Author
Lucan
39–65
Lucan was a Roman poet whose Pharsalia turns Caesar’s Civil War into a dark epic of republican collapse.
Lucan, nephew of Seneca, wrote the Bellum Civile, commonly known as the Pharsalia. The poem presents Caesar, Pompey and the civil war without the consoling machinery of traditional epic, emphasising violence, tyranny and political ruin.
He belongs in Classical for pages on Caesar’s Civil War, Nero’s literary culture and Roman epic after Virgil. His work is especially useful for the imaginative afterlife of the Republic’s collapse.