later books, on the scale, may be, of a word or less to a chapter, the 'Commentaries' of Cæsar on the Civil War constitute the sole continuous contemporary narrative of the last days of the Roman Commonwealth. Cæsar being what he was, and human nature being what it is, it is not unnatural or unreasonable that we should go outside for evidence to control and supplement his testimony. For this purpose the Correspondence of Cicero is of inestimable value; and the Roman biographies of the late Greek writer Plutarch give us much that has not been preserved elsewhere. But this material, after all, is scanty; and hence it is that the Civil War' of Lucan, an historical epic written little more than a century after the events which it professes to describe, when the sources now lost to us were still accessible, is invested with a more than literary interest. It has been the aim of more than one painstaking and learned investigator to enquire what materials Lucan had before him, how he dealt with them, and how much he altered or added from his own invention. The method, though attractive, is not without drawbacks of its own; its results are not positive but inferential and presumptive. It has, in fact, some of the uncertainty which would attend a restoration of a dialogue on the telephone from what was heard at one end only. Notwithstanding this, there is general agreement that, embedded in the poem of Lucan, are precious fragments of history which have not been preserved to us elsewhere; and that the author on whom he drew (if not exclusively, as has been supposed by some, at least in the main) for all that was not due to his own imagination, was the great historian of Padua. Such, for example, is the view of M. Pichon, in his recent monograph on The Sources of Lucan,' in which, despite some partiality towards his author, the subject on the whole is handled with fairness and discretion.

There is good reason for thinking that the influence of Livy upon Lucan was particularly marked in the two books of the Civil War' which take the career of Pompey to its close. On the appreciative character of Livy's references to Pompey we have the clearest testimony from outside. Tacitus (Annals, IV, 34) reports the words of a speaker in the Senate who said that 'Titus Livius, a writer in the first rank for style and honesty, extolled

Gnæus Pompeius so highly that Augustus called him a "Pompeian." In his seventh and eighth books, and especially in the latter, Lucan is frankly and enthusiastically 'Pompeian'; and, while from the nature of the case much evidence of specific borrowing from the historian cannot be expected, there is still explicit testimony that more than one passage and incident were so derived.

There is something more; but to appreciate it properly we must have regard to the difference in the subjects of the books. The two together make up the Pompeian tragedy, but their aspects are not the same. The seventh shows us the fall of the leader and his cause; its interest in the main is military and political. But the eighth directs our eyes towards a lonely figure on a darkening stage; and the interest is acutely personal and human, until the curtain falls. There, then, we should expect the Livian influence to be strongest and the contrast with the ordinary Lucanian manner most marked. A writer's style, it has been said, is himself; and of all the Roman writers there were none whose individualities were more distinct and more different than those we are considering. They have both of them, it is true, that rhetorical character which marks the Augustan and still more the post-Augustan literature; but the rhetoric of Lucan is not the rhetoric of Livy. They lie as far apart as the period and the epigram. The natural propensity of Lucan's genius was never better given than in the anonymous epitaph:

'Cordova bare me, Nero slew. My lyre

The duel sung of son-in-law and sire.

Not mine the long-drawn period's delays

Of crawling verses; mine the short, sharp phrase.

If thou would'st shine, dart with the lightning's flight;
A style is striking only if it smite.'

To the poetical quality of Livy's prose it is impossible to be blind. But whether Lucan was in truth a poet even his admirers could not agree. At all events, for much that lies nearest to the hearts of poets he cared but little. One of the most magnificent passages of Classical Literature is the Homeric description of the untroubled

* Quintilian, x, 1, 90; Martial, xiv, 194.

and unsullied serenity of Olympus, the home of the Gods, in the Odyssey' (6, 42 sqq.). Its beauty has stirred many poets to noble imitation, as, for example, Lucretius, Swinburne, and Tennyson, who takes from it:

'The island valley of Avilion

Where falls not hail or rain or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.'

But see what our Corduban makes of it (VII, 478-480):

'tunc aethera tendit

extremique fragor conuexa inrumpit Olympi

unde procul nubes, quo nulla tonitrua durant.'

In the last line we have the reduction of poetry to its lowest terms. In the phrase of an American humourist, it is as succinct as an invoice.'

6

In Lucan, again, who, we must in fairness remember, was cut off before his genius had begun to ripen and ere he had learned the lessons of life, we miss for the most part the touches of sympathy that enlist human interest and redeem even horrors from repulsiveness. Let a single illustration suffice. An unhappy combatant in one of the scenes of carnage in which the constant sight. of gladiatorial exhibitions made the Roman take a callous enjoyment has been torn in sunder (III, 635 foll.); and this is Lucan's comment on the death, nullius uita perempti est tanta dimissa uia' ('Never had life passed by so broad a road'). To put the matter briefly, in this narrative of the final scenes of Pompey's life not only are the characteristic faults of the narrator-exaggerated emphasis, unnatural antithesis, twisted expression and so forth-less obtrusive than usual; but we are also aware of touches of subtle appeal to our emotions, and thrilling, if vague, suggestions of pathos and romance. And in these, or at least a portion of them, it seems natural to see the influence of the sympathetic imagination of the greatest historical artist of Rome.t

'The roar of battle mounted to the skies and broke in on the remote Olympian vault, from which clouds are far, whither no thunders reach.'

In another respect, which may seem to some a trifle, though I do not think it is, these two books, and particularly the eighth book, are marked off from the rest. This is their sparse employment of simile. For the remaining eight, Lucan's average is one simile in every 86 lines. In Books VII-VIII, he has 6 in 1744 (in v 1 in 872 lines)-the figures for Books

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 Larismans 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).