Line #12 Literature/Pharsalia


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/4846.jpg]]
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3	->''Victrix causa deis placuit sed Victa Catoni.''
4	->''The victor's cause pleased the gods, but the vanquished pleased Cato.''
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6	''Pharsalia'', or ''Bellum Civile'' (''The Civil War''), is an {{epic poem}} by the first century AD [[AncientRome Roman]] poet Creator/{{Lucan}}. It covers the Roman Civil War between UsefulNotes/JuliusCaesar and UsefulNotes/PompeyTheGreat, from the former's crossing of the Rubicon to his seduction by UsefulNotes/{{Cleopatra}}. It was still in progress when [[DiedDuringProduction Lucan was forced to commit suicide]] for conspiracy to kill Emperor Nero. This gave it the mother of all Classical cliffhangers, with Caesar in the midst of a sword fight with Ganymede, a partisan of Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy.
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8	What makes the ''Pharsalia'' special among epics is Lucan's decision to depict the gods as dead. Other Roman poets had attempted to portray relatively-recent history, such as the Second Punic War, as world-historical events on par with the Trojan War. All they succeeded in doing was producing knockoffs of ''Literature/TheIliad''. Lucan abandoned the Homeric trope of human conflict as a family feud among the Olympians. Every bad thing that happens can be ascribed entirely to [[HumansAreBastards human leaders]], with the issue of ''why'' these particular men had power being ascribed to the Stoic concept of "fate."
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10	Despite its unfinished status, the epic was a huge success and remained a popular school text as long as Latin was the language of instruction, though never enjoying universal use like ''Literature/TheAeneid'' and ''Literature/TheMetamorphoses''.
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12	!!Tropes found in ''Pharsalia'':
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14	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: One of Lucan's main sources was Julius Caesar's ''Commentaries on the Civil War''; but in ''Pharsalia'', Caesar is the villain.[[invoked]]
15	* BodyHorror: In Book 9, Cato's army marches through Libya and is attacked by African snakes whose bites have some horrifying effects, such as completely dissolving one victim (including his skeleton), or causing one to swell up to an amorphous lump that shows no sign of stopping its growth when the others leave him behind.
16	* BlackAndGreyMorality: Neither side is depicted as having the moral high ground, and they're both tearing apart the Roman Republic.
17	* DeathByIrony: Lucan himself. The epic was cut short by his involvement in a failed conspiracy against Nero, to whom the poem begins with a fawning dedication.
18	* {{Gorn}}: The poem is considerably gorier than earlier epic poems, relishing in descriptions of death and injuries.
19	* GreenAesop: Men kill trees to build siege engines to kill other men, and it is '''evil'''!
20	* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: Cato the Younger.
21	* HumansAreBastards: Pretty much everyone but Cato.
22	* NarrativePoem
23	* RuleOfSymbolism: The poem is full of descriptions of suicides and gory dismemberment, symbolising the Roman Empire hurting itself and falling apart in the civil war.
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Context Literature / Pharsalia