Blut Auf Pharsalischen Feldern

The book scrutinizes Lucan's reception of Vergil. Former contributions to this question were focusing nearly exclusively on the "Aeneid," which Lucan was often said to have abandoned as a manifest anti-Vergil. Kersten, however, examines Lucan's references to the "Georgics," which are all but antiphrastic. The author shows that Lucan's poem on the civil war can be read as a sort of prequel for Vergil's didactic epos: Lucan tells of the events that led to the catastrophe of Emathian fields dunged with blood, a central motive both in the "Georgics" and the "Bellum Ciuile." Rather than stating in an anti-Vergilian manner that Augustan values are of no importance any longer, Lucan seems to support them ex negativo by dealing precisely with that historical moment which has made necessary the cultural renewal that was propagated by the Augustan poet. Cultural standards as already re-affirmed in the highly intertextual "Georgics" are strengthened once more by the narrator who remembers the loss of culture and the hope for a new Golden Age and seems still to wait for the implementation of Vergil's lessons. The numerous intertextual relations between Lucan and the "Georgics" are discussed and set in relation to the major issues of recent scholarship on Lucan such as the significance of the heroes Caesar, Pompey, and Cato or the meaning of the panegyric for Nero.