Who in the Hell?: An Exploration of the Meaning
of Lucan’s De Bello Civili 6.745-749

Casey S. Shamey (University of Missouri, Columbia)

In De Bello Civili 6.745-749, Lucan has the witch Erictho threaten several underworld deities with an unnamed being of incredible power (referred to as ille) during a necromantic ritual:

paretis, an ille
compellandus erit, quo numquam terra vocato
non concussa tremit, qui Gorgona cernit apertam
verberibusque suis trepidam castigat Erinyn,
indespecta tenet vobis qui Tartara, cuius
vos estis superi, Stygias qui perierat undas?

Despite the quantity of scholarship on Lucan, no one has given a detailed analysis of this passage with the purpose of determining who the mysterious ille could be; most authors, if they mention it at all, simply hazard a guess and move on.  The purpose of this paper is to determine some likely possibilities of who this unnamed god might be and to examine the feasibility of those candidates suggested by others.  As Lucan clearly lays out characteristics possessed by his fearsome deity, examination of these characteristics and of other structural and contextual indicators makes it possible to outline a rubric to compare against potential candidates. 

The list of suspects range from the Demiurge, by J.D. Duff[1], to the intriguing Demogorgon, suggested by Lactantius Placidus in the 5^th century and more recently championed by Daniel Ogden,[2] to R. Badali’s speculated Osiris or Iawe.[3]   This paper argues against these traditional suggestions and offers, instead, several new candidates that better satisfy the conditions set out in the passage including the hundred-handed Briareos, and incarnations of Zeus of the Underworld.  Briareos meets all of the conditions set forth by Lucan and corresponds well with the structural and contextual indicators.  Zeus of the Underworld also meets these conditions and is attested archaeologically to exist in conjunction with the nether goddess of magic, Hecate.

The context of this passage is of great importance to the Erictho scene since it serves as the climax of the necromantic ritual itself and directly precedes the disappointing climax of the scene as a whole.  Identifying one or even several likely candidates for this powerful ille will greatly augment our understanding of Roman necromancy and conceptions of the underworld as well as provide a better understanding of this exciting but ultimately anticlimactic scene.