These fearful predictions had terrified the masses enough,
but a greater one is looming. For like from the summit of Pindus
a reveler runs down filled with Theban Bacchus,
just so a matron runs enraptured through the stunned city,
with these words revealing Phoebus, pressing her breasts:
‘Where am I borne, Apollo? Carried off over the ether,
where do you situate me on earth? I see the Pangaean whites
with snowy collars, and under the cliffs of Haemus, broad Philippi.
What madness is this, O Phoebus, show me, why Roman arms
and missiles mingle their points, and there is war without a foe.
Where else am I borne? First you lead me towards dawn,
where the sea is colored by the streams of the Egyptian Nile.
This one, a headless trunk on the river’s sands,
I recognize who lies there. Over the sea to shifting Syrtis
and arid Libya I am borne, where grim Enyo
has transferred the Macedonian front. Now over the peaks
of the cloudbearing Alps to the aerial Pyrennees
I’m hauled away. To my home in the city of my fatherland I return,
and impious battles are carried out in the middle of the Senate.
The factions rise up again, and around the whole world
once more I go. Let me see a new shore of the sea
and a new land, Phoebus, I’ve already seen Philippi.’
So she speaks, and has lain down, deserted by the exhausted frenzy.
Author: Lucan
Title of Work: Civil War (Pharsalia)
Location in Work: 1.673-695
Date of Work: c. 65 CE
Original Language: Latin
Original Text:
Terruerant satis haec pavidam praesagia plebem,
sed maiora premunt. nam qualis vertice Pindi
Edonis Ogygio decurrit plena Lyaeo,
talis et attonitam rapitur matrona per urbem
vocibus his prodens urguentem pectora Phoebum:
‘quo feror, o Paean? qua me super aethera raptam
constituis terra? video Pangaea nivosis
cana iugis latosque Haemi sub rupe Philippos.
quis furor hic, o Phoebe, doce, quo tela manusque
Romanae miscent acies bellumque sine hoste est.
quo diversa feror? primos me ducis in ortus,
qua mare Lagei mutatur gurgite Nili:
hunc ego, fluminea deformis truncus harena
qui iacet, agnosco. dubiam super aequora Syrtim
arentemque feror Libyen, quo tristis Enyo
transtulit Emathias acies. nunc desuper Alpis
nubiferae colles atque aeriam Pyrenen
abripimur. patriae sedes remeamus in urbis,
impiaque in medio peraguntur bella senatu.
consurgunt partes iterum, totumque per orbem
rursus eo. nova da mihi cernere litora ponti
Telluremque novam; vidi iam, Phoebe, Philippos.’
haec ait, et lasso iacuit deserta furore.
Reference Edition: Shackleton Bailey, De Bello Civili
Translation Notes: I aimed for the most literal possible translation, except of Lucan’s less known eponyms and epithets, for which standard names have been supplied: the Latin has ‘Edonus’ for a reveler, after a person or place in Thrace associated with worship of Dionysos; ‘Ogygius’ for Theban, after a legendary early Theban ruler; ‘Lyaeus’ for Bacchus, from Lysios, a Greek epithet of Dionysos; ‘Lageos’ for Egyptian, after the reputed father of Ptolemy I; ‘Emathius’ for Macedonian, after a place or legendary early figure of lower Macedonia; and once ‘Paean’ for Apollo (more often called by his common alternate name, Phoebus).
Source of Date of Work: Braund, Civil War, x
Commentary:
This text’s Apollo-inspired flight in the mind around the battle scenes of the Roman civil war might have been indirectly influenced by the Arimaspeia’s flight of a disembodied soul to the edge of the world. Or, this text might be an important witness to a broader tradition of stories in which Apollo inspired flights over the earth of the soul or mind.
This excerpt begins after Caesar has crossed the Rubicon and Romans have heard two other prophecies of the looming civil war, from an Etruscan diviner and an astrologer. The scenes shown to the Roman matron in her flight of the mind are oracles of how the war will play out: the flight’s beginning scene, revisited at the end, is the climactic battle of Philippi (42 BCE); the sight of the headless corpse in Egypt foretells the assassination of Pompey (48 BCE); the flight over the gulf of Syrtis and Roman Libya hints at the battle of Thapsus (46 BCE) in what is now Tunisia; the jaunt to the Pyrennees hints at the battle of Munda (45 BCE) in what is now southern Spain; and the scene in Rome foretells the assassination of Caesar (44 BCE).
Lucan took some poetic license with his Greek geography: Philippi, a major city of lower Macedonia, lay between the Pangaios mountains to its southwest and the Rhodope mountains to its north; but Lucan likely preferred to place Philippi under the Haimos (modern Balkan Mountains), which are north of the Rhodopes in what is now Bulgaria, because Haimos means ‘bloody.’ The Pindos mountains are in Epeiros, in northwest Greece.
Enyo was a goddess of war.