Virgil's Aeneid, written between 27-17 B.C., is the essential Latin epic. Like Lucan's Pharsalia, it was unfinished at its author's death. It quickly became a school text. Lucan would have studied the poem in great detail. His own epic has been compared, usually unfavorably, to Virgil's since his own lifetime.

Caesar's own De bello civili offers his view of the Roman civil war. Like his account of his campaigns in Gaul (modern day France and the Rhineland), it is written in the third person, and while understandably self-serving, is disarmingly direct and matter-of-fact.

Tacitus's Annals, written early in the second century A.D., is the history of the Roman emperors from the death of Augustus to Nero. Tacitus's natural sympathies were republican, but he still believed that good men could and should serve their countrymen even under a tyrant...