Lucan Civil War Landscape

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Lucan's Follies: Memory and Ruin in a Civil-War Landscape

Author(s): Diana SpencerSource: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Apr., 2005), pp. 46-69Published by: Cambridge University Presson behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567858.

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Greece& Rome, Vol.52, No. 1 ? The Classical Association, 2005. All rights reserveddoi: 10. 1093/gromej/cxi008

LUCAN'S FOLLIES: MEMORY AND RUIN IN ACIVIL-WAR LANDSCAPEBy DIANA SPENCER

'uilia sunt nobis quaecumque prioribus annisuidimus, et sordet quidquid spectauimus olim.'

'all the things which we saw in former years are worthless tous, and squalid - everything that in times past we gazed upon(esteemed/respected) .'1

Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogue 7.45-6When Calpurnius' old Roman tells Corydon, the country-boy fresh intown, that nothing that one has seen before can prepare one adequatelyfor Nero's Roman spectacle (probably the games of 57 CE),it is almostimpossible not to recall the magnificent loathing that Suetonius (Nero12.1-2) and Tacitus (Annals 13.31) express for the new emperor'sextravaganzas. Eleanor Leach comments that: 'The builder of theamphitheatre [Nero] has combed the world for his marvels, creating anew cosmos within his gilded wooden oval.'2 This spectacular newcosmos maps out a world in which pastoral can no longer exist

1 All translations of texts are the author's own. Editions of texts used are: J. Amat (ed.),CalpurniusSiculus, Bucoliques, Pseudo-Calpurnius,Elogede Pison (Paris, 1991); W. S. Anderson(ed.), Ovidius, Metamorphoses Leipzig, 1977); D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Horatius, Opera(Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1991); and M. Annaei Lucani, De Bello Civili (Stuttgart and Leipzig,1997); M. Schuster (ed.), Catulli Veronensis iber(Leipzig, 1954). Thanks in general go to JohnHenderson and Gideon Nisbet for helpful suggestions.2 E. W. Leach, Ramus 2 (1973), 84. N. Purcell, in E. B. MacDougall (ed.), AncientRoman VillaGardens,Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 10 (WashingtonDC, 1987), 201, highlightsthe continuitybetween Nero's 'fantasypark'and the staged spectaculars(which themselves deployed 'rural'spectacle for Rome's delight, as Purcell also notices) that suc-ceeded it in the Colosseum. As he also suggests, landscape(d) tableaux were increasingly afeature of Roman intellectualization and experience of their world (ibid.). Cf. E. Harwood's com-parison of Disney's reinventionsof 'reality'with the kinds of culturalappropriationon offerin eight-eenth-century landscape artifices, in T. Young and R. Riley (eds.), Theme Park Landscapes:Antecedents and Variations. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of LandscapeArchitecture 20 (Washington DC, 2002), 49-68. J. D. Hunt's chapter on 'Classical ground andclassical gardens' provides a striking example of how appropriationof art in Renaissance gardensmimicked Pliny's version of Nero's Domus Aurea (N.H. 34.84) as documents of imperialism. Inmany ways, Renaissance (re)appropriation of classical Rome echoes Rome's reinvention ofGreece-as-cultural-wallpaper. See Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in theEnglish Imagination1600-1750 (Philadelphia, 1996), 13.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESbecause Nero has distorted the notion of rus in urbe to such an extentthat Calpurnius' only recourse is obituary. Here, Calpurnius' ecloguefunctions not just as an elegy for pastoral, but as a poem which opensup a dialogue with Lucan's civil war landscape; in this world, metapho-rical and real species of ruin take on an ever greater culturalurgency asmeans of interpretingthe dramatic artifice of Rome's present.3Against a backdrop of the increasingly rapid physical and intellectualchanges that were realigning the relationship between emperor and cityin the mid-first century CE, there are three key moments of concrete andpsychological ruin in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile (B.C.) that express thepsychic and cultural impact of the Empire on its landscapes. Mostobviously (and famously) we have Caesar's visit to Troy, an instant ofoverlapping and allusive histories that retrospectively foreshadows(perhaps) the rumour that Nero (Caesar's last imperial descendent)recalled Troy as he watched Rome burn.4 The other two passages areconnected - Pompey's grave and Caesar's visit to Alexandria - and allthree feed into Lucan's earlier vision of Sullan Rome (B.C. 2.16-233). Ultimately, these scenes evoke a discursive engagement with pro-gress that has many similarities with what Francis Fukuyama hasrecently termed 'the end of history'.5 Lucan's particular irony is toplay out for us why the persistence of stories and texts, his own included,respond to and shore up the devastation he portrays.6

3 T. Habinek's discussion 'Pannonia domanda est: The Construction of the Imperial Subjectthrough Ovid's Poetry from Exile', in ThePoliticsof Latin Literature:Writing, Identity,and Empirein AncientRome (Princeton, 1998), 165, suggests that nostalgia, lamentation, and sentimentalityare part of a 'comfortable pose' in Latin poetry. Both Calpurnius Siculus, here, and Lucan takeon a key tenet of nostalgia (the nostalgic voice's enforced distancefrom its objectof desire), demon-stratingthe extent to which Rome is 'now' being defined by its peripheries (cf. Habinek, ibid.,152).4 Suetonius, Nero 38.2 describes the costumed emperor singing of the sack of Ilium whilstfire-gazing.5 F. Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992) takes on a Hegelian/Marxist conceptualization of an end-stopped historical process. Although Fukuyama is by nowrather passe (even something of a straw man within historiographical discourse) some of hisideas do offer an interesting angle on history and memory in Lucan. For Fukuyama, the struggleto achieve (and impose) 'liberal'democracy constitutes a 'Universal History of mankind' (ibid.),xiv, marching towards an essentially optimistic conclusion. Lucan's nihilism, in these terms, is toassert the pointlessness of struggle or resistance as a method of restarting history (contraFukuyama, ibid., 334). J. Cropsey's humane deconstruction of this position in A. M. Melzer,J. Weinbergerand M. R. Zinman (eds.), History and the Idea of Progress Ithaca, 1995), 97-116,offers a thoughtful response to Fukuyama'spolemic that could locate Lucan's story as a call-to-arms for a society in which such a Panglossian 'best-of-all-possible-worlds'seems to have becomeimpossible. P. Fenves in T. Bums (ed.), After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics(London, 1994), 217-37, addresses the semantic difficulties of a mono-cultural interpretationof'liberaldemocracy' that offers an interesting angle on post factum nostalgia for a rose-tinted respublica.6 This reading of Lucan draws on P. Ricoeur's 'tragic/ironic' view of history whereby:'As soonas a story is well known, to follow the story is not so much to enclose its surprises or discoveries

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESIn this article, I suggest that Lucan's use of these sites develops into asignificantarticulationof Rome's imperial landscape, transformingTroyand Egypt into stage-sets for a melodramatic reconfiguration of Romeand Empire whereby even memory is implicated in a process of corrup-tion. This reading makes Lucan's conceptualization of Empire(bounded by a Trojan past and 'Alexandrian' future) into a literaryentertainment; its ongoing availability for command performances iswhat makes visiting Troy and Alexandria - as Caesar or reader - somomentous. Through a programme of cultural and literary allusion,Lucan confronts us with the prospect of a world in which politicalparticipation has been redefined as a touristic act of spectating, whilst

historical meaning is drained so effectively from Rome that the city isno longer at the heart of its own story, displaced by Troy andAlexandria. Using 'memory' and 'ruin' as starting points opens upthree approaches on which this article focuses: we can explore Lucan'spoem in terms of Nero's architecturaland aesthetic transformation ofRome; as a literary response to imperial fascination with cultural aes-thetics, taking the grotto as a model; and lastly, as an exploration ofthe implications of imperialdomination for perceptions and experiencesof landscape.Archaeologies of memory

'Memory' has taken on an increasingly importantrole in studies of iden-tity, and drawing in particularon post-Holocaust readings of narrativememory as a creative but also editorial process, Calpurnius' lines cantake on a biting significance.7These lines might suggest that Nero has,within our recognition of the meaning attached to the story, as to apprehendthe episodes which arethemselves well known as leading to this end... .In reading the ending in the beginning and thebeginning in the ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the recapitulationof theinitial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences.' (Time and Narrative, 3 volstrans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer [Chicago 1984/5], vol 1 67-8). Lucan, of course, doesnot attempt to limit himself (or us) to a diachronicversion of (literary) history.7 N. King, Memory,Narrative,Identity:RememberingheSelf (Edinburgh, 2000), 11-32, drawstogether some of the ways in which I use 'memory' in this article,particularly he idea that narrativememory necessitates a kind of forgetting (or at least a process of editing). Cf. D. P. Spence,Narrative Truthand Historical Truth:Meaning and Interpretationn Psychoanalysis (New York,1982), 28. Spence also argues that when telling a story of the past, 'the new description becomesthe early memory', ibid., 280. This is particularly significant in view of J.-F Lyotard's attempt toconfigure a narratologyin which the excluded memory-fragments become an indelible narrativein themselves. (Heideggerand thejews , trans. A. Michel and M. S. Roberts [Minneapolis,1988], 26). Hence, Calpurnius' amphitheatreforces its audience to confront the process and theresults of memory's editorialeffects on Rome.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESin effect, made it impossible to conceptualize Rome's past in terms otherthan those of a commemorative funeral speech. For Corydon's inter-locutor in Calpurnius Eclogue7, the amphitheatre has created a worldin which all memory has become a kind of ruin, and in which to contem-plate the present is to be forced to confront the squalor of the past. Hischoice of words is striking: sordeoimmediately recalls the squalor ofmourning clothes, whilst uilis also has overtones of abandonment anddeath.8 Tantalizingly, these comments may also nudge us towards thepolysemy of specto, reminding us that whilst the context might mostobviously demand a translation of 'gaze upon', an alternative readingmight prioritize 'respect' or 'esteem': what we once admired nowevokes mourning, squalor, and loss. For Calpurnius, Nero's Rome hashad a ruinous effect on memory, making it impossible to control per-sonal responses to everything that preceded Nero's spectacularreinven-tion of the city. This version of Neronian 'memory-death' recalls PrimoLevi's comment that the artistic perfection of frequently invoked narra-tive memories cannibalizes 'rawmemory', and replaces it.9 But Lucan'svision uses ruinaeto map the Empire in a new way. His literarycartogra-phy triangulatesRome, Troy, and Alexandria, redefining and obliterat-ing Rome in the memories evoked by the others.If we look back to Cicero's agenda-settingpassage on memory-loci (DeOratore2.87.357-60) and 'Piso's' comments on the Curia (De Finibus5.1.2) we find a direct instance of late Republican engagement withhumane landscapes of memory. Furthermore, both Cicero andQuintilian develop the mnemonic trick of 'structural' memorywhereby one furnishes the rooms of a 'house' with the elements of aspeech.10 Lucan's civil war landscape, I suggest, offers a strikingly

8 Cf. Horace, Ep. 2.1.38, 1.17.21; Odes3.27.57; Ovid, Her. 7.48. Horace's comments are par-ticularly interestingbecause they form part of his send-up of the evaluationof antiquityas a key cul-tural benchmarkof quality:Scriptorabhinc annoscentumqui decidit, nterIperfectosueteresqueeferridebetan interIuilis atquenouos?('A writer who bit the dust a hundred yearsago, is he to be countedamong Ithe perfect and the ancient, or the squalid and modem?') Ep. 2.1.36-8. This juxtapositionof death and modernity is strikingwithin its own context (see D. Spencer, MD 51 [2003]), but alsoreminds us of the culturallyloaded relationship between literature and (im)mortality that Nero's(famous) last words send up so magnificently (Suetonius, Nero 49.1); cf. C. Connors in J. ElsnerandJ. Masters (eds.), Reflections fNero:culture,historyand representationLondon, 1994), 225-35.9 P. Levi, TheDrownedand the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London, 1988), 11-12.10 F Yates explores this three-dimensionalityof late republicanmemory in The Art of Memory(London, 1966), 32-41. On the Ad Herenniumshe comments that: 'one has to envisage placesextending one might almost say for miles within the memory, places past which one moves inreciting, drawing from them the mnemonic cues.' ibid., 30. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.17-26.See also B. Bergman, The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 225-56. As J. P. Small, Wax Tabletsof theMind: cognitivestudiesof memoryand literacyin classicalantiquity (London, 1997), 101-5, 107-8, notes, studies of the psychology of memory bear out the Ad Herennium'snsistence on a directrelationship between the visual/spatial rules of memory-loci and those which constrain 'reality'.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESsimilar model to both Ciceronian and even Virgilianconnexions of spaceand memory, whereby he decorates the Mediterranean world with grot-toes, pleasure palaces, temples, and groves thatwill evoke key features ofa Roman panorama. In effect, this allows us to read Lucan's poem as ameditation on Rome as 'memory garden', a story of collapsing empirethat nevertheless could also be paralleled in such theme-park imperial-isms as Disney's 'It's a Small World', in Disneyland, California.11Even in Cicero, however, memory was not an unproblematic rhetoricaldevice. In the De Oratore (2.74.299-300; 2.86.351), Cicero makes'Antony' marvel at Themistocles' refusal of the gift of universalmemory (and plead, instead, for palliativeforgetfulness), whilst particu-larly in the wake of Sejanus, memory itself was an increasingly conten-tious political force. Sejanus was the first instance of damnatiomemoriae n 'recent' history, but L. Appuleius Saturninus' 'erasure' in98 BCE lies within easy range of Lucan's narrative time. More recently,Lucan's audience might remember the destruction of images ofValeria Messalina and conversely, Claudius' refusal to allow the Senateto erase Gaius (Caligula). Remembering who or what people were andhad been was not susceptible to straightforwardarticulation, and waspotentially very dangerous indeed. We might compare this withFreud's contrastingversions of memory as both a ruined site (for recup-erative excavation) and a buried site whose excavation entails its devas-tation (citing Pompeii as an example).12

Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.18-21, focuses on the memory-house, but as Smallargues,late republicanlandscape perspectives meant that houses and gardens were intimately connected as part of thesame visual system (ibid.), 107-9, 115-16. E. W. Leach's sophisticated study: The RhetoricofSpace: Literary and Artistic Representationsof Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome(Princeton, 1988), particularly73-143, offers a thought-provoking reading of landscape art intexts, and vice versa; more recently, see also B. Kellum, The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 211-24.Looking ahead to the later Italian Renaissance, as Hunt (n. 2), 68 suggests: 'If a garden recalledthe world, then its imagery functioned as a device to remind visitors of that plenitude beyond itsgrounds.' The iconographical programmes of renaissance gardens (such as the Villa D'Este)were designed, he notes, 'to trigger certain responses in visitors, release specific ideas and themesstored previously in their memory.'11 Cf. Harwood (n. 2), 66-7 on miniaturization and liminality,and N. Stanley'sdiscussion ofChina's 'Window on the World' theme park, where rescaled tourist destinations are displayed, inYoung and Riley (n. 2), 284-7. We could also compare this with some of Piranesi'smulti-layeredimages of Rome's various identities, e.g. 'Scenographia'from Il CampoMarzio dell' AnticaRoma(1762) and 'Plan of Rome' from Antichita Romane de' Tempi della Repubblicae de' PrimiImperatori 1748), both in C. Edwards, WritingRome: textualapproaches o the city (Cambridge,1996), plates 2 and 3.12 S. Freud, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', in The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorks f SigmundFreud,trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London, 1953-74), vol. 3, 198; 'Notes upona case of Obsessional Neurosis' ('The Rat Man'), in The Pelican Freud Library,trans. and ed.J. and A. Strachey (London, 1973-85), vol. 9, 57-8.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESThe idea of Rome as a decaying and ruinous space is one which

Augustus addressed head on when he made restoration a cornerstoneof his authority.13 This keys directly into Vergilian emphasis on theruins of Troy, and the interplaybetween Roman and Trojanrestorationthat Rome's future glory would ensure. The multiple timescales ofAeneid 8, where Rome's future is embedded in a succession of ruinedarchaeologies, draw out the kinds of intellectual tension that remember-ing ruins can evoke. As Jocelyn Small points out, Aeneas' tour of futureRome (Aeneid8.306-69) is in effect a mnemonic foreshadowing of theAugustan city - an expression of achievement and a memorial to itstransience.14In this respect, it redefines and sharpensLucan's notionallypre-Augustan and consciously post-Vergilian civil-war topography.Such a close connexion between articulations of landscape andmemory recurs in later European thought when gardens function asliving metaphors for the theatrum mundi.15 Garden design in theItalian renaissance develops the simultaneity of mortal and divine thatcan be experienced through the imposition of human order on nature,but also suggests landscaping as a way of expressing man's authorityover the whole world. This approach is already present in Cicero'sarticulation of alteranatura (De Natura Deorum2.60.151-2) where heconceptualizes this 'other' nature as the man-made landscape thatexpresses human domination of the environment.16

RuinMan-made landscapes can both contain and anticipate ruin, and thissection briefly explores the range of meanings that Lucan opens upwhen he razes the Trojanruins that both Virgil and Ovid had embedded

13 Cf. Res GestaeDivi Augusti 19-20 (on architecturalrestoration), 6, 8, 24 (on political andmoral restoration); on Horace's pessimistic integration of ruin into Rome, see C. W. MacLeod,CollectedEssays (Oxford, 1983), 218-19. On urban 'ruin' as a particularlyAugustan concern,see M. Labate, Maia 43 (1991), 167-84.14 Small (n. 10), 234. Cf. W. Benjamin'scomparison of languageto the earthwhich buries deadcities, 'A Berlin Chronicle', in One WayStreetand OtherWritings, rans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter(London, 1979 [1932]), 314. Benjamin draws on Freud's concept of memory-as-archaeology,butinsists that to approach one's 'buriedpast' requiresa willingnessto keep workingover the 'ground',repeatedly scatteringthe 'soil' evokes the complex cultural allusiveness that Lucan's text offers.

15 See Hunt (n. 2), 67-9. Cf. J. A. Hanson, Roman Theatre-TemplesPrinceton, 1959);M. Fagiolo (ed.), La Citta Effimerae l'UniversoArtificialedel Giardino (Rome, 1980), 125-41.We could also compare these later versions to Pliny's comments on the naturallytheatricalqualitiesof some landscapes (e.g. Pliny, Ep. 5.6).16 Cf. Leach (n. 10), 138, on Lucretius D.R.N.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESso firmly in Rome's cultural memory. Ruins demand exposition andopen up a range of historiographical possibilities, but Lucan's implicitsuggestion that ruins can be designed and artificial structures has far-reaching implications for their semiotic role in Roman historical myth-making.

etiam periere ruinae.even the ruins have perished.

Lucan, B.C. 9.969The semiotic significance of ruin is woven into Lucan's narrative,but itis particularly significant in his descriptions of two opposing spaces thatCaesar visits after Pharsalus:Troy (9.950-99) and Alexandria (10.9-331).17 Both cities offer implicit commentaries on the nature ofRoman identity in a post-civil war world, and both are sites which keyinto the discursive locusof Romanitas that Lucan configures at 5.9-11.For Lucan, a description of Caesar's tour of ruined Troy can be a wayof evoking the vanished delights of an untarnished past, both politicaland literary.Visiting (and writing and reading about) 'ruin' involves usall in an interpretativeprocess that could signify progression and intel-lectual change. In order for this to function, however, progress and inno-vation must somehow be stimulated by the deadness of the dead past.We might therefore choose to read Lucan's recreation of yet anotherpost-Virgilian ruined world - locked in a 'present' that depends on itas a foundation - as clear evidence of 'ruin' and ordered chaos as a per-sistent stimulus urging Rome optimistically onwards. If this readingfalters, however, as I think the text's emphasis on Rome's disintegrationmakes inevitable, then Lucan flags an alternative. Rome will come toequal rather than to build upon 'ruin', because by concentrating onthe effect of the past on the present (both physical ruin and intellectualspace) the effect of 'ruin' is to choke off any possibility for vitality andtransformation. This ruined world, with its seductive offer of a nostalgicperspective, would be symptomatic of a 'present' continuous, in which acycle of destruction and rebirthhas ground to a halt.18

17 For 'ruin' in the B. C., see e.g. 1.496-8: Roma and ruo- ruin/devastation; 1.149-50: Caesaras a function of ruina;2.731: Pompey's fate as ruina; and 1.81: greatness (magna)as agent of ruin/ruo.18 Cf. Edwards (n. 11), 11-12; P.Hardie,in A. Powell (ed.), RomanPoetryandPropagandan theAge of Augustus(Bristol, 1992), 59-82. But where Hardie suggests that Lucan's 'Troy has fallen(60), Rome is falling', I read this passage as even more claustrophobic - both collapses arelocked into the present continuous. Labate (n. 13), explores in detail the role of Troy's destructionfor readingurban Rome.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESWhen Lucan's Caesar promises 'RomanaquePergamasurgent'('andRoman Troy will rise') (9.999), he makes no explicit claim that Troy'swalls will rise again at Troy (contra, Edwards [n. 11], 65-6) becausethe 'Phryges' for whom the walls will rise are as much the Romans asthe Trojans. The ambiguity of these lines in fact opens them up toanother potential element in this allusive and polyphonic dialogue:anxiety about and interest in the relationship between the site ofRome, its physical integrity, and Roman historical destiny. This is

emphasized by Curio's impassioned comment to Caesar that 'pellimure patriis laribus patimurque uolentes I exilium: tua nos faciet uictoriaciuis.' ('we have been driven from our homeland and gods and endureexile willingly; your victory will make citizens of us') (1.278-9).Similarly, Laelius' speech 'Nec ciuis meus est, in quem tua classica,Caesar, I audiero' ('He's no fellow-citizen of mine, Caesar, againstwhom I hear your trumpet sound') (1.373-4).19 Perhaps Caesar'srealerror is that he does not recognize the cultural and political wastelandthat his focus, at Troy, on restoration and rebuilding presages. AtTroy, Caesar has to create ruinae (9.969) because the 'real' ones arelong gone. Ironically, he creates his complicatedly allusive ruins deepwithin a narrative that models him as a devastator: (gaudensqueuiamfecisseruina ('and rejoicing that he cleared his path by means of devas-tation') (1.150). Far from being a new and invigorating enterprise (ala Vergil), his prioritization of Trojan reconstruction is a way ofdenying the purgativeand cleansing qualitiesof history, and particularlyrepublican history. One might even argue that in Lucan's scheme,Pompey's 'ruin' (decapitation) and death, and the end of civil war,mark the last grand gesture for Roman destruction and rebirth beforethe un-dead world of the Principate 'romanticizes' each culture-ruin.20This reading might also, to some extent, provide an explanation forLucan's fascinated horror when he allows his Caesar to take over thepoem; he is both the ultimate destroyer, and the man who makes sub-sequent destruction and chaotic vitality impossible.Lucan's ruinae are most straightforwardlytranslated as 'ruins', butother available overtones are worth considering: we can see ruin-as-death (e.g. Horace, Odes 2.17.9), as catastrophe (e.g. Sallust, Bell.

19 See also 1.381-7. Cf. Camillus'speech after the sack of Rome (Livy 5.51-4) and rumours ofRome's displacement by Alexandria that clustered around both Caesarand Antony.20 This reading pushes Hardie's deconstruction of the potential problems of the Augustan urbsaeterna(n. 18), 60-1 rather hard. He arguesthat Lucan's historicalprogrammeis a directchallengeto Vergil,but I suggest we readit as mapping the insanityand decaythat adoptingthe Aeneid'sworldmakes inevitable. Cf. Figulus' prophecy B.C. 1.668-72.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESCat. 31; Livy 5.51, 25.4), and as a collapse (e.g. Horace, Odes 3.3.8;Vergil, Aeneid 2.310, 9.712). All these overtones are present inLucan's Troy, a site which marvellously appears to represent graveyard,locus amoenus,and urban ruin all at once, but Lucan's negation of allphysical traces of Troy is also a response to another kind of ruin: the lit-erary traces left behind by Ovid and Vergil which Lucan quarries tocreate foundations for understanding his own narrative.

nunc humilis ueteres antummodoTroiaruinaset pro diuitiis tumulosostenditauorum.humble now, Troy displays its ancient ruins,and for wealth, has only ancestraltombs.Ovid, Metamorphoses15.424-5

Lucan's use of ruina picks up on Ovid's when he makes Pythagorastell the Iliad and Aeneid (Met. 15.420-52), setting out a cyclical his-torical programme.21 But Lucan's echo at Caesar's visit to Troy setsup a very different alignment. In conjunction with his interjection at9.980-6, Lucan commences a process of undermining the fabric ofRome's Troy, leading instead to a world in which 'Troy' cannot beobliterated or reborn because of Caesar's Trojan fantasy heritage.Vergil's use of ruin within the proto-Rome of Evander's tour (e.g.Aeneid 8.312) offers continuity and managed change, as does Ovid's(though less straightforwardly).For Lucan, such a potentially positiveand life-affirming model grinds to a halt becauseof the permanence ofthe world-view that Caesar imposes - at Troy, Caesar creates ruinsfrom memory, wishful thinking, and stories, because a ruined Troyguarantees an appeal to Julian dynasticism as a basis for his authority.Conflating the fates of Rome, ruins, and Caesar is strikingly reminis-cent of Horace's play on Roma and ruo: Altera iam teriturbellis ciuilibusaetas I suis et ipsa Roma uiribus ruit ('Yet another generation is alreadybeing ground down by civil wars, I and through its own strengthRome itself hastens ruin') (Epode 16.1-2, cf. 9-10). Horace's poemadvises Romans to flee the city (16.36) for a Golden Age fantasy-land, to abandon Italy and retreat to a pre-epic world. Lucan'squaking, tottering city of Rome may pick up on the Sibylline

21 See e.g. G. Tissol, The Faceof Nature:Wit,Narrative,and CosmicOrigins n Ovid'sMetamorphosesPrinceton,1997), 194-5. Cf. C. Segal'spessimistic eadingof the relationshipbetween man and nature in Ovid's Metamorphoses:andscapen Ovid'sMetamorphoses:Study n theTransformationsfa Literary ymbol.HermesEinzelschriften3 (Wiesbaden,1969),88-9.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESconnotations of Horace'spoem, whilst also warningof the impossi-bilityof escape.22We see this at work ntheparadox hatLucan'serasureof Troy'sruinsopens up: Caesar's ripto Troy exists (of course) in multiplehistorio-graphical time-frames, BCE and CE, but one way or the other Ovid'sruinaehaveapparently anishedbeforetheir maginative econstructionby the guideat Caesar's Neronian'Troy,andthe promiseof reificationby Lucan's Caesar.23We can choose whether or not to collude inCaesar'sguide's reading of the landscape,and, indeed, to questionLucan's nsistence hat the 'Troy'that we and Caesarareexperiencingin the poem is whollymade up. Lucan'sdeterminationo emphasizeTroy's role as negative space is testamentto his determination oremind us that the Trojanruins that make Rome's foundationandfuture possible are themselves fragmentaryfictions. They defineRome, kickstart Rome's story, and in their disappearancetheycomment on its crumbling connexion with Republican, pre-Julio-Claudianhistory.24As vanishedobjectsof desire,for Caesar, heyfore-shadow the follies and grottoesthat were such a feature of landscapedesign and autocraticself-fashioning n eighteenth-and nineteenth-century park-land, but also prominent in imperial and aspirantpleasure-gardens of the first century CE.25Ruinsoffer a concretevisionof whathappenswhen boundaries ol-lapse and man-made environments are abandoned. Through theprocess of deterioration hat they signify, they hint at potentialfor

22 Or. Sib.3.363-4, and see MacLeod (n. 13). Cf. Lucan B.C. 1.71-2. For Sibyls in Lucan, see1.564-5, and the re-activation of Delphi (5.69-236).23 B.C. 9.999. S. Wheeler,Arethusa35 (2002), 361-80, makes avery persuasivecase for readingLucan's poem as a revisionarycontinuation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.He develops the connexionsbetween Ovid's Thebes and Lucan's Rome made in P. Hardie, CQ 40 (1990), 224-35.24 A useful analogy for these ruinae is Benjamin'sreading of monument-packed cities as 'docu-ments' of ruin. His ruinous mapping of Naples makes it impossible to differentiatebetween con-struction, dilapidation, and pre-existing ruin (e.g. n. 14, 169-70). On the oddness of Caesar'stouristic interlude, see W. R. Johnson, MomentaryMonsters:Lucan and his Heroes(Ithaca, 1987),118-19. Labate (n. 13), 180-3, traces the qualities of mimetic anxiety that inform attempts to'map' Rome in the wake of Troy.25 See Pliny, Ep. 8.8 on the gardens of the Temple of Clitumnus. On his own gardens, see Ep.2.17.14-22, 5.6.16-40. Perhaps the best example of an eighteenth-century landscape-as-textcan be found at Stowe (Buckinghamshire, UK), on which see J. D. Hunt's discussion: Gardensand the Picturesque:Studies in the History of LandscapeArchitectureCambridge MA, 1994), 76-91. Hunt's reading of the emblematic significance of the 'Elysian Fields' and Temples of Ancientand Modem Virtues is particularlyinteresting. It is significant that William Kent's design for theTemple of Ancient Virtue makes it into an (Ionic) restoration of the ruined (Corinthian) templeat Tivoli, which is also echoed so vigorously in the Fountain of Rome at the Villa D'Este atTivoli (which itself offers a reinvention of 'classical' Rome, available for comparison with the'modem' city-scape visible from the Villa).

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESboth restoration and dissolution. The description of Rome at 1.158-82(immediately after the descriptions of Pompey and Caesar) suggests aworld in which limits (Lucan uses fines) no longer exist - without nor-mative limits, both destruction and renewal are teleologically unknow-able, and the ultimate conclusion of this world is that the naturalprocess of ruin will cease. Virgil canonizes Aeneas' escape from theburning ruins of Troy, emphasizing the need to leave smoulderingTroy behind, but when Caesar 'returns' to Troy in Lucan, traces ofruin have vanished except in his imagination. Caesar's return to thememory-wilderness that once held these ruins in Lucan's poem(9.964-5) reminds us that the physical ruins that held Troy in placehave disappeared, and in their vanishing they have dissolved the bound-aries that stopped Troy from bleeding into Rome and corrupting theMediterraneanworld.

FolliesThe topologies of memory and ruin are functionally comparable, andindeed overlay each other to a significant extent, but follies are equallybound up in Lucan's cultural aesthetic. Primarily,I use 'folly' in its archi-tectural sense, to signify an artificial structurethat evokes cultural mem-ories and acts as a concrete articulation of physical and intellectualspace.Its less familiar connotations of 'rage' and 'mania' are also, however,present. Lucan's ruinae, tombs, and even the city of Alexandria, act askinds of 'folly' familiar from western Europe's eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century aristocratic landscapes. Indeed, by hinting at the likeli-hood that 'ruins' may be created ex nihilo as backstories for theimposition of new and culturally normative mnemonic hegemonies,Lucan approaches a model familiar not just from landscaped parksbut also from the public theme parks of the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies. This section traces some of the connexions between Nero'suse of multi-dimensional aesthetic narratives in his palace building,and Lucan's dystopian vision of a Mediterranean landscape itselfdotted with follies.Historical follies and follies-as-history are particularlysignificant forour understanding of Nero's palace-building projects at Rome becauseof the contradictory nature of the aesthetic and intellectual buttonsthat these projects were pushing. On the one hand, Nero's firstproject, the Domus Transitoria, functioned as a direct link between

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESthe emperor and his republican (and imperial) predecessors, blurringspatial boundaries and highlighting his own ambitious vision of auto-cracy and its imprint on the city. On the other hand, the house couldalso emphasize the increasingly proprietorial and imperialistic natureof the emperor's relationship with the city's fabric. Nero's connexionof the various imperial properties and gardens in this developmentreminds Rome of his direct links with the historical panorama of thepast hundred odd years. In this context, Lucan's recreation and recon-figuration of republican topographies could represent the logical fall-out from Nero's urban programme.By rearticulatingRome as domestic imperial space, Nero made expli-cit a process of slippage between public and privatethat had commencedin the last years of the Republic. Boundaries between domestic andimperial were, eventually, to be transfigured in the Domus Aurea, buteven in the Domus Transitoria we can see how imperial space is increas-ingly taking on explicitly epic qualities: this process is the focus of thissection. One striking feature of both palaces is particularly importantfor thinking about how three-dimensional story-telling was becomingenshrined in the aesthetic vocabulary of imperial living-space. Recentexcavations under Domitian's palace on the Palatinehave demonstratedthat Nero's work on the Domus Transitoria included an elegant andhighly decorated nymphaeum;this space is potentially engaged in acomplex dialogue with the allusive Homeric and epic cavern-tableauxthat transformed Tiberius' dining suite into a theatrical space atSperlonga, and possibly also with Claudius' 'grotto' at Baiae thatappearsto mimic it.26In the Domus Aurea, Nero installeda nymphaeumthat echoed these 'follies' decoratively,whilst making it plain that it wasitself a self-conscious nod to Tiberius' original.27

Of particular note here is Nero's wish to pick up on earlier imperialinterest in scene-setting using the blinding of Polyphemus. This storyoffers a striking counterpoint for Lucan's caves, tombs, and grottoes,whilst also engaging with issues of interpretativefailure concerning theworld around us, and highlighting the complex relationship betweenpower and civilization, monstrosity and Roman identity. Sorcha Carey26 On nymphaeaand 'grottoes' as architecturalfeatures, see P. Grimal, Les jardins romains(Fayard, 19843), 300-1, 306-8.27 M. Beard and J. Henderson, ClassicalArt: From Greece to Rome (Oxford, 2001), 74-82,provide a detailed, illustratedreading of the grotto at Sperlonga and the diverse range of statue-groups found there. On Sperlonga, Baiae, and Rome, see S. Carey, G&R 49 (2002), 44-61.A. F Stewart,JRS 67 (1977), 76-90, discusses grottoes and grotto-triclinia,and highlightsthe cul-turallymodelling potential of 'horror'scenes as a baroque response to 'republican'Classicism.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESargues that by the time Nero decorated his Domus Aurea nymphaeumwith a 'blinding of Polyphemus', Odyssean sculptures, and particularlyPolyphemus groups, had become synonymous with imperial spaces.28If so, philhellene Nero's appropriation of this key story of Hellenicidentity, cultivation, and education reminds viewers that sometimesthe theatrical space of a 'folly' casts us in unexpected roles. Are weOdysseus? Or Polyphemus? The Domus Aurea nymphaeumis itselfunlikely to have been available to Lucan. Nevertheless, the earlier ver-sions (and particularly that in the Domus Transitoria) do offer amodel for imperial interest in combining grotesquerie and carnage, con-fusion of roles and control over how spaces are experienced and inter-preted that Lucan's poem appears to reflect.29 Blinding Polyphemusoffers an elegant tableau for a culturally imperialistic revision of aRoman odyssey, but becomes particularlypertinent when we rememberthat Rome has its very own version of the story in the clash betweenHercules and the culture-monster Cacus.30Nero's interest in creating discrete spaces which set the scene formythic re-enactments plays around with the idea of a folly as a dramaticspace which tells a story (in this instance, a story that has potential pol-itical significance for Rome), but both Polyphemus and Cacus are alsotopographically significant for another reason. Both are monsters wholive in caves, and both are also (though Polyphemus more obviously)deprived of their sight as part of their downfall. Like Pompey, Cacusloses his head(s). In conjunction with the fashion for nymphaeaand

28 Carey (n. 27), 55-6, 58.29 R. J. Clare,in C. Atherton (ed.), Monstersand Monstrosityn Greekand RomanCulture,NCLS6 (Bari, 1998), 1-17, describes Homer's Polyphemus succinctly as a monster constantlyexpecting'the arrivalof someone else' (16). The blinding of Polyphemus and its dining context are, of course,delightfully ironic given the dangers associated with imperial dinner-parties (cf. Edwards [n. 11],186-8, 199-204). Grimal (n. 26), 66-72, discusses the culturalomnipresence of Homeric (andHellenistic) 'gardens' in Roman landscaping, and in his section on nymphaeaand grottoes (306-10), he traces the grotto tradition back to Homer's Polyphemus (308-9). Other monster-killing'rooms' provide a sense of the popularity of this kind of image (e.g. at Boscotrease, and theOdyssey landscapes from the Esquiline house at Rome). On James I's Whitehall 'dinner'grottoes,see Hunt (n. 2), 133. Cf. R. Strong, TheRenaissanceGarden n England(London, 19982), 138-9,and his description of the sixteenth-centurygarden-grottoesat Pratolino, near Florence (78-83).30 Roman Polyphemus always has his eye on Theocritus' Idyll 11. For Cacus, cf. Vergil,Aeneid8.185-305; Ovid, Fasti 1.543-86; Propertius4.9 (for Vergil's Polyphemus, see Aeneid3.616-81).All of these 'monsters' play out a symbiosis of culture (the highly literate stories that contain them,the 'classical'landscapes they inhabit, the 'civilizing'forces they invoke) and barbarism(landscapethat lacks stories - without their clashes with civilizingforces and containment within literaryland-scapes, these monsters do not exist). On Cacus, Hercules, Polyphemus, and gigantomachy in theAeneid see P. Hardie, Virgil'sAeneid: Cosmos and Imperium(Oxford, 1986), 114-18, which alsoreferences key bibliography. As Hardie notes, the complexity of the allusions in this episode ofthe Aeneid marks out its significance for Rome, ibid., 115.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESthe interconnectedness f interiorand exteriorspacesthat a 'cave' ele-gantlyrepresents,blinded,troglodyticmonsters draw our attention oa central featureof Roman landscapedesign:controlling he gaze.3'The abilityto model the gaze both in and out of a space was, asNicholasPurcellasserts,animportantunctionof autocracyandowner-ship. A 'cave'might seem to be diametrically pposedto the bravuraclaims to the surroundinglandscape asserted by the increasinglypopularviewingtowers(or 'gazebos')that Purcelldiscusses,but as healsonotes, therearewaysin which the cave's enforcementof a unifiedvisualescape,a keyholescene which allparticipants hare,has its ownauthority.32n fact we could also arguethat the mythic cave/grottooffers unlimitedpossibilitiesfor self-aggrandizement ecause of theepic landscapes t can open up. Hercules' 'execution' of Cacus takesplacein a spacethat is almost,but not yet, Rome.Polyphemuscan dienightlyin a grottothat is both cave and imperial antasyworldwheredinerscan imaginethemselvesas epic heroes- or monsters.In 60 CE,Nero celebrated he Neroniagames,and in the wakeof hisIuvenalia estivalthe previousyear,the gamesof 57, and his develop-ment of the Domus Transitoria,we find an increasingmomentum ofspectacle and imperial omnipresence saturating he city. Combinedwith the focus on wonders brought to Rome from the empire forNero's, and the city's,pleasure, his suggeststhat NeronianRome wasincreasingly akingon an auraof Disneyfication.33The complex aes-thetic rhetoric of the imperialgrottoes that I have drawn into thisreadingoffers one more way of thinkingabout this process, but also

31 See Pliny, N.H. 35.116-17 on the interiority of Augustan landscape art. Leach (n. 10)addresses issues of the narratologyof landscape art that underlie my reading of Lucan.32 On the role of elevation in Roman landscaping, see Purcell (n. 2), 193-5. On 'views' andvista-control see Purcell, ibid., 195-7. Examples of raised and sunken buildings with particularNeronian significance are the cloud-sweeping 'tower' in the Gardens of Maecenas (Horace, Odes3.29.10), possibly the vantage-point from which Suetonius makes Nero watch the fire of Rome,and the semi-subterranean dining-'nymphaeum', also in the Gardens, decorated with fantasywindows which seem to open onto an impossible underground garden. We could compare thesewith the subterraneantrompe l'oeil 'grotto' from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, on which seeKellum (n. 10).33 Grimal'scomments (n. 26), 441-4, areparticularlyuseful here. He notes that the creation ofgardens for pleasure, picking up on Hellenistic planting models, was a key element of Roman self-presentationas Hellenistic world leader ('En les empruntant,Rome s'efforce de s'introduiredans laCommunaute hellenistiqueet de prendre rang (le premier) parmiles capitales... Le jardinromain adonne un corps a un reve grec.'442-3). In effect, he arguesthat Roman gardensact out and appro-priate Greek mythic landscape and intellectual territory. For an introduction to contemporaryapproaches to theme-park landscapes, Young and Riley (n. 2) contains a number of importantarticles, particularly those by D. Lowenthal, E. Harwood, M. Treib, and B. J. Brown. Cf.Pompey's dream (B.C. 7.9-29), and on myth and spectacle, see e.g. K. Coleman, JRS 80(1990), 44-73.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESconnects directlywith Lucan's poem. This takes place most straightfor-wardlyin Lucan's Egypt, memorable for its range of cave tombs, and thespectacular,limitless palace, but Lucan's repeated emphasis on the cavesat Delphi also highlights their quality as liminal, transgressivespaces.34The self-conscious melange of myth, history, art, domination, andperformance that such underground and almost self-contained spacesoffer, locates us in similar territory to that explored by Michel Serreswhen he noted that 'a landscape is a mosaic of spaces, not an ensembleof objects put in a common space.'35Serres' characterizationsuggestsnot only the fragmentation of vision and interpretation that Lucanexplores in his shifting perspectives on the civil war: it also sets up anotion of topographical mnemonics whereby culturally resonantspaces (Actium, Pharsalus, Troy, Alexandria) interlock to createRome's 'Mediterranean' theme park.36Indeed, if Sperlonga and othersuch tableaux risk reconfiguring Rome's mythography as kitsch, wecould argue that Lucan does the same for its history.

The grave of all the worldDead Pompey and his gravetakeup the final two hundred lines of Lucan8 (672-872), and entangle his death and headless corpse (the ruinaforetold at 2.731) intimately with Roman and Alexandrian history.These lines take on particular significance in the wake of readingPolyphemus/Cacus into Nero's Rome, and with Troy's sepulchral pre-sence looming over the poem's fiery end. At 8.684-91 we flash betweenthe auctoritas of Pompey's 'head' (in control of the law, Campus, andRostra), to the process of its desanguination and brain-removal, andthen poisonous 'fixing' of its features at Ptolemy's order. Finally,

34 On Delphi, e.g. B.C. 5.84, 87, 95, 153, 159, 169, 192.35 M. Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations,trans. F McCarren (Stanford, 1991), 185.N. Purcell, in T. Blagg and M. Millett (eds.), The Early Roman Empire in the West(Oxford,1990), 7-29, emphasizes the inherently 'cellular' nature of imperial topography until at least thethird century CE. He suggests that this is an important feature in the radiantpattern of itinerary'spokes' that branch out from Rome (ibid.), 24 n. 15. This located Rome at the epicentre of anempire that bridged two Oceans. His analysis of topographical change as inherentlyan expressionof monarchical (or even divine) authority (16) makes imperial exploitation of the landscape as afunction of personal magnificence inevitable (22). In this way, the superimposition of an artificialand hyperreal'nature'(even if it replacesa 'natural'feature)tells a version of imperial appropriationof divine power. Cf. Strong (n. 29), 197, on renaissance identification of absolutistmonarchy andgardening, and Hunt's development of these ideas (n. 2), 143-4.36 This reading places us squarelywithin the territoryset up by Vergilin Jupiter'sprophecy ofRome's future extent (Aeneid 1.278-9), and echoed in e.g. Ovid, Fasti 1.85-6; 2.683-4; 4.832;857-8.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESPompey is characterized by his facelessness (8.710-11; cf. Aeneid2.557-8). Here, just as with Cacus (and Polyphemus), Pompey's con-trolling gaze is removed.37 Pompey's potential to remind us of Cacus,Rome's tamed monster, is further suggested through a series of allusionsto 'grottoes' and death as key featuresof the Egyptianroyal landscape. InEgypt, graves, grottoes and death increasingly serve to collapse theMediterranean horizons into a funereally themed scenography;Ptolemy is defined as the keeper-of-corpses: he preserves Alexander'sbody in a grotto (antrum 8.694);38 kings' ashes (regumcineres:8.695;cf. 9.990) permeate his environment; whilst shades of Ptolemies pastinhabit pyramids and mausoleums (8.696-7). Ptolemaic Alexandriaappearsto be a city of the dead, but in the wake of civil war, Lucan con-taminates our whole experience of 'Egypt' through his insistence on thefar-reaching pollution and transformation that Pompey's grave effects,irrevocably changing the world into a sepulchral theme park.Cordus' burial of Pompey takes up a sizeable section of book 8(8.712-78), but it is the aftermath and Lucan's editorial commentarythat focuses us so emphaticallyon the impact of this one final republicandeath. 'Hic situs est Magnus' (8.793) is inscribed on the stone markingPompey's grave, but a stone planted in the sand is both impervious totime, and utterly susceptible to dislocation. The ambiguities of situsare such that Lucan's re-use of it a few lines later repays close attention.Situs, although most usually translated at line 793 as 'buried', has twoclear and potentially oppositional meanings: firstly, situs, a, um -(OLD situs1) buried (or laid out for burial), a sense which evokes situs-us, m. (OLD situs3):'the condition of lying undisturbed', neglect, stag-nation, rottenness and physical deterioration. Secondly, 'founded' or'erected', which overflows into situs -us, m. (OLD situs2): location ortopography of something or somewhere; structure,building; (geographyof) a region. All of these meanings coalesce in the formulaic 'here lies...'of hic situs est. This hic situsis thereby both everywhere and nowhere, asfurther elucidated by Lucan a few lines later when he apostrophizes:

... temerariadextra,cur obicisMagno tumulummanesqueuagantisincludis?situs est qua terra extremarefuso37 Paradoxicallyfor Pompey, his only 'success' at Rome in Lucan's text is his dream vision (uana

imago7.8) - the night before Pharsalus- of himself, watching Rome, watching (and cheering for)him, in his theatre (7.7-24).38 This meaning of antrum remains available,despite the more 'straightforward' ense of 'burialvault' (see TLL2.192.28-30). Cf. Caesar's visit to Alexander'santrum(10.22-3), and Augustus'later trip.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESpendetin Oceano;Romanumnomenet omneimperiumMagno tumuliest modus:obruesaxacrimineplena deum.... rash hand,why do you impose a tomb on Magnus and imprison a spirit thatwanders free? His grave/monument/neglectedorpse/domainencompassesthe furthest landthat rests on the encircling Ocean; the Roman name and entireempire are the only limit to Magnus' tomb: cast down [bury] that stone,fully charged with accusation against heaven.

Lucan, B.C. 8.795-800

These two deployments of situsencapsulate Lucan's ambivalence aboutthe role of Pompey in his poem, and furthermore, situs represents theputrefying spread of (dead) hero worship that has led to Caesar'sTrojan fantasies, and Julian mythography.39Lucan's intense interest inPompey's grave might also recall another feature of Roman landscapingthat would have been highly familiar to contemporary Romans, andmight perhaps have acquired renewed significance in the wake of thispassage's defamiliarizing funerary technique: the grave gardens thatfringed Rome's outskirts near the grove of Libitina. These 'gardens'(cepotaphia) provided a space in which the living could meet, rest,work, and think, with the dead as their notional companions.40 Can aRoman, buried in Egypt, remain Roman? Can there ever be any expec-tation that Pompey's Egyptian grave will achieve the topographicalapotheosis that an Italiangrave-garden could have allowed him?These epitaph-lines on Pompey's grave also go some way towardsexpressing similar cognitive anxieties to those that Walter Benjamindescribes when he depicts his memory as studded with 'isolated words[that] have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters'.41Here, the inscription that flows out from Pompey's monument alsoretains its oblique isolation. Quis capit haec tumulus?('What tomb can

39 Gideon Nisbet kindly drew my attention to the wide-ranging implications of the meanings ofsitus.40 On Rome'sgardentombs, see Purcell(n. 2), 188 and n. 4, and A. R. Littlewood,nMacDougall (n. 2), 12-13 (and briefly, Grimal [n. 26], 322-3). These 'gardens'should be readalso in terms of Augustus' landscaped Mausoleum. J. H. Miller's exploration of the simultaneouslyaporetic, placeless, and foundational natures of 'the crypt' (after Derrida) offers one more way ofthinking about the grave as a locus for both containment and indefinability (Topographies[Stanford, 1995], 301-11). On Lucan's 'heroization' of Pompey in this section, see e.g.R. Mayer, Lucan: Civil War VIII (Warminster, 1981), 187, 188. Pompey's 'stoic' apotheosis, ofcourse, is given at 9.1-18. With Julio-Claudianhindsight, its futility is total.41 Benjamin (n. 14), 303. Cf. J. Derrida, 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', in WritingandDifference,rans. A. Bass (London, 1978), 196-231.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESholdallthese?')(8.816), demandsLucanof the resgestae achievements)that Pompey'stomb would need to recount - but no adequatestoneexists (8.798-804). Lucan's vision of the grave-siteas a place of col-lision between myth, politics, and mercantilerealityleaves Romanswith little else to do other than act the acquisitive ourist in Caesar'swake(8.820-1, 851-8). This activitywill eventuallybecomepartof aprocessof devastationand ruin (8.865-72) in whichattempts o findtraces of and tell stories about the tomb will fail. The ambivalenceofthesetwo versionsof sightseeing at TroyandPompey's omb)highlightLucan's authorialdilemma.By turning solatedwordsand ruins into a'story',an authorcolludes in a process hijackedby Caesars,but byforetellinga worldin which the obliteration f Pompey's omb ensuresthatmythsare robbedof theirpower,Lucan can offera prospectof aworld in which Pompey's death has itself disappeared(8.867-9).Paradoxically,hen, the meagrenessof Pompey'stomb both precludestheprospectof anothermythicTroy nsome distant uture,whilstensur-ing that CaesarianRomeremainsdrenched n sepulchral ignificance.One final allusion sharpens our focus on the interconnexion ofPompey and Troy. Inevitably, think,Pompey'sfuneralscene recallsCatullus' impassioned denunciationof Troy-as-tomb (68.89-104).Catullus contrasts the role of Troy as communesepulcrumAsiaeEuropaeque- 'common tomb of Asia and Europe' (68.89) with thenota sepulcra- 'familiargraves' (68.97) on Roman soil amongst whichhis brotherought to rest. The bitter joke is that it is to Troy, notRome whereone must go to see the nota sepulcra.42Yet CatullanTroystillacknowledgeshe possibilityof a distinctivelyRomanidentity-indeathat least, his brother'sbody is recognizably oreignat Troy-anoption that Lucan closes down when Caesar visits the site.Furthermore,Lucan'sdispersalof Pompey'sremainsthroughout hewhole worldmarksa starkcontrastwithTroy's posthumous mprison-ment of Catullus'brother:

sed Troiaobscena,Troia nfelicesepultumdetinetextremo erraaliena solo.but buried at unmentionable Troy, unhappy Troya foreign land keeps you in its most far flung ground.Catullus 68.99-100

42 ElenaTheodorakopoulosemindedme of theusefulnessof Catullusor Lucan'sTroy.Notahere mustbe significantn thewidercontextof poem68'semphasison the name(lessness) f itsdedicatee 68.50, 151).

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESIn contrast to Pompey's interment, Catullus' brother is firmly buried atTroy, and becomes part of its ruinous landscape, and a Trojangravewillput him firmly on all subsequent sightseers' itineraries.Similarly,whilstthe sepulchralwords that do not quite root Pompey in the Egyptian sandindicate catastrophe, their susceptibility to erosion and invisibility alsosuggests a potential inconclusivity that offers at least a morsel of hope.This picks up on book 2's hope that Fortuna will ensure that Pompeyis buried in a far-flung corner of the world (2.732-6), though ofcourse we, as readers, know that Egypt, like Troy, is now 'Rome', andPompey's grave is the whole world. Lucan closes this book with a pro-grammatic statement that returns us to the paradox of stasis and decaythat collapsing realities at Troy set up: no age will be happy (or atleast felicior)until we have allowed Pompey (and the rest) to pass fromhistory into myth, yet in Nero's Rome, how can we tell one from theother?

Domesticating the city43Cleopatra'spalace offers a strong counterpoint to Pompey's grave, anddraws out the palimpsestic aspect of architecturethrough the incremen-tal nature of its developing identity; speculatively, it also evokes the con-tinuing sprawl of successive emperors' remodelling of Rome. This all, Ithink, makes Lucan's Alexandria and his focus on the palace particularlypertinent. Read alongside the transformationstaking place in the imper-ial residences at Rome, we find that the royal quarter (including themuseum) at Alexandria sprawled over about a quarter of the cityspace, and it was an agglomeration of palace buildings, built up anddeveloped over the years.44This palace epitomizes the breakingof nor-mative boundaries, and also reminds us of the susceptibility of cities toredefinition as domestic prospects and landscapes for their rulers. Itsincorporation of layers of royal construction and design makes thepalace at Alexandria re-connect directly with both Ptolemy I and thecity's legendary founder, Alexander the Great. When Lucan choosesto describe the palace (as Caesar sees it) first of all in terms ofAlexander-Pellaea aula ('Pellaean hall': 10.55), then Emathia tecta('Emathianroof': 10.58) - we areimmediately sensitized to his selectionof terminology.These descriptorsmake it hard to tell where Alexander's

43 For Nero as Rome's colonizer, and Rome as imperial domus,see Tacitus, Annals 15.37.44 See Grimal (n. 26), 85 and Strabo 17.1.8. Tacitus suggests that Nero uses the ruins of hispatria to redefine the city as ruralparkland (Annals 15.42).

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LUCAN'S FOLLIEStomb ends, and the royal palace begins. Regia ('palace/court') appearsonly at 10.442, 486, and 527, but in the wake of Virgil's Cacus andhis connexions with Polyphemus, it might not be too far-fetched torecall the regiain which monstrous and unhuman Cacus lurks (Aeneid8.242).45 As Hardie comments ([n. 30], 115), the significance ofVergil'sremodelling of the story of Hercules and Cacus is in his insis-tence that Cacus' defeat involves focusing the battle on Cacus' home.His extraction from it marks the destruction of both. Here in Lucan'sAlexandria, Caesar enters the regia,but is himself a function of its cor-ruption; this regia s not a confining space, it is a place where boundariesand barriers are transgressed.

At first (10.14-24) Alexandriaappearsto offer a step back to Troy, aswe hear that Caesar has reverted to tourist mode and gone sightseeingfor tombs; here the antrum is Alexander's (10.17-19). This sepulchralvisit, rightat the beginning of his and our Alexandriantrip, contaminatesthe city and models our responses to its glamour. Lucan's description ofthe palace/city focuses on its role as a set for a spectacular piece ofdinner-theatre,and he chooses to turn the venue for this piece of grand-standing into a temple, specifically,a temple which could have no realityin such a corruptioraetas - 'degraded era' (10.111). And to ram thismessage home just a little more thoroughly, aetas is followed as a line-end by aurum, two lines down (10.113). This palace is also, in itsdetail, startlingly reminiscent of accounts of the Domus Aurea,suggesting that accounts of Nero's palace were tapping a well-knownand popular set of descriptors for perverted luxury and decadence. Itis a perversion of a sacred space (perhaps reminding the audience ofNero's divine aspirations and urban appropriations); ceiling, rafters,walls, all are encrusted with a thick veneer of ostentation. Gold,marble, semi-precious stones, ebony, ivory, alabaster, tortoise-shell,jewels; a rainbow of colours, which is matched in the ethnic diversityof the servants and the ostentation of Cleopatra's appearance(10.111-46).46

45 Regia might initially appear to be the most culturally loaded term that Lucan could havechosen (and therefore his sparse use of it could be both emphatic and intriguing), but asA. Winterling, Aula Caesaris:Studien zur Institutionalisierung es romischenKaiserhofesn derZeitvonAugustusbis Commodus 31 v.Chr.- 192 n.Chr)(Munich, 1999) suggests, aula tends to functionas a portmanteaufor the whole imperialpackage - space and lifestyle - and in the firstcenturyCEatleast, had negative connotations. Lucan uses aula on four further occasions (10.73, 115, 422, 440),and then uses domus(house) to stand for both the Ptolemaic dynasty (10.98, 414) and the palace(10.119, 335, 443, 460, 479, 481).46 Cf. Tacitus,Annals 15.42 and Suetonius, Nero 31.1-2 on the Domus Aurea. Tacitus specifi-cally comments that the Domus Aurea was a function of Rome's ruin (ruina). Edwards'important

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESThe abrupt ending of book 10, and its relativebrevity,have led to sug-gestions that it remains unfinished, and might suggest that this wasLucan's last work-in-progress. In fact, the dysfunctional end seems to

fit neatly into Lucan's scheme, and of course the text's denial ofclosure allows us to take compositional context as far as possible andto read-in Nero's Roman architectonics in the wake of the great fire.47The fire that ravages Alexandria is preceded by a gala performance ofsensuous theatricality (10.56-8, 82-5) that continues in the displayfeast that Caesar then luxuriates in (10.111-71). This really is abanquet of the gods and Egypt's deities consume and are consumedby the menu (10.158-9). The menu itself gives us another hint at theuniversality of the empire of corruption that this scene representswhen we are told that the food encompassed earth, air, sea, and Nile:the spoils of the whole world (toto ... in orbe:10.132), whilst Rome'sglobal imperialism allows (or even forces) us to read 'Rome' forAlexandria.48 As Lucan's configuration of Pompey's grave (8.795-800) suggests, Egypt is increasingly central, relegating the rest of theworld, including Rome, to the periphery (modus:8.799). And we findthat in this seismic meeting of old and new versions of empire, politicsis banished from the agenda. Instead, the experience is wholly focusedon pleasure, sensuality, and personal gratification.

Postquamepulis Bacchoquemodum lassata uoluptasimposuit,longis Caesarproducerenocteminchoatadloquiis,When wearied pleasure set a limit to feasting andcarousing, Caesar set about prolonging the night with lengthy discourse,

Lucan, B.C. 10.172-4

discussion of architecture and luxury rightly notes that Roman texts are unusually concerned withstructural ethics (n. 11), 137-72. A grand and luxurious home could bring prestige, honouringguests through the display of wealth (and power) that was opened up to them, whilst at the sametime this house might allow political opponents to raise charges of unwarranted ambitioagainstits owner (cf. Cicero, Pro Murena 76). As Edwards comments on Vitruvius, De Architectura6.5.1-2, the terms regaliaand basilica suggest anti-republican political aspirations (ibid.), 153,perhaps hinting at the crimenregni suggested by Vedius Pollio's Palatine house in Ovid's Fasti(6.643). Seneca's discussion of luxurious bath-houses (Ep. 86.6.7) highlights a sense of anxietyabout ostentatious wealth without status, and his unease locates him in similar territory toLucan's narrativevoice here. By indulging in 'Alexandrian'luxury, Caesar divorces himself fromrepublican auctoritasand therebyfrom acceptable public display.47 On Lucan and closure, see J. Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile(Cambridge, 1992), 216-59.48 On food, luxury, and identity, see E. Gowers, TheLoaded Table:Representationsf Food inRoman Literature Oxford, 1993), 18-22; cf. 198-202 on Juvenal.

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESLucan's use of modushere could recall the dramatic shift in topographicnarratologythat Pompey's grave provokes, foreshadowing the temporaland cosmographical deformation that Caesar sets in motion. Lying,sated after the feast, Caesar's control over time (or, we might argue,the distortion of time that his presence provokes) is foregrounded ashe appears to make the passing hours grind to a halt. His request toAcoreus demands an encyclopedic response, detailing the origins ofEgypt, its religious beliefs and customs, but he retrenches, and focuseshis enquiry on the calendar, heavens, and source of the Nile. What hegets from Acoreus demonstrates the cultural permeability of the worldin which Caesaroperates.Acoreus' account commences with thoroughlyRomanized heavens (10.194-218) before concluding with an accountof the Nile that locates Caesar in a long tradition of world leaders whobecame obsessed by it (10.268-83).49 Similarly, long service in Egypthas brought oblivion and loss of identity to Romans in the army there(10.403-5). Perhaps these are the very same 'tourists' whom Lucanenvisages at Pompey's burial site when he elegantly foreshadowsCaesar's visit to Troy:

haudproculest ima Pompeinomen harenadepressumumulo,quodnon legataduenarectus,quodnisi monstratumRomanustranseathospes.Pompey's name is scarcely above the lowly sand,set low upon the grave, so that a standing passer-by would not read it,and unless it were pointed out, a Roman visitor would pass it by.Lucan B.C. 8.820-2

Through loss of identity and dallianceon the banks of the Nile (10.412-13) all these Romans (Caesar and those who besiege him) play out theeffects of a process of spatial destabilization on the peoples of theempire, with the palace, jutting out over the water and blurring thedivide between land and sea, as a focal point.50 The destruction that

49 Hardie'sreading of Vergil's'Cacus' story in Aeneid8 as a kind of 'Roman cosmogony, func-tioning as a grand and universalizingprelude to the themes of human history that ensue' (n. 30),117, becomes important for Lucan's focus on temporal distortion. Perhaps here we are seeing akind of pervertedcosmogonywherebyCaesar'sEgyptianreverieusurps'Roman'(or at leastVergilian) mythic consciousness. Cacus' regia might mimic the Underworld, as Hardie notes(ibid.), 112; Cleopatra's regia might, given the nature of Acoreus' Nilo-centric historiography,invoke Anchises' explication of the parade of future Rome's heroes at the river Lethe/Forgetfulness (Vergil,Aeneid 6.752-885). Cf. Wheeler (n. 23), 372-8, on Lucan's cosmological(if fragmentary) dialogue with Ovid.50 Nec non et ratibustemptaturregia, qua se I protulitin medios audaci margine luctus I luxuriosadomus. ('And the palace was also under attack by ships, at the point where I this magnificenthouse projected out over the waves I with a daring aspect.') (10.486-8). Lucan's use of fluctus

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESAlexandriaspreadsacross the Roman world is finallymatched with a fire(10.491-505) which must surely suggest Rome's counterpoint asTrojan ruin, the great fire whose effects were still a key feature of thecity's heart. Alexandria's flames evoke the regumcineresof B.C. 8.695whilst also recalling the cognatos ... cineres - 'familiar ashes' fromwhich Troy keeps Catullus' brother (68.98) and the acerba cinis -'bitter ash', that characterizesTroy itself (68.90).

No end in sightNew (Roman) Troy demonstrates how the stultifying effect of the pastcontinues to contaminate the nature of the present, but throughLucan's description of Alexandria we see how this mini-Grand Tourrequires us to rethink the intellectual and cultural effects of a scenarioin which there can be no possibility for radical change. This civil-warworld is one in which ruined Troy is symptomatic of the detrimentaleffect of mythic history on perceptual reality. Troy is simultaneouslysubsumed into the natural landscape (9.964-9) and a semblance of aRomantic locus amoenus which Caesar, inscius, struggles to interpret(our narrator has no such difficulties, the stories trip from his pen:9.973, 980-1). Here, the weeds that choke what was once Trojanspace offer a tacit commentary on Troy's potential to suffocate Romanachievement. This suggests that Rome, like Troy, will eventually onlybe a series of competing narratives,pastiches, and increasingly solipsisticallusions to stories to which we granta greatervitalitythan our own (nar-rative) present. But as Lucan ominously suggests, the sun will never seton our (Caesar's and Lucan's? Lucan's and his audience's?) Pharsalia(9.985-6). If History has ended, 'we' are left without the option of dif-ferentiating ourselves from the world Caesar creates. This trope of per-sistence is important for the second kind of paradoxical'ruin' that Lucanpresents: ruin-as-end of history, and this is focused on Pompey's grave(8.842-72) and Alexandria.With Pompey dead, Caesar loses the conquistadorial dynamism thattemporarily displaces the new kind of 'ruin' that Rome will experience.The complacent, destructive corruption of Alexandria in book 10blurs the definition of the kind of water, linking this building to a literarytradition of boundary-defying, corrupting edifices. E.g. Horace, Odes 2.18.15-22; cf. Pliny, N.H. 36.2-3. We couldalso read this back into Lucan's conceptualization of Pompey's grave in similar terms (8.795-9,802-5, 838-40), which in turn evokes the widespread semina belliset out in book 1: 1.158-82,and particularly,non auro tectisuemodus ('there was no limit eitherto wealth or homes') (1.163).

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LUCAN'S FOLLIESmirrors the decadence that empire brought for Rome (1.158-82), butwhereas that city was corrupted only by military success, Alexandriastands for an ancient narrativeof corruptionwith no republicanidealismat its heart. If Troy offers a primarycontaminatorymodel (ruin-as-ruin)for the world that Caesar's dangerous brilliance makes inevitable, thenthe version that Lucan presents for us at Alexandria represents themoral and ethical ruin-that-follows-success, familiar, as Mario Labate(n. 13), 168-71, notes, even in Sallust's version of Roman decline(Bell. Cat. 2.6-13) and forcefully expressed in Horace, Epode 16.Lucan's inclusion of Sulla's Rome, half a century before Caesar's clashwith Pompey, offers a mass grave from which a new Rome could grow(2.98-232) whereas the alternative Rome represented by Alexandriaremains a luxurious sepulchre (8.692-700, 729-872; 10.9-52)forever implicated in 'orientalist' decadence and perversion (10.53-171).In conclusion, I suggest that reading these touristic segments redefinesLucan's civil-war landscape as a paradoxical story of the way in whichopening up the present to the past can result in a closing down of oppor-tunities for progression and change. Troy and Egypt, together with theCaesars who define them, corrupt the possibility of critical and intellec-tual engagement with the past. Fascination with the sights of theMediterranean sets the stage for the ordered chaos of a series ofmytho-historical theme-parks, stage-managed and instantly recogniz-able back-drops for Lucan's voluble tableaux.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORSLYNDA MCNEIL: Instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the

University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.STUART LAWRENCE: Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at Massey University,New Zealand.JOHN WHITEHORNE: Reader in Classics and Ancient History at the University of

Queensland, Australia.ARMAND D'ANGOUR: Fellow and Tutor in Classical Languages and Literature,Jesus College, Oxford.CHRISTINE LUZ: Assistant in Greek Philology, Institutefor Classical Philology, Bern,Switzerland.DIANA SPENCER: Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham.

JOHN CURRAN: Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the Queen's University ofBelfast, Northern Ireland.

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Lucan Civil War Landscape

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