|
Grandson of the elder Seneca, LUCAN was born at Corduba in Spain. He gained an introduction to Nero from his uncle by his youthful fame as a declaimer. His life at Rome was moulded by two forces -- the complacent luxury of the court, and the Stoic truthfulness of Cornutus, the tutor of Persius. His trial came when Nero cast him out of his friendship through jealousy, it is said, of his greater name as an orator. He wrote the Pharsalia, in which violent attacks on Nero and the Empire are interspersed amid the cant of compliment universal at the time. Then he joined Piso's conspiracy, and, on discovery, opened his veins. His poem is a historical epic in hexameters, describing the closing scene of the Republic.
In Lucan, external conditions seem lost in personal circumstances. Yet the reaction of his soul could not efface the deep effects of imperial union, and a court steeped in luxury and pride.
Virgil was his model of form: but his verses are weighted with the studied point and much of the prose of oratory. The epic of a vanquished hero and a lost cause is a wholesome corrective to the pride and ingratitude of an age of absolute temporal power. But when Lucan recalls the glory of Pompey and the aristocratic Republic, the value of his estimate is marred by the lack of a sense of social growth. To him the imperial present was a malformation of history; and the future, with its promise of a new life, dimly foreseen by Virgil a hundred years before, a deepening, hopeless darkness. His social pessimism was buttressed by a strong intellectual grasp of the logic of the current skepticism which he preached with a vehemence unknown to Lucretius or any other ancient doubter. Yet his imagination was so vivid and minute that it led him into sensational realism. While his life was oozing from the opened veins, he recited dramatically passages from his poem to friends around. And in the same spirit he wrote. Working on a great character or a striking event, he elaborated an effect by bold drawing and heightened tints.
The influence of Lucan on later writing lay mainly in phrase and style. His spirit was abortive, because it was out of joint with the times. The epic poet needs an age of undeveloped vigour to fulfil his powers, and most men of epic power who have had the ill lot of being born to a world satisfied with its own completeness, have turned their mind to other work or died inglorious. But Lucan strove by strong imagination and deep passion to force the growth of epic poetry in an age which had saturated even his own mind with its pride of luxury.
Find more articles on Lucan
Purchase books by Lucan
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
