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Nihilistic Cosmology and Catonian Ethics in Lucan's Bellum Civile

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajp.1999.0028

1086-3168

Robert John Sklenár,

Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies

Nihilistic Cosmology and Catonian Ethics in Lucan's Bellum Civile R. Sklenár* For many years, a powerful communis opinio dominated the scholarly literature on Lucan: that the poet is not merely influenced by Stoicism but is himself a committed Stoic, who expounds his doctrines both in his own voice and in the speeches of Cato. 1 The obvious difficulty with this argument is that Cato's Stoic ideal defies reconciliation with some of the most powerful and characteristic utterances of Lucan's authorial voice. A more recent line of interpretation, typified by W. R. Johnson (1987), John Henderson (1988), and Jamie Masters (1992), 2 has rejected the putatively Stoic Lucan in favor of a dark, sinister, at times grimly parodic poet who both describes and exemplifies a view of the cosmos as chaotic, fragmentary, and ultimately meaningless. Under this reading, which has gained currency mostly since the mid-1980s, 3 Lucan's Cato becomes a nasty caricature both of the Stoic sage and of the traditional Roman vir bonus. 4 While this satirical interpretation of Lucan's Cato represents a significant improvement over the orthodoxy which it has displaced, it still does not adequately account for the systematic opposition between Cato's Stoic ideal and the universe in which he attempts to practice it, or for the painful futility of his attempt to make sense of a world where senselessness is sovereign. The Stoic morality according to which Cato regulates his life presupposes a Stoic cosmos, both governed by and part of a divine logos. This cosmos is reason and order, all its processes part of a divine plan. 5 Since the task of human beings is to understand this plan and [End Page 281] consciously to conform their actions to it, the highest ethical plane is reached when human reason, brought to perfection, governs all aspects of a person's behavior, for it brings that person into harmony with the rationally ordered cosmos. In other words, the height of wisdom and the height of goodness are one and the same (Long and Sedley 1987, I 374). But Lucan deposits Cato into a universe devoid of reason, "one wholly without purpose or meaning" (Johnson 1987, 10), marked by "the blatant absence of any design" (8)—in short, a nihilistic universe, 6 where the cosmological prerequisites for Catonian ethics necessarily fail. Cato's pursuit of the Stoic ideal is in a literal sense doomed from the start, as Lucan assigns a prominent section of the Bellum Civile's long proem to an exposition of his anti-rational cosmology: Fert animus causas tantarum expromere rerum, immensumque aperitur opus, quid in arma furentem impulerit populum, quid pacem excusserit orbi. invida fatorum series summisque negatum stare diu nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus nec se Roma ferens. sic, cum compage soluta saecula tot mundi suprema coegerit hora antiquum repetens iterum chaos, [omnia mixtis sidera sideribus concurrent,] 7 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 divulsi turbabit foedera mundi. (1.67–80) As many commentators have noted, the imagery of this passage is strongly reminiscent of the Stoic theory of ekpyrosis, 8 in which the celestial fire draws the other elements up toward itself and thereby consumes [End Page 282] the entire universe; hence Lucan's image of the stars falling into the sea (ignea pontum astra petent): in fact the sea would be rising up toward the stars, but Lucan adopts the perspective of a terrestrial observer, from which the stars would appear to be falling. The world-conflagration, moreover, is a metaphor for the civil war and its causes. 9 These causes, though multiple, are not discrete; instead, they comprise a chain of causation, as indicated by series in the first cause (invida fatorum series) and further suggested by the paratactic arrangement in which all four causes are listed. The semantic force of series does not confine itself to the first cause, but rather governs a sequence in which each cause results directly from its predecessor. Summisque negatum / stare diu and nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus, then, are both consequences of fate's...