War More Punic than Civil:
Carthage in Lucan’s De Bello Civili

Philip T. Waddell (University of Missouri, Columbia)

Throughout his De Bello Civili, Lucan identifies certain characters with a civilization a century in its grave: Carthage. The reader of book 1 is struck immediately by the repetition of Punic references and familiars in relation to the civil war.  From the very first line of De Bello Civili, Lucan tells his reader that this war is something special.  This is a war plus quam civilia.  Lucan is highlighting the fact that the war is horrible because it is not just a civil war, but a familial one. There is a blindness to traditional distinctions of family, nation, and culture in the characters of the civil war.  Lucan explains the cause of this blindness through the vengeful dead of Carthage.  Scholars such as Frederick Ahl (Lucan, 1976), Jamie Masters (Poetry and Civil War, 1992), and others have noted the Punic references and that Lucan's Romans are degenerate and debased, but they do not sufficiently stress the Punic aspects of the Caesarian forces.   Lucan uses the Punic references to show the Caesarians, not merely as degenerate Romans, but as Carthaginians.  The Caesarians are not simply Carthaginian-like, or Carthaginians reborn; they were once Romans who are now possessed and animated by the vengeful souls of Carthage with the object of destroying Rome.

There are three Caesarians in particular who illustrate this metamorphosis from Roman to Punic.  These are Marius, Curio, and Caesar.  Each one serves a different purpose in the narrative. Marius should be identified with Caesar’s past since the two are related, and since, like Caesar, Marius engaged in civil wars; Marius, like Caesar, is possessed by the ghosts of Carthage (2.90 – 93) in order to destroy the Republic.  Curio is a Caesarian not up to the task of being Carthaginian (4.581-660); his death serves to feed the vengeful dead of Carthage and so advance the war (4.788-90).  Caesar is a Hannibal reborn and a fiend who, like Hannibal (1.303-7), crosses the Alps to attack Italy.  Caesar then outdoes Hannibal in his treatment of the Roman dead at Pharsalia (7.792-95, 799-803).  To illustrate Lucan’s analogy, this paper will first highlight his use of Carthaginian imagery to describe the civil war itself, then investigate these three Caesarians and their Carthaginian symbolism, and finally show how the culmination of these Punic aberrations make them the worst enemies of Rome.