Great, however, as were Lucan's obligations to Livy and potent as was the influence exerted upon him in this part of the Civil War,' it would be a grave mistake to suppose that his account is a faithful reproduction of his predecessor's. Livy's work was a history; Lucan's was not, but a poem and pamphlet in one, whose object was to glorify the cause which had been lost at Pharsalia. And accordingly it is not permissible to take a presentment of Lucan's without more ado as historical. We have first to enquire whether it has been coloured by some external motive, whether artistic or political. I have considered this question at some length in the Historical Introduction to my edition of Book VII (pp. ix-xii); and I shall therefore here content myself with adhering to the principles which were there set forth and including in my narrative of events anything from Lucan which there is no good reason to disbelieve.*

The personal note is struck and the impending fate foreshadowed at the very beginning of Book VII (7–27). The day of Pharsalia breaks dull and dim; and it follows upon a night of feverish unrest for Pompey. The singular dream of which Lucan has given us a description conceived in his noblest style was no invention of his own. Plutarch and Appian both refer to it; and we can hardly doubt that it was in Livy. I offer no apology for giving it in an English dress:

'That night, to Pompey last of happy life,

With phantom show beguiled his troubled sleep.
In his own theatre's seats he saw appear

Th' innumerable multitude of Rome,
And heard his own name lifted to the skies

On the glad shouts of all the vying tiers.
So looked, so cheered the people, when a youth
In his first triumph time, o'ercome the tribes
That swirling Ebro compasses and all
The fleeing fightings of Sertorius,

The West now tranquil, as revered in white
As in the hues that decked his victor's car,

IX and X are 10 in 1108 and 4 in 546 lines respectively. I take these statistics from Mr Heitland's Introduction to Haskins' Edition of Lucan. * The text of Lucan which I have used for quotation and translation is based on the Teubner standard edition of Dr C. Hosius.

While rose the cheering senators, he sate
Plain Roman knight as yet. Ah, did his dream,
Fearing the future, lost the happy past,
Fly back to brighter days, or, prophet-like,
Masking its sense in contraries to the sight,
Bear presage of a people wailing loud?
Or did the Fortune who denied his eyes
Their fatherland thus give him Rome again?
Break not his slumber, watchmen of the camp!
Let ne'er a trumpet beat upon his ears!
Ghastly to-morrow's sleep which, imaging
The woeful day, will on his vision crowd

Death and lost battles, fought and fought again.'

In much of Book VII there was little scope for the vein of personal sentiment. The dispositions for battle, the orations attributed to the generals as they marshalled their troops, the details of the fighting and the carnage -all this the vain young rhetorician could be trusted to work up in his own way. We have signs enough that here his mind was free and inventive. There is the unhistorical figment that it was Cicero who urged the unwilling Pompey to declare for battle; there is the still wilder fiction that Brutus disguised himself as a common soldier to find an opportunity of killing Cæsar;* there is the grisly inventory of wounds and deaths; the unsparing catalogue of the beasts and birds that fed upon the slain. But, when the battle is over and the hero a forlorn and beaten figure, we catch the personal note again. The touching incident of the fidelity of the Larisæans to the vanquished leader and his counsel to them to transfer their allegiance to the conqueror (712 sqq.) is no invention of Lucan's, for it is found with close verbal coincidences in Valerius Maximus (IV, 5, 5), who wrote before Lucan was born, and of whose two main sources Livy is known to have been one.

When the manoeuvre by which Pompey had designed

*The excuse for such inventions is their rhetorical effectiveness. Lucan can hardly have reckoned on their being taken for granted or have expected to find readers as credulous as is Baron Stoffel: 'lorsqu'il [Lucan] ne s'agit que de rapporter des faits (nous ne disons: quand il s'agit de les juger), le poète de Cordove se montre un historien des plus véridiques' (Histoire de Jules César; Guerre Civile, II, p. 251).

to win the battle of Pharsalia had been foiled by the counter-stroke of Cæsar, he rode at once from the field. He entered his camp by the prætorian gate and, after giving an order to the centurions on duty, shut himself in his general's quarters, where he awaited in silence the issue of which he now despaired. He had not to wait long. In spite of a gallant resistance by the cohorts left in garrison and the barbarian auxiliaries, the devoted veterans of Cæsar soon forced an entry, and the whole population of the camp, the centurions and military tribunes leading, fled helter-skelter to the top of the neighbouring heights. With the bitter cry 'The camp also!' their general himself, stripping off the last vestiges of an imperator, sprang upon a horse, dashed out of the decuman gate, and with only four companions galloped at full speed to Larisa. He did not deem it safe to accept that city's proffer of hospitality; Cæsar, in fact, was in Larisa on the following day. But he stayed there long enough to be joined by a sprinkling of his followers, and with a small band of thirty horsemen he pursued his flight towards the coast. The haste and the heat proved too much for his steed's endurance; and Pompey had to labour through much of the forest of Tempe, athirst and afoot, having ample time for the saddening reflexions upon his past and his present which Lucan (VIII, 18 sqq.) and Plutarch ('Pompeius,' c. 73) have placed upon record. He reached the mouth of the Peneus late at night and found refuge in a poor fisherman's hut. At daybreak he dismissed all but the freemen in his company, and, entering one of the small river-boats, rowed up and down the shore. Here he was espied by a merchantman, commanded by a Roman citizen named Peticius, who, we are told, had had a dream about him the night before. The vessel responded to his signals and took him aboard, together with certain of his companions, including the two Lentuli* and later the old king Deiotarus, tetrarch of Galatia.

On board this vessel Pompey proceeded to Amphipolis, where he issued a proclamation summoning all the Greeks and Roman citizens in Macedonia who were of

* L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus, Consul in 49, and P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther, Consul in 57.

military age to assemble in that place. Cæsar suspected that the proclamation was a feint; for Pompey only dropped anchor at Amphipolis, and the next day set sail for Mitylene in Lesbos, where his wife Cornelia had been placed for safety at the beginning of the war.* The voyage to Mitylene took but a few days; and, as soon as his vessel was in port, Pompey despatched a messenger to his wife, who had heard nothing since his successes at Dyrrachium, to apprise her of his arrival and to break the news of his defeat. Cornelia fainted with the shock, but presently recovered herself and hastened with her handmaids to the shore. The touching meeting of husband and wife is described by Plutarch (c.74) and Lucan (55 sqq.), both drawing from Livy as their source. To Cornelia's self-upbraidings Pompey replied in a strain which has been stigmatised as callous by some who have not kept in mind the difference between the Roman and the modern feeling, or realised the motive of Pompey's chidings. Cornelia had to be saved from again collapsing ; and for this there was nothing so effective as a sharp reminder of what she owed to duty and her noble birth. His wife regained, Pompey had no reason for delay in Lesbos; and even the friendly entreaties of the people of Mitylene could not prevail upon him to remain beyond the two days during which the winds were contrary.

The news of Pharsalia had spread like wildfire; and nowhere could Pompey count on the welcome of a friend. Plutarch tells us that he only stopped where necessary to take in water or provisions. But Lucan adds a number of details, some of them no doubt invented, but others probably emanating from his source. The wind was blowing fresh off the coast of Asia; and the sun was about to set when they reached the point where an ancient mariner would turn, between the island of Chios and the Enussae islets, if his destination were the south. The sharp change in the vessel's course from W. to S. is marked by a precise description of the shifting of the sail and the altered sound of the water, and is accentuated by the only simile in the book.

By a natural, if invented, touch Pompey had been

*Had we only Lucan's account (35 foll.) we might suppose that Pompey crossed to Lesbos in the river-boat.

shown in converse with the skipper, seeking thus to divert his mind from the cares that wearied him and the oppressive task of deciding what should be his future course. The questions which the poet represents him as putting to the steersman are not the idle ones of a passenger merely curious about navigation. They are prompted by the alternative plans between which his choice was wavering and now for the first time indicated. Should he appeal for help in his hour of need to the free communities which had treaty rights with Rome, such as the rich and powerful state of Rhodes? Or to one of the monarchs with whom he had had relations or upon whom he had claims-the kings of Parthia, Numidia and Egypt? As to Rhodes, his hopes were presently to be rudely shattered. For the Rhodians bluntly refused to the two Lentuli, and even to Pompey himself, all admittance to their city and harbour; so that it is not without significance that Lucan, in giving his itinerary, says that he avoided' Rhodes ('relinquit Rhodon,' 247). At one of the places where he touched he was joined by his son Sextus and a number of senators and others who had escaped from Pharsalia. Here (perhaps near Ephesus, which was friendly) King Deiotarus left him to return to his tetrarchy of Galatia. Lucan (209 foll.) covers up the defection by representing the king as sent on a mission to the king of Parthia, of which we hear

no more.

Passing Icaria and Samos, Cos, Cnidos and Rhodes, and striking thence across the sea to the Lycian coast, Pompey made his first stopping-place Phaselis on the borders of Lycia according to Lucan, or Attalia in Pamphylia according to Plutarch. On the Pamphylian seaboard he remained some time, collecting ships, troops and treasure. Cæsar, however, was now in Asia, and something must be done. The little force was moved to Syhedra, a small and obscure seaport not far from Selinus (Selindi) in Cilicia. Here was held the fateful council to which the narrative of Lucan gives the prominence it deserves; and, allowing for some rhetorical colour and ornament, his account may be accepted as substantially correct. Of the four possible courses three alone remained, and these the speech of Pompey takes in their obvious order. It was natural to think of Egypt Vol. 226.-No. 448.

E