ABSTRACT
If the first-century Roman ‘cult of suicide’ finds its chronicler in Tacitus and its philosopher in Seneca, it is to Lucan and his epic on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey that it owes its poetic voice. Lucan returns relentlessly to the theme of suicide, repeatedly exploiting throughout his epic De Bello Civili 1 (“On the Civil War”) every concern his aristocratic audience nurtured regarding the noble death, and exaggerates without limit the values, self-contradictions, and anxieties attached to the idea in the thought of his contemporaries. The centrality of the noble death to Lucan’s work is seen not only in the number of self-killings it contains and the level of detail lavished upon their description, but is explicitly announced in the programmatic opening lines of the poem. bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos iusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem in sua victrici conversum viscera dextra. 2
(“Of wars fought on Emathian plains, wars worse than civil I sing—and of crime granted the status of law, and of a powerful people turning its victorious sword-arm against its own vitals”)
