis will be divided into two parts to match Lucan’s two apparition scenes: Chapter 2 will concentrate on the apparition of Roma to Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon (1.183–205); Chapter 3, on the ghost of Julia’s appearance to Pompey the Great (3.1–35). This project should be seen as a focused application of my proposed apparition topos, and as an example of the kind of results this application can yield. I intend to provide a more flexible means for analyzing apparition scenes in epic, one which requires no concessions, but instead examines visitations of ghosts and gods and dreams as they were conceived of by the ancients: holistically, and with attention given to a wide variety of supernatural beings. 14 CHAPTER 2: ROMA The setting is a cold night in early January on the banks of the Rubicon. As Caesar prepares to spur his horse into the river, an eerie vision, the personification of the city of Rome, appears to the general. She glows in the darkness, larger than life, and addresses her soldier. Visible to Caesar alone, she petitions him in a last, desperate attempt to prevent the coming war. Lucan’s treatment of the Roma scene (1.183–205) reveals several accommodations to the topos—especially where the elements suit his dramatic purpose—but also several deviations. In structure and theme, Book I of Lucan’s Bellum Civile is most often credited as being modeled on the first book of the Aeneid and the first book of the Iliad.23 These influences are all certainly present, and have been well explored by scholarship. However in this episode, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the strongest parallel is to be found in the episode’s content rather than its placement in the poem itself. On examination of the action alone, we are certainly intended to recall the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, not the first.24 As Book 2 features Aeneas fleeing from war, Book 1 of the Bellum Civile features Caesar rushing into it, a paradox Lucan is quite fond of (Naufragium sibi quisque facit; sic urbe relicta/In bellum fugitur 1.503–504; “Each … creates his own shipwreck—just so, they abandon Rome/and flee towards war”).25 The inversion reflects the familiar topsy-turviness of Lucan’s epic world, and is an early example of Lucan’s intent to interact with Virgil by means of inversion. As Virgil detailed the making of Rome, Lucan will detail its dismemberment.26 23 See Green (2010), 149–183. 24 The connections between the Bellum Civile as a whole and second book of the Aeneid, particularly the fall of Troy, have been examined in some depth by Lynette Thompson and R. T. Bruère (1968). 25 For an examination (and defense) of Lucan’s fondness for paradox, see Martindale (1976). All translations of Lucan provided by Susanna Braund’s translation of the Bellum Civile (1992). All other translations are my own. 26 “Lucan’s proem is anti-Virgilian inasmuch as the theme announced in it is destruction, not construction (Aeneid 1.33: ‘So massive a task it was to found the Roman race’ tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem). It is Lucan’s declared aim to describe a suicidal conflict of a universal relevance and a cosmic significance which is sometimes overlooked.” Albrecht (1999), 239. Lucan scholars show a particular fondness for metaphors of dismemberment in 15 This intertextual reading invites comparison between Aeneas and Caesar. The “hero” of the Bellum Civile has long been debated. If we are to follow Robert J. Getty, who suggests Caesar to be the practical hero of the poem,27 we see a striking personality difference between the heroes of the Aeneid and the Bellum Civile in their introductory moments, as elucidated by the poet’s use of apparitions. Aeneas requires no less than three supernatural visitors to propel him to action in Book 2: the ghosts of Hector (2.268–297) and Creusa (2.768–795), and an epiphany of his mother, Venus (2.589–623). Caesar, on the other hand, receives only one: a vision of his country, an entity which should carry greater weight than any of the familial relations Aeneas encounters.28 In contrast to the pietas shown by Aeneas, Caesar disobeys his apparition’s instruction emphatically by crossing the Rubicon. Indeed, while supernatural entities act as the primary agents in convincing Aeneas to flee Troy, indicating that they have no small amount of power in the text, Lucan features a somewhat pathetic apparition, one which holds little sway over her spectator, and which appeals to Caesar not as her sole protector, but as the enemy ante portas. I shall now examine Lucan’s first apparition scene, Roma at the Rubicon, in close detail, comparing each element of the topos to its equivalent in the three apparition scenes of Aeneid 2. analyzing Lucan’s epic (see Dinter (2012); Bartsch (1997), Boyle and Sullivan (1991), 154-161, etc.); Lucan certainly invites such imagery with his fascination with gore and the breach of bodily integrity. 27 The epic “hero” of the Bellum Civile has long been debated. Getty summarizes well: “… Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem …” Getty (1940), xxiv–xxv. Vanessa B. Gorman rightly reminds us of Lucan’s aim with this ambiguity: “Civil war cannot produce a hero in the conventional sense of the word because it pollutes both parties: aggressive action is moral depravity, but defensive resistance is little better since it too involves violence against fellow countrymen and thus participation in their crimen.” Gorman (2001), 263. Most important for my argument is Lucan’s establishment of a connection between Aeneas and Caesar as analogous “heroes” in these early moments of the poem, characters whose similarities compel close comparison to one another. 28 The Roman virtue of pietas encouraged devotion first to the gods, then to country, then to family, in descending order of importance. See Cicero, Off. 1.57: Cari sunt parentes, cari liberi, propinqui, familiares, sed omnes omnium caritates patris una complexa est, pro qua quis bonus dubitet mortem oppetere, si ei profuturus? (“Dear are parents, dear are children, relatives, friends, but all our dear ones are embraced by one fatherland, and which man who is good would hesitate to give his life for his country, if he could render it a service?”) 16 But before moving into the scene itself, it will be fruitful to examine the lines just preceding specter’s arrival. The lead-up to the apparition scene can cue important information about the character of the spectator—in this case, Lucan’s portrayal of Julius Caesar. Iam gelidas Caesar cursu superaverat Alpes 183 Ingentisque animo motus bellumque futurum Ceperat. Ut ventum est parvi Rubiconis ad undas … [Now swiftly Caesar had surmounted the icy Alps and in his mind conceived immense upheavals, coming war. When he reached the water of the little Rubicon …] After one hundred and eighty-two lines of narrative delay, the first major action of the poem occurs: Caesar bursts into Lucan’s narrative with the very act which bursts the levies of civil war. Lucan opens the action of the poem with a scene about crossing boundaries, a theme which he carries throughout the work. The poet is obsessed with the breaking of boundaries.29 Lucan’s interest in liminality has been well explored, particularly by Shadi Bartsch, who characterizes the crossing of the Rubicon as the ultimate liminal crossing: “the act that sets the poem in motion, the greatest violation of them all.”30 One point of significance in the crossing of the Rubicon—a river, that is, a spatial boundary—has not yet been observed to my knowledge. Entering this liminal area, this space between spaces, also puts Caesar at special risk of experiencing supernatural phenomena. Supernatural beings (excluding divinities) exist somewhere between this world and the next: not quite dead but not quite alive, not quite substantial, but nor immaterial. As liminal beings, they 29 For the abundance of boundary violations in the Bellum Civile, particularly as they reflect Lucan’s pessimism towards civil war and his dissatisfaction with his political surroundings, see Davis (2007). 30 Bartsch (1997), 14. See also Masters (1992) 5 n. 12 on Caesar crossing the Alps as Lucan crosses from his poem’s introduction to narrative. 17 tend to appear in transitional areas.31 As Sarah Iles Johnston summarizes, “The Greeks, Romans, and many other ancient civilizations regarded both natural and man-made liminal points of all kinds—doors, gates, rivers and frontiers, as well as crossroads—as uncertain places, requiring special rituals …”32 Thus it makes sense both narratively and by the rules of the supernatural that Roma would make her appearance to Caesar here, just as he reaches the boundary between Gaul and Italy and, indeed, between fas and nefas. With the stage set for Caesar’s ultimate violation, we turn to the apparition scene itself. The passage begins with a short narration of Caesar’s previous action, one which immediately characterizes Caesar as a warrior, formidable in combat. He conquers the Alps, which dwarf the Rubicon in size and difficulty, though not in significance. For historical sources for the crossing of the Alps and the Rubicon episode, Lucan likely looked to the now-lost books 109–116 of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, which covered the civil war, and to the works of Caesar himself.33 Because Caesar surmounted the mountain range in November or in early December 50 BCE, Lucan’s yoking of this action to the action of crossing the Rubicon at least a month later is of some significance: Caesar, the conqueror of foreign lands, now turns his sights to his homeland.34 The mention of the crossing of the Alps also suggests the paradoxical idea of Caesar invading his own country, one which will be reinforced with later references confirming Caesar’s connections with Hannibal.35 Significant too is the close proximity of gelidas Alpes to the apparition scene. Gelidus is an adjective often applied to alpine climbs and to Gaul in particular, but it also carries a more 31 For a more thorough discussion of supernatural entities appearing in transitional spaces, see Felton (1964), 93–97. 32 Johnston (1991), 217. 33 For consideration of Lucan as a historical source, see Getty (1940), xxx–xxxvii. For further historical background on the crossing of the Rubicon, see Stanton (2013). 34 For dating the crossing of the Alps, see Holmes (1923), 323–327. 35 1.205–212, restated by Pompey at 2.535. Masters provides an exhaustive list of passages which evoke the motif of Hannibal’s invasion in the Bellum Civile. Masters (1992), 1 n. 1. See further Roche (2009), 204. 18 sinister undertone. It lends the passage both a sense of physical coldness—and of cold’s attendant physical reactions, which closely resemble those of fear—but also indirectly implies dread and death. Besides atmospheric phenomena, gelidus is commonly used to describe fear and death (OLD gelidus 2); indeed, of the thirty-two occurrences of gelidus in the Bellum Civile, seventeen are directly related to the experience of dread or death.36 Thus, before the shade of Roma even appears, Lucan gives foreboding signs: Caesar is approaching Rome as a chilling invader, and his intended actions will bring fear and death to his country. With Caesar’s previous actions established, we enter the apparition scene proper and examine Lucan’s treatment of its first element: the apparition’s approach (§1). It is a common theme of the apparition topos that the specter approach the hero when he is in a state of intense confusion or vulnerability. All three of Virgil’s apparitions in Book 2 approach Aeneas when he is either ignorant of danger or willfully putting himself into danger. Hector appears as Aeneas sleeps, unaware that the Greeks have entered the city (2.268–270); Creusa, when Aeneas’s survival is in jeopardy in his rash attempts to find her (2.768–772); and Venus, when Aeneas is delaying his escape from the city in his internal debate to kill Helen (2.588). All three appear at moments when the hero is in desperate need of direction. Indeed, it is one of the functions of the epic apparition to guide the hero in times of indecision.37 Lucan’s Roma, in contrast, approaches Caesar when the general is wide awake, calm, and actively making decisions; while the noun motus can carry a sense of 'political upheaval', its primary sense is of physical motion (OLD motus 1 ; 9). Both senses are at work here: Caesar is in constant, active motion, both mentally and physically, in his attack on the Republic. Where Aeneas was youthful, unsure, panicked at the onset of war and hesitant to accept his destiny to 36 See especially the shades of Marius and Sulla, 1.582; the botched sacrifice, 1.629; the pagan grove, 3.401; and the Erichtho episode, 6.568, 6.629, 6.752. 37 Hunink (1992), 34–35. 19 found the city of Rome, there is no hesitation in Caesar, no wasted time or need of instruction. Lucan’s lightning bolt (1.151–157) lacks restraint, not initiative.38 Indeed, it is of no small significance that it is Caesar who breaks Lucan’s extended sequence of introductory delay—again, fairly abruptly, and with little introduction. Caesar will not wait for an apparition to spur him on; indeed, he will not even wait for his author.39 Roma must move quickly to stop him: Ingens visa duci patriae trepidantis imago 186 Clara per obscuram voltu maestissima noctem, Turrigero canos effundens vertice crines, Caesarie lacera nudisque adstare lacertis Et gemitu permixta loqui: … [Clearly to the leader through the murky night appeared a mighty image of his country in distress, grief in her face, her white hair streaming from her tower-crowned head; with tresses torn and shoulders bare she stood before him and sighing said: … ] Roma appears suddenly, as the poet indicates with the strong enjambment of line 186; this great specter of the country, we are to imagine, interrupts Caesar’s action, appearing before him just as he attempts to cross. Virgil prefers to lay the groundwork of his apparition scenes with some sort of transitional sequence. For example, a couplet gives an ominous description of sleep before the appearance of Hector’s ghost (2.268–269) and Aeneas, distraught, calls for Creusa again and again before the arrival of her ghost, reintroducing her character before she actually appears (2.768–771). In contrast, Lucan provides no transition to Roma’s appearance and no indication that her specter is approaching, underlining both the relentless speed of 38 Perhaps the most famous metaphor of the Bellum Civile, Lucan introduces Pompey and Caesar with two extended similes: Pompey, the old and venerable oak now sapped of strength, battered in the wind, whose weight alone allows it to continue to stand, still the most revered among all the trees in the forest (1.136–142); and Caesar, the youthful lightning bolt which flashes fast, wreaking havoc and terrifying all who see it (1.151–157). 39 For more on the deliberate play of the contradiction between the poet’s delay (mora) and Caesar’s urgency, see Masters (1992), 1–10. 20 Caesar’s invasion and the helplessness of the apparition before him—themes which will be emphasized further as the scene proceeds. Different from Virgil too is the audience for the apparition, and the setting in which Roma appears. Traditionally the apparition appears to its viewer alone in a moment of isolation, a setting which reflects the private nature of the exchange and the often intensely personal message conveyed (§1). This pattern is first established in the Iliad, where Patroclus makes his nighttime appearance to Achilles (23.62–64); the Odyssey follows suit, with Athena’s visit to Nausicaä (6.15–19). Virgil’s apparition scenes are also nearly always an explicitly private affair. Hector visits Aeneas in his bedroom during sleep (2.270), and Venus appears to her son after Aeneas glances around and notices his forces have all deserted him (2.565–566). One potential exception is the appearance of Creusa, which occurs during the chaos of the fall of Troy, when, presumably, other citizens of Troy might be fleeing around him. However, the poet does make a point of indicating that Aeneas has left Ascanius, Anchises, and the Penates with his comrades before his search began, suggesting that Aeneas is without companion when he sees Creusa (2.747–749).40 Lucan’s Roma, however, approaches at a very public and important moment. Caesar’s army must be present for the crossing of the Rubicon; indeed, the apparition scene is immediately followed by a description of the military action of a river crossing. The fording involves multiple cavalrymen drawing up in the stream, the poet tells us, then the remaining throng enter the water (sonipes … cetera, 1.220–222; “the rest … of the horses”). Certainly they must be here at the edge of the river with Caesar as he prepares to cross; Roma addresses not Caesar, but viri (1.191). Yet strangely, all indications point to Caesar’s subordinates not seeing 40 Poulheria Kyriakou notes the intimate nature of the apparition scenes of Creusa and Hector, both of which mirror the intimate nature of their predecessor, Achilles’ dream of Patroclus. Kyriakou (1999), 326–327. 21 the apparition, as it is not in their character to show bravery when faced with supernatural terror. Book 3 provides a glimpse of Caesar’s troops when faced with a frightful and potentially sacrilegious action: when Caesar orders them to fell the sacred grove at Massilia, his men are terrified of the pagan grove, a forest which is frightening due to its foreboding atmosphere, not anything so immediate and threatening as an apparition. Nevertheless Caesar must justify his impious action to his subordinates, claiming to accept full guilt for the crime they commit and striking the first blow himself (3.429–439). If the sacred grove of a foreign nation inspired such fear in Caesar’s army, a grieving image of their own country should inspire hesitation, if not outright rebellion. Yet Lucan makes no mention of Caesar’s men reacting here, fearfully or otherwise. In the absence of such a reaction, it seems safe to assume that they do not see Roma, despite being there with Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon. Why, then, does she appear to Caesar alone? Perhaps Lucan takes poetic license to accommodate a private encounter as an important aspect of the apparition topos, choosing to ignore the presence of the soldiers for the sake of dramatic effect. Lucan is no stranger to this sort of manipulation. Book 8 sees Pompey and Cornelia reunite on the shore of Lesbos in a fairly intimate meeting, and then suddenly the empty beach is full of citizens, who make their appearance once their presence becomes convenient for the poet (8.50–109). In the same way, although surrounded by his soldiers on the Rubicon, Caesar and his country share a private moment. The lights dim on the secondary players, time stands still, and Caesar’s homeland makes her final plea. Another concession Lucan makes to the standard apparition topos is found in the time of day in which Roma appears. The river crossing is situated at night, despite it being standard 22 military action to make river crossings during the day.41 Night is the preferred time for apparitions in Virgil as well; all three of Virgil’s Book 2 apparitions appear at night, as does Book 3’s vision of the Penates (§1).42 Lucan’s placement of the river crossing at night not only falls in line with the topos, but serves to strengthen the intertextual connection between the fall of Troy, a night of terror, and the invasion of Italy by Caesar, an action which will ultimately result in the fall of Troy’s spiritual successor, Rome. While Lucan accommodates Virgil’s topos in many of the features provided thus far, he deviates from Virgil’s formula in one important area: the description of the spectator viewing the specter. In Virgil the apparition topos tends to include a phrase about the clearness of the vision, despite potential difficulty with seeing, usually due to darkness (§3). Lucan accommodates this element in some capacity by including the phrase clara per obscuram… noctem, a clear reference to Virgil’s use of the same adjective, clarus, in two of his apparition scenes (2.589–592; 3.150–152). Despite this accommodation, Lucan eschews a striking detail found in all three of Virgil’s Book 2 apparition passages (2.270; 2.589; 2.773; 3.150): the phrase ante oculos (§2). The reference to the organ of sight lends a sense of real physicality and substantiality to Virgil’s apparitions. While one might assume the phrase to be limited to episodes outside of sleep—does one see with one's eyes in a dream?—the state of wakefulness of the spectator is irrelevant for Virgil; for Hector, Venus, and Creusa all appear to Aeneas ante oculos. We might conclude that the poet encourages the reader to understand these apparitions as very real, even physical characters in his narrative. Virgil does not suggest the reader spend any time considering 41 Thomson and Bruère (1968), 7. 42 It is worth noting that Homer seemed to prefer dawn for supernatural visitations, an hour which makes sense, given its liminal nature as the transition between night and day. See Il. 2.48–49; 23.109–110; 24.695; Od. 6.48–49; 8.26–27. 23 whether these entities actually exist: they are real for his characters, and therefore real for his universe. Lucan, however, for all his hyperawareness of Virgil’s treatment of the topos, chooses to leave the phrase out of both of his major supernatural encounters.43 It seems likely that this is an instance of Lucan’s own Stoicism preventing the poet from too openly vouching for the existence of supernatural entities. Indeed, he employs a further distancing technique with his use of the passive form of video (1.184); Roma only seems to appear to Caesar, but the poet himself will not confirm it. The Stoic influence on other aspects of the epic is well-documented.44 Seneca the Younger, undoubtedly a large influence on his nephew, asserts that the wise man passes over insults as if they were “the delusive appearances of dreams and nocturnal visions, which have nothing in them that is substantial and true” (De. const. 11.1). It seems possible that small elements in Lucan’s apparition scenes could hint at the poet’s underlying suspicion of the supernatural. The reader is left uncertain: does Lucan encourage us to doubt Roma’s appearance? Should Caesar? If Lucan is suggesting that his apparitions are not “real”—either to his reader or to his characters—we must question what he means his apparitions to represent. The answer may lie in examining the Bellum Civile’s other spectral entities. The epic’s second apparition, the vengeful Julia (to be discussed at length in Chapter 3), comes bearing a dark message of guilt and punishment to Pompey (3.12–34). Her emphasizing of the nefas of Pompey’s actions is not unlike Roma’s chastisement of Caesar here. Book 7 features the only other specters in the epic as it survives: the ghosts of fathers and brothers haunt Caesar’s troops after the bloody battle of Pharsalus (7.771–776): 43 That is, Roma at the Rubicon and Julia’s dream visitation to Pompey. The ghostly apparitions to Caesar’s soldiers after the battle of Pharsalus also lack the phrase (7.771–776). 44 See generally Behr (2007); Lapidge (1979), 344–370. 24 Quos agitat vaesana quies, somnique furentes Thessalicam miseris versant in pectore pugnam. 765 Invigilat cunctis saevum scelus, armaque tota Mente agitant, capuloque manus absente moventur. Ingemuisse putem campos, terramque nocentem Inspirasse animas, infectumque aera totum Manibus et superam Stygia formidine noctem. 770 Exigit a meritis tristes victoria poenas, Sibilaque et flammas infert sopor. Umbra perempti Civis adest; sua quemque premit terroris imago: Ille senum voltus, iuvenum videt ille figuras, Hunc agitant totis fraterna cadavera somnis, 775 Pectore in hoc pater est, omnes in Caesare manes. [A maddened sleep harasses them and frantic dreams revolve the battle of Thessaly in their tortured breasts. Their savage crime is wide awake in everyone and in all their thoughts they brandish weapons and they jerk their hands though no hilt is there. I could think the battlefield moaned, that the earth breathed forth guilty spirits, that all the air was tainted by the shades and the night of upper world by Stygian terror. Victory exacts a hideous punishment deservedly, and slumber brings on flames and hissing. The ghost of a murdered citizen stands there; each man is terrified by a terrifying vision all his own. He sees faces of old men, he the forms of younger men, he in all his dreams is harried by his brother’s corpse, in this breast is his father—all these shades are in Caesar.] It is interesting that in the Bellum Civile, otherwise consciously devoid of a divine apparatus, apparitions occur exclusively to challenge the participants of civil war for their wrongdoings. This reading—as supported by the lack of the phrase ante oculos—suggests Lucan’s apparitions not to represent literal gods and ghouls (as do Virgil’s). Perhaps they function as spectral manifestations of the characters’ psychological torment at participating in the nefas of civil war (this is certainly a natural implication of 7.771–776), or perhaps they represent the poet’s own stern condemnation of civil war. There is no “clear” answer in the darkness: shades of both possibilities are likely at play. 25 Roma has made her appearance: she now speaks Caesar in a surprisingly brief address (§5–7): “… Quo tenditis ultra? 190 Quo fertis mea signa, viri? si iure venitis, Si cives, huc usque licet.” [ “Where further do you march? Where do you take my standards, warriors? If lawfully you come, if as citizens, this far only is allowed.” ] Some manifestation of speech from the apparition to the spectator is an element present in all epic apparition scenes, without exception (§5, §6, §7). The universality of the trope reflects two important functions of the topos as a whole: first, the acceleration of the plot, and second, the conveying of vital information to the hero for his journey. This function finds its origin in Book 23 of the Iliad, where Achilles refuses to bathe and refuses to go to war, repeatedly stalling the action of the epic in his grief for Patroclus (23.35–37; 43–47). The ghost of Patroclus appears in a dream first to request burial, progressing the narrative and encouraging an end to delay (23.70–71). He then reminds Achilles of his destiny—a destiny not unknown to Achilles, but one which he has forgotten, perhaps, in his grief—to die under the walls of Troy (23.80–81). Virgil’s hero delays too. Aeneas, detained first by sleep, then by a drive to Homeric valor, tarries in the burning city of Troy until two ghosts and a goddess appear to guide his action. They perform the same basic functions as Patroclus: first, urging an end to Aeneas’s delay by facilitating his escape from the city (2.289; 2.788–789), and second, revealing important information about Aeneas’s destiny (2.293–295; 2.780–784). Virgil modifies the topos slightly from Homer, extending the revelation of destiny beyond Aeneas to include the glory of the future city of Rome. This reflects the broader concerns of the poets: where the Iliad concentrates largely on the individual, Virgil historicizes his epic, concentrating not only on his lackluster hero, but the 26 founding of the city. Thus, Virgil’s apparitions can be seen as pointing not only to Aeneas’s future glory as the founder of Rome, but to the glory of the city herself. Lucan’s epic, on the other hand, points to Rome’s impending destruction. The apparition scenes stand as fitting microcosms of the themes of the works as a whole: where Virgil details the violent but ultimately glorious event of Rome’s birth, Lucan looks back on the moment of death and dissects the cadaver. Scholars have already noted Lucan’s subversion of the function of the apparition topos in the speeches of his ghosts.45 As Hunink summarizes, in the Bellum Civile, the speeches of epic apparitions neither further the action of the poem by disclosing the truth nor expose what steps the heroes should take.46 In effect, instead of ending delay, Lucan’s apparitions are yet another agent of delay—characters which briefly halt the action of the poem, only to be quickly disregarded by the person to whom they appear, with no discernable impact either on the intentions of their spectator or on the narrative of the poem as a whole. Thus Roma appears in an attempt to stop the onslaught of Caesar, not to spur him to action, and her speech gives Caesar not a prophecy of the future, but an ultimately ineffective summary of the current state of affairs. In fact, Roma’s address to Caesar shares only one key element with the speeches of Virgil’s ghostly apparitions: syntactical simplicity. While straightforward syntax is certainly not limited to the speeches of ghosts in Virgil and Lucan, ghost apparitions do speak in a noticeably simple style.47 Here, Roma addresses Caesar in short phrases, with sense units divided in small blocks of two to four words. Her vocabulary is plain and common. There are no complex grammatical constructions to be found, with no subordination and a use of anaphora which rings repetitive. These are aspects shared by the speech of ghosts in Virgil, and may in fact encourage Lucan’s audience to read Roma in a ghostly light. However, this is where the shared features end. 45 See Dick (1963), 46; Marti (1975), 82. 46 Hunink (1992), 35. 47 This feature of the apparition topos will be briefly addressed here, but discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 27 In tone and content, there are far more differences between Roma’s speech and Virgilian apparitions than similarities. Roma’s entreaty to Caesar is strikingly brief in length. At just a little over two full metrical lines, it stands significantly shorter than Hector and Creusa’s speeches to Aeneas, which total thirteen and fourteen lines respectively. Dwarfing Roma’s speech further still is the speech of the Penates in Aeneid 3, which stands at around eighteen lines. The brevity underlines Roma’s relative weakness; Lucan defangs his apparition, making her request noticeably shorter than Caesar’s reply, which overpowers it at ten full lines.48 The shortness of Roma’s address is even more striking when considered in the broader context of Lucan’s highly rhetorical and speech-heavy epic: even in his attempt at defending Lucan’s style, Antony Snell admits, “Many of the speeches are in fact much too long.”49 Indeed, the mean length of Lucan’s speeches is much longer than Virgil’s (Lucan has approximately twenty-one lines; Virgil, ten).50 Thus, Roma’s conciseness here is striking. Roma’s position of weakness is highlighted not only by the brevity of her speech, but by its surprisingly mild tone. After all, in their role as inciters and agents of action, it is a hallmark of the epic apparition to issue strong commands to its viewer, almost always through use of the imperative voice. This is, in fact, one of the most common and defined aspects of the topos, an element which finds its origin in Patroclus’s address to Achilles and which appears in nearly every major apparition scene following (§7).51 As supernatural figures, apparitions possess authority. They are privy to arcane knowledge, and made more powerful by their extra-human status. The 48 Roche argues that patriae trepidantis (1.186) transfers the expected response of the spectator to a superhuman figure; it is Roma who is afraid of Caesar. Roche (2009), 207. Many scholars have noted Caesar’s presence as an almost divine figure in the Bellum Civile, akin to Jupiter. See especially Feeney (1991), Putnam (1995), Hershkowitz (1998), and Fantham (2003). 49 Snell (1939), 86. 50 Hunink (1992), 38. 51 See Il. 23.71; Od. 6.25–31; Aen. 2.289–295; Aen. 2.619–620; Aen. 2.780–784; Aen. 3.160–171; Met. 11.661–670; Met. 25.22–23. 28 mortal viewer is not in a position to argue with a specter. This power discrepancy between the two is reflected in the strong tone apparitions typically take with their viewers. Roma, however, issues no direct prohibitive command to Caesar. She chooses instead to convey her request—not demand—via two rhetorical questions and a more general statement of legality. Instead of pointing to a bright future, Roma states things as they exist in the here and now, with the weakness of her address underlining Caesar’s culpability as the progenitor of civil war. The boundaries have been indicated by the country herself, in a clear and simple statement. So, by choosing to proceed, Caesar takes on the full guilt of the action: the nefas of marching against his own motherland. The apparition has made her plea. We now see Caesar’s reaction, a detailed physical description of dread in the face of the supernatural. As I mentioned in the introduction, focus on the apparition topos necessitates a study of the language of fear in Latin epic, as the details of the spectator’s reaction often reveal vital information about the color of the scene and the poet’s characterization of the spectator. I will take a little time now to talk about fear as it is depicted in epic apparition scenes, and to discuss fear vocabulary in Lucan and Virgil as whole. Descriptions of fear reactions in Latin epic have been given surprisingly little attention in scholarship to date. This is due perhaps to the deceptively codified appearance of the trope: fear reactions tend to be brief, usually no more than four or five lines, and are comprised of a seemingly random assortment of the same standard elements (the viewer’s hair stands on end, their limbs chill or a cold sweat breaks out, the viewer goes pale, their movement or speech halts in surprise, §8a–d). I argue, however, that Lucan’s fear language in the Roma episode is not haphazardly chosen, but carefully selected.52 Lucan continues to model the Roma episode heavily 52 A caveat to my reader: such a statement is impossible to make with certainty, as argued by Stephen Hinds in Chapter 2 of his Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (1998). Nevertheless, I hope to 29 on the apparition episodes of Aeneid Books 2 and 3. I believe that, by careful use of diction, he draws a contrast between the emotional states of Caesar and Aeneas at seeing the apparitions: where Aeneas is “astonished”—that is, surprised, but not ultimately afraid—Caesar feels a distinctly negative fear reaction, one which we might label “fearful shame.” Tum perculit horror 193 Membra ducis, riguere comae, gressumque coercens Languor in extrema tenuit vestigia ripa. [ Then trembling struck the leader’s limbs, his hair grew stiff, and weakness checked his progress, holding his feet at the river’s edge.] It is my task to pinpoint linguistic differences between a depiction of “astonishment” versus a depiction of “fear.” This may seem a difficult distinction to make, for descriptions of astonishment and fear share strong linguistic similarities. And for good reason: epic prefers to relate the emotion of fear with a description of the physical reaction of the spectator, and visually, the experience of surprise and fear present almost identical physical reactions. Both stem from the same complex internal function—the sympathetic nervous system acting in conjunction with hormones released by the brain—which causes the hair to stand on end, the steps or voice to halt, the limbs to turn cold.53 On first glance, Caesar’s physical response indeed resembles Aeneas’ in many respects. His hair stands on end (see steterunt comae, Aen. 2.774, §8b; “his hair stood on end”), and his motion is halted just as Aeneas’s speech halted (vox faucibus haesit, Aen. 2.774, §8d; “his voice stuck in his throat”). These details are not found in Homeric or Ovidian model scenes, and suggest, again, that Lucan pays close attention to Virgil’s epic in composing his provide strong support for this claim in the following section, utilizing a close word study of fear words in the Aeneid and the Bellum Civile and additional evidence of Lucan’s close patterning of his apparition scenes on those of Virgil. For further reconciliation of my methodology with Hinds’ model, see 44 n. 75. 53 For more on the internal and external physiological effects of fear, see Gray (1987), 55-56. 30 apparition scenes. Telling, then, are the areas in which Lucan chooses to diverge from Virgil’s formula, as seen in his addition of two key words: horror and languor. My methodological approach in this section will be to examine the general context of these two words—horror and languor—in both the Aeneid and the Bellum Civile, gauging each author’s attitude towards the word in their work as a whole, then using those findings to examine the use of horror and languor in Lucan’s apparition scenes. Because Latin fear words have so much overlap in meaning, and because there is so much variation in use and feel across authors, this approach should provide a more stable foundation for analysis for Lucan and Virgil and, hopefully, yield more fruitful results. Horror is a difficult concept to pin down, largely because, like many Latin fear nouns, it can refer both to the agent which incites fear (a horrific sight, a discordant sound) and to the fear reaction itself (shivering, goosebumps).54 Cognate to the verb form horreo, its most basic meaning refers to the action or quality of hair bristling or standing on end. Thus it has connections both to fear and to cold, with both experiences physically effecting the “goosebump” reaction (see OLD horreo 1–7). Virgil’s use of the word horror is generally limited. There are only seven total occurrences in the epic, of which three appear in Book 2 during the siege of Troy, where it is a universally negative experience.55 Horror in Virgil is evoked at moments of intense, heightened dread—the hair-raising trumpets of war (clarescunt sonitus armorumque ingruit horror 2.301; “The sounds grow clearer, and the horror of war sweeps down”), the silence of the city as Aeneas desperately searches for Creusa (horror ubique animo, simul ipsa silentia terrent 2.775; “Horror in my heart on every side, and the silence itself terrifies me”). Aeneas does experience horror in Book 3 at a distinctly terrifying supernatural event: the bleeding reeds of Polydorus (mihi frigidus 54 See also formido, -inis (OLD1–2); metus, -ūs (OLD 1 ; 4–5); terror, -ōris (OLD 1–2); timor, -ōris (OLD 1–2); tremor, -ōris (OLD 1–2). 55 2.301; 2.559; 2.755; 3.29; 4.280; 12.405; 12.868. 31 horror/membra quatit gelidusque coit formidine sanguis 3.29–30; “Icy horror shakes my limbs/and my blood chilled with fear”), however, none of the model passages from the Aeneid feature Aeneas experiencing horror at the sight of an apparition. Aeneas’s response is different. He experiences horror only at the images his imagination produces: At me tum primum saevus circumstetit horror. 559 Obstipui; subiit cari genitoris imago, ut regem aequaeuum crudele vulnere vidi vitam exhalantem, subiit deserta Creusa et direpta domus et parvi casus Iuli. [Then for the first time a wild terror closed in around me. I stood paralyzed: the shade of my dear father rose up as I saw the king, of like age, with a cruel wound, sighing out his life, and Creusa, left behind, and the ransacked house, the slaughter of little Iulus.] We are not to understand these apparitions as literal visitations of these characters; Anchises and Iulus are certainly still alive at this point in the narrative, and Creusa’s shade has not yet made her dramatic reappearance. This horror, then, is evoked not by an actual visitation of entities, but at the imagined deaths of Aeneas’s loved ones. In contrast, Aeneas is certainly surprised by the apparitions of his family members—Hector, gruesome in death, appears at a vulnerable moment in sleep, and Aeneas’s wife Creusa is now unnaturally large, glowing in the darkness. But it seems to be the sudden nature of their appearance and the experience with the supernatural which take Aeneas aback, not fear of the entities themselves. His reaction to Hector is overwhelmingly one of grief. He fixates on his pitiable wounds, his tears, his altered appearance (2.270–279). He shows no concern for escape: indeed, he asks Hector why he has delayed so long in appearing (2.281–283). His encounter with Creusa is similarly poignant—he cannot speak due to emotion at seeing his deceased wife (2.774–775) and attempts to embrace her ghost as she 32 recedes (2.790–794) (§10). Horror is absent from the narrative; horror does not grip Aeneas because he does not fear his loved ones. Lucan, however, does use horror in his apparition passage, and he employs it to indicate that this visitation is distinctly negative and dreadful experience for Caesar. He does not use the word lightly. The Bellum Civile’s two other significant horror passages are Julia’s haunting of Pompey, where her ghost appears “full of grim horror” (diri tum plena horroris imago 3.9), and the pagan grove near Massilia, where the forest “has a horror of its own” (… non ulli frondem praebentibus aurae/Arboribus suus horror inest 3.410–11; “Though the trees present their leaves to no breeze/they have a trembling of their own”). The grove episode features a clever use of horror by Lucan. It can refer literally to the trembling of the leaves, but its effect is certainly frightful: with its silent trees and crude statues and dark pools, Lucan’s locus horridus is full of fear.56 The use of horror in the Julia episode makes even more explicit the connection between horror and dread: Julia is a Fury standing on a burning pyre, “full” of the raw power to terrify. Thus, in context, Lucan’s horror is no mild expression of surprise of fear. In the Bellum Civile, as in the Aeneid, it carries associations of strong dread and negativity. In applying these findings to the Roma episode, we must conclude that Lucan suggests this to be a distinctly horrific event for Caesar—he feels, here and only here, something approximating fear. As mentioned in the introduction, both Plutarch and Suetonius mention Caesar dreaming of his mother: Plutarch actually places the dream the night before Caesar crosses the Rubicon (Caes. 32), while Suetonius sets it while Caesar was serving as quaestor in Further Spain (Div. Jul. 7). Perhaps we are invited to map these historical mother dreams onto Lucan’s waking vision. Roma appears in the garb of Magna Mater (turrigero … vertice 1.188) and many details attributed to her 56 For an exploration of the role of the locus amoenus and locus horridus in Lucan, see Barrière (2013). See also Masters (1992), 285. 33 appearance evoke the grieving mothers of Book 2 (crine solute 2.23, “with hair unbound”; laceras … comas 2.31–32, “torn hair”; maestae 2.29, “sad”; laniate comas 2.39, “tear your locks”). It follows, then, that Caesar’s reaction seems to mirror a child experiencing fright at being caught in a naughty deed. For a brief moment, Lucan’s agent of fear experiences fear himself. This impression of Caesar being not surprised, but unsettled, is underlined by Lucan’s employment of a second unusual word for an apparition scene: languor. It is languor, we are told, which holds Caesar’s steps on the very edge of the Rubicon. Hesitation is not an unexpected element in apparition scenes; as previously mentioned, Aeneas’s voice sticks in his throat at seeing Creusa (2.774, §8d). However, Lucan’s choice of vocabulary is unusual. Virgil never uses languor itself in the Aeneid, only the verbal and adjectival cognates, langueo and languidus. These cognates occur five times total in the Aeneid, and never in an apparition scene.57 Lucan, on the other hand, has a real interest in the concept: languor and its cognates occur in the Bellum Civile a total of twenty-three times.58 It makes sense for the “poet of delay” to be interested in an abstraction expressing irresolution. Indeed, languor appears again in Book 1, also with connection to Caesar, as a concept closer to apathy: Caesar, ut acceptum tam prono milite bellum 392 Fataque ferre videt, ne quo languore moretur Fortunam, sparsas per Gallica rura cohortes Evocat et Romam motis petit undique signis. [When Caesar sees his soldiers welcome war so eagerly and destiny proceeding onward, to avoid impeding Fortune by any apathy, he summons cohorts scattered through the Gallic fields and advancing standards from every region he heads for Rome.] 57 9.436; 10.289; 11.69; 11.874; 12.908. 58 The occurrence of langu- cognates is consistent throughout the Bellum Civile; three instances in Book 1 (1.194, 1.393, 1.504); one in Book 2 (2.723); four in Book 3 (3.8, 3.326, 3.692, 3.737); four in Book 4 (4.169, 4.281, 4.306, 4.699); five in Book 5 (5.421, 5.449, 5.454, 5.504, 5.544); one in Book 6 (6.100), two in Book 7 (7.246, 7.562), two in Book 8 (8.471, 8.671), and one in Book 9 (9.1033). Ovid, like Virgil, uses languor and its cognates sparingly, with only ten occurrences in the whole of the Metamorphoses (1.716, 2.454, 6.291, 7.82, 7.547, 8.523, 9.767, 11.612, 11.648, 12.318). Given the relative rarity of the term in these much longer epics of two influential predecessors, we might posit a certain predilection for the word family in Lucan. 34 Languor is the enemy here, one Caesar will not allow to brook delay. It is an impediment to war, which Caesar is eager to overcome as the soldier of Fortuna. Thus, languor having the power to hold Caesar back at the Rubicon is striking. Caesar, the Bellum Civile’s great agent of fear, stands stupefied before a relatively weak apparition of his country. Lucan’s machine of war has briefly been held back and occupied by very uncharacteristic uncertainty. As this brief study has shown, it is worthwhile to make a scrutinous examination of physical reactions and fear vocabulary in apparition scenes. Lucan’s close attention to Virgil’s model—and his marked deviations in his portrayal of Caesar from the model character, Aeneas—lend deeper nuance to Caesar’s characterization in this scene. The fear language suggests Caesar to be anxious. This reading is bolstered by his response to Roma (§9), an address marked by defensiveness: Mox ait: “O magnae qui moenia prospicis urbis 195 Tarpeia de rupe, Tonans, Phrygiique penates Gentis Iuleae et rapti secreta Quirini Et residens celsa Latiaris Iuppiter Alba Vestalesque foci summique o numinis instar, Roma, faue coeptis; non te furialibus armis 200 Persequor; en adsum victor terraque marique Caesar, ubique tuus—liceat modo, nunc quoque—miles. Ille erit, ille nocens, qui me tibi fecerit hostem.” Inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem Signa tulit propere … 205 [At last he speaks: O Thunderer, surveying great Rome’s walls from the Tarpeian Rock; O Phrygian house-gods of Iulus’ clan and mysteries of Quirinus, who was carried off to heaven; o Jupiter of Latium, seated in lofty Alba, and hearths of Vesta; O Rome, the equal of the highest deity, favour my plans. Not with impious weapons do I pursue you—here am I, Caesar, conqueror by land and sea, your own soldier everywhere, now too if I am permitted. The man who makes you my enemy, it is he will be the guilty one.” Then he broke the barriers of war and through the swollen river quickly took his standards ... ] 35 Caesar’s response to Roma overcompensates. He invokes several state deities, taking a full five lines before actually replying to Roma herself. There is a desperation to his diction here, reflected in the extremely uncharacteristic repetition in line 203. As Getty notes, furia may be used of a public enemy, e.g. Cicero calls Clodius illa furia ac pestis patriae (Sest. 14 33). In this light, Caesar’s speech solves the mystery of why he is so stricken with dread: Caesar is afraid of Roma, but not because she might cause him physical harm—she cannot, as a weak and not particularly threatening apparition. He fears being labeled a Clodius, a Catiline, a Hannibal; that is, he fears being labeled as exactly what he is.59 However, with the brashness typical of Lucan’s characterization, Caesar takes no further delay to consider what should be done. Mox, we are told, he breaks the barriers of war, marching right through the apparition of Roma as the Rubicon swells in protest.60 The application of the apparition topos proves especially useful in drawing concluding statements about Lucan’s vision of Roma. A broader umbrella topos means that we do not need to ask whether Roma should be considered a dream or a goddess or a ghost; indeed, there would be many difficulties in attempting to subcategorize the vision in this way. But the use of ghostly language challenges the reader to interpret her in this light. As we have seen, the description of Roma’s physical appearance, with its strong linguistic similarities to the speech of Hector, and her 59 The apparition of Roma recalls the speech of Patria to Catiline in Cicero Cat. 1.18, another case of a representation of the fatherland appearing to her citizen and warning him away from national disaster. Roche cites Cicero’s speech of the patria here as a possible influence on Lucan’s Roma. Roche (2009), 206. Lily Ross Taylor credits the creation of the goddess Roma to the Greeks, where she enjoyed a prominent place in their cult to Roman power due to her permanence (unlike the consuls, who changed every year). Her temples spread; as early as the year 195 BCE, the city of Smyrna erected a temple to the goddess. Lily Ross Taylor (1931), 36-37. While the patria made an anthropomorphized appearance in prose previously (in the Cicero passage quoted above), Lucan’s Roma is the goddess’s first appearance in extant Latin poetry. 60 Fratantuono links the swelling of the Rubicon to the hesitation of the Golden Bough (6.210–211 corripit Aeneas extemplo avidusque refringit/cunctantem). Indeed, both are responding to the impious actions of their conquerors—the Rubicon to Caesar’s outrageous act of nefas, the Golden Bough to Aeneas’s much more venial sin, a lack of proper solemnity in his eagerness to pluck the bough. If this allusion is intentional, Lucan quickly undercuts it in his typical prosaic manner; the river, he tells us, has been strengthened by recent rains and melting snow (1.217–219). Fratantuono (2012), 25. 36 syntax, simple and terse in epic style, suggest that she shares many characteristics with ghosts. However, unlike a ghost, Roma is not yet dead. From the perspective of the poem, the war is not yet lost, Octavian has not yet won the battle of Actium, any number of historical events Lucan might attribute as the actual deathblow of the Republic have yet to occur. Thus it seems best to interpret Roma’s “ghost” as a kind of narrative hysteron proteron, in that her “death” happens temporally later than the appearance of her shade, calling attention to important concept of her murder at the hands of Caesar. We see her focalized through the perspective of an audience member (or Lucan himself) rather than through the character of Caesar. Lucan’s contemporary audience, all too familiar with the tyranny of imperial rule, is given a glimpse back to the crossroads moment over one hundred years before. With the knowledge that Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is the symbolic act which kills the Republic, even if it is not the final blow, the reader sees the “ghost” of Roma appear to her killer just before he strikes, begging him not to break this final boundary.61 In any case, Roma’s apparition is suggested to be a distinctly negative experience for the reader, one which inverts many elements of Virgil’s apparition scenes and which points, ultimately, not to a hopeful future, but to the destruction of Rome. 61 This would not be the only place in the narrative where Lucan (perhaps) chooses to distort time, particularly in connection to the supernatural. Book 6 sees the Überwitch Erichtho picking through bodies on a battlefield before the battle of Pharsalus even takes place (6.624–631); Book 7 sees the “ghosts” of the slain appear to the combatants just before the battle begins (7.177-180). Lucan’s manipulation of death and time may be imitated by Dante in his Inferno, where the poet encounters a paradoxical figure: a man whose soul is in hell while his body still walks the earth (Inf. 33.91–157). 37 CHAPTER 3: JULIA After the illegal crossing of the Rubicon, Caesar and his forces successfully invade northern Italy and finally enter the panicked city of Rome, where gruesome portents and visions foreshadow disasters to come. Book 2 of the Bellum Civile features the Republican heroes Cato and Brutus confirming their alliance with Magnus Pompey, who, at the beginning of Book 3, has only narrowly escaped Italy, having broken free of Caesar’s siege and maritime blockade at the coastal city of Brundisium. In his typical fashion, Lucan devotes little space to the narration of action. David Quint calls his constant slowing of narrative progression a “deliberate deformation of Virgilian narrative structure.”62 A scant seven lines into Book 3, the poet moves immediately into an apparition scene, another device of delay: Pompey is visited in sleep by the terrifying apparition of his deceased wife, Julia, the daughter of Caesar. In this chapter I shall argue that Julia’s apparition scene confirms many of the theses argued in the Chapter 2: that while Lucan sometimes makes concessions to the standard elements of the apparition topos, particularly when they suit his narrative purpose, he is often more interested in inverting and perverting elements of Virgilian apparition scenes to cast a harsh light on the Aeneid’s “illusion” of liberty under the principate. As the second and final major apparition scene in Lucan’s poem as it survives,63 the dream of Julia also has several points of thematic and linguistic overlap with Roma’s appearance to Caesar, intersections which compel close comparison between the two scenes. Thus, this chapter will not only make an intertextual 62 Quint (1993), 134. 63 Lucan’s apparition scenes are curiously front-loaded in the Bellum Civile; with both occurring in the opening three books of the epic. This may reflect their function as early character dioramas of Caesar and Pompey—set pieces which give a distilled flavor of each hero’s personality. Despite the limited number of apparition scenes, there is certainly no dearth of other supernatural occurrences in the epic. Book 5’s oracular possession scene and Book 6’s infamous witch Erichtho help fill out a poem enamored with the macabre and the unsettling. It is likely that Lucan also intended to include an apparition scene featuring the ghost of Pompey. Bernard J. Dick suggests he would appear to his son Sextus in Sicily; B. M. Marti, that he would prophecy Caesar’s murder and rail against Caesar’s successors. Dick (1963), 45; Marti (1945), 375. For an excellent general hypothesis of the scope of Lucan’s epic, see Marti (1970). 38 comparison of the ghost of Julia with its Virgilian precedents, but also an intratextual examination of Julia with the Roma apparition of Book 1. In function, Roma and Julia serve as perfect foils for each other. The Roma scene occurs when Caesar moves to invade Italy; an image of his country appears, reminding him that he should not proceed, whereas when Pompey moves to flee Italy, an image of his dead wife appears, reminding him that he cannot escape. The deployment of an apparition scene by Lucan at these two particular junctures invites us to cast a spotlight on both of his major heroes, and indeed, the characters of Caesar and Pompey are revealed in microcosm in their apparition scenes. Caesar, the lightning bolt, strikes forward, conquering all that lies before him; Pompey, the ancient oak, still looks back to the past.64 Other scholars have explored in depth many points of comparison between the two scenes;65 this paper will concentrate on the manipulation of the apparition topos specifically. We turn now to the apparition scene. It is important to examine the lines just preceding the specter’s arrival because, as evidenced by Chapter 2’s examination of the Roma scene, the lead-up to the apparition scene can cue important information about the character of the spectator. The three lines preceding Roma’s appearance (Iam gelidas Caesar cursu superaverat Alpes/Ingentisque animo motus bellumque futurum/ceperat 1.183–185; “Now swiftly Caesar had surmounted the icy Alps/and in his mind conceived immense upheavals/coming war”) saw Caesar solidified as a determined and relentless force of nature, conquering the snowy Alps and planning even greater military upheavals for the future. Pompey’s actions before his apparition scene could not be more different: Propulit ut classem velis cedentibus Auster Incumbens mediumque rates movere profundum, 64 See 19 n. 38. 65 See especially Hunink (1992). See also Newmyer (1983), 242-3; Narducci (1985), 1553-6. 39 Omnis in Ionios spectabat navita fluctus: Solus ab Hesperia non flexit lumina terra Magnus, dum patrios portus, dum litora numquam 5 Ad visus reditura suos tectumque cacumen Nubibus et dubios cernit vanescere montes. Inde soporifero cesserunt languida somno Membra ducis … [As Auster drove along the fleet with sails yielding before the pressure and the ships ploughed the middle of the deep, every sailor was watching the Ionian waves: Magnus alone did not turn his gaze from the land of Hesperia until he sees disappear his country’s harbours, the shores never again to return to his sight, the peak veiled in clouds and indistinct mountains. Then the leader’s weary limbs give way To drowsy sleep … ] Pompey flees, not conquers. In flight, he still will not look forward to the future, though all his subordinates have their eyes fixed on the sea before them. As Hunink comments, non flexit lumina is a small but thoughtful detail which reveals Pompey as “static, inert, unable to change.”66 Even Lucan’s choice of diction lends a starkly contrasting tone to the passages: Chapter 2 discussed the foreboding color the adjective gelidus lends the scene of Caesar’s crossing the Alps. In the same way, words like tectum … nubibus, dubios, and vanescere create a sense of irresolution and haziness in the introductory section of Pompey’s apparition scene. As the Alps cut a concrete picture in comparison to these indistinct and unnamed mountains, so Caesar’s purpose and resolve is clear where Pompey’s is muddled and uncertain. Lucan invites us to make a direct comparison between Caesar and Pompey with a phrase repeated in both apparition passages: membra ducis (… tum perculit horror/Membra ducis … 1.194 (“… Then horror/struck the limbs of the leader”; … Inde soporifero cesserunt languida somno/Membra ducis … 3.8–9, “… Then the leader’s weary limbs give way/to drowsy sleep …”). 66 Hunink (1992), 31. Judith A. Rosner-Siegel argues that Pompey’s immobility and static nature are reflected in the land appearing to recede, while Pompey is actually departing. Rosner-Siegel (1983), 171. For discussion of Pompey as a character always looking back to the past, see Ahl (1976), 155. 40 When Roma flew up before Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon, horror actively “struck” (perculit) his limbs to slow him. He could not be delayed except by means of an extremely physical verb, percellere, one which has strong military connections to conquest and subjugation (OLD percello 3). On the other hand, the loose limbs of Pompey “yield” to drowsy sleep—cedere, too, has a common military sense of surrender (OLD cedo 2, 3). Once again, Lucan’s characterization of Caesar as a driving, active force is put in bold contrast to the passive and hesitant Pompey. This reading helps explain another important difference between the two apparition scenes: Caesar experiences an epic vision, while Pompey experiences an epic dream. A vision is an active experience, one which underlines Caesar’s culpability as the inciter of civil war, while Pompey receives an epic dream, which I contend is ultimately a more passive experience for the spectator. As previously discussed in the Chapter 1, it would have been easy for Lucan to portray Caesar as having a dream of Roma the night before the crossing of the Rubicon; he had access to historical sources which actually attested a dream the night before Caesar made the fateful (and also fatal—to Rome) crossing. However, despite several difficulties with staging a vision—difficulties which would not have been present for a dream (i.e. a river crossing should be performed during the day, not the night, and Caesar was not alone at the crossing of the Rubicon, a circumstance preferred for the appearance of supernatural entities)—Lucan chose to stage the Roma apparition while Caesar was awake. This must be intentional: Caesar’s consciousness underlines his awareness and hence, his culpability. He is wide awake when Roma approaches him, and wide awake when he ignores her request. Pompey, however, is quickly put to sleep for a dream. Despite his being the only person looking back to Italy (solus)—a word which should serve as adequate isolation for a supernatural 41 experience—and the overall strangeness of staging a dream during the day, Lucan chooses sleep as the avenue for his Julia scene. This dream, I argue, is a more passive experience than a waking vision, as the power differential is skewed in the apparition’s favor in a dream. This is underlined by the aggressive nature of Julia’s speech to Pompey, and Pompey’s lack of response (extremely unusual in an apparition scene, dream or otherwise, §9). There is certainly an underlying sense of vulnerability in sleep, a lack of control. Dreaming is not the active, dynamic motion of crossing a river. This talk of dreams introduces a second, more striking difference between the apparition scenes of Caesar and Pompey: Pompey’s dream takes place during the day (§1).67 This is not only an intratextual discrepancy with Roma. I have found no extant example of an epic apparition taking place during the day, be it a dream, waking vision, or otherwise.68 Virgil and Ovid indicate night as the setting for their specters, and Homer usually mentions dawn (see 22 n. 42). Indeed, in addition to the apparition of Roma, all of the dream sequences in the Bellum Civile explicitly occur at night, including Pompey’s dream of the amphitheater (7.7–12) and the haunting of Caesar’s men by the ghosts of Pharsalus (7.760–811). Superficially there is an easy explanation for Lucan’s innovation. The poet is interested in following the epic and elegiac tradition of the hero looking back at his homeland as he sails away 67 There has been some attempt to argue that it was in fact nighttime when the dream occurred (see especially Stearns (1927)), but lines 2.719–725 before the sea voyage begins (… iam Phoebum urguere monebat/Non idem Eoi color aetheris, albaque nondum/Lux rubet et flammas propioribus eripit astris; “Now the changing color/of the eastern ether warned that Phoebus was imminent, and the light/is white and not yet red, and steals their flames from the nearer stars”) and lines 3.40–41 after the dream sequence ends (Titan iam pronus in undas/Ibat …; “Titan now was sinking/in the waves”) confirm that Julia must appear in the middle of the day. 68 One important caveat to this statement lies in midday encounters with supernatural entities. The eerie stillness of the noontime hour, as the liminal moment between the waxing and the waning of day, carries dangerous potential for supernatural encounters, particularly with rustic deities. See Teiresias’s blinding at noontime in Callimachus’s Fifth Hymn, The Bath of Pallas (73–74); Jason’s meeting of Libyan nymphs in Apollonius of Rhodes (4.1321); Theocritus warning of the dangers of piping at noon, lest Pan be disturbed (1.15); and Ovid’s Actaeon fatally meeting Artemis at the noon hour (Met. 3.144–5). However, as none of these scenes follow the standard formula of the epic topos, I do not categorize them as apparition scenes for the purposes of this study. 42 and, practically speaking, daylight would be required for Pompey to see the coast.69 However, this explanation is not quite sufficient. After Pompey sees the shore, Lucan could have easily inserted a couplet transitioning the scene from day to night—as he does, in fact, at 3.40–43, just after the dream sequence concludes (Titan iam pronus in undas/Ibat …, “Titan now was sinking/into the waves”).70 There is no discernable reason for the sun to set after the dream sequence and not before—unless there were narrative cause to allow as little interruption as possible between Pompey looking back to Italy and the appearance of the ghost. There is such a reason, I will argue, one rooted in a Virgilian passage Lucan is modeling closely. This connection will be discussed in full below. The apparition appears: … diri tum plena horroris imago Visa caput maestum per hiantis Iulia terras 10 Tollere et accenso furialis stare sepulchro. [ … Then he dreamt that Julia, a phantom full of dreadful horror, raised her mourning head through gaping earth and stood upon the flaming pyre like a Fury.] Like Roma, Julia’s appearance is sudden, with Lucan providing little narrative cuing to prime the reader for an apparition sequence. For the Roma scene, I have argued that this haste underlines the rapidity of Caesar’s movement and the helplessness of Roma in the face of his onslaught. She flew up before him just as he was already moving to cross the river. In the Julia scene, the lack of transition seems to be an author’s tool of surprise: Lucan’s ghost blindsides the reader. It is daytime, an unprecedented time for an apparition, and the spectator is in no particular confusion or danger and requires no particular supernatural guidance or urging. Who would expect an 69 For an excellent summation of the literary influences on Pompey’s taking a last look at his homeland, see Hunink (1992), 28. 70 Lucan often speaks of Titan this way to shift the narrative from day to night or vice versa (7.1–6; 8.159–161; 8.202). 43 apparition sequence here? Where Virgil’s specters are naturally embedded in his story, serving a clear purpose and having a clear impact on the narrative, Lucan’s supernatural visitations aim at provoking surprise in the reader. They appear unexpectedly not only to the characters in the story, but to the epic audience. Thus, I posit the Julia scene to be working on three levels. The first is a literal level, which stays within the boundaries of the given text (i.e. the ghost of Julia appears to Pompey the Great). The second level is intertextual: the scene is interacting with epic and elegiac models from previous works. The third level is “poetological.”71 It relies on the audience’s understanding of the text as a piece of epic literature, and plays with its expectations of the genre. Here, Lucan not only makes contact with Virgil; he makes contact directly with his audience. By compressing the distance between the reader and the story, he facilitates a more involved reading of his epic.72 The dreamscape for this apparition is most unusual, as Pompey is transported, it seems, from the sea back to solid ground (per hiantis … terras). Hunink suggests that this might refer to Campus Martius, where Julia was cremated and buried,73 but he overlooks the strangeness of the dream’s transporting Pompey at all. The transportation of the spectator during an apparition sequence is not attested in any other major epic apparition scene. Waking apparitions occur exclusively in the space the spectator is currently occupying. In dreams, some apparitions bend over their lover’s bed, some stand at the foot; all hold their conversation in the bedchamber of the 71 Albrecht usefully suggests this system of layers and the term “poetological” in his analysis of the Scylla scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ov. Met. 1.400). Albrecht (1999), 10-11. 72 In Book 7 Lucan explicitly outlines this agenda of stirring emotions in his audience and aligning the reader with the author and his characters: “Even among later races and the people of posterity, these events—/whether they come down to future ages by their own fame alone/or whether my devotion also and my toil can do anything/for mighty names—will stir both hopes and fears together … all will be stunned as they read the destinies, as if/to come, not past and, Magnus, still they will side with you” (7.207-213). 73 Hunink (1992), 37. 44 spectator.74 The setting is much the same as if the spectator is awake in his or her room, but now in a liminal state—sleep—which enables interaction with supernatural beings. Thus, we should assign some importance to Lucan’s innovation. Julia does not appear on the deck of the ship, or even just before the eyes of Pompey. Any description of location is left conveniently unstated. Why, at this exact moment in the narrative, does Pompey see the ghost of his wife first emerge from the gaping earth, then stand, blazing, on a pyre? The description of Julia raising her head from the ground may bring anachronistic images to the mind of the modern horror fan: the living dead dragging themselves from their burial plots, or Carrie’s hand bursting unexpectedly from the loose soil. The image of ghouls crawling from their graves originated in the media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and while necromancy is a perennially popular theme for the ancients—especially for the Neronian literary audience, who seemed to have a special fondness in the gruesome and the macabre—the specific image of the living dead emerging from the earth is unattested. How should we understand this image, then, from an ancient perspective? The key to the reading is found in the participle hiantis. Formed from the verb hiare, “to gape,” it is cognate to hiatus, a noun used of chasms or fissures in the earth, particularly of entrances to the Underworld. Virgil employs this noun in his description of the entrance to the Underworld (spelunca alta fuit vastoque immanis hiatu 6.237; “There was a deep cave, huge, with gaping chasm”), and Lucan may be referring to this famous passage.75 We witness Julia rising not 74 See most notably Patroclus to Achilles (Il. 23.59–68), Athena to Nausicaä (Od. 6.20–24); Hector to Aeneas (Aen. 2.268–270), the Penates to Aeneas (Aen. 3.147–152), pseudo–Ceyx to Alcyone (Met. 11.650–655), and Cynthia to Propertius (4.7.1–6), an influential example for this passage, though from the elegiac genre. Blanche Conger McCune (2014) provides an excellent study of the parallels between Cynthia and Julia, including their frightening appearance, angry speeches about their men’s relationships with new women, the promise of eternal haunting, and many more. McCune (2014), 173-178. 75 In making this claim, I am going further than Hinds allows in his Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (1998), the primary theoretical model for my work. In explaining my reasoning, I hope to support not only the claims made here about hiare, but related claims made throughout the thesis about the 45 from her grave (or, indeed, the Campus Martius), but from the Underworld itself. Permitted by the infernal gods to return to the plane of the living, she performs a reverse katabasis—an inversion of Virgil which Lucan rather enjoys and will expand upon in greater depth in Book 6, where the witch Erichtho brings the Underworld to the surface.76 The second component of Julia’s appearance involves her standing on a pyre, another element which is unprecedented in epic apparition scenes before Lucan. A likely explanation lies in the most famous pyre scene in Latin epic: Dido’s dramatic suicide at the end of Aeneid 4. At the beginning of Aeneid 5, as Aeneas’s fleet begins the long sea voyage to Italy, Aeneas glances back to the walls of Carthage, where he sees the smoke of Dido’s funeral pyre. What caused the smoke, he and his men do not know (quae tantum accenderit ignem/causa latet 5.4–5; “What the reason for such a great fire to be lit/is unknown”). Aeneas is spared the certain knowledge of his own guilt concerning the death of Dido until they meet again in the Underworld in Book 6 (“Infelix Dido, verus mihi nuntius ergo/venerat exstinctam ferroque extrema secutam?/Funeris heu tibi causa fui?” 6.456–8; “Unlucky Dido, was the news true then/which came to me, that you were dead, taking your own life with a sword?/Alas, was I the cause of your death?”). Lucan begins Bellum Civile 3 with a very similar scene to the beginning of Aeneid 5. Pompey too sails away, never to return. It is my assertion that with the land just disappeared from direct intertextual influence of Virgil on Lucan. As Hinds argues in the most important chapter of his work, “Interpretability: Beyond Philological Fundamentalism,” there can be no absolute statements made concerning intertextual influences. Instead, we must weigh a balance of probabilities. In this example, I would not argue that every instance of the verb hiare in Latin literature refers to Virgil’s katabasis scene. Rather, I suggest that the combination of the closely related contexts of the scenes in question (both relate to entrance to/exit from to the Underworld) and Lucan’s more general patterning on Virgil encourage the reader to make this association. (Lucan’s close attention to the Aeneid goes far beyond, I argue, R. F. Thomas’s insufficient requirement that the poet must be “demonstrably familiar” with the putative source text. Thomas (1986), 173-174. Addressed by Hinds (1998), 18 pp.) However, the blurry boundaries between deliberate reference and chance or meaningless resemblance must always be kept in mind. To support my secondary claim of the influential nature of Virgil’s katabasis scene, we might look to its influence on poets other than Lucan. Juvenal, writing under Trajan and Hadrian, also references specifics of the Aeneid’s katabasis scene to lend an epic tone to his third Satire. See Braund (1996) 219 n. 261-7. 76 I use the term “reverse katabasis” here to refer to the unusual image of a character physically emerging from the Underworld, the inverse of the typical description of the epic hero plunging down into the earth. If my reading is correct, the “reverse katabasis” is a Lucanian innovation. 46 sight, Lucan rushes Pompey into sleep to facilitate a supernatural experience, one which extends the truncated scene from Book 5 of the Aeneid and forces Pompey to see what Aeneas did not: his lover burning on the pyre, reaffirming his guilt and threatening vengeance. This might explain why the dream takes place during the day. A couplet changing the scene from day to night—that is, an accommodation of the topos—would undercut this dramatic moment. Now asleep, Pompey continues to look back to Italy and sees Julia raging from her pyre, maintaining his guilt and cursing him, as Dido cursed Aeneas.77 Unlike Virgil, Lucan does not allow his hero to sail away in blissful ignorance, only to meet a scornful but silent lover in the Underworld. In typical form, Lucan ratchets up the unpleasantness and subjects Pompey to immediate and terrifying censure from a woman he loved through a supernaturally terrifying dream sequence. Thus we find another example of Lucan manipulating standardized rules of an epic topos—dreams should take place at night (§1)—to suit his narrative ends. And Julia is certainly an agent of terror, as embodied by her physical appearance (§4). Where Roma was ingens, larger than life—a common epithet of ghosts (1.186; Virg. Aen. 2.270–3; V.Fl. 5.232)—Julia is immense not with regards to her size, but her capacity to effect horror. She is “full,” Lucan tells us, of grim horror (plena), much as the pagan grove has a horror of its own (suus horror inest 3.412). Both are imbued with the supernatural ability to effect dread. Lucan’s use of dirus also lends an uncanny, frightful color to the scene. As Mackay points out, dirus saw an evolution in Silver Age epic from a sense of “dreadful”—more common in Virgil 77 This intertextual relationship between Dido and Julia is strengthened by Cornelia’s referring to Julia “taking vengeance” (“Ubicumque iaces civilibus armis/Nostros ulta toros, ades huc atque exige poenas” 8.103; “Cruel Julia, you have avenged/our marriage-bed with civil war”), a theme which recalls Dido’s famous curse (“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” 4.625; “Rise from my bones, some unknown avenger”). Dido’s threat to Aeneas could just as easily be spoken by Lucan’s Julia: “Though I am gone, I will pursue you with black flames, and when chilly death has pulled my limbs from my soul, I shall be in every place, a shadow. You will pay the penalty, wicked man” (“… Sequar atris ignibus absens/et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,/omnibus umbra locis adero. Dabis, improbe, poenas 4.384–6). 47 and Ovid—to something more supernatural, “awful, uncanny, ominous, accursed.”78 The tone of Julia’s portrayal is starkly different from that of Roma in Bellum Civile 1. I have argued that Roma aroused horror in Caesar not through frightful appearance or threatening message: indeed, she is presented as a grieving mother, and gives a relatively weak command to her general. Caesar’s horror originated from a personal sense of guilt at being confronted in the act of committing nefas. In contrast, Julia’s dreadful physical description can leave no doubt: Lucan intended Julia to effect horror even before she begins to speak. The poet strengthens Julia’s frightful appearance by likening her to a Fury (furialis 3.11). Hunink points out that Lucan is very vague concerning in what way, exactly, Julia resembles a Fury: in appearance? in function?79 For what such a character might look like visually, we can refer to Virgil’s apparition of Allecto, the Fury sent by Juno to rouse war lust in the Latins in Book 7 of the Aeneid (7.413–466).80 As Turnus sleeps in the city of Ardea, Allecto approaches him in a dream—first, in the benign form of an elderly priestess, and then, goaded by Turnus’s patronizing response to her message, revealing her full, terrifying form: flaming eyes and hissing snakes for hair, wielding the Fury’s torch (Tot Erinys sibilat hydris… tum flammea torquens/Lumina cunctantem … et geminos erexit crinibus anguis/Verberaque insonuit rabidoque haec/Addidit ore 7.447–451; “The Fury hissed with so many snakes … then, rolling her fiery/eyes towards him as he hesitated … she raised twin snakes in her hair/and cracked her whip and added this with rabid lips”). 78 Mackay (1961), 311. 79 Hunink (1992), 37. Hunink goes on to argue that furialis to be taken as “like a Fury” rather than “raging,” citing the same adjective being used to describe the witch Erichtho in BC 6, whose appearance maps closely onto that of a Fury (Discolor et vario furialis cultus amictu/Induitur, voltusque aperitur crine remoto,/Et coma vipereis substringitur horrida sertis 6.654–656; “With a Fury’s crazy robes of many hues/she garbs herself, uncovered is her face with locks pulled back/her bristling hair is bound with wreaths of vipers”). This shared descriptor with Erichtho also strengthens Julia’s associations with the Underworld. Hunink (1992), 37. 80 Hardie notes the popularity of this scene in Latin epic after Virgil: “The Allecto episode in Aeneid 7 is one of the passages most frequently imitated in post-Virgilian epic; it doubtless fulfills all the ‘Silver’ requirements for horror, violent emotion, hyperbole, but it also performs important thematic and structural functions.” Hardie (1993), 62. 48 Julia shares strong similarities with Allecto. Both are enraged, both goad their spectator to war. The appearance of Furies is often tied to the elements of fire, snakes (either hair or used as whips, sometimes both), and torches. Are we to imagine Lucan’s Julia, then, to be literally in the garb of a Fury? It is possible. More likely, though, is a metaphorical sense reflected by the content of Julia’s speech. Traditionally the Furies appear to avenge impious actions taken against family members, and Julia has come to reinforce the familial relationship between herself, Pompey, and Caesar. She stands as a raving casualty of civil war’s destruction of social and familial relations; no simile could be more fitting than a Fury. What is clear is that Julia’s appearance inspires dread, and the furialis descriptor lends all the attendant associations of the Furies—physical and metaphorical—without forcing Lucan to be explicit. Julia is also an imago, we are told, a ghost, a choice of vocabulary which establishes the Creusa episode in Virgil as a particularly important intertext (Aen. 2.773). In comparing the ghosts of the wives, we see another prime example of Lucan inverting Virgil. Creusa, the model of a faithful wife, appears to Aeneas as he flees Troy to give support and guidance to her husband (2.776–89), whereas Julia appears as Pompey flees Italy to threaten him and foretell his doom. Creusa was a necessary casualty to the founding of the city of Rome: she had to be removed from the narrative to allow Aeneas’s tryst with Dido and, more importantly, his marriage to Lavinia in Italy. As Virgil’s epic narrates the founding of Rome, Lucan’s epic details the events leading to its destruction, and the death of Julia, like that of Creusa, is the lynchpin in this outcome. Lucan attributes to her death the dissolution of the alliance between Caesar and Pompey, which ultimately leads to civil war.81 Julia confirms this “guilt” in the outset of her speech: 81 The marriage of Caesar’s daughter Julia to Pompey the Great in 59 BCE solidified a political alliance between the two leaders (Cic. Att. 8.12.1; Suet. Iul. 21; Plut. Caes. 14.7; Pomp. 47.10); Julia died in childbirth in 54 BCE and was buried in the Campus Martius. Lucan himself attributes the start of the war to the death of Julia early in the work (1.111–119). 49 “Sedibus Elysiis campoque expulsa piorum Ad Stygias” inquit “tenebras manesque nocentis Post bellum civile trahor. Vidi ipsa tenentes Eumenidas, quaterent quas vestris lampadas armis; 15 Praeparat innumeras puppes Acherontis adusti Portitor; in multas laxantur Tartara poenas; Vix operi cunctae dextra properante sorores Sufficiunt, lassant rumpentis stamina Parcas.” [She said: “Since civil war began, I have been driven from the Elysian abodes and Field of the Good and drawn to Stygian darkness and the guilty shades. I myself have seen the Eumenides holding torches to brandish at your weapons; the ferryman of scorched Acheron prepares countless ships; Tartarus is widened for many a punishment; all three Sisters are hardly equal to the work though their hands make haste; breaking threads tires the Parcae.”] Julia’s speech is much longer than Roma’s. In style, however, it is not dissimilar. Like Roma’s speech, it displays a surprising syntactical simplicity. I argue that this simplicity of style is a feature of the apparition topos in the speeches of ghosts in Virgil and, subsequently, in Lucan. I must address a potential objection to this statement. In arguing for the “simple speech” of ghosts (and thus differentiating ghosts from gods), one might suggest that I undercut my main argument, which encourages a holistic approach to apparition events of all types. However, my thesis should not be understood to suggest that there are no distinctions in ancient thought between the nature of ghosts and gods; such a position would be extreme and untenable. Rather, I argue that the linguistic similarities and shared narrative function of epic apparition scenes—which include visitations of ghosts, gods, and dreams—merit the direct comparison of such passages. In contending that the speech of ghosts is noticeably “simple,” I recognize a nuance rather than invalidate the legitimacy of the apparition topos. I will now make a brief aside to 50 discuss my theory of the language of ghosts in Latin epic, particularly as they manifest in apparition scenes. In arguing for the “simple speech” of ghosts, it may be useful to provide some cultural rationalization in antiquity which supports this phenomenon. In her landmark work on early Greek attitudes towards death, Emily Vermeule devotes some time to the Greek concept of the forgetfulness in the dead, and Greek anxieties about losing cognitive ability and wit after death.82 The ancient idea of the dead somehow losing cognitive ability, she argues, is reflected in the basic techniques for communicating with the dead, with the rules “reflecting their own slightly stupid and sleepy condition … you must remind him of his name, his titles, his exploits, and that he is loved.”83 Vermeule’s concept is evocative, if not without its flaws: to support her assertion, she cites Greek tragedy, particularly selections from Aeschylus’s Persians and Euripides’s Elektra.84 While the invocations of the dead she cites are certainly simple, the speeches of the ghosts themselves are not, undercutting her presentation of the “witless dead.” However, her core observation is useful: if humans must speak simply to be understood by the deceased due to death’s dimming of their intellect, then that same dimmed intellect might also force the ghosts to speak simply in return. This shared Greco-Roman cultural awareness of the nature of ghosts and life after death provides a possible explanation for a phenomenon I have noted in my research on Virgil’s epic apparitions: the speeches of ghosts display a more simple syntactical style than the speeches of gods or living mortals. Here I must insert a caveat: the simplicity of the speech of ghosts is, in my research, limited to Virgil and the Roman epic genre. A study of Homer’s iconic example of a ghostly 82 See especially Chapter 1, “Creatures of the Day.” 83 Vermeule (1979), 199. 84 Ibid. Aesch. Pers.: ἦ φίλος ἁνήρ, φίλος ὄχθος (647); βαλήν, ἀρχαῖος βαλήν, ἴθι, ἱκοῦ (657); βάσκε πάτερ ἄκακε Δαριάν, οἶ (663) Eur. El.: ἔµβα, ἔµβα κατακλαίουσα/ἰώ µοί µοι (113–4) 51 visitation—the ghost of Patroclus’s dream visit to Achilles—reveals the expected syntactical simplicity and brief, formulaic phrases, but his speech is not markedly simpler than the speeches of living characters. Beyond the epic genre, the ghosts of both Greek and Roman tragedy are eloquent indeed.85 I must confine my observation, then, to Roman epic and to Virgil, and suggest Virgil’s simple ghost speeches may well be a Virgilian innovation, or perhaps an innovation of Latin epicists (here, Ennius’s apparition of Homer is especially missed). In any case, Lucan seems to be imitating the simplicity of Virgil’s ghost speeches in the speeches of his own ghosts, which stands as further evidence of his close attention to Virgil’s epic. The most important elements of the theory are readily seen in the Aeneid. Especially illustrative is Hector’s speech to Aeneas in Book 2, presented here in full for comparison: “Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his” ait “eripe flammis. Hostis habet muros; ruit alto a culmine Troia. 290 Sat patriae Priamoque datum: si Pergama dextra defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent. Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia penatis; hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere magna pererrato statues quae denique ponto.” [“Alas, son of the goddess, flee, tear yourself from the flames. The enemy holds the walls. Troy falls from her high place. Enough is given to the country and Priam. If any right hand could save Pergamum, it would have been saved by mine. To you Troy hands her sacred objects and household gods. Take these companions of your fate, seek walls for them, great walls, those you will build at last after wandering the sea.”] Hector’s speech is simple, staccato. Sense units average only four words, with frequent use of asyndeton. There is an unusually high level of alliteration (hostis habet; patriae Priamoque; Pergama dextra defendi possent; sacra suosque) and internal rhyme (fuge nate; teque … eripe; sat patriae Priamoque), which lends, I argue, a “sing-songy” quality to his speech. There is only 85 See especially the introductory speeches of Aeschylus’s Darius (Pers. 681–693) and Seneca’s Tantalus (Thy. 1–22). 52 one example of subordination (defined here as a clause dependent on another clause), the short relative clause concluding the speech. Compare to this a short excerpt from Anchises’s speech to Aeneas in the Underworld, the beginning of a much longer treatise on, coincidentally enough, the fate of souls after death: “… Animae, quibus altera fato corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis undam securos latices et longa oblivia potant. 715 Has equidem memorare tibi atque ostendere coram iampridem, hanc prolem cupio enumerare meorum, quo magis Italia mecum laetere reperta.” [“… They are spirits, to whom a second body is owed by Fate, at the wave of the river Lethe they drink the calm waters, forgetful at long last. Indeed I have desired for a long time to recount them to you, To show them to you face-to-face, to enumerate my descendants, so that you might be more happy with me at finding Italy.”] It is immediately clear that there is a significant increase in complexity. Anchises uses interlocking word order, subordination, and long clauses. This example is particularly useful, because Anchises too is dead. I argue the simplicity of speech to be a feature of ghostly apparitions in epic—that is, only ghosts which appear to mortals outside the Underworld. By nature of exiting their proper space, the realm of the dead, and reentering the realm of the living, the dead reflect loss of intellect they suffered when they exited the mortal plane. While the speech of Hector is the most obvious example of this phenomenon in the Aeneid, similar patterns can be seen in the speech of Creusa. She too speaks in short phrases with little subordination or complexity (e.g. non haec sine numine divum/eveniunt nec te comitem hinc portare Creusam/fas aut ille sinit superi regnator Olympi 2.777–779; “Not without divine approval do these things/ happen, it is not lawful to take Creusa as companion from here/the ruler of high Olympus does not allow it.”) 53 The speech of Julia in Lucan’s BC 3 shows all the hallmarks of the simple speech of ghosts as well: “Coniuge me laetos duxisti, Magne, triumphos: 20 Fortuna est mutata toris, semperque potentis Detrahere in cladem fato damnata maritos Innupsit tepido paelex Cornelia busto. Haereat illa tuis per bella, per aequora, signis, Dum non securos liceat mihi rumpere somnos, 25 Et nullum vestro vacuum sit tempus amori, Sed teneat Caesarque dies et Iulia noctes. Me non Lethaeae, coniunx, obliuia ripae Inmemorem fecere tui, regesque silentum Permisere sequi. Veniam te bella gerente 30 In medias acies. Numquam tibi, Magne, per umbras Perque meos manes genero non esse licebit; Abscidis frustra ferro tua pignora: bellum Te faciet ciuile meum.” … [“While I was your wife, Magnus, you led happy triumphs home: your fortune changed with your marriage-bed, and that paramour, Cornelia, condemned by fate to drag her mighty husbands down always to disaster, married into a warm tomb. Let her cling to your standards through warfare and through waters, provided that I may disturb and break in on your slumbers, provided that no time is free for love between you, but that Caesar occupies your days and Julia your nights. The oblivion of Lethe’s bank has not made me forget you, husband; the kings of the dead have permitted me to chase you. When you are waging wars I shall come into the middle of the ranks. Never, Magnus, by the ghosts and by my shade, will you stop being his son-in-law; in vain you sever with the sword your pledges: civil war will make you mine.” … ] The second half of the speech in particular, starting at line 27, reveals the same sort of phrasing displayed by Hector: short, terse sense units and extremely simple syntactical arrangement—a feature especially striking in a poet famous for his rhetorical flair, whom Quintilian even claimed to be “better suited for imitation by orators than poets” (Inst. 10.1.90). This simplicity of speech is one facet of the apparition topos Lucan accommodates, possibly because it lends a foreboding 54 tenor to the speeches of his ghosts.86 Like Roma, however, Julia issues no direct command to Pompey. This is, again, quite an unusual aspect for an apparition scene, and one which reflects the ultimate futility of Lucan’s apparitions in effecting any actual change in the narrative. After Julia delivers her supremely threatening message, Pompey attempts to embrace his wife, a familiar element (§11): … Sic fata refugit Umbra per amplexus trepidi dilapsa mariti. 35 [ So spoke the ghost and fled away, melting through her trembling husband’s embrace.] Pompey’s failed attempt to embrace Julia’s ghost is a standard conclusion to apparition scenes of loved ones, especially (but not limited to) apparition scenes of lovers.87 It is surprising here only in that it follows a uniquely terrifying message: it is rare that a lover deliver such a foreboding speech, and Pompey’s love for his former wife despite her threats is surprising and poignant. Lucan likely includes this detail in a continued effort to generate pathos for the character of Pompey, a theme he maintains throughout the Bellum Civile. Both of Lucan’s major apparitions, Roma and Julia, ultimately have no major impact on the heroes they appear to or on the narrative as a whole. Caesar boldly marched on. Pompey calmly rationalizes the dream away (3.36–45). This is not the typical response. Traditionally the dreamer accepts the dream and follows its precepts, much as, more broadly, all epic spectators accept their apparition’s message and implement their instructions to progress the plot. In contrast, neither Roma nor Julia reveal an important truth or save their spectators in a time of confusion and distress; rather, they provide a brief window of characterization for Caesar and 86 See Fratantuono’s comment on the speech of Roma: “Roma is not loquacious, and perhaps her laconic address to Caesar chills the glib orator as much as her stunning appearance.” Fratantuono (2012), 24. 87 See Hom. Il. 23.99–100; Od. 11.206–8; Virg. A. 2.792–4, 6.700–02; Ov. Met. 11.675. 55 Pompey88 and, just as importantly, provide Lucan with an opportunity to stall the progression of his poem about the unspeakable: civil war. 88 The ghost of Julia also stands as a particularly effective foil for Pompey’s wife, Cornelia, whose devotion and tenderness for her husband never falter. Cornelia and Pompey provide what Ahl calls “rare moments of close and warm human contact in Latin epic,” noting that Lucan otherwise never involves any of his major protagonists—Caesar, Cato, or Pompey—in physical encounters of any kind, even on the battlefield. Ahl (1976), 177. 56 CONCLUSIONS From the wintry vision of Roma at the Rubicon to the raging shade of Julia on the pyre, this thesis has explored in detail Lucan’s treatment of the apparition topos in his Bellum Civile. I have demonstrated the merits of applying a new, holistic way of looking at epic apparitions, subsuming ghosts, dreams, and gods as related phenomena worthy of close comparison. My findings of my close reading support many of the broader assertions of Lucanian scholarship: chief among them, Lucan’s working in epic topoi with the familiarity and innovation which characterize his epic, in turns deferring to and inverting the standard elements of apparition scenes to suit his narrative ends. The potential applications of this study are many, though two are of particular appeal. First, a focused project of this type invites the application of its methodology to epic apparition scenes beyond Lucan and Virgil. A natural extension would be a tracing of the evolution of the apparition scene in Latin epic. Before Virgil, hypothetical work could be done on Homer’s dream visit to Ennius,. Virgil himself must be examined at greater length. Ovid would also be a key player in the study, as a major poet before Lucan who also had to deal with anxiety of influence after Virgil.89 Finally, a close reading of the apparitions of Statius and Silius Italicus will not only enrich our understanding of the Thebaid and the Punica, but also reveal the impact of the Bellum Civile’s treatment of the topos on the epic genre after Lucan’s death. A second, even broader application could examine whether the elements of the apparition topos are unique to epic, or if they are shared with the presentation of supernatural beings in other genres as well. The wrathful Cynthia of Propertius 4.7 would be an obvious point of interest in elegiac poetry: her ghost approaches Propertius at night, much in the manner of 89 For an insightful application of Harold Bloom’s theory of the relationship between poets and their predecessors (1973) to epic, see Hardie (1993),116–119. 57 Lucan’s Julia. Of interest too would be Seneca the Younger’s tragic ghosts. Thyestes’ Tantalus is certainly more loquacious than his epic counterparts—a difference, perhaps, necessitated by stage performance, with theater lacking the descriptive narrative voice afforded to the written word. For all the scholarly attention devoted to dreams and ghosts and gods over the years, supernatural apparition scenes remain a rich and fruitful field of study. There is promise of further revelations still from epic’s messengers from the world beyond. As there are currently three standard topoi, so too epic heroes grasp at the ghost of their lover three times—perhaps the application of this new apparition topos will bring us one step closer to understanding epic apparitions, and in doing so, to embracing the unembraceable. 58 BIBLIOGRAPHY EDITIONS, COMMENTARIES, AND TRANSLATIONS OF THE PRIMARY TEXTS Aeschylus Page, Denys, ed. Aeschyli septem quae supersunt tragoedias. Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis. Oxford [U.K.]: Clarendon Press, 2009. 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A specter is haunting epic : a close reading of the apparition topos in Lucan's Bellum Civile
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