it a sardonic and even a satiric tone.
The blend of political passion and rhetorical conceits is the essence of the Pharsalia. In the first book the
character of Caesar is sketched in sharp terse phrases which recall Sallust. Cato's summing up of Pompey's
career shows a historical sense, setting the great man in the context of his time and balancing virtues against
faults with a dignified restraint:
'ciuis obit', inquit, 'multum maioribus impar
nosse modum iuris, sed in hoc tamen utilis aeuo,
cui non ulla fuit iusti reuerentia; salua
libertate potens, et solus plebe parata
priuatus seruire sibi, rectorque senatus,
sed regnantis, erat.'(9.190-5)
'A citizen has died', he said, 'far inferior to our ancestors in recognizing the limits of legality, but
valuable in this present age, which has had no reverence for justice. He was powerful, and yet
preserved liberty; he alone stayed a private citizen when the people were ready to be his slaves; he
was ruler of the Senate, but of a Senate which kept the sovereignty.'The last five words show how the sententia could be directed to the service of a political and historical theme:
the difference between autocracy and dictatorship is put with admirable concision. Sometimes, too, the sententia
displays a psychological acuity, as when the boy king of Egypt takes a child's delight at 'being grown up' and
ordering the death of Pompey:
adsensere omnes sceleri. laetatur honore
rex puer insueto, quod iam sibi tanta iubere
permittant famuli.(8.536-8)
All voted for the crime. The boy king delights in the unaccustomed honour-that now his slaves
should allow him to issue such important orders.Unfortunately, though, an account of Lucan that dwelt only upon his virtues would be seriously misleading, for
his faults are very gross. The promise of historical and political seriousness which the poem appears to make is
for the most part unfulfilled; Caesar soon turns into a mere pantomime villain, a preposterous ranter hardly worth
the compliment of our hatred. The rhetoric is often absurd, and the ceaseless search for paradox produces results
that are often tedious and far-fetched; worst of all, the poem lacks variety of style and theme, and the unchanging
note of sardonic bleakness becomes wearisome. The way in which Lucan allowed a taste for rhetorical smartness
to run away with him can be seen (for example) in the speech of Pothinus at the court of Ptolemy (8. 484-535):
for a line or two it looks as though this may be a powerful if cynical defence of expediency against absolute
morality, but Pothinus quickly becomes a cardboard monster mouthing clever epigrams of the kind that would
persuade nobody. Lucan is, apart from Ovid, the one major Latin poet surviving who composed with speed and
fluency, and he has all the faults of the man who never blots a line. His early death leaves us with one of the