F. offers a running commentary on Lucan's epic as the final volume in a trilogy ostensibly on the theme of epic madness beginning in Virgil (Madness Unchained: a Reading of Virgil's Aeneid [2007]), continuing in Ovid (Madness Transformed: a Reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses [2011]) and culminating in Lucan. The book is arranged in ten chapters, each corresponding to a book of the Bellum Civile, together with a brief introduction, index and sparsely annotated bibliography. F.'s aim is to introduce the epic to those who are either completely unacquainted or only passingly familiar with the poem (p. xvii); in this he succeeds. As a reward for their efforts, this group will find a detailed summary and interpretation of every scene in the poem. Even scholars already familiar with Lucan's epic will find F.'s volume a steadfast companion for thinking through the poem as well as a useful compendium of Lucanian scholarship.
The volume's commentary format prevents summary of each chapter, but there are some tantalising themes that run through the text, including Roman ethnicity as a fraught mixture of Trojan and Italian lineage. Particularly compelling is F.'s assessment of Caesar as a resurgent Trojan (p. 141) in an affront to the divine agreement on a non-Trojan Rome at the end of the Aeneid, as he tries to repeat Aeneas' journey in Bellum Civile 5 (pp. 200–6) and as he visits Troy in Book 9 (pp. 388–9). The pursuit of libertas also recurs as something at once desirable (p. 47 n. 6) and dangerous, in that it elicits excessive and destructive devotion (e.g. pp. 156, 401) to the point that the famous snakes in Book 9 are interpreted as ‘an explosion of hyper libertas … [with] no king save their individual selves’ (p. 376).
Madness, the titular theme, is the one to which F. returns most frequently and deliberately, although it is less a structuring element or consistent thread in the book than the title might suggest. The basis for F.'s meditation on the emotion appears to be the rhetorical questions at the epic's opening (quis furor, o ciues, quae tanta licentia belli?, 1.8) and its Book 7 counterpart (o quis furor, o caeci, scelerum?, 7.95) (p. 274); he comes to the conclusion that ‘furor equals bellum civile’ (p. 6), that unchained furor is necessary ‘to attain libertas’ and that ‘the princeps is the Muse of madness, the poet of fury’ (p. 10). This last point presumably stems from Lucan's address to Nero at 1.38–66, although the princeps seems not only to be the source, but also to be the brake on madness, since ‘the Augustan system provides the chains that seek to tame that madness – and the chains grow slack at the death of each princeps’ (p. 10).
Caesar is unsurprisingly a destructive force and an embodiment of furor, like lightning that not only rages (in templa sua furit, Luc. 1.115) but also rejoices in his own destruction (p. 20). F., however, stops short of pushing the connection between the fama furoris (p. 81; Luc. 2.573) and Caesar's reputation as ‘the anti-hero of the epic and subject of the investigation into the nature of Furor that Augustus would chain’ (p. 388). On the other hand, the connection between siege warfare and chaining madness is particularly nice, especially the idea that ‘the point is in part that the more successful a restraint, the likelier the victim will actually succumb to greater rage’ (p. 111).
At some points F. might have made more of his goal of explicating the theme of madness throughout the text: for example, he misses the opportunity to link unchaining to furor (p. 60), to discuss further madness as an ethnic problem (p. 99) or to engage with D. Hershkowitz's The Madness of Epic. Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius (1998). Moreover, some errors remain (e.g. ‘Pompey, as Lucan noted, cannot brook an equal’, p. 72), as do unexplained moments wherein F. finds himself at odds with conventional readings of epic topoi (e.g. Caesar's fearless approach to ‘the glory of an epic death, a letum on the sea’, p. 206). Where Pompey might appear in Bellum Civile 3 as ‘Augustus yet again, as the nations of the East are assembled under Roman banners’ (p. 107), a more apt comparison might be Antony. In addition, ethnicity is confusingly called ‘ethnography’ at pp. x, 1, 89 n. 41, 194, 201, 206, 362.
F.'s analysis is clearly the product of long and deep thought on Lucan's project. He expertly finds parallels to Virgil's and Ovid's epics not only in specific scenes, but even in whole books (e.g. the persistent echo of Aeneid 3 in Bellum Civile 3). More importantly, however, throughout the text F. also adduces intertexts from Manilius' Astronomica and Propertius 4.7 – sources largely untapped in Lucanian scholarship. Students may benefit from reading the volume alongside a traditional commentary, and more advanced scholars may find new readings of already familiar passages.
