To Be and Not to Be Turnus:
The End of Lucan’s Pharsalia as an Inversion of the End of Vergil’s Aeneid

Wolfgang Polleichtner

Ruhr-Universitat Bochum in Germany

Lucan’s Pharsalia commonly has been interpreted as Lucan’s attempt to revert Vergil’s Aeneid in several respects: the role of the gods, Rome’s glorious beginnings vs. its decay, etc. This paper undertakes to combine this approach with a new look at the end of the Pharsalia. Is it possible to discover traces of Lucan’s effort to turn the Aeneid on its head also at the end of his work?

That Lucan likens his Caesar to various characters of several episodes of the Aeneid has long been recognized. Caesar’s position at the end of the Pharsalia looks very much like Turnus’ in his fight in the camp of the Trojans in Aeneid 9. Both do not regard their survival as their prime interest, to say the least. Both save themselves by jumping into the nearby water. This, of course, is not explicitly part of Lucan’s work, but the reader knows from historiography that this jump is what will immediately follow after the text of the epic poem ends. The term dux Latius, which is used in 10.536f., is very significant in this context, because Vergil calls Turnus dux in Aen. 9.691.

Within the last scenes of the Pharsalia Lucan describes the victims (victima 10.524) that fall to atone of the death of Pompey. Lucan’s finger points to the fact that Caesar would complete this list, but also to the fact that this will not happen yet (10,528f.). In so far, Caesar is just like Turnus in the list of victims that are sacrificed for the death of Pallas in the Aeneid. Aeneas expresses this in his last words that he utters in the Aeneid.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, however, Caesar will indeed be sacrificed not only for Pompey, but also before Pompey’s statue. Caesar’s escape at Pharos is only an intermediate step just as Turnus’ escape from the Trojan camp. The explicitly inconclusive, but by foreshadowing implicitly conclusive ending of Lucan’s Pharsalia shows us its author as imitating and outdoing Vergil at the same time. In adapting the heroes of the Aeneid, Lucan avails himself of a technique that Vergil used in regard to his literary predecessors too. On the other hand, once more the Aeneid is turned on its head. Caesar ends up being at the same time both like and unlike Turnus. Whether the end of the Pharsalia is its intended end becomes once more an interesting further question.