Lucan’s language, though it frequently adheres to the poem’s reputation as crude and gory, also reaches heights of intense beauty in the isolation of a line or two. Sometimes, these lines are scenes that are themselves beautiful; sometimes, they are simply particularly lovely renderings of something that is itself terrible. Perhaps the most well-known line in the above-translated proem to Book 1 is in sua victrici conversum viscera dextra, roughly renderable as “[the Roman people] had turned their victorious right hand on their own guts.” (A brief contextual note: in Latin poetry, dextra, strictly translatable as “right hand,” is often a metonym for one’s sword. Knowing Lucan, though, one cannot help but imagine that perhaps here it isn’t.)

It’s an awful image, often cited as microcosmic of the Pharsalia as a whole: Rome’s brutal self-evisceration, writ large across the stage of the discordant cosmos. Lucan’s masterwork is a slow suicide of a poem, an agonizingly detailed and viciously sharp tale about the self-made end of an autographical history. It is a poem about cannibalism, and the apocalypse, and the terrible & pathetic grandeur of the autocrat. It is also a poem about love.

Sottolineature a Farsalia di Lucano

Mi era rimasta la voglia di leggerlo dal liceo, questo anti-poema latino grondante sangue e disperazione. Apocalittico e catastrofista come pochi, sembra convogliare lo stesso panico che oggi si soffoca a suon di compresse e serie tv e videoricette su Instagram, bollato come irrazionale e quindi indegno di espressione. Ma Lucano non reprime nulla; dà  corpo e dà voce a tutti i suoi mostri, vitupera il presente e maledice il futuro, lamentando l’irrimediabile perdita del conforto della tradizione, dello ius e dei mores della defunta Repubblica. 

- “In se magna ruunt; laetis hunc numina rebus

crescendi posuere modum.” 

(La grandezza crolla su se stessa; i numi delimitarono così lo sviluppo della prosperità.)

- Semper nocuit differre paratis

- Giulia, in sogno a Pompeo:

“ Verrò in mezzo alle schiere mentre guiderai le battaglie...

La guerra civile ti farà mio.”

- Vulteio esorta i compagni al suicidio collettivo: 

“Soltanto quelli toccati dall’imminenza del fato possono riconoscere - gli dèi lo celano ai superstiti affinché continuino a vivere - quanto è dolce il morire!”

- “Eripe consilium pugna” (Impedisci la riflessione con la battaglia), in pratica il motto dei cesariani

- ma Lucano si rivolge a Cesare come ad un pari (l’autore del poema si specchia nell’autore della Storia, che narra) quando prende parola e consacra Farsalia ad un inedito futuro anteriore:

“O sacra e grande fatica dei poeti, che tutto strappi al destino, e doni l’eternità ai popoli mortali (...) Se le Muse latine possono promettere qualcosa, i posteri leggeranno me e te;

la nostra Farsaglia vivrà, e da nessuna epoca saremo condannati alle tenebre.”

 fert animus causas tantarum expromere rerum, inmensumque aperitur opus, quid in arma furentem inpulerit populum, quid pacem excusserit orbi. inuida fatorum series summisque negatum                  stare diu nimioque graues sub pondere lapsus nec se Roma ferens. sic, cum conpage soluta saecula tot mundi suprema coegerit hora antiquum repetens iterum chaos, [omnia mixtis sidera sideribus concurrent,] ignea pontum                   astra petent, tellus extendere litora nolet excutietque fretum, fratri contraria Phoebe ibit et obliquum bigas agitare per orbem indignata diem poscet sibi, totaque discors machina diuolsi turbabit foedera mundi.                  in se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus crescendi posuere modum.

My spirit brings me to tell the causes of such things, And to disclose the great work, which compelled a maddened people To war, and drove out peace from our world. The hateful dictates of fate long stood Beneath a slipping and solemn weight: and, well Rome couldn’t bear its own bulk. Naturally, when such frameworks were dissolved And the century’s last hour dawned Ancient chaos returned to take its due. All the heavens ran together, and burning Stars sought the earth, which itself refused To extend to its own borders. Land shook off sea, and Phoebe, opposite her brother no longer,  Drove her two-horsed chariot through the slanting sphere And arrogantly demanded the day for herself. In short: the CHAOSMACHINE entire tore up the treaties of the gutted world. See, here’s the thing: Greatness falls upon its own sword, and the gods reserve The secrets of growth for joyful things. Not for us.

— Lucan, Pharsalia I.67-82 (translation mine)

lovecraft...lucan...same thing really