After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of
this fashion:
Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.[11]
Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so far
as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of
political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;
and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he
made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more
real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction,
supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was
fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and
memorable lines:
Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]
which would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could be
invented. The _Pharsalia_ could not be anything more than an interesting
but unsuccessful attempt; it was not on these lines that epic poetry was
to develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing very
remarkable; that he already had achieved a poem like the _Pharsalia_,
would make us think he might have gone to incredible heights, were it
not that the mistake of the _Pharsalia_ seems to belong incurably to his
temperament.
Lucan's determined stoicism may, philosophically, be more consistent
than the dubious stoicism of Virgil.
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