The motive for this monograph on Bellum Civile is to explain how Lucan creates a unified work of art out of a fragmentary epic whose disintegrating narrative form reflects its subject – the endless chaos of civil war. D. does not tarry over the condemnations of Lucan's epic technique in a bygone era but positions his studies of it in relation to the poet's recent defenders: ‘Morford, Ahl, Johnson, Henderson, Masters, Leigh, and Bartsch have all fought the good fight’ and ‘changed our outlook on Lucan’ (p. 1). But the fight is not quite over. In D.'s view, the defence of Lucan has focused on championing his politics rather than his poetics. By contrast, D. aims to understand Lucan ‘more on his own terms as a poet’ (p. 1), assuming that Bellum Civile ‘does not serve any ideology but … functions rather as vessel for Lucan's fame’ (p. 119).
The claim that recent criticism has neglected Lucan's poetics in favour of his politics seems overstated, especially given the metapoetic reading of BC by J. Masters (1992), or R. Sklenář's study of Lucan's poetic logic in The Taste for Nothingness (2003). None the less, D. does launch a new critical approach to BC: he borrows a theoretical distinction made by Bakhtin between the literary ideals of a closed and an open body (p. 28). According to D., Lucan conceptualises his epic as an open rather than a closed body, the unity of which he maintains through the repetition of a binding theme or metaphor, which also happens to be the body.
The first chapter establishes that Lucan intensively uses corporeal language, both literal and metaphorical, in BC to tie its episodic and discontinuous narrative together thematically. D. maps the semantics of recurring anatomical terms (such as caput and manus) across five discursive layers of the epic: the cosmos, state of Rome, military corps, human body and the poetic text itself. A unifying image emerges: Lucan represents Rome's civil war as an anonymous body of limbs that perpetrates its own suicide: even ‘the decapitation of Pompey reads as a virtual suicide: one of the limbs of the leader's military body turns against himself when he is killed by a former soldier’ (p. 23). Next, D. gives a serial reading of corporeal imagery in BC 7, justifying the selection of this book as ‘the heart to which the veins of body language flow that run through the epic corpus' (p. 29). If ‘body language’ is the blood of Lucan's poem, one may wonder why D. excludes sanguis and its synonyms from his purview, especially since this part of the body is more commonly mentioned than any other in BC. Chapter 1 closes with a mini-study of Lucan's treatment of the epic topos of the automatism of severed limbs, particularly with reference to examples in Ovid's Metamorphoses (the head of Medusa and the tongue of Philomela, though not the head of Orpheus). The apparent autarchic survival of the severed body part destabilises the finality of death and offers an analogy for post-mortem life: dismemberment enables remembrance. The face-saving automatism of Pompey's cut-off head wins him the enduring renown which the epic poet confers and shares in.
The second chapter examines Lucan's technique of motivating and unifying his epic through the different embodiments of fama in its senses of glory and rumour. D. reads BC as a battle between Caesar and Pompey for fama, but sees Lucan himself as the ultimate beneficiary of this struggle: ‘Lucan has recognized that Fama can work both inside his epic for his characters and outside his epic for the narrator. He secures the lion's share by placing himself in the epic's center, by writing himself into his epic and by linking his fate to its fate’ (p. 54). D. assumes that virtually all mentions of fama are personified in BC (and shows no interest in other manifestations of hearsay such as vetustas); he boldly suggests that Fama takes a leading role in this epic after her flighty cameo in Virgil's Aeneid and open house in Ovid's Metamorphoses. For example, Lucan plots Fama in Thessaly as the witch Erictho, the most powerful character of BC (replacing Jupiter as die letzte Instanz), who reveals the nefas of civil war that Lucan himself baulks at telling. D. infers as well that Lucan's fama takes over the function of fatum in the Aeneid. Another facet of Lucan's fama is the commemoration of the protagonists in BC, who are conversely self-conscious about their posthumous reputation before they die. Above all, and here D. becomes biographical, Lucan's epic turns into a monument for his own fame as he prepares for his own suicide, which is mirrored in the suicidal end of Rome.
Chapter 3 focuses on the excerptability and discursivity of Lucan's sententiae. Each epigrammatic saying is like a discrete body part whose quotation preserves, pars pro toto, the memory of BC. Read in the proper context of BC, the sententiae represent the continuous presence and essence of the poet as he comments on the events of his poem. D. treats the literary history of Lucan's sententious style and provides a selective inventory of sententiae according to theme (guilt, fear, death, etc.). Additionally, he deals with Lucan's fondness for the anti-proverb. The chapter ends with an excursus on the reception of Lucan's sententiae by Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, who collected and commented on 300 of these in the preface to his 1695 translation into German of BC.
The last chapter handles the structural and unifying function of repetition in BC. D. does not describe the unifying structure produced by repetition. He reviews different types of repetition without making distinctions: intratextual repetition of narrative patterns and of vocabulary (figured and unfigured) and extratextual repetition of the events reported in sources such as Caesar and Livy. D. selectively catalogues and interprets examples of repetition, cosmic and historical, introduced by adverbs such as iterum and rursus. He reads the Vulteius episode in BC 4 as a repetition in miniature of BC. The poetic value of Lucan's mise en abyme is that fama does not praise the suicidal Caesareans as much as it does their raft, which is a metaphor for Lucan's poetic art (p. 138). The chapter concludes with a coda on the narrative closure of BC which seems like a non sequitur given the book's emphasis on thematic unity and open-endedness. D. flip-flops over what the narrative end of BC should be, and seems to think that Lucan did too: on p. 37, Rome undergoes a metamorphosis from Republic to Principate; later, on pp. 79–80, the panegyric of Nero in BC 1.33–66, is bracketed off from the rest of the epic and his imperial rule is renounced as the epic's final cause. On p. 125, D. likens Lucan's civil war to a gigantomachy, a return to chaos, out of which the principate rises; on p. 142, Caesar ‘break[s] through the rings of repetition’ to institute a new government and calendar. On p. 143, it is up to the reader to decide whether the poem reaches its end with the reign of Nero, or if it collapses again into the chaos of civil war. D. caps off this discussion with an appendix of collaborative efforts on the parts of later readers to fill in the end of the poem: the Argumenta Lucani (with no indication of provenance); the Pharsaliae Lucani Appendicula composed by the humanist Johannes Sulpicius Verulanus; and Thomas May's continuations of BC in English (1630) and in Latin (1640), the former of which has a pro-monarchical ending and the latter of which reverts to a pro-republican conclusion.
The four chapters on different features of Lucan's epic technique tend to devolve into lists of examples. None the less, D. cleverly integrates these diverse items through the idea of the body, whose dismemberment in civil war is reflected in the content and form of BC. The surprise is that this dismembered body turns out to be Lucan's, which is left to his readers to remember.
