92 BRUCE GIBSON
while his limbs fell, who permits weapons to pass through his chest and
who were fixed to the battlefield with a spear, whose blood broke
through the air as his veins were emptied, and fell on the weapons of
his enemy, or who struck the breast of a brother, and, so that he could
despoil a corpse that he knew, cast the severed head far away, who mu-
tilated the face of a parent, and proves to those who are watching with
too much anger that the person whose throat he cuts is not his father.
No death is worthy of its own lament, we have the leisure to lament for
no men. Pharsalia did not have those divisions of battles which other
slaughters have: there Rome perished through the fates of men, here
through peoples; what was the death of a soldier there was here the
death of a nation ...Lucan is discussing here how to write of Roman defeat, with the end
of the passage comparing Pharsalus with other unnamed defeats for
the Romans. However, by a kind of praeteritio, Lucan is also declin-
ing to describe the kinds of death which can be found in epic poetry,
whilst at the same time giving examples of such slayings. Now of
course Lucan’s own writing does include instances of individual
deaths elsewhere (one thinks for instance of the various extraordinary
deaths of individuals described in the sea-battle in Luc. 3.509–762).^18
At the same time, however, Lucan’s refusal to speak of individual
deaths in narrating the battle of Pharsalus may be felt both to evoke
the scale of the casualties, but also to suggest that the kind of battle
narrative offered by epic which concentrates on individuals is not
equal to such a situation (cf. 7.634–5 quod militis illic / mors hic gen-
tis erat, “what was the death of a soldier there was here the death of a
nation”).
The question then arises: to what extent do Lucan’s successors in
epic respond to this? The reaction of Silius is striking: Silius’ battle
scenes such as Cannae and Zama are replete with the deaths of indi-
viduals; the historical content does not seem to stop Silius from pro-
viding deaths of individuals of a kind which go back to Homeric epic:
thus we find Hannibal, for example, killing Crista and his six sons at
Sil. 10.92–169 in a manner which obviously recalls the exploits of
heroes in Homer. Statius’ subject, however, was of course different
from those of Lucan and Silius in that it was not historical epic, and
was indeed already sanctified as a story of the achievements of heroes.
However, Lucan’s critique of conventional epic battle narrative might
18 On the violent deaths of individuals in Lucan, see e.g. Bartsch 1997, 15–7.