Pharsalia

"It’s an epic poem. In fact, quite apart from the topic that we’re talking about today, how to be a better person, Pharsalia is one of the best epic poems in the Western tradition. If somebody is interested in Roman/Latin literature , it’s definitely something to read, also because of the history. It’s a historically fairly accurate poem, not like Virgil’s Aeneid , or Homer’s Odyssey . Marcus Annaeus Lucanus was a Roman poet of the first century, better known in English as Lucan. He was the nephew of Seneca, one of the famous Stoics of that period. Seneca was an adviser to the emperor Nero for several years and then was “invited” to commit suicide by Nero. Seneca was suspected by Nero of being a member of a failed conspiracy against him. We don’t know whether Seneca was or not, he probably wasn’t. But he was also probably aware of the conspiracy and didn’t tell the emperor which, to all intents and purposes, is the same as being part of the conspiracy. Lucan, on the other hand, definitely was a part of that conspiracy. Sure enough, he was put to death by Nero. He was pretty young at the time and the Pharsalia was unfinished because of that. There are at least two books that are missing. It’s a really interesting, well-done poem. It refers to the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar, which happened about a century and a half before Lucan. The title, Pharsalia , refers to a place called Pharsalus which is where, in 48 BCE, the final battle between the two sides took place and Julius Caesar vanquished Pompey, thereby ending the Roman Republic and setting the stage for the onset of the Roman Empire a few years later. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Other than reconstructing the historical happenings there, Lucan pits two major characters in the book against each other from a moral perspective. One is Cato the Younger, a Stoic senator on the Republican side. Cato opposed Caesar for many years in the Senate and eventually took up arms, joining the Republican forces against Caesar’s army. The other is Julius Caesar himself. The contrast couldn’t be starker and, therefore, in my mind, this is a good study into what you want to be and what you don’t want to be, how to be a good person and how not to be a good person. Cato is the example of the good person, the quintessential Stoic role model, the paragon of moral virtue. He was very consciously always trying to do what he understood to be the right thing. He was very famous in Rome. If you were caught by a fellow Roman doing something not quite right, your likely response would have been something along the lines of, ‘Well, not everybody can be a Cato.’ That’s the extent to which he was a role model, even for regular citizens. He also continued to have an influence through the centuries, even influencing founding fathers of the American republic, like George Washington. Lucan presents Cato as the person who does the right thing no matter what and at great personal cost. In the end, he loses his life. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Caesar, who comes across as self-serving, self-aggrandizing and devious in his political aims. Throughout the poem, little by little, you have this emerging contrast between these two larger-than-life figures. There are also other interesting characters in between. Pompey the Great, for instance, comes across as a little bit of both. He’s self-aggrandizing but he’s not as bad as Caesar. He tries to do the right thing, at least some of the time, and so on. So I thought that Pharsalia was a good and unusual choice. It’s a poem and we tend to think of philosophy in the form of essays or prose. In fact, as you know, a lot of philosophy has been done as literature, either poems or dialogues in the case of Plato and Xenophon . It’s an interesting and different way of looking at a philosophical issue. It’s beautifully written in the original Latin and the Jane Wilson Joyce translation is one of the best available. It’s certainly possible to be like Cato. He wasn’t a god or anything like that. But it’s definitely very difficult, which is why he became such a well-known role model. The idea of role models, especially in Stoicism and for the Greco-Romans in general, isn’t necessarily that you want to be exactly like the role model. Cato did have vices. He really liked his wine and was drunk a number of times. The notion of a role model isn’t somebody you want to equal in every sense. It’s simply a reminder that people can be good, most of the time, they can strive seriously to do the right thing and to behave in a way that is virtuous. You can then reflect on your own behavior and say, ‘I can do better.’ It’s about being inspired. Let’s say you’re into football and you’re inspired by a great footballer. That doesn’t mean that you want to become a Messi because very few people can become a Messi. In fact, only one can become a Messi, as far as we can tell. But that doesn’t mean that Messi doesn’t inspire others to improve, to work hard to become better in so much as they can. So that’s the notion that Lucan tries to put forward. Role models are good, not because you are ever necessarily going to be like them, but because they are an inspiration."