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    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia"
    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia"
    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia"
    Ebook49 pages36 minutes

    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Epics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Epics for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535838849
    A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia"

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      A Study Guide for Marcus Annaeus Lucanus's "The Pharsalia" - Gale

      10

      Pharsalia

      Marcus Annaeus Lucan

      65

      Introduction

      The Pharsalia, written during the reign of Nero (54–68 CE), is a harrowing portrait of the disintegration of Rome, of civil war, and the triumph of a single will. Yet Lucan's unfinished epic was a subject of criticism even as he wrote it. In Petronius's Satyricon, a bitterly satiric novel written by another victim of Nero, a character complains that Pharsalia is not a true epic but a history because it does not incorporate divine motivation. Even more important to later readings of the poem was the historian Tacitus's negative portrait of the poet in the Annales.

      Lucan's ability to paint the terrifying and the unearthly and to produce a pithy quotable line has not endeared him to all critics, but he has never lacked readers. Between 550 and 750 CE, Pharsalia was the only secular poem copied. His partisan portraits of Cato, Brutus, and Marcia made them models for medieval clerics and eighteenth century revolutionaries. His treatment of the witch Eric tho and her necromancy made a fundamental impression on the western mind. Lucan's influence surfaces in the narratives of witch trials as well as in horror literature. Despite Lucan's references to fate, his use of human rather than divine will as the source of action and events is more immediately understandable to modern readers, who may know the work as Civil War (or Bellum Civile or De Bello Civili) because scholars believe that Pharsalia was not Lucan's choice for the title. Oxford University Press issued the work in a newly annotated, free verse translation in 2008 as Civil War.

      Author Biography

      Of all the poetry written during the short life of Marcus Annaeus Lucan us, better known to English readers as Lucan, only his unfinished epic Pharsalia survives. What little is known about Lucan comes from two biographies that circulated in some manuscripts of Pharsalia and from the Annals of the historian Tacitus. Lucan was born in Cordova in Spain on November 3, 39 CE. He committed suicide at the order of the emperor Nero on April 30, 65 CE.

      The grandson of a famous rhetorician, Seneca the Elder, and the nephew of philosopher, writer, and financier Seneca the Younger, Lucan was brought to Rome as a baby. There he received the usual upper-class Roman education in literature and public speaking. He also studied Stoicism. By the time he was a teenager, he had made himself a reputation as a public speaker. Nero, his uncle Seneca's student, encouraged him at first with political appointments, but later the emperor forbade him to plead in the courts, publish his poetry, or even to give private readings. Traditionally, this treatment has been used to explain why Lucan joined a plot to assassinate Nero. Modern scholarship has tended to reject this revenge motive.

      It is uncertain whether Nero's change of attitude towards the poet came from jealousy of Lucan's talent or fear of Lucan's philosophical and political beliefs that his talent increasingly served. Lucan had written a poem that suggested

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