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POMPEY, VENUS AND THE POLITICS OF HESIOD IN LUCAN'S BELLVM CIVILE 8.456–9
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2021
Extract
Pompey does not accept defeat at Pharsalus. Rather, in an effort to gain support from powers beyond Rome, he makes for Egypt and, unbeknownst to him, his decapitation. As narrated in Lucan's Bellum ciuile, after deliberating in Cilicia with his senatorial advisers (8.259–455), Pompey stops at the island of Cyprus (8.456–9):
- tum Cilicum liquere solum Cyproque citatas
- immisere rates, nullas cui praetulit aras
- undae diua memor Paphiae, si numina nasci
- credimus aut quemquam fas est coepisse deorum.
Then they left the Cilician soil and steered their vessels in haste for Cyprus—Cyprus which the goddess, mindful of Paphian waves, prefers to any of her shrines (if we believe that deities have birth, or if it is lawful to hold that any of the gods had a beginning).
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association.
Footnotes
This paper began in a seminar, ‘Lucan and the Poetics of Civil War’, at Stanford University led by Christopher Krebs, whose comments and encouragement assisted greatly in its various stages. It likewise owes a debt of gratitude to several individuals who generously responded to drafts, including Edward Kelting, Brittney Szempruch, Scott Weiss, Maud Gleason, Matthew Loar, Alessandro Barchiesi, Stephen Harrison and David Petrain. Catherine Kearns, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Justin Leidwanger and Sturt Manning provided helpful thoughts on the geography of Cyprus. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader and to the CQ editors for their insightful criticisms and revisions. Texts are cited from D.R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Marcus Annaeus Lucanus: De bello civili libri X (Berlin, 2009), F. Solmsen (ed.), Hesiodi: Theogonia, Opera et Dies, Scutum (Oxford, 1990) and R.A.B. Mynors (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis opera (Oxford, 1972). Translations of Lucan are adapted from J. Duff (ed.), Lucan: The Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1928) and of Hesiod from G. Most (ed.), Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia (Cambridge, MA, 2018); other translations are attributed as they occur or are otherwise my own.
References
2 Scholars have thus far deemed the mythological reference of little significance; cf. Mayer, R. (ed.), Lucan: Civil War VIII (Warminster, 1981), 139–40Google Scholar.
3 Cn. Pompeius cum Aegyptum petisset, iussu Ptolemaei regis, pupilli sui, auctore Theodoto praeceptore, cuius magna aput regem auctoritas erat, et Pothino occisus est ab Archelao, cui id facinus erat delegatum, in nauicula antequam in terram exiret. Cornelia uxor et Sex. Pompei<us> filius Cypron refugerunt. Caesar post tertium diem insecutus, cum ei Theodotus caput Pompei et anulum obtulisset, infensus est et inlacrimauit. For a thorough discussion of Cyprus in Greco-Roman literature, see Kearns, C., ‘Cyprus in the surging sea: spatial imaginations of the Eastern Mediterranean’, TAPhA 148 (2018), 45–74Google Scholar.
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15 This follows the Homeric topos of Zeus's jars of good and ill fortune (Luc. 8.705–7; cf. Hom. Il. 24.525–33).
16 For the relation of Bellum ciuile 8.710–11 to the fate of Priam in Aen. 2.557–8, cf. Mayer (n. 2), 167 and Serv. ad loc.
17 ludibrium occurs twice later: as the spirit of Pompey looks down from the sky and laughs serenely at the sui ludibria trunci (9.14), and in reference to the body of Alexander the Great, whose body, the narrator claims, should have been a ludibrium to dissuade imperial impulses (10.26).
18 Shackleton Bailey adopts Idalio (8.716) from more recent manuscripts in contrast to Housman's Icario (Ω C); cf. Icariae (8.244).
19 Although it is beyond the literary focus of this paper, the way in which Caesar's victory and its association with the Birth of Venus predetermine the outcome of the characters in the poem parallels what Liebeschuetz and others have identified as the working of providence in Lucan's Stoic philosophy; cf. Liebeschuetz, J.H.W.G., Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford, 1979), 140–55, especially 140Google Scholar: ‘The historical events of the Civil War are shown to be part of an unbroken chain of cause and effect stretching from the beginning of the world to its end.’
20 For a brief overview of Aphrodite-Venus in Roman literature, see Cyrino, M.S., Aphrodite (London, 2010), 127–30Google Scholar.
21 unde genus ducis ut diximus supra, quia feliciter est nauigaturus Aeneas, Venerem dicit a mari procreatam. ut fert fabula, Caelus pater fuit Saturni. cui cum iratus filius falce uirilia amputauit, delapsa in mare sunt: de quorum cruore et maris spuma nata dicitur Venus: unde et Ἀφροδίτη dicitur, ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀφροῦ. sed hoc habet ratio: omnes uires usu uenerio debilitantur, qui sine corporis damno non geritur: unde fingitur Venus nata per damnum; de mari autem ideo, quia dicunt physici sudorem salsum esse, quem semper elicit coitus. unde etiam myrtus ei consecrata est, quae litoribus gaudet, ut ait ‘litora myrtetis laetissima’. ideo autem diximus ‘Caelus pater’, ut deus significaretur: nullus enim deus generis neutri est. nam caelum genere neutro elementum significat.
22 The phrase fas est occurs only twice elsewhere in Virgil, both times in the Aeneid (mihi iussa capessere fas est, 1.77; uos quoque Pergameae iam fas est parcere genti, | dique deaeque omnes, quibus obstitit Ilium et ingens | gloria Dardaniae, 6.63–5). In Lucan, the phrase is marked by intertextual associations that increase the likelihood of heightened referentiality in 8.456–9. The most significant of these occurrences is at 9.980–6, wherein the narrator refers to the Muses (Latiis … Musis), to Homer (Zmyrnaei … uatis) and perhaps even to the title of Lucan's own poem (Pharsalia nostra); see also the references to the Gigantomachy (3.328–9 and 7.455–9) and to the gods (10.414–16). The phrase likewise has an emphatically Hesiodic context in Ovid's Pont. 4.8.55–62; cf. Rosati (n. 11), 372–3. On the Pharsalia, see Joseph, T.A., ‘Pharsalia as Rome's “day of doom” in Lucan’, AJPh 138 (2017), 107–41Google Scholar.
23 Cf. Hinds, S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1997), 9 and 151Google Scholar; and Nelis, D., Vergil's Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Leeds, 2001), 5Google Scholar.
24 The technique is described in Conte, G.B., La ‘Guerra Civile’ di Lucano: studi e prove di commento (Urbino, 1988), 38Google Scholar as follows: ‘selezionare alcuni tratti marcati del modello virgiliano, … accentuarli fino ad esasperarne il significato, renderli pertinenti al proprio discorso attraverso un gesto sempre e comunque antifrastico (per opposizione o rovesciamento), è questo il modo in cui Lucano lavora il suo testo’. For a similar definition, see Asso, P., A Commentary on Lucan, ‘De Bello Civili’ IV (Berlin, 2010), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Narducci, E., La provvidenza crudele. Lucano e la distruzione dei mitti augustei (Pisa, 1979)Google Scholar.
25 Cf. Rossi, A., ‘The Aeneid revisited: the journey of Pompey in Lucan's Pharsalia’, AJPh 121 (2000), 571–91Google Scholar. For Lucan's polemical stance towards Virgil, see, for example, Conte, G.B., ‘Il proemio della Pharsalia’, Maia 18 (1966), 42–53Google Scholar; Martindale, C., ‘Paradox, hyperbole and literary novelty in Lucan's De bello ciuili’, BICS 23 (1976), 45–54Google Scholar; and especially Casali, S., ‘The Bellum ciuile as an anti-Aeneid’, in Asso, P. (ed.), Brill's Companion to Lucan (Leiden, 2011), 81–109Google Scholar.
26 Virgil is not, of course, uncritical of Julius Caesar's role in the Civil War; cf. Aen. 6.827–31 with Martindale, C., ‘The politician Lucan’, G&R 31 (1984), 64–79, at 70–1Google Scholar.
27 Cf. Krebs, C.B., ‘The world's measure: Caesar's geographies of Gallia and Britannia in their contexts and as evidence of his world map’, AJPh 139 (2018), 93–122, at 94Google Scholar: ‘it is true … that, by substituting natural history for the traditional mythical topic, Lucan adheres to his overall “historical” poetics’.
28 Feeney, D., The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1991), 294Google Scholar.