Pharsalia (De Bello Civili)

An unfinished epic in ten books on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, left incomplete at Lucan's forced suicide at twenty-five after his involvement in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero, radically breaking from Virgilian and Homeric convention by removing the gods entirely as active characters and treating Fortune, or simple human ambition and cruelty, as the only force driving Rome toward self-destruction. Lucan, Seneca's nephew and once a favorite of Nero before a personal and literary falling-out, gives sympathetic weight to the losing Pompeian and republican side, elevating the Stoic senator Cato into something close to the poem's moral center, and treats Caesar with an ambivalent mixture of fascination and condemnation unusual for a poem written under Caesar's own imperial successors. The poem's bleak, rhetorically excessive style divided ancient critics but proved deeply influential on later poets uncomfortable with celebratory imperial epic, including strong admiration from Dante.