History in Ruins: Irony and the Sublime in Lucan's Bellum Civile

Time is a complex thing in Lucan’s Bellum ciuile; at once radically condensed, indefinitely paused, endlessly repeated, and stretched out on a boundless historical plane so that the fall of the Republic and rise of the Principate were and are and will be and yet, somehow, might not. This temporal play speaks to the dynamics of the infinite but also to a destructive inward turn where time collapses in on itself (cf. in se magna ruunt, 1.81). This double movement of expansion and collapse is captured in the figure of the ruin, where sublimity emerges in the distance it contains between past greatness and present obscurity. The ruin-gazer feels the sublime as a delightful pain that expresses, in James Porter’s phrase, the ‘tension between permanence and loss’ that the ruin captures (Porter 2011: 685). The figure of the ruin plays an important part in the sublimity of Lucan’s epic (Day 2013), perhaps never more so than in the barest of remains over which Caesar tramples at Troy in Book 9. In this dustbowl landscape, a site with multiple authors and manifold readers, both poet and Caesar test the dynamics of power and time by looking to Rome’s past in the future tense (venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra uiuet, 9.985-6; Romanaque Pergama surgent, 9.999). This is a site of the sublime, but for Caesar sublimity fails to register (inscius, 9.974) and the scene is redolent with an irony that emerges from our sense that Caesar’s counterfactual tour of Troy (a trip it seems he never really took) is a ruinous repetition of so many others. The site and scene are so radically overdetermined in both textual and temporal terms that, I argue, sublimity registers here with an ironic force. Irony is an essential condition of the paradoxical reality that the Bellum ciuile creates and occupies; it is from this paradox that the sublime emerges, but the role that irony plays in Lucanian sublimity has not yet been explored. This paper rereads the scene at Troy to draw out the ironic force of its sublimity and explore the ways in which Lucan pushes temporal boundaries to reframe for the Principate the questions of identity, memory, ideology and power that this episode raises.