Lucanus, M. ANNÆUS (39-65 A.D.), whose Pharsalia heads the epic poems of the silver age, was born at Corduba, capital of the province Bætica, the centre of Roman influence in Spain, and of a literary school which lasted on into medieval times. Among the leading Corduban families were the Annæi, of whom Annæus Seneca, the rhetorician, had three sons—M. Annæus Seneca, the Gallio of the Acts of the Apostles; L. Annæus Seneca, the philosopher; and M. Annæus Mcla, who married Acilia, daughter of Acilius Lucanus, a noted orator of the place, and by her became father of M. Annæus, who received the cognomen Lucanus from his maternal grandsire. Rome's irresistible attraction for the outlying world had already drawn thither Seneca, the philosopher; and Mela, with his wife, followed, to place their son, an infant prodigy, under his uncle's eye for the usual training in rhetoric and moral science. Young Lucan took kindly to the hereditary culture, and under Palæmon the grammarian, and Cornutus the Stoic, of whom Persius the satirist was also an admiring pupil, he became proficient in the merits which won the applause of the lecture-room. Indeed, his aptitude for prose and verse was ominous of the fatal fluency which evolved the first three books of the Pharsalia while yet in his teens. Hatred of tyranny was the prevailing note of the patricians, and Lucan shared the hopes of his order as to Nero's government, not inauspiciously begun. But the imperial pupil of Seneca ere long betrayed the lower side of his character; and a morbid vanity, courting the applause of the circus and the theatre, made him the rival of charioteers and poets, and, among these, of Lucan. At first the young emperor and the young poet were friends, and Nero's favour had conferred on the latter the quaestorship, with which he entered the curia as well as the augural priesthood. But imperial vanity 'bears no brother near the throne,' and Nero's self-love was mortally wounded when, in a great public contest, the palm went over his head to Lucan. The emperor's marked discourtesies were returned by his successful rival with satire and with redoubled efforts to outshine him, till Nero was stung into forbidding Lucan either to publish poems or to recite them. About that time the Pisonian conspiracy had been hatching, and the emperor's increasing follies and barbarities hastened its development. Lucan became one of its ringleaders, and with characteristic impetuosity was already discounting its success, when the news came to him that it was discovered and he himself betrayed. At first his demeanour was worthy of a Stoic: then his courage declined, till it sank so low that—quite falsely, it is believed—he accused his own mother Acilia of being privy to the plot, in hopes that the matricidal emperor might be conciliated by a similar crime! But in vain. He was ordered to die, and, having had his veins opened, he bled to death in the bath, reciting an appropriate passage from one of his poems.
Except a few fragments, we now have nothing of Lucan's many writings but the Pharsalia in ten books, recounting the mighty duel of Pompey and Cæsar Julius for the empire of the world. Though always freely criticised, its acceptance in antiquity and in modern times has been great. From Tacitus to Scaliger and Macaulay it has found praise and censure in pretty even proportion. Its defects are mainly those of youth-inspired youth trained in a school where epigram and antithesis were sought after as the chief merit of style. It is frequently bombastic, sometimes obscure; so unsteady, moreover, in its delineation that it is open to doubt whether its hero is not Cæsar Julius after all, rather than the Pompey who is characterised as 'Magnus' throughout. When at its best its merits are those of eloquence rather than poetry; and for its many brilliant and apt 'sententiæ' it justly enjoys an 'immortality of quotation.' Its Roman patriotism strikes so true a note that with all pioneers of liberty it has been a favourite—particularly in the England of the 17th century. Indeed, the historian of the Long Parliament, Thomas May, not only wrote a respectable translation of it, but also a still more respectable continuation in the language and verse of the original. Rowe's translation, considered by Johnson to be one of the best in the English language.
There are other English translations in verse by Marlowe (Bk. i.), Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and E. Ridley (1897); and in prose by H. T. Riley (1853). There are editions by Oudendorp, Burmann, Haskins (1887), Hosius (Teubner, 1893), and Francken (1895-98).