Content area
This dissertation examines the violence that is omnipresent in Lucan’s first century-CE poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: the poet depicts the world afire, the Roman Republic toppled, the ripping apart of bodies, and the distortion of historical and cultural memory in and through civil war. I read this violence through the lens of Epicureanism, a Greek philosophical school based on the teachings of Epicurus (ca. 341-271 BCE), a religious skeptic, early promoter of atomic theory, and believer in scientific approaches to the cosmos whose precepts are also espoused in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, a Roman poet of the first century BCE.
Lucan, I argue, uses the atomic language of Epicureanism to vividly describe the dissolution of bodies and memory to create his own “history” that highlights the futility of civil war and the inevitable disintegration of the Roman world. Working with intertextuality and narratology as my primary theoretical frameworks, this dissertation simultaneously demonstrates Lucan’s grounding in the earlier work of Epicurean writers and emphasizes the fragile nature of bodies and the destructive power of civil war: everything is penetrable, soluble, and changeable as the cosmos decays, political and physical bodies disintegrate, and memory erodes.
This dissertation comprises five chapters. The first chapter argues that Lucan used atomic language and highlights various tenets of Epicureanism. This chapter sets the groundwork for the remaining chapters. The second chapter focuses on the dissolution of the human body, which highlights the futility of glory and civil war. In the third chapter, I claim that the language of bodily dissolution extends to the state, and Rome dissolves as its leaders—especially Pompey—are killed in atomic fashion. The fourth chapter looks at Lucan’s cosmos and shows that, rather than Stoic conflagration, the world undergoes a piecemeal deconstruction that does not lead to regeneration, but permanent destruction. The final chapter shows that memory dissolves along with the disintegrating bodies in the poem. Lucan’s own poem, rather than drawing an authentic memory, instead reconstructs the fragments of civil war to create a new memory that vies with Caesar’s own portrayal.