ABSTRACT
Memory was a major issue in education and civic life in ancient Rome. It mostly preserved the city’s moral tradition through the imitation of exemplary behaviors within political and social interactions. Thus, memory was a pivotal feature of Roman identity, which was closely related to the regulation of power, knowledge, and speech. The literary reconstructions of the later Republic’s civil wars make clear the link between memory and the collective past. Moreover, early on internal struggle became a cultural theme associated with the mythical motif of katabasis: the symbolic topography of the underworld and its traditional topoi provided useful material for the narration of social disorder. In the Neronian age, Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile exploited the foundational Roman myth of fratricide. Indeed, Lucan’s poem reshaped some martial epic topoi and the conventional underworld imagery in order to stress the horror of a historical sacrilege. This essay analyses how Lucan’s description of the battle at Pharsalus in book VII (460‒646) presents the civil war as a metaphorical deathscape. The blurring of boundaries between human and hellish spheres in the battleground aims to underline the unnatural confusion between identity and otherness (Romanus and hostis) in a military event. Lucan refuses to comply with Rome’s official, forgetful self-narrative. Instead, he gathers memories of the past and retells the city’s history from a perspective critical of Roman power. His ‘poetic journey’ into the underworld of history functions simultaneously as a metaphor for identity reconstruction and generic experimentation.
