"Gaze, Monstrosity, and the Poetics of History in Lucan"

ELEONORA TOLA

PAN. Rivista di Filologia Latina.

Università di Palermo, Italia

Lugar: Palermo, Sicilia; Año: 2017 vol. 6 p. 115 - 123

0390-3141

The battlefield scene in Book 7 of lucan´s Bellum Ciuile clearly shows a redefinition of the traditional topos of the day after the battle. Although bloody scenes appeared in Latin literature since Early roman tragedy, Lucan´s Neronian epic provided a new interpretation of that literary convention by focusing on its gruesome aspects. The underlining of hideous details is a powerful expression of civil struggle´s anomaly and excess. On the one hand, internal strife relates to a subversion of usual warfare rules by facing roman to roman in the battleground; on the other hand, it also shows the excess of war, as the poet claims at the very beginning of his text. Within such a reading horizon, the uncommon performance of both parties connects Lucan´s narrative with the roman idea of monstrosity. The description of bloody scenes in Book 7 is even more complex because they involve Caesar himself. Moreover, as a cruel spectator of that landscape, Caesar strengthens the problematic status of the winning side in a brotherly killing, and the ambivalence of power in Lucan´s world. show that the intersection of historiographic, epic and tragic codes and the manipulation of some literary and cultural motifs function as a pivotal feature of Lucan´s poetics of roman history.