In Silvae 2.7, one of the earliest literary responses to Lucan, Statius makes Calliope predict of the newborn poet, Pharsalica bella detonabis, quo fulmen ducis inter arma divi (66–7). The epic Muse herself thus characterises both Lucan's antihero Caesar and Lucan's own narrative voice with the imagery of the thunderbolt, which also features prominently in ancient and modern theorising on the ‘sublime’. An in-depth exploration of this hallmark of Lucan's style is therefore long overdue, and D.'s monograph to a large extent fulfils this need.
In Chapter 1, D. sets out his theoretical framework. Two ancient sources for the sublime, Longinus and Lucretius, predominate here, along with Burke and Kant among the moderns. Chapter 2 then considers Lucan's poetic art as designed to meet the sublime challenge of ‘presenting the unpresentable’.
Chapters 3 and 4 constitute the core of D.'s argument, establishing in turn the opposite poles of the ‘Caesarian’ and ‘Pompeian’ sublimes. Chapter 3 is primarily devoted to Caesar's violation of natural barriers, analysed in terms of the victory of human intellect over awesome Nature that Lucretius and Kant enthusiastically celebrate. D.'s treatments of the lightning simile (pp. 107–16) and the Rubicon (pp. 116–36) are of particular interest. The final chapter, however, is undoubtedly the most original, insightful and compelling section: I will never again read Lucan 7 and 8 in quite the same way. Building on F. Ankersmit's investigations into traumatic memory and the ‘historical sublime’, D. shows how the aura of irretrievable loss that surrounds both Pompey himself and his beloved Republic throughout the poem operates, paradoxically, to ensure that neither of them will ever be entirely absent or forgotten. D.'s detailed, concluding analysis of Pompey's grave (pp. 219–33) is truly brilliant.
That said, I have some deep reservations about both the underlying philosophy and the scope of D.'s overall argument. First, D. frequently elevates text above reality, or at least places the two upon a level, in a manner that I find hard to swallow. On pp. 4–5, for instance, D. seems to imply that our human capacity to experience mountains as sublime depends on fashions in theoretical writing about such experience. More unsettlingly, on p. 101 (compare p. 16), D. posits an effective moral equivalence between Caesar, Lucan and Lucan's readers, because Lucan narrates Caesar's ‘sublime’ violence in sublimely overpowering language, which is then activated by the reading process. This criticism could as easily be directed against the sublimity of Schindler's List, or indeed any art that strives adequately to represent the full, destructive power of evil. To me, it bespeaks the same flight from common sense that, in our modern academy, has given rise to the concepts of ‘microaggressions’ and ‘trigger warnings’. In any case, Lucan himself firmly prioritises concrete deeds over words. His narrative pivots around two catastrophic events, the battle of Pharsalus and Pompey's murder: while these are both facilitated by corrupt rhetoric (from Cicero and Pothinus respectively), Lucan reserves his fiercest indignation for the criminal acts, not the speeches, and I suspect that no pre-modern (or non-academic) reader would feel otherwise.
An allied and more serious problem lies in D.'s refusal to countenance any inherent moral quality to the sublime. Sublimity, D. insists, can belong alike to good and evil, liberty and tyranny (see especially pp. 63–71). Consequently, in a schema based largely on J. Masters, Poetry and Civil War (1992), D. presents the ‘Caesarian’ and ‘Pompeian’ sublimes as two equal and opposite forces within Lucan's universe, equally attractive to the conflicted narrator (pp. 104–5 and 236–7). This stance is partly the result of D.'s intensely subjective, ego-oriented reading of the sublime (e.g. pp. 55–63), the fallacy (as I take it) that provoked C.S. Lewis’ classic essay on ‘The Abolition of Man’. If all apparently sublime experiences are equally authentic, then (as D. argues on p. 101) Hitler's Nuremberg rallies have as much claim to sublimity as anything else. One may, however, contend that, as sublime object, Nazi (or Caesarian) propaganda amounts to a shabby illusion in a way that (e.g.) the heavens and the Himalayas do not, since the last two are anchored in a transcendent reality, whereas the former is mere self-serving, fraudulent ‘spin’. In the many works of Western literature that have held up the ‘tyrannical’ sublime to withering scrutiny, a stark contrast between the glittering image projected by megalomaniacs and the real universe that they inhabit is emphatically and repeatedly drawn. We find this strategy employed in Orwell's 1984 (Chapter 1.7) and Milton's Paradise Lost (e.g. 10.504–77); we find it in Herodotus, when he exposes Xerxes’ risible con-job at 8.24–5. More to the point, D. ignores the fact that Lucan likewise again and again confronts Caesar's sublime pretensions with a healthy dose of reality.
Consider three key instances of Caesar's apparent sublimity examined by D.: his destruction of the sacred grove near Massilia in Book 3 (pp. 136–43), the storm of Book 5 (pp. 143–56) and his victory at Pharsalus in Book 7 (pp. 165–76). In the first, Lucan juxtaposes Caesar's quasi-Epicurean triumph over superstition with the ‘banality of evil’, as humble farmers, now facing ruin, lament Caesar's confiscation of their oxen to cart lumber pillaged from the grove (3.450–2). During the storm narrative, Caesar's two loftiest assertions of his centrality to the cosmos, at 5.578–93 and 5.654–71, are immediately, even comically, contradicted by the actual course of the storm (5.593–6 and 5.672–6). Lastly, on the corpse-strewn field of Pharsalus, Caesar's petty denial of a funeral pyre to the enemy dead (7.797–808) is capped and defeated with one of the most sublime passages in Lucan's entire poem (omitted by D.), where Lucan looks forward to the Stoic ekpurosis that will consume victor, vanquished and world alike in a single cleansing fire (7.809–19).
The last of these examples, with its exaltation of mighty Nature over a tyrant's spite, brings me to the limitations imposed by D.'s narrow focus on a mere handful of classical models and parallels. Seldom venturing far beyond Lucretius, Longinus or (sometimes) Virgil, D. accords only three cursory mentions to Seneca the Younger. In particular, there is no discussion at all of Seneca's Naturales Quaestiones, even though this treatise exercised considerable influence at least on Lucan's later books, and even though it explores, in great depth, the complex relationship between tyranny and the natural sublime that dominates D.'s third chapter (e.g. N.Q. Pref. 1–17 and Pref. 3.5–18).
Seneca's conspicuous absence from the analysis is matched by that of Cato. Here again, I believe that D.'s argument suffers from his too-faithful adherence to Masters's Pompey/Caesar dualism. In the Cato of Book 9, we can see precisely an effort by Lucan to establish a hopeful middle ground between the ‘Caesarian’ sublime of violent transgression and the ‘Pompeian’ one of passive, traumatised memory. Cato's head-on collision with the marvels and horrors of the Libyan desert is a sublime moment par excellence, characterised as such by both Cato (9.379–406) and Lucan (9.593–604). Unlike Caesar, however, Cato embraces this supreme challenge as a test for his Stoic virtue and means of defending the laws and liberties of his homeland, rather than as a stimulus to boundary-violating egomania. And unlike Pompey's grave, Cato's sublime march can inspire not only futile remembrance of the vanished Republic but its actual, eventual restoration (9.603–4).
Nevertheless, for all its flaws, this monograph sheds fascinating new light on a central but hitherto neglected building-block of Lucan's artistry. Beyond Lucan scholarship, D.'s approach has the potential to stimulate useful work on such diverse fields as Paradise Lost (discussed intelligently by D.) or Palestinian memory of the so-called ‘Nakba’. What is more, D. helps answer an aesthetic question that has often struck me: why so many modern narratives of the Roman civil wars, for example the novels of Colleen McCullough, despite (because of?) their obsession with minute accuracy of historical detail, fall so far short of Lucan's verse in all its terror and grandeur.
