Purification of Caesar at the Scythia altar (Lucan BC 7.763-94)

Carin Green

University of Iowa

Just as Augustus[1] used the Orestes’ myth to contextualize a religious expiation for the crimes of the Civil Wars, so Nero also turned to that particular tragic hero.  Nero the matricide not only publicly performed the role of Orestes himself, as he did so, he wore a mask with his own features on it (Suet. Nero 21.3).  Lucan, then, was acutely aware of the imperial implications of the Orestes myth.  He would have been steeped in the ways the Augustan poets, particularly Vergil, had used Orestes to define the madness resulting from Civil War, and would have understood the religious and political need for purification that motivated Augustus’ transference of Orestes’ bones to Rome from the sanctuary of “Scythian” Diana at Aricia (Servius ad Aen. 2.118).  It is in this light that we must read Lucan’s description of Caesar (7.763-94) after Pharsalus, where his state of mind is compared to Orestes’ insanity.

Lucan has exceptional insight into the mental instability, and the terrifying flashbacks of what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The men who were victorious at Pharsalus—  “Each is prey to his own form of terror”[2]—suffered and would continue to suffer an overwhelming guilt for their actions.    Caesar—the one who had taken all the guilt to himself (3.437)—will suffer nightmares for all (7.776), says Lucan, who then compares him to Orestes “before he was purged at Scythia’s shrine”  (7.777-8).   Lucan’s audience would have known that the crimes for which Caesar was guilty would be expiated when Augustus eventually brought Orestes’ bones to Rome.  In this comparison, Lucan is foreshadowing an historical event that he may have intended to bring into his own narrative. Even if he did not so intend, he contextualized the very brutality of Pharsalus so as to point directly to Augustus, and to the ritual purification of the emperor and the state through Diana’s rituals. 

When the passage is read, then, in the light of Augustan ritual, we can see that in the depths of Caesar’s guilt and madness, Lucan places a reminder that even these crimes will be expiated by the next member of the Domus Caesariana.