Caveat lector: this ‘companion’ is no comprehensive guide or introductory work for those new to Lucan. Brill has form for stretching the remit of the companion-genre to include mythological, generic and historical topics. But while previous companions devoted to single authors in this series (e.g., Homer, Ovid) have taken the traditional tour through textual history, discussion of central themes, and analysis of poetic technique, Asso's collection positions itself rather as a ‘sample’ of contemporary responses to Lucan. Grouped in five sections (i. ‘Life’, ii. ‘Intertexts-Contexts-Texts’, iii. ‘Civil Warriors’, iv. ‘Civil War Themes’, v. ‘Reception’), the volume includes its own internal review in the shape of John Henderson's retrospective, which highlights the innovative and sets the collection in current scholarly context. Even so, this companion makes few concessions to those not already au fait with the twists and turns of Lucanian scholarship. In the following paragraphs I sketch some major preoccupations, which, appropriately enough for the claustra-bursting Bellum Civile, are rarely contained within their allotted section-headings.
Recent interest in the scientific literature of the early Empire and geopolitics/geopoetics sparks several thought-provoking pieces. Asso reads Lucan's exploitation of the gap between myth and science in his Libya-narrative as debunking of Numa's ancile-prodigy, calling Roman identity itself into question through a process of ‘rationalization’ that inverts the aetiological strategies of the Aeneid and Ovid's Fasti. Myers broadens the focus to consider the geographical relationship between centre and periphery as expression of the cosmic cataclysm provoked by civil war; Reed reflects on Lucan's exploration of the effects of the collapse of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in his scripting of a new ‘Orientalized’ monarchical Rome. Keith's study of Ovidian intertextuality establishes the programmatic rôle of the Metamorphoses' Theban narrative in Lucan's own discors discordia. And Manolaraki provides impressive deconstruction of Acoreus' Nile-digression, using Seneca's Natural Questions to argue that Lucan uses ‘scientific’ interpretation to refract imperialist, ethical and poetic perspectives on Caesarian power.
Manolaraki's conclusion — that Acoreus' speech is both expression of philosophical impotence against autocracy, and celebration of vatic prowess — engages with another prominent theme of the collection, the politics of Lucanian poetics (one of the collection's weaknesses is that there is little sense of contact between pieces on closely similar themes). Murray perceives, in a close reading of Argo-references within Bellum Civile, the shadow of a republican ‘Argonautic’ ideology contested by Pompey and Caesar. Tracy suggests that the poem's ‘incomplete’ ending, informed by the vates-figure Acoreus' own incomplete Nile-excursus, is an appropriate endpoint, stopping amidst libertas rather than submitting to any imperial telos. Thorne reads Bellum Civile itself as funerary monument to libertas. And, in another of the picks of the collection, Walde takes discussion in a different direction, using modern traumatology theory and ‘postmemory’ to argue that the affective cathexis of Lucan's narrative is simply part of evolving response to the civil war from the Georgics on.
The narrator's ‘participation’ in civil war trauma returns in Bartsch's suggestive analysis of Lucanian bias. Taking her start from Quintilian, she argues that Lucan presents himself not as dispassionate historian, but as orator reacting to a present injury. The notion that blame charges the epic voice of Bellum Civile is fleshed out further in Easton's study of invidia, which, he deftly shows, contaminates and inverts previous praise-based norms of epic (cf. Sklenář on Lucan's ‘disennobling’ of epic, and Casali, who revisits Narducci's famously ‘anti-Virgilian’ Lucan). And the collection, which takes its start from Fantham's discussion of the intense implication of Lucan's life, work and poetic/political reception, returns to such preoccupations in the ‘Lucans’ to be found in Statius' Silvae and Dante's Inferno (Newlands and Marchesi), and reborn in fervently partisan form in the English Renaissance (Hardie and Braund). In two pieces squarely aimed at stimulating further research, the terra incognita of Lucan's influence in the Middle Ages is addressed by the bibliographical survey of D'Angelo and the mission statement regarding future study of the scholia on Lucan from Esposito.
Finally, it is notable that Cato plays a major rôle in this collection. The ‘world at war’ tradition of recent Lucanian scholarship, concentrated on the polarizing opposition of Caesar and Pompey and the schizophrenic voice of the narrator, is here re-configured around Lucan's ‘third man’. Thorne sees Cato as the potential carrier of a positive memoria after Pharsalus, and icon of resistance: Tipping and Seo complicate the picture with focus on the problematic virtue and self-conscious (failed?) exemplarity of the Stoic figure. D'Alessandro Behr charts the process of correction and Christianization for the figure in Joseph Addison's Cato. Studies on minor figures (Fucecchi), ghosts (Bernstein), and key socio-linguistic systems (Coffee on fides, pietas, gratia, Ganiban on scelus, nefas and silence) contribute further to shift attention away from Pompey/Caesar, showing how closely implicated characterization and theme is at all levels in the text. And Alison Keith's Engendering Rome (2000), which considerably advanced the study of gender in Lucan, is here complemented by the contributions of Augoustakis, Bernstein and especially Caston, who sets Cornelia and Cleopatra against elegiac norms in Propertius Elegies 4.
There is undoubtedly a problem with labelling this collection a ‘companion’, and little sense of coherence for the reader aiming to wade through this 600-page volume in one go; staggeringly poor standards of copy-editing throughout do not help. But for the (more typical?) reader who takes the text on in bits, there is much solid material and a few outstanding pieces.
