SOURCE: "Lucan and Civil War," Classical Philology, XXVIII, No. 2, April, 1933, pp. 121-27.

In the following essay, Sanford contends that Lucan was not concerned with developing heroes in his writing but rather with illustrating the horrors of civil war.

The old question whether Lucan was a historian or a poet has been largely superseded in these more subjective days by a milder controversy as to the identity of his hero. The popular solutions are familiar enough, but satisfactory chiefly to those who find failure in this essential point of epic consistent with their general conception of Lucan's second-rate quality. Duff argues that Caesar was, despite the poet's intention, the "practical hero of the poem," while Pompey was its "formal" and Cato its "spiritual hero." This is surely a triumvirate from which the Muse of Epic Unity would have averted her face in very shame.¹ Heitland disagrees in part; to...