Caesar’s famous leniency in dealing with his former enemies has frequently in modern times been interpreted as an assertion of lordly mastery, establishing a quasi-monarchic supremacy over the recipients of his pardon that trampled aristocratic, "republican" sensibilities. But as Konstan showed some time ago, "clemency was a virtue," and an unimpeachably republican one at that. The first systematic collection of actual instances of Caesar’s Civil War leniency shows that his enemies rushed to avail themselves of it in great numbers, and never refused it (Cato notwithstanding) when it was actually offered. Nor were its recipients tightly bound to Caesar in chains of reciprocity once they had availed themselves of his pardon: the record of "recidivists" who simply returned to the fight after being pardoned shows that any gratitude they felt lay very lightly on their shoulders. Caesar’s letter to his advisers after Corfinium shows that it was no thinl -veiled blueprint for regnumbut a plausible attempt to prevent the catastrophe of civil war if possible and to minimize bloodshed if not, and in any case, to further restoration of a deeply divided community.

Chapter 3 focuses on funeral denial and perversion in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile. The first section details the elderly survivor’s recollection of the civil war between Marius and Sulla in BC 2. This flashback is crucial for Lucan’s handling of the issues of funeral rites as it anticipates the horrors to come, particularly the warped funeral for Pompey in book 8. Lucan expands Pompey’s death, abuse, and funeral rites over the final three books. The disparate scenes create a patchwork of repeated but slightly altered funeral rites, none of which function as a legitimate ‘whole’. The next section considers Caesar’s position vis-à-vis funeral rites by exploring four scenes that demonstrate his rejection of or lack of interest in what happens to the human body after death (including his own body). The chapter ends with the witch Erichtho’s ‘zombie’ prophetic corpse-soldier, his quasi-prophecy predictive of further death, and Erichtho’s paradoxical, almost loving funeral for the corpse-soldier in book 6. The chapter argues briefly in closing that Lucan lingers on issues of death-in-life, and life-in-death, as a means of highlighting his perception of Neronian Rome as a slavish ‘death-world’.