27 - Lucan

Summary

Petronius' classicistic reaction to Lucan's Stoic epic, the Bellum civile, foreshadows the later response: why the neglect of convention, the disregard for precedent, the carelessness about poetry? He prefaces his Civil war (Satyricon 119–24), a Virgilian pastiche on Lucan's theme, its style a mixture of the old and the new, with a prescription for the correct approach:

ecce belli ciuilis ingens opus quisquis attigerit nisi plenus litteris sub onere labetur. non enim res gestae uersibus comprehendendae sunt, quod longe melius historici faciunt, sed per ambages deorumque ministeria et fabulosum sententiarum torrentem praecipitandus est liber spiritus, ut potius furentis animi uaticinatio appareat quam religiosae orationis sub testibus fides.

(Satyricon 118.6)

Look at the immense theme of the civil wars. Whoever takes on that without being immersed in literature must falter beneath the load. Historical events are not the stuff of verses – that's much better dealt with by historians. Instead, the free spirit must be plunged in complexities of plot, divine machinery, and a torrent of mythological material. The result should be the prophecies of an inspired soul, not the exact testimony of a man on oath.

(Tr. M. Winterbottom)

Quintilian had no doubts: Lucan is a model for orators, not poets. Martial shows that prose and verse had become polarized – that sense was now distinct from sensibility – when he records that Lucan, for many, had forfeited the name of poet: there were rules, and the rules were there to be followed. Fronto's judgement we might question, but he too helped in the devaluation of Neronian baroque.