Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars

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Lucan's Pharsalia (c. 61-65 CE) is the great anti-Virgilian epic: a poem about the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey that deliberately subverts the genre's conventions — no gods, no divine machinery, just the bare horror of Romans killing Romans. Lucan was twenty-five when Nero forced him to stop writing and eventually to commit suicide; the poem breaks off mid-sentence. It is perhaps the most politically bitter and formally daring work of Latin epic poetry, admired by Shelley and Dante, and its portrait of Caesar as conqueror-tyrant is a founding document of Republican political thought.