A Pack of Bulls: Lucan’s Simile at Bellum Civile 2.601-9

Jennifer E. Thomas (Oberlin College)

Τowards the end of Bellum Civile 2, after Pompey has failed to rally his troops with a speech focusing on his own past glory (2.531-95) and as he prepares to flee Italy (2.680-736), Lucan compares the general to a bull who, defeated by another bull, practices alone in exile until he may return victorious, leading a battle-line of other bulls in the invasion of a pasture held by an unfriendly herdsman (2.601-9). This simile builds on Vergil’s politically-charged discussion of bulls at Georgics 3.220-36 and other similes comparing Turnus (Aen. 12.103-6) and Agamemnon (Il. 2.481-4) to bulls. While Lucan’s use of Vergil has been well-studied, this simile raises questions, since its development “fits neither Pompey’s subsequent career nor the metaphorical world of the bulls” (Fantham 1992, 197). Even if interpretation of the simile as Pompey’s plan rather than his future (with the other bulls as his noble colleagues and the hostile herdsman Caesar) reconciles the first objection, as Fantham (ibid., 198) suggests, the conduct of the bulls remains unusual.

This behavior, however, would not be unusual for wolves, the animal kingdom’s most obvious parallel to both the pack mentality and the adversarial relationship to the pastor. This interpretation would allow us to see several other Vergilian parallels, notably the similes at Aen. 2.355-60 comparing Aeneas’ crazed Trojan band to wolves and that at Aen. 9.59-64 comparing Turnus to a wolf. By linking Pompey to these defeated predecessors (with Pompey as both lone wolf and leader of the pack), Lucan reinforces the reader’s knowledge of Pompey’s own fate, at a moment when the general himself believes in his eventual success. The conflation of different Vergilian animal imagery highlights the irony, much as Vergil foreshadowed Pallas’ death with the lion and bull simile at Aen. 10.454-6 (S. Harrison 2003).

The combination of bull and wolf imagery also calls to mind Roman and Italian political symbolism, notably in Social War-era Italian coins depicting the Italian bull goring the Roman she-wolf (Pobjoy 2000). Roman writers also put into the mouths of Italian leaders wolf analogies as condemnations of the Romans’ rapaciousness, both for the Social Wars and earlier (e.g. Velleius 2.27.2, Livy 3.66.4). Imperial authors tended to view the Social Wars as a civil war (Mouritsen 2006). With his bulls that act like wolves, then, Lucan also alludes to another example of Roman civil war; this simile thus takes its place with the discussions of civil war that dominate BC 2: the account of Sulla and Marius at 2.67-233, Brutus and Cato’s debate at 2.234-325, and Pompey’s speech at 2.531-95.

In a far from straight-forward reworking of the Georgics passage, Lucan reinforces the irony of Pompey’s imminent downfall and conflates previous epic material to produce a simile whose oddity updates his epic predecessors in a fashion typical of Neronian mannerism.