Lucan
Translated by A. S. Kline, 2014
In 60 BC, Julius Caesar forged an alliance for power in Rome with Pompey the Great and a wealthy man named Marcus Licinius Crassus. The deal was sealed with the betrothal of Caesar’s daughter Julia to Pompey. The three leaders were able to dominate Roman politics for a time. But the relationship between Pompey and Caesar deteriorated rapidly after Julia died in childbirth in 54 BC and Crassus perished in a disastrous war against the Parthians in the east a year later. The short life of the poet Lucan (AD 39–65), a nephew of Seneca the Younger, ended when he was forced to commit suicide for allegedly conspiring against the emperor Nero. Happily for us, he had already written his epic Pharsalia, one of the great Roman history poems. Here he describes the moment in 49 BC when Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his forces, initiating civil war. The decisive battle was fought at Pharsalus, in central Greece, and led to Pompey being beheaded.
For a short while a discordant harmony was maintained, there was
peace despite the leaders’ wills, since Crassus stood between them,
a check to imminent war. So the slender Isthmus divides the waves,
and separates two seas, forbidding their waters to merge; and yet
if the land were withdrawn, the Ionian would break on the Aegean.
Thus when Crassus, who kept those fierce competitors apart, died
pitifully, drenching Syrian Carrhae with Roman blood, that defeat
by Parthia let loose the furies on Rome. In that battle the Parthians
wrought better than they knew, visiting civil war on the defeated.
Power was divided by the sword; the wealth of an imperial people
who ruled the sea, the land, possessed the globe, was not enough
for two. For now, when Julia, Caesar’s daughter, Pompey’s wife,
was cut down by fate, she bore with her to the Shades the bonds
of affinity, and a marriage turned, by that dread omen, to mourning.
She, if fate had granted her longer life, might alone have restrained
her husband’s anger on the one side, and her father’s on the other.
She might have struck aside their swords, made them clasp hands,
as the Sabine women stood between their husbands and their fathers
and brought about reconciliation. But at her death bonds of loyalty
were broken, and the generals freed to pursue armed conflict.
A powerful rivalry drove them on: for Pompey feared fresh exploits
might obscure his former triumphs, his ridding the seas of pirates
yielding second place to Caesar’s victories in Gaul; while Caesar,
used to battle, inured to endless effort, was driven by an ambition
that yearned for supremacy; Caesar could accept none above him,
Pompey no equal. It is wrong to ask who had the greatest right
to seek war; each had great authority to support him: if the victor
had the gods on his side, the defeated had Cato. The contest was
unequal, Pompey being somewhat past his prime, long used
to the toga and forgetting in peace how to play a general’s part;
courting adulation, lavish with his gifts to the people of Rome,
swayed by popularity, overjoyed by the clamour that greeted him
in the theatre he had built, trusting in former claims to greatness,
he did nothing to establish wider power, and stood as the mere
shadow of a mighty name. So some oak-tree towers in a rich grove,
hung with a nation’s ancient trophies, sacred gifts of the victors,
and though its clinging roots have lost their strength, their weight
alone holds it, spreading naked branches to the sky, casting shade
not with leaves but its trunk alone, and though it quivers, doomed
to fall at the next gale, among the host of sounder trees that rise
around it, still it alone is celebrated. But Caesar possessed more
than mere name and military fame: his energies were un-resting,
his only shame in battle not to win; alert and unrestrained, every
summons of anger or ambition his strength answered, he never
shrank from an opportunistic use of the sword; intent on pursuing
each success, grasping the gods’ favour, pushing aside every
obstacle to his supremacy, happy to clear a path through ruin.
So a storm drives a lightning-bolt through the clouds, its flare
shattering the daylight sky, with the sound of thunderous air,
with a crash of the heavens, filling the human mind with terror,
dazzling the eye with its slanting flame. Rushing to a given
quarter of the skies, nothing material prevents its course;
mighty in its descent and its retreat it spreads destruction
far and wide, before gathering its scattered energies again.
Such were the leaders’ motives; but there were those hidden causes
of the war, amongst the people, that will ever destroy powerful
nations. For, the world conquered, and fortune showering excessive
wealth on Rome, virtue yielded to riches, and those enemy spoils drew
men to luxury. They set no bounds to wealth or buildings; greed
disdained its former fare; men wore clothes scarcely decent on women;
austerity, the mother of virtue, fled; and whatever ruined other nations
was brought to Rome. Then estates were increased, until those fields
once tilled by Camillus’ iron ploughshare, or Curius’ spade, became
vast tracts tended by alien farmers. Such a people took no pleasure
in peace and tranquility, no delight in liberty free from the sword.
Thus they were quick to anger, and crime, prompted by need, was
treated lightly; it was a virtue to take up arms and hold more power
than the State, and might became the measure of right. Thence laws
and statutes of the people passed by force, thence the consuls
and tribunes alike confounding all justice; office snared by bribery,
popular support bought at auction, while corruption, year after year
perpetuating venal elections to the magistracy, destroyed the State;
thence voracious usury, interest greedily seeking payment,
trust readily broken, and multitudes profiting greatly from war.
Now, Caesar, swiftly surmounting the frozen Alps,
had set his mind on vast rebellion and future conflict.
On reaching the banks of the Rubicon’s narrow flow
that general saw a vision of his motherland in distress,
her sorrowful face showing clear in nocturnal darkness,
with the white hair streaming from her turreted head,
as with torn tresses and naked arms she stood before him
her speech broken by sobbing: ‘Where are you marching,
whither do you bear those standards, my warriors?
If you come as law-abiding citizens, here you must halt.’
Then the general’s limbs quaked, his hair stood on end,
faintness overcame him and he halted, his feet rooted
to the river-bank. But soon he spoke: ‘O, Jupiter, God
of Thunder, who gazes from the Tarpeian Rock over
the walls of the mighty city; O Trojan household gods
of the tribe of Iulus, and you, sacred relics of Quirinus;
O Jove of Latium, on Alba’s heights, and you, fires
of Vesta, and you, O Rome, equal in sanctity, favour
my enterprise; I bring no assault on you in wild warfare;
see me here, victorious by land and sea, always your
champion – now as ever, if that be possible. His
shall be the guilt, who forces me to act as your enemy.’
Then Caesar let loose the bonds of war, and led his
standards swiftly over the swollen stream; so a lion
in the untilled wastes of burning Libya, seeing his foes
nearby, crouches at first, uncertain, rousing himself to rage,
but soon maddened, lashing his tail, his mane erect,
sends out a roaring from his cavernous mouth, such
that if a nimble Moor pierces his flesh with the lance
he brandishes, or a spear lances at his vast chest, he
leaps over the weapons careless of such wounds.
The reddish waters of the Rubicon glide through
the valleys and serve as the boundary between
the land of Gaul and the farms of Italy. Born from
a modest spring it is parched by the heat of summer,
but then its volume was increased by winter, its waters
swollen by the third rising of a rain-bearing moon
with its moisture-laden horns, and by Alpine snows
melted by damp gales. The cavalry first met the flow,
taking position slantwise across the current, lessening
its power so the rest of the army could ford it with ease.
Once Caesar had crossed and reached the Italian shore
on the further side, he halted on territory proscribed to them:
‘Here I relinquish peace,’ he cried, ‘and the law already
scorned, to follow you, my Fortune. Let me hear no more
talk of pacts, I have placed my trust in those for far
too long, now I must seek the judgement of war.’