The Importance of Being Julia: Historical Revision and the Mutable Past in Lucan’s Pharsalia

Angeline C. Chiu (University of Vermont)

Two distinct depictions of Julia appear in the Pharsalia—the historically anchored Julia, a young woman tragically dead, and the poetically unleashed Julia, a vengeful ghost come to wreak havoc on the living. Together, these disparate renderings reveal a poetic treatment not only of history, but also of the power of its interpretation. Julia becomes the symbol of extreme historical revisionism in Lucan, as the present radically reshapes the view of the past (Gowing 2005, Lintott 1971). Julia’s transformation takes place within the context of the epic’s other women, who primarily reinforce the characterization of their male partners (e.g., Pompey-Cornelia, Cato-Marcia, and Caesar-Cleopatra). While Lucan takes artistic liberties, these women are recognizably linked to historical evidence, and Julia first appears in this vein as a gentle figure of mediation and peace (1.111-120). Even so, in her only appearance in propria persona, she has become a savage specter bent on destruction (3.1-40), a hellish transformation confirmed by Cornelia (8.103-5). While scholarship on Julia has focused on her literary nature (e.g., Ahl 1976, Batinski 1993, Bruere 1951, Morford 1967, Rutz 1963 and 1970, Rossi 2000, Thompson 1984), her role in contesting history has been often underappreciated. Because of the outbreak of civil war, Julia has been revised from tragic peacemaker to monstrously culpable casus belli, as she declares: sedibus Elysiis campoque expulsa piorum / ad Stygias, inquit, tenebras manesque nocentes / post bellum civile trahor (3.12-14). Julia has become enwrapped in radical revision, and her reassignment in the Underworld displays both the power of such revision and the sway of poetically assigned guilt. Furthermore, through her Lucan introduces the greater theme of historical judgment and cosmic order that comes to grim fruition in Book 6, as chaos infects the Underworld and the shades of historical figures both good and evil become unmoored from their traditionally static assigned places: Elysias Latii sedes ac Tartara maesta / diversi liquere duces (6.781-82) and, to crown all, camposque piorum / poscit turba nocens (6.798-99). The universe has collapsed into anarchy; the chaos overturns the Underworld’s place as the immutable physical manifestation of historical assessment and remembrance of individuals’ lives (as in Homer and Vergil; Feeney 1986). In Lucan’s disordered cosmos, the past is vulnerable, subject to the travails of civil upheaval. Historical interpretation and judgment themselves are being viciously contested, and this inflames the civil war’s widespread noxious energy. In sum, Lucan’s Julia is not only a historical character translated into poetry with embellished imagination. She becomes a testimony to the power of retrospection and revision, the vanguard of Lucan’s sweeping re-conception of the cosmos in nihilistic chaos (Sklenar 1999, 2003). She emerges from the Pharsalia as the embodiment of poetry’s power to complicate views of history.