Page:The Pharsalia of Lucan; (IA cu31924026485809).pdf/13

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PREFACE
ix

The poem, as is well known, ends abruptly, and is unfinished. To what point in the civil wars Lucan proposed to carry it, must be a matter of conjecture only. It might have ended either with the murder of Cæsar, or, possibly, with the battle of Philippi; but there are also indications in the existing poem which point to the battle of Actium as the intended closing scene. This was the battle which left Octavius sole victor; and from some passages which need not be particularly mentioned, it might be inferred that the poet would not have been content until he had depicted the whole of the struggle which left Cæsar's house in possession of the Empire.

On the other hand, in the first book, Munda is called the final battle (line 47), by which must be meant the battle which terminated the conflict between the forces of Pompeius and Cæsar: and in a similar way, at line 766 of the same book, the murder of Cæsar is treated as the close of the war.

Pompeius is in a sense its hero. He was, to Lucan, the champion of liberty and the Senate; of that Senate which had conquered Italy and triumphed over Hannibal, and which to the poet represented the force whereby the old republican order might have been preserved, with its Consuls, its Tribunes, its suffrages, and all the institutions that to his mind were the tokens and fortresses of freedom. It escaped him that the power which had in the past achieved these triumphs failed, when the moment came, to define the wider boundaries required by the increased strength and population of the Roman dominion. Opposed to the Senate stood Cæsar, who despised the ancient forms and offices which were no longer the symbols of living force. In him Lucan saw only the upstart, who wished to cast aside the forms of law because, and only because, they obstructed his path to empire. He did not see, and perhaps in his day it was not possible to see, that in Cæsar's time the old order of Rome had become powerless, and that in Cæsar only and in the party which he

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