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‘Stat Magni Nominis Umbra.’ Lucan on the Greatness of Pompeius Magnus*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

D. C. Feeney
D. C. Feeney
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

At the age of twenty-five, Gn. Pompeius acquired the spectacular cognomen of Magnus. According to Plutarch (Pomp. 13), the name came either from the acclamation of his army in Africa, or at the instigation of Sulla. According to Livy, the practice began from the toadying of Pompeius' circle (‘ab adsentatione familiar’, 30.45.6). The cognomen invited play. At the Ludi Apollinares of July 59, Cicero tells us, the actor Diphilus won ‘a dozen encores’ when he pronounced, from a lost tragedy, the line ‘nostra miseria tu es magnus’. Four or five years later Catullus scored a fine hit, filching Pompeius' cognomen and giving it to his zealously competitive father-in-law: ‘Caesaris uisens monimenta magni’ (11.10). In Lucan's Bellum Civile such plays on the cognomen are elevated into something of considerable power, testifying to a consistent controlling design, of the sort which many still deny the poem.

When Pompeius first appears he is compared with Caesar, to his detriment: ‘nec coiere pares’ (1.129). So much for Pompeius' vaunted intolerance of an equal, of which we have just been reminded: ‘nec quemquam iam ferre potest Caesarue priorem | Pompeiusue parem’ (125f.). Many of the images in this introductory section have a programmatic power, and will recur. With ‘nec coiere pares’ Lucan presents the two as an ill-matched pair of gladiators. The metaphor is ubiquitous. Note, in particular, 5.1–3, and 6.3, ‘parque suum uidere dei’. We are further told that Pompeius seeks ‘fama’, is a ‘popularis’, indulges the people, basks in the applause he receives from the mob in his theatre: ‘famaeque petitor | multa dare in uolgus, totus popularibus auris | impelli plausuque sui gaudere theatri’ (131–3). We will return later to this complex of ideas.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 1986 , pp. 239 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

1 Att. 2.19.3. The ‘dozen encores’ are from Shackleton Bailey's translation. I thank Dr J. R. Patterson for the reference.

2 Getty collects examples of this formulation in his note on 125, ed. De Bello Ciuili Liber I (Cambridge, 1940)Google Scholar.

3 See here Ahl, Frederick M., Lucan. An Introduction (Cornell U.P., 1976), 82–115, esp. 86fGoogle Scholar.

4 Commentary (n. 2), ad loc.

5 On this figure, see Pease on Cic. Div. 1.102; Riess, , RE 18.376ffGoogle Scholar.

6 Athens is a long-standing target for such gibes. Compare the words of Livy (taken from Polybius. as J. Briscoe notes in his commentary on Livy 31–33 [Oxford, 1973]): ‘contraxerant autem sibi cum Philippo bellum Athenienses haudquaquam digna causa. dum ex uetere fortuna nihil praeter animos seruant’. 31.14.6.

7 The true Alexander in the poem is of course Caesar: cf. Morford, M. P. O., The Poet Lucan. Studies in Rhetorical Epic (Oxford, 1967). Ch. 2. pp. 13–19Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Steen, Otto Due. C & M 22 (1962), 111ffGoogle Scholar.

9 The words also convey the notion that Ptolemy is the shadow, not of his own name, as is Pompeius, but of his ancestors’ great name.

10 Pompeius as a ‘proficiens’ made his appearance in Marti, Berthe M., ‘The meaning of the Pharsalia’, AJPh 66 (1945), 352–76Google Scholar. The idea is conclusively dealt with by Lintott, A. W., CQ 21 (1971), 504fGoogle Scholar. Discussion continues: see Rutz, W., Lustrum 26 (1984), 164ffGoogle Scholar.

11 Cf. Lintott, 502. Lintott rightly stresses the fact that it is Pompeius' death, not his defeat as such, which provides his amelioration (501).

12 Lucan's reversals here produce the paradoxes remarked upon by Mayer, R., ed. Lucan. Civil War VIII (Aris and Philips, 1981), 185Google Scholar: ‘At one moment Pompey's tomb is a disgrace, at the next a glory; now an object of pilgrimage, now lost to sight’.

13 The first man to honour Pompeius after his death is motivated by ‘pietas’, which was the Pompeians' battle-cry at Munda; Pompeius' younger son took the cognomen of ‘Pius’ (cf. Syme, R., The Roman Revolution [Oxford, 1939], 157)Google Scholar. Another play on this fact at 9.147, where this son is ‘iusta…furens pietate’.

14 It is not, then, as commonly asserted, a matter of ‘Lucan's increasingly pro-Pompeian attitude’ (so put by Holliday, Vivian L., Pompey in Cicero's Correspondence and Lucan's Civil War [The Hague, 1969], 55)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see here Due (n. 7), 106.

15 It is very likely, as Professor M. D. Reeve suggests to me, that Lucan got at least the germ of his presentation from the writings and conversation of his uncle. Seneca has one or two comparatively straightforward plays on Pompeius' cognomen: note Cons. Marc. 14.3, ‘Cn. Pompeius non aequo laturus animo quemquam alium esse in re publica magnum’; cf. Ben. 4.30.2, ‘unius uiri magnitudo tanta quondam’. But there is a highly suggestive sequence of allusions in one of the Epistles, where Seneca exposes the hollowness of Pompeius' grand title: ‘Ne Gnaeo quidem Pompeio externa bella ac domestica uirtus aut ratio suadebat, sed insanus amor magnitudinis falsae…quid illum in Africam, quid in septentrionem…traxit? infinita scilicet cupido crescendi, cum sibi uni parum magnus uideretur’, 94.64f.