Lucan's Follies: Memory and Ruin in a Civil-War Landscape Author(s): Diana Spencer Source: Greece & Rome, Second

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Greece & Rome, Vol. 52, No. 1 ? The Classical Association, 2005. All rights reserved doi: 10. 1093/gromej/cxi008

LUCAN'S

FOLLIES: MEMORY AND RUIN IN A CIVIL-WAR LANDSCAPE

By DIANA SPENCER

'uilia sunt nobis quaecumque prioribus annis uidimus, et sordet quidquid spectauimus olim.' 'all the things which we saw in former years are worthless to us, and squalid - everything that in times past we gazed upon .'1 (esteemed/respected) Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogue 7.45-6

When Calpurnius' old Roman tells Corydon, the country-boy fresh in town, that nothing that one has seen before can prepare one adequately for Nero's Roman spectacle (probably the games of 57 CE), it is almost impossible not to recall the magnificent loathing that Suetonius (Nero 12.1-2) and Tacitus (Annals 13.31) express for the new emperor's extravaganzas. Eleanor Leach comments that: 'The builder of the amphitheatre [Nero] has combed the world for his marvels, creating a new cosmos within his gilded wooden oval.'2 This spectacular new cosmos maps out a world in which pastoral can no longer exist
1 All translations of texts are the author's own. Editions of texts used are: J. Amat (ed.), Calpurnius Siculus, Bucoliques,Pseudo-Calpurnius,Eloge de Pison (Paris, 1991); W. S. Anderson (ed.), Ovidius, Metamorphoses(Leipzig, 1977); D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Horatius, Opera (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1991); and M. Annaei Lucani, De Bello Civili (Stuttgart and Leipzig, Liber (Leipzig, 1954). Thanks in general go to John 1997); M. Schuster (ed.), Catulli Veronensis Henderson and Gideon Nisbet for helpful suggestions. 2 E. W. Leach, Ramus 2 (1973), 84. N. Purcell, in E. B. MacDougall (ed.), Ancient Roman Villa Gardens,Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 10 (Washington DC, 1987), 201, highlights the continuity between Nero's 'fantasy park' and the staged spectaculars (which themselves deployed 'rural' spectacle for Rome's delight, as Purcell also notices) that succeeded it in the Colosseum. As he also suggests, landscape(d) tableaux were increasingly a feature of Roman intellectualization and experience of their world (ibid.). Cf. E. Harwood's comparison of Disney's reinventions of 'reality'with the kinds of cultural appropriationon offer in eighteenth-century landscape artifices, in T. Young and R. Riley (eds.), Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 20 (Washington DC, 2002), 49-68. J. D. Hunt's chapter on 'Classical ground and classical gardens' provides a striking example of how appropriation of art in Renaissance gardens mimicked Pliny's version of Nero's Domus Aurea (N.H. 34.84) as documents of imperialism. In many ways, Renaissance (re)appropriation of classical Rome echoes Rome's reinvention of Greece-as-cultural-wallpaper. See Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600-1750 (Philadelphia, 1996), 13.

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because Nero has distorted the notion of rus in urbeto such an extent that Calpurnius' only recourse is obituary. Here, Calpurnius' eclogue functions not just as an elegy for pastoral, but as a poem which opens up a dialogue with Lucan's civil war landscape; in this world, metaphorical and real species of ruin take on an ever greater cultural urgency as means of interpreting the dramatic artifice of Rome's present.3 Against a backdrop of the increasingly rapid physical and intellectual changes that were realigning the relationship between emperor and city in the mid-first century CE, there are three key moments of concrete and psychological ruin in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile (B.C.) that express the psychic and cultural impact of the Empire on its landscapes. Most obviously (and famously) we have Caesar's visit to Troy, an instant of overlapping and allusive histories that retrospectively foreshadows (perhaps) the rumour that Nero (Caesar's last imperial descendent) recalled Troy as he watched Rome burn.4 The other two passages are connected - Pompey's grave and Caesar's visit to Alexandria - and all three feed into Lucan's earlier vision of Sullan Rome (B.C. 2.16233). Ultimately, these scenes evoke a discursive engagement with progress that has many similarities with what Francis Fukuyama has recently termed 'the end of history'.5 Lucan's particular irony is to play out for us why the persistence of stories and texts, his own included, respond to and shore up the devastation he portrays.6
3 T. Habinek's discussion 'Pannonia domanda est: The Construction of the Imperial Subject through Ovid's Poetry from Exile', in The Politics of Latin Literature:Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 1998), 165, suggests that nostalgia, lamentation, and sentimentality are part of a 'comfortable pose' in Latin poetry. Both Calpurnius Siculus, here, and Lucan take on a key tenet of nostalgia (the nostalgic voice's enforced distance from its object of desire), demonstrating the extent to which Rome is 'now' being defined by its peripheries (cf. Habinek, ibid., 152). 4 Suetonius, Nero 38.2 describes the costumed emperor singing of the sack of Ilium whilst fire-gazing. 5 F. Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992) takes on a Hegelian/ Marxist conceptualization of an end-stopped historical process. Although Fukuyama is by now rather passe (even something of a straw man within historiographical discourse) some of his ideas do offer an interesting angle on history and memory in Lucan. For Fukuyama, the struggle to achieve (and impose) 'liberal' democracy constitutes a 'Universal History of mankind' (ibid.), xiv, marching towards an essentially optimistic conclusion. Lucan's nihilism, in these terms, is to assert the pointlessness of struggle or resistance as a method of restarting history (contra Fukuyama, ibid., 334). J. Cropsey's humane deconstruction of this position in A. M. Melzer, J. Weinberger and M. R. Zinman (eds.), History and the Idea of Progress(Ithaca, 1995), 97-116, offers a thoughtful response to Fukuyama's polemic that could locate Lucan's story as a call-toarms for a society in which such a Panglossian 'best-of-all-possible-worlds' seems to have become impossible. P. Fenves in T. Bums (ed.), After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics (London, 1994), 217-37, addresses the semantic difficulties of a mono-cultural interpretation of 'liberal democracy' that offers an interesting angle on post factum nostalgia for a rose-tinted res publica. 6 This reading of Lucan draws on P. Ricoeur's 'tragic/ironic' view of history whereby: 'As soon as a story is well known, to follow the story is not so much to enclose its surprises or discoveries

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In this article, I suggest that Lucan's use of these sites develops into a significant articulation of Rome's imperial landscape, transforming Troy and Egypt into stage-sets for a melodramatic reconfiguration of Rome and Empire whereby even memory is implicated in a process of corruption. This reading makes Lucan's conceptualization of Empire (bounded by a Trojan past and 'Alexandrian' future) into a literary entertainment; its ongoing availability for command performances is what makes visiting Troy and Alexandria - as Caesar or reader - so momentous. Through a programme of cultural and literary allusion, Lucan confronts us with the prospect of a world in which political participation has been redefined as a touristic act of spectating, whilst historical meaning is drained so effectively from Rome that the city is no longer at the heart of its own story, displaced by Troy and Alexandria. Using 'memory' and 'ruin' as starting points opens up three approaches on which this article focuses: we can explore Lucan's poem in terms of Nero's architectural and aesthetic transformation of Rome; as a literary response to imperial fascination with cultural aesthetics, taking the grotto as a model; and lastly, as an exploration of the implications of imperial domination for perceptions and experiences of landscape.

Archaeologies of memory 'Memory' has taken on an increasingly important role in studies of identity, and drawing in particular on post-Holocaust readings of narrative memory as a creative but also editorial process, Calpurnius' lines can take on a biting significance.7 These lines might suggest that Nero has,
within our recognition of the meaning attached to the story, as to apprehend the episodes which are themselves well known as leading to this end... .In reading the ending in the beginning and the beginning in the ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences.' (Time and Narrative, 3 vols trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer [Chicago 1984/5], vol 1 67-8). Lucan, of course, does not attempt to limit himself (or us) to a diachronic version of (literary) history. 7 N. the Self (Edinburgh, 2000), 11-32, draws King, Memory, Narrative, Identity:Remembering together some of the ways in which I use 'memory' in this article, particularlythe idea that narrative memory necessitates a kind of forgetting (or at least a process of editing). Cf. D. P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretationin Psychoanalysis (New York, 1982), 28. Spence also argues that when telling a story of the past, 'the new description becomes the early memory', ibid., 280. This is particularly significant in view of J.-F Lyotard's attempt to configure a narratology in which the excluded memory-fragments become an indelible narrative in themselves. (Heideggerand "the jews", trans. A. Michel and M. S. Roberts [Minneapolis, 1988], 26). Hence, Calpurnius' amphitheatre forces its audience to confront the process and the results of memory's editorial effects on Rome.

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in effect, made it impossible to conceptualize Rome's past in terms other than those of a commemorative funeral speech. For Corydon's interlocutor in Calpurnius Eclogue7, the amphitheatre has created a world in which all memory has become a kind of ruin, and in which to contemplate the present is to be forced to confront the squalor of the past. His choice of words is striking: sordeo immediately recalls the squalor of mourning clothes, whilst uilis also has overtones of abandonment and death.8 Tantalizingly, these comments may also nudge us towards the polysemy of specto, reminding us that whilst the context might most obviously demand a translation of 'gaze upon', an alternative reading might prioritize 'respect' or 'esteem': what we once admired now evokes mourning, squalor, and loss. For Calpurnius, Nero's Rome has had a ruinous effect on memory, making it impossible to control personal responses to everything that preceded Nero's spectacular reinvention of the city. This version of Neronian 'memory-death' recalls Primo Levi's comment that the artistic perfection of frequently invoked narrative memories cannibalizes 'raw memory', and replaces it.9 But Lucan's vision uses ruinaeto map the Empire in a new way. His literary cartography triangulates Rome, Troy, and Alexandria, redefining and obliterating Rome in the memories evoked by the others. If we look back to Cicero's agenda-setting passage on memory-loci (De Oratore2.87.357-60) and 'Piso's' comments on the Curia (De Finibus 5.1.2) we find a direct instance of late Republican engagement with humane landscapes of memory. Furthermore, both Cicero and Quintilian develop the mnemonic trick of 'structural' memory whereby one furnishes the rooms of a 'house' with the elements of a speech.10 Lucan's civil war landscape, I suggest, offers a strikingly
8 Cf. Horace, Ep. 2.1.38, 1.17.21; Odes 3.27.57; Ovid, Her. 7.48. Horace's comments are particularly interesting because they form part of his send-up of the evaluation of antiquity as a key cultural benchmark of quality: Scriptorabhincannos centumqui decidit,inter Iperfectos referri ueteresque debetan inter I uilis atquenouos?('A writer who bit the dust a hundred years ago, is he to be counted among I the perfect and the ancient, or the squalid and modem?') Ep. 2.1.36-8. This juxtaposition of death and modernity is strikingwithin its own context (see D. Spencer, MD 51 [2003]), but also reminds us of the culturally loaded relationship between literature and (im)mortality that Nero's (famous) last words send up so magnificently (Suetonius, Nero 49.1); cf. C. Connors in J. Elsner andJ. Masters (eds.), Reflections (London, 1994), 225-35. of Nero:culture,historyand representation 9 P. Levi, The Drownedand the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London, 1988), 11-12. 10 F Yates explores this three-dimensionality of late republican memory in The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 32-41. On the Ad Herenniumshe comments that: 'one has to envisage "places" extending one might almost say for miles within the memory, "places" past which one moves in reciting, drawing from them the mnemonic cues.' ibid., 30. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.17-26. See also B. Bergman, The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 225-56. As J. P. Small, Wax Tabletsof the Mind: cognitivestudies of memoryand literacy in classical antiquity (London, 1997), 101-5, 1078, notes, studies of the psychology of memory bear out the Ad Herennium'sinsistence on a direct relationship between the visual/spatial rules of memory-loci and those which constrain 'reality'.

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similar model to both Ciceronian and even Virgilian connexions of space and memory, whereby he decorates the Mediterranean world with grottoes, pleasure palaces, temples, and groves that will evoke key features of a Roman panorama. In effect, this allows us to read Lucan's poem as a meditation on Rome as 'memory garden', a story of collapsing empire that nevertheless could also be paralleled in such theme-park imperialisms as Disney's 'It's a Small World', in Disneyland, California.11 Even in Cicero, however, memory was not an unproblematic rhetorical device. In the De Oratore (2.74.299-300; 2.86.351), Cicero makes 'Antony' marvel at Themistocles' refusal of the gift of universal memory (and plead, instead, for palliative forgetfulness), whilst particularly in the wake of Sejanus, memory itself was an increasingly contentious political force. Sejanus was the first instance of damnatio memoriaein 'recent' history, but L. Appuleius Saturninus' 'erasure' in 98 BCE lies within easy range of Lucan's narrative time. More recently, Lucan's audience might remember the destruction of images of Valeria Messalina and conversely, Claudius' refusal to allow the Senate to erase Gaius (Caligula). Remembering who or what people were and had been was not susceptible to straightforward articulation, and was potentially very dangerous indeed. We might compare this with Freud's contrasting versions of memory as both a ruined site (for recuperative excavation) and a buried site whose excavation entails its devastation (citing Pompeii as an example).12
Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.18-21, focuses on the memory-house, but as Small argues, late republican landscape perspectives meant that houses and gardens were intimately connected as part of the same visual system (ibid.), 107-9, 115-16. E. W. Leach's sophisticated study: The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representationsof Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton, 1988), particularly 73-143, offers a thought-provoking reading of landscape art in texts, and vice versa; more recently, see also B. Kellum, The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 211-24. Looking ahead to the later Italian Renaissance, as Hunt (n. 2), 68 suggests: 'If a garden recalled the world, then its imagery functioned as a device to remind visitors of that plenitude beyond its grounds.' The iconographical programmes of renaissance gardens (such as the Villa D'Este) were designed, he notes, 'to trigger certain responses in visitors, release specific ideas and themes stored previously in their memory.' 11 Cf. Harwood (n. 2), 66-7 on miniaturization and liminality, and N. Stanley's discussion of China's 'Window on the World' theme park, where rescaled tourist destinations are displayed, in Young and Riley (n. 2), 284-7. We could also compare this with some of Piranesi's multi-layered images of Rome's various identities, e.g. 'Scenographia' from Il Campo Marzio dell' Antica Roma (1762) and 'Plan of Rome' from Antichita Romane de' Tempi della Repubblica e de' Primi Imperatori(1748), both in C. Edwards, Writing Rome: textual approachesto the city (Cambridge, 1996), plates 2 and 3. 12 S. Freud, 'The Aetiology of Hysteria', in The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Worksof Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London, 1953-74), vol. 3, 198; 'Notes upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis' ('The Rat Man'), in The Pelican Freud Library, trans. and ed. J. and A. Strachey (London, 1973-85), vol. 9, 57-8.

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The idea of Rome as a decaying and ruinous space is one which Augustus addressed head on when he made restoration a cornerstone of his authority.13 This keys directly into Vergilian emphasis on the ruins of Troy, and the interplay between Roman and Trojan restoration that Rome's future glory would ensure. The multiple timescales of Aeneid 8, where Rome's future is embedded in a succession of ruined archaeologies, draw out the kinds of intellectual tension that remembering ruins can evoke. As Jocelyn Small points out, Aeneas' tour of future Rome (Aeneid8.306-69) is in effect a mnemonic foreshadowing of the Augustan city - an expression of achievement and a memorial to its transience.14In this respect, it redefines and sharpens Lucan's notionally pre-Augustan and consciously post-Vergilian civil-war topography. Such a close connexion between articulations of landscape and memory recurs in later European thought when gardens function as living metaphors for the theatrum mundi.15 Garden design in the Italian renaissance develops the simultaneity of mortal and divine that can be experienced through the imposition of human order on nature, but also suggests landscaping as a way of expressing man's authority over the whole world. This approach is already present in Cicero's articulation of altera natura (De Natura Deorum 2.60.151-2) where he conceptualizes this 'other' nature as the man-made landscape that expresses human domination of the environment.16

Ruin Man-made landscapes can both contain and anticipate ruin, and this section briefly explores the range of meanings that Lucan opens up when he razes the Trojan ruins that both Virgil and Ovid had embedded
13 Cf. Res Gestae Divi Augusti 19-20 (on architectural restoration), 6, 8, 24 (on political and moral restoration); on Horace's pessimistic integration of ruin into Rome, see C. W. MacLeod, CollectedEssays (Oxford, 1983), 218-19. On urban 'ruin' as a particularly Augustan concern, see M. Labate, Maia 43 (1991), 167-84. 14 Small (n. 10), 234. Cf. W. Benjamin's comparison of language to the earth which buries dead cities, 'A Berlin Chronicle', in One WayStreetand Other Writings,trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London, 1979 [1932]), 314. Benjamin draws on Freud's concept of memory-as-archaeology, but insists that to approach one's 'buried past' requires a willingness to keep working over the 'ground', repeatedly scattering the 'soil' evokes the complex cultural allusiveness that Lucan's text offers. 15 See Hunt (n. 2), 67-9. Cf. J. A. Hanson, Roman Theatre-Temples (Princeton, 1959); M. Fagiolo (ed.), La Citta Effimerae l'Universo Artificiale del Giardino (Rome, 1980), 125-41. We could also compare these later versions to Pliny's comments on the naturally theatrical qualities of some landscapes (e.g. Pliny, Ep. 5.6). 16 Cf. Leach (n. 10), 138, on Lucretius D.R.N.

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so firmly in Rome's cultural memory. Ruins demand exposition and open up a range of historiographical possibilities, but Lucan's implicit suggestion that ruins can be designed and artificial structures has farreaching implications for their semiotic role in Roman historical mythmaking.
etiam periere ruinae.

even the ruins have perished. Lucan, B.C. 9.969

The semiotic significance of ruin is woven into Lucan's narrative,but it is particularlysignificant in his descriptions of two opposing spaces that Caesar visits after Pharsalus: Troy (9.950-99) and Alexandria (10.9331).17 Both cities offer implicit commentaries on the nature of Roman identity in a post-civil war world, and both are sites which key into the discursive locus of Romanitasthat Lucan configures at 5.9-11. For Lucan, a description of Caesar's tour of ruined Troy can be a way of evoking the vanished delights of an untarnished past, both political and literary. Visiting (and writing and reading about) 'ruin' involves us all in an interpretative process that could signify progression and intellectual change. In order for this to function, however, progress and innovation must somehow be stimulated by the deadness of the dead past. We might therefore choose to read Lucan's recreation of yet another post-Virgilian ruined world - locked in a 'present' that depends on it as a foundation - as clear evidence of 'ruin' and ordered chaos as a persistent stimulus urging Rome optimistically onwards. If this reading falters, however, as I think the text's emphasis on Rome's disintegration makes inevitable, then Lucan flags an alternative. Rome will come to equal rather than to build upon 'ruin', because by concentrating on the effect of the past on the present (both physical ruin and intellectual space) the effect of 'ruin' is to choke off any possibility for vitality and transformation. This ruined world, with its seductive offer of a nostalgic perspective, would be symptomatic of a 'present' continuous, in which a cycle of destruction and rebirth has ground to a halt.18
17 For 'ruin' in the B. C., see e.g. 1.496-8: Roma and ruo - ruin/devastation; 1.149-50: Caesar as a function of ruina; 2.731: Pompey's fate as ruina; and 1.81: greatness (magna) as agent of ruin/ ruo. 18 Cf. Edwards (n. 11), 11 -12; P. Hardie, in A. Powell (ed.), RomanPoetryand Propagandain the Age of Augustus (Bristol, 1992), 59-82. But where Hardie suggests that Lucan's 'Troy has fallen (60), Rome is falling', I read this passage as even more claustrophobic - both collapses are locked into the present continuous. Labate (n. 13), explores in detail the role of Troy's destruction for reading urban Rome.

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When Lucan's Caesar promises 'RomanaquePergama surgent' ('and Roman Troy will rise') (9.999), he makes no explicit claim that Troy's walls will rise again at Troy (contra, Edwards [n. 11], 65-6) because the 'Phryges' for whom the walls will rise are as much the Romans as the Trojans. The ambiguity of these lines in fact opens them up to another potential element in this allusive and polyphonic dialogue: anxiety about and interest in the relationship between the site of Rome, its physical integrity, and Roman historical destiny. This is emphasized by Curio's impassioned comment to Caesar that 'pellimur e patriis laribus patimurque uolentes I exilium: tua nos faciet uictoria ciuis.' ('we have been driven from our homeland and gods and endure exile willingly; your victory will make citizens of us') (1.278-9). Similarly, Laelius' speech 'Nec ciuis meus est, in quem tua classica, Caesar, I audiero' ('He's no fellow-citizen of mine, Caesar, against whom I hear your trumpet sound') (1.373-4).19 Perhaps Caesar's real error is that he does not recognize the cultural and political wasteland that his focus, at Troy, on restoration and rebuilding presages. At Troy, Caesar has to create ruinae (9.969) because the 'real' ones are long gone. Ironically, he creates his complicatedly allusive ruins deep within a narrative that models him as a devastator: (gaudensqueuiam fecisse ruina ('and rejoicing that he cleared his path by means of devastation') (1.150). Far from being a new and invigorating enterprise (a la Vergil), his prioritization of Trojan reconstruction is a way of denying the purgative and cleansing qualities of history, and particularly republican history. One might even argue that in Lucan's scheme, Pompey's 'ruin' (decapitation) and death, and the end of civil war, mark the last grand gesture for Roman destruction and rebirth before the un-dead world of the Principate 'romanticizes' each culture-ruin.20 This reading might also, to some extent, provide an explanation for Lucan's fascinated horror when he allows his Caesar to take over the poem; he is both the ultimate destroyer, and the man who makes subsequent destruction and chaotic vitality impossible. Lucan's ruinae are most straightforwardlytranslated as 'ruins', but other available overtones are worth considering: we can see ruin-asdeath (e.g. Horace, Odes 2.17.9), as catastrophe (e.g. Sallust, Bell.
19 See also 1.381-7. Cf. Camillus' speech after the sack of Rome (Livy 5.51-4) and rumours of Rome's displacement by Alexandria that clustered around both Caesar and Antony. 20 This reading pushes Hardie's deconstruction of the potential problems of the Augustan urbs aeterna(n. 18), 60-1 ratherhard. He argues that Lucan's historical programme is a direct challenge to Vergil, but I suggest we read it as mapping the insanity and decay that adopting the Aeneid'sworld makes inevitable. Cf. Figulus' prophecy B.C. 1.668-72.

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Cat. 31; Livy 5.51, 25.4), and as a collapse (e.g. Horace, Odes 3.3.8; Vergil, Aeneid 2.310, 9.712). All these overtones are present in Lucan's Troy, a site which marvellously appears to represent graveyard, locus amoenus, and urban ruin all at once, but Lucan's negation of all physical traces of Troy is also a response to another kind of ruin: the literary traces left behind by Ovid and Vergil which Lucan quarries to create foundations for understanding his own narrative.
nunc humilis ueterestantummodoTroiaruinas et pro diuitiis tumulosostenditauorum. humble now, Troy displays its ancient ruins, and for wealth, has only ancestral tombs. Ovid, Metamorphoses15.424-5

Lucan's use of ruina picks up on Ovid's when he makes Pythagoras tell the Iliad and Aeneid (Met. 15.420-52), setting out a cyclical historical programme.21 But Lucan's echo at Caesar's visit to Troy sets up a very different alignment. In conjunction with his interjection at 9.980-6, Lucan commences a process of undermining the fabric of Rome's Troy, leading instead to a world in which 'Troy' cannot be obliterated or reborn because of Caesar's Trojan fantasy heritage. Vergil's use of ruin within the proto-Rome of Evander's tour (e.g. Aeneid 8.312) offers continuity and managed change, as does Ovid's (though less straightforwardly). For Lucan, such a potentially positive and life-affirming model grinds to a halt becauseof the permanence of the world-view that Caesar imposes - at Troy, Caesar creates ruins from memory, wishful thinking, and stories, because a ruined Troy guarantees an appeal to Julian dynasticism as a basis for his authority. Conflating the fates of Rome, ruins, and Caesar is strikingly reminiscent of Horace's play on Roma and ruo:Altera iam teriturbellisciuilibus aetas I suis et ipsa Roma uiribus ruit ('Yet another generation is already being ground down by civil wars, I and through its own strength Rome itself hastens ruin') (Epode 16.1-2, cf. 9-10). Horace's poem advises Romans to flee the city (16.36) for a Golden Age fantasyland, to abandon Italy and retreat to a pre-epic world. Lucan's quaking, tottering city of Rome may pick up on the Sibylline
21 See e.g. G. Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative,and CosmicOriginsin Ovid's Metamorphoses (Princeton,1997), 194-5. Cf. C. Segal'spessimistic readingof the relationship between man and nature in Ovid's Metamorphoses: in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Landscape 23 (Wiesbaden,1969), Hermes Einzelschriften Studyin the Transformations of a Literary Symbol.

88-9.

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connotationsof Horace's poem, whilst also warning of the impossibility of escape.22 We see this at workin the paradoxthatLucan'serasure of Troy'sruins opens up: Caesar'strip to Troy exists (of course) in multiplehistoriographical time-frames, BCE and CE, but one way or the other Ovid's

ruinaehave apparently vanishedbeforetheirimaginative reconstruction by the guide at Caesar's'Neronian'Troy, and the promiseof reification by Lucan's Caesar.23We can choose whether or not to collude in Caesar'sguide's reading of the landscape, and, indeed, to question Lucan'sinsistencethat the 'Troy'that we and Caesarare experiencing in the poem is wholly made up. Lucan's determination to emphasize Troy's role as negative space is testament to his determinationto remind us that the Trojan ruins that make Rome's foundation and future possible are themselves fragmentary fictions. They define Rome, kickstart Rome's story, and in their disappearance they comment on its crumbling connexion with Republican, pre-JulioClaudianhistory.24 As vanishedobjectsof desire,for Caesar,they foreshadow the follies and grottoesthat were such a featureof landscape design and autocraticself-fashioningin eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury park-land, but also prominent in imperial and aspirant
pleasure-gardens of the first century CE.25

Ruins offer a concretevision of what happenswhen boundariescollapse and man-made environments are abandoned. Through the process of deteriorationthat they signify, they hint at potential for
22 Or. Sib. 3.363-4, and see MacLeod (n. 13). Cf. Lucan B.C. 1.71-2. For Sibyls in Lucan, see 1.564-5, and the re-activation of Delphi (5.69-236). 23 B.C. 9.999. S. Wheeler, Arethusa35 (2002), 361-80, makes a very persuasive case for reading Lucan's poem as a revisionary continuation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He develops the connexions between Ovid's Thebes and Lucan's Rome made in P. Hardie, CQ 40 (1990), 224-35. 24 A useful analogy for these ruinae is Benjamin's reading of monument-packed cities as 'documents' of ruin. His ruinous mapping of Naples makes it impossible to differentiate between construction, dilapidation, and pre-existing ruin (e.g. n. 14, 169-70). On the oddness of Caesar's touristic interlude, see W. R. Johnson, Momentary Monsters:Lucan and his Heroes (Ithaca, 1987), 118-19. Labate (n. 13), 180-3, traces the qualities of mimetic anxiety that inform attempts to 'map' Rome in the wake of Troy. 25 See Pliny, Ep. 8.8 on the gardens of the Temple of Clitumnus. On his own gardens, see Ep. 2.17.14-22, 5.6.16-40. Perhaps the best example of an eighteenth-century landscape-as-text can be found at Stowe (Buckinghamshire, UK), on which see J. D. Hunt's discussion: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of LandscapeArchitecture(Cambridge MA, 1994), 7691. Hunt's reading of the emblematic significance of the 'Elysian Fields' and Temples of Ancient and Modem Virtues is particularly interesting. It is significant that William Kent's design for the Temple of Ancient Virtue makes it into an (Ionic) restoration of the ruined (Corinthian) temple at Tivoli, which is also echoed so vigorously in the Fountain of Rome at the Villa D'Este at Tivoli (which itself offers a reinvention of 'classical' Rome, available for comparison with the 'modem' city-scape visible from the Villa).

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both restoration and dissolution. The description of Rome at 1.158-82 (immediately after the descriptions of Pompey and Caesar) suggests a world in which limits (Lucan uses fines) no longer exist - without normative limits, both destruction and renewal are teleologically unknowable, and the ultimate conclusion of this world is that the natural process of ruin will cease. Virgil canonizes Aeneas' escape from the burning ruins of Troy, emphasizing the need to leave smouldering Troy behind, but when Caesar 'returns' to Troy in Lucan, traces of ruin have vanished except in his imagination. Caesar's return to the memory-wilderness that once held these ruins in Lucan's poem (9.964-5) reminds us that the physical ruins that held Troy in place have disappeared, and in their vanishing they have dissolved the boundaries that stopped Troy from bleeding into Rome and corrupting the Mediterranean world.

Follies The topologies of memory and ruin are functionally comparable, and indeed overlay each other to a significant extent, but follies are equally bound up in Lucan's cultural aesthetic. Primarily,I use 'folly' in its architectural sense, to signify an artificial structure that evokes cultural memories and acts as a concrete articulationof physical and intellectual space. Its less familiar connotations of 'rage' and 'mania' are also, however, present. Lucan's ruinae, tombs, and even the city of Alexandria, act as kinds of 'folly' familiar from western Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aristocratic landscapes. Indeed, by hinting at the likelihood that 'ruins' may be created ex nihilo as backstories for the imposition of new and culturally normative mnemonic hegemonies, Lucan approaches a model familiar not just from landscaped parks but also from the public theme parks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This section traces some of the connexions between Nero's use of multi-dimensional aesthetic narratives in his palace building, and Lucan's dystopian vision of a Mediterranean landscape itself dotted with follies. Historical follies and follies-as-history are particularly significant for our understanding of Nero's palace-building projects at Rome because of the contradictory nature of the aesthetic and intellectual buttons that these projects were pushing. On the one hand, Nero's first project, the Domus Transitoria, functioned as a direct link between

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the emperor and his republican (and imperial) predecessors, blurring spatial boundaries and highlighting his own ambitious vision of autocracy and its imprint on the city. On the other hand, the house could also emphasize the increasingly proprietorial and imperialistic nature of the emperor's relationship with the city's fabric. Nero's connexion of the various imperial properties and gardens in this development reminds Rome of his direct links with the historical panorama of the past hundred odd years. In this context, Lucan's recreation and reconfiguration of republican topographies could represent the logical fallout from Nero's urban programme. By rearticulatingRome as domestic imperial space, Nero made explicit a process of slippage between public and private that had commenced in the last years of the Republic. Boundaries between domestic and imperial were, eventually, to be transfigured in the Domus Aurea, but even in the Domus Transitoriawe can see how imperial space is increasingly taking on explicitly epic qualities: this process is the focus of this section. One striking feature of both palaces is particularly important for thinking about how three-dimensional story-telling was becoming enshrined in the aesthetic vocabulary of imperial living-space. Recent excavations under Domitian's palace on the Palatine have demonstrated that Nero's work on the Domus Transitoria included an elegant and highly decorated nymphaeum;this space is potentially engaged in a complex dialogue with the allusive Homeric and epic cavern-tableaux that transformed Tiberius' dining suite into a theatrical space at Sperlonga, and possibly also with Claudius' 'grotto' at Baiae that appears to mimic it.26In the Domus Aurea, Nero installed a nymphaeum that echoed these 'follies' decoratively, whilst making it plain that it was itself a self-conscious nod to Tiberius' original.27 Of particular note here is Nero's wish to pick up on earlier imperial interest in scene-setting using the blinding of Polyphemus. This story offers a striking counterpoint for Lucan's caves, tombs, and grottoes, whilst also engaging with issues of interpretative failure concerning the world around us, and highlighting the complex relationship between power and civilization, monstrosity and Roman identity. Sorcha Carey
26 On nymphaea and 'grottoes' as architectural features, see P. Grimal, Les jardins romains (Fayard, 19843), 300-1, 306-8. 27 M. Beard and J. Henderson, Classical Art: From Greeceto Rome (Oxford, 2001), 74-82, provide a detailed, illustrated reading of the grotto at Sperlonga and the diverse range of statuegroups found there. On Sperlonga, Baiae, and Rome, see S. Carey, G&R 49 (2002), 44-61. A. F Stewart, JRS 67 (1977), 76-90, discusses grottoes and grotto-triclinia, and highlights the culturally modelling potential of 'horror' scenes as a baroque response to 'republican' Classicism.

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argues that by the time Nero decorated his Domus Aurea nymphaeum with a 'blinding of Polyphemus', Odyssean sculptures, and particularly Polyphemus groups, had become synonymous with imperial spaces.28 If so, philhellene Nero's appropriation of this key story of Hellenic identity, cultivation, and education reminds viewers that sometimes the theatrical space of a 'folly' casts us in unexpected roles. Are we Odysseus? Or Polyphemus? The Domus Aurea nymphaeum is itself unlikely to have been available to Lucan. Nevertheless, the earlier versions (and particularly that in the Domus Transitoria) do offer a model for imperial interest in combining grotesquerie and carnage, confusion of roles and control over how spaces are experienced and interpreted that Lucan's poem appears to reflect.29 Blinding Polyphemus offers an elegant tableau for a culturally imperialistic revision of a Roman odyssey, but becomes particularlypertinent when we remember that Rome has its very own version of the story in the clash between Hercules and the culture-monster Cacus.30 Nero's interest in creating discrete spaces which set the scene for mythic re-enactments plays around with the idea of a folly as a dramatic space which tells a story (in this instance, a story that has potential political significance for Rome), but both Polyphemus and Cacus are also topographically significant for another reason. Both are monsters who live in caves, and both are also (though Polyphemus more obviously) deprived of their sight as part of their downfall. Like Pompey, Cacus loses his head(s). In conjunction with the fashion for nymphaea and
Carey (n. 27), 55-6, 58. R. J. Clare, in C. Atherton (ed.), Monstersand Monstrosityin Greekand Roman Culture,NCLS 6 (Bari, 1998), 1-17, describes Homer's Polyphemus succinctly as a monster constantly expecting 'the arrivalof someone else' (16). The blinding of Polyphemus and its dining context are, of course, delightfully ironic given the dangers associated with imperial dinner-parties (cf. Edwards [n. 11], 186-8, 199-204). Grimal (n. 26), 66-72, discusses the cultural omnipresence of Homeric (and Hellenistic) 'gardens' in Roman landscaping, and in his section on nymphaeaand grottoes (30610), he traces the grotto tradition back to Homer's Polyphemus (308-9). Other monster-killing 'rooms' provide a sense of the popularity of this kind of image (e.g. at Boscotrease, and the Odyssey landscapes from the Esquiline house at Rome). On James I's Whitehall 'dinner' grottoes, see Hunt (n. 2), 133. Cf. R. Strong, The RenaissanceGardenin England (London, 19982), 138-9, and his description of the sixteenth-century garden-grottoes at Pratolino, near Florence (78-83). 30 Roman Polyphemus always has his eye on Theocritus' Idyll 11. For Cacus, cf. Vergil, Aeneid 8.185-305; Ovid, Fasti 1.543-86; Propertius 4.9 (for Vergil's Polyphemus, see Aeneid 3.616-81). All of these 'monsters' play out a symbiosis of culture (the highly literate stories that contain them, the 'classical' landscapes they inhabit, the 'civilizing' forces they invoke) and barbarism (landscape that lacks stories - without their clashes with civilizing forces and containment within literary landscapes, these monsters do not exist). On Cacus, Hercules, Polyphemus, and gigantomachy in the Aeneid see P. Hardie, Virgil'sAeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), 114-18, which also references key bibliography. As Hardie notes, the complexity of the allusions in this episode of the Aeneid marks out its significance for Rome, ibid., 115.
29 28

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of interiorand exteriorspaces that a 'cave' elethe interconnectedness blinded, gantly represents, troglodyticmonsters draw our attentionto a central feature of Roman landscape design: controllingthe gaze.3' The ability to model the gaze both in and out of a space was, as functionof autocracy and ownerNicholasPurcellasserts,an important ship. A 'cave' might seem to be diametrically opposed to the bravura claims to the surrounding landscape asserted by the increasingly popularviewingtowers (or 'gazebos')that Purcelldiscusses,but as he also notes, there are ways in which the cave'senforcementof a unified visual escape, a keyholescene which all participants share,has its own In fact we could also argue that the mythic cave/grotto authority.32 offers unlimited possibilitiesfor self-aggrandizement because of the epic landscapesit can open up. Hercules' 'execution'of Cacus takes place in a space that is almost,but not yet, Rome. Polyphemuscan die nightlyin a grotto that is both cave and imperialfantasyworld where dinerscan imaginethemselvesas epic heroes - or monsters. In 60 CE,Nero celebrated the Neroniagames, and in the wakeof his Iuvenaliafestivalthe previousyear, the games of 57, and his development of the Domus Transitoria, we find an increasingmomentumof spectacle and imperial omnipresence saturatingthe city. Combined with the focus on wonders brought to Rome from the empire for Nero's, and the city's, pleasure,this suggeststhat NeronianRome was The complex aesincreasinglytaking on an aura of Disneyfication.33 thetic rhetoric of the imperial grottoes that I have drawn into this reading offers one more way of thinkingabout this process, but also
31 See Pliny, N.H. 35.116-17 on the interiority of Augustan landscape art. Leach (n. 10) addresses issues of the narratology of landscape art that underlie my reading of Lucan. 32 On the role of elevation in Roman landscaping, see Purcell (n. 2), 193-5. On 'views' and vista-control see Purcell, ibid., 195-7. Examples of raised and sunken buildings with particular Neronian significance are the cloud-sweeping 'tower' in the Gardens of Maecenas (Horace, Odes 3.29.10), possibly the vantage-point from which Suetonius makes Nero watch the fire of Rome, and the semi-subterranean dining-'nymphaeum', also in the Gardens, decorated with fantasy windows which seem to open onto an impossible underground garden. We could compare these with the subterranean trompe l'oeil 'grotto' from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, on which see Kellum (n. 10). 33 Grimal's comments (n. 26), 441-4, are particularlyuseful here. He notes that the creation of gardens for pleasure, picking up on Hellenistic planting models, was a key element of Roman selfpresentation as Hellenistic world leader ('En les empruntant, Rome s'efforce de s'introduire dans la Communaute hellenistique et de prendre rang (le premier) parmi les capitales... Le jardinromain a donne un corps a un reve grec.' 442-3). In effect, he argues that Roman gardens act out and appropriate Greek mythic landscape and intellectual territory. For an introduction to contemporary approaches to theme-park landscapes, Young and Riley (n. 2) contains a number of important articles, particularly those by D. Lowenthal, E. Harwood, M. Treib, and B. J. Brown. Cf. Pompey's dream (B.C. 7.9-29), and on myth and spectacle, see e.g. K. Coleman, JRS 80 (1990), 44-73.

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connects directly with Lucan's poem. This takes place most straightforwardly in Lucan's Egypt, memorable for its range of cave tombs, and the spectacular, limitless palace, but Lucan's repeated emphasis on the caves at Delphi also highlights their quality as liminal, transgressive spaces.34 The self-conscious melange of myth, history, art, domination, and performance that such underground and almost self-contained spaces offer, locates us in similar territory to that explored by Michel Serres when he noted that 'a landscape is a mosaic of spaces, not an ensemble of objects put in a common space.'35 Serres' characterization suggests not only the fragmentation of vision and interpretation that Lucan explores in his shifting perspectives on the civil war: it also sets up a notion of topographical mnemonics whereby culturally resonant spaces (Actium, Pharsalus, Troy, Alexandria) interlock to create Rome's 'Mediterranean' theme park.36Indeed, if Sperlonga and other such tableaux risk reconfiguring Rome's mythography as kitsch, we could argue that Lucan does the same for its history.

The grave of all the world Dead Pompey and his grave take up the final two hundred lines of Lucan 8 (672-872), and entangle his death and headless corpse (the ruina foretold at 2.731) intimately with Roman and Alexandrian history. These lines take on particular significance in the wake of reading Polyphemus/Cacus into Nero's Rome, and with Troy's sepulchral presence looming over the poem's fiery end. At 8.684-91 we flash between the auctoritas of Pompey's 'head' (in control of the law, Campus, and Rostra), to the process of its desanguination and brain-removal, and then poisonous 'fixing' of its features at Ptolemy's order. Finally,
34 On Delphi, e.g. B.C. 5.84, 87, 95, 153, 159, 169, 192. 35 M. Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. F McCarren (Stanford, 1991), 185.

N. Purcell, in T. Blagg and M. Millett (eds.), The Early Roman Empire in the West (Oxford, 1990), 7-29, emphasizes the inherently 'cellular' nature of imperial topography until at least the third century CE. He suggests that this is an important feature in the radiant pattern of itinerary 'spokes' that branch out from Rome (ibid.), 24 n. 15. This located Rome at the epicentre of an empire that bridged two Oceans. His analysis of topographical change as inherently an expression of monarchical (or even divine) authority (16) makes imperial exploitation of the landscape as a function of personal magnificence inevitable (22). In this way, the superimposition of an artificial and hyperreal 'nature' (even if it replaces a 'natural'feature) tells a version of imperial appropriation of divine power. Cf. Strong (n. 29), 197, on renaissance identification of absolutist monarchy and gardening, and Hunt's development of these ideas (n. 2), 143-4. 36 This reading places us squarely within the territory set up by Vergil in Jupiter's prophecy of Rome's future extent (Aeneid 1.278-9), and echoed in e.g. Ovid, Fasti 1.85-6; 2.683-4; 4.832; 857-8.

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Pompey is characterized by his facelessness (8.710-11; cf. Aeneid 2.557-8). Here, just as with Cacus (and Polyphemus), Pompey's controlling gaze is removed.37 Pompey's potential to remind us of Cacus, Rome's tamed monster, is further suggested through a series of allusions to 'grottoes' and death as key features of the Egyptian royal landscape. In Egypt, graves, grottoes and death increasingly serve to collapse the Mediterranean horizons into a funereally themed scenography; Ptolemy is defined as the keeper-of-corpses: he preserves Alexander's body in a grotto (antrum 8.694);38 kings' ashes (regum cineres:8.695; cf. 9.990) permeate his environment; whilst shades of Ptolemies past inhabit pyramids and mausoleums (8.696-7). Ptolemaic Alexandria appears to be a city of the dead, but in the wake of civil war, Lucan contaminates our whole experience of 'Egypt' through his insistence on the far-reaching pollution and transformation that Pompey's grave effects, irrevocably changing the world into a sepulchral theme park. Cordus' burial of Pompey takes up a sizeable section of book 8 (8.712-78), but it is the aftermath and Lucan's editorial commentary that focuses us so emphatically on the impact of this one final republican death. 'Hic situs est Magnus' (8.793) is inscribed on the stone marking Pompey's grave, but a stone planted in the sand is both impervious to time, and utterly susceptible to dislocation. The ambiguities of situs are such that Lucan's re-use of it a few lines later repays close attention. Situs, although most usually translated at line 793 as 'buried', has two clear and potentially oppositional meanings: firstly, situs, a, um (OLD situs1) buried (or laid out for burial), a sense which evokes situs -us, m. (OLD situs3): 'the condition of lying undisturbed', neglect, stagnation, rottenness and physical deterioration. Secondly, 'founded' or 'erected', which overflows into situs -us, m. (OLD situs2): location or topography of something or somewhere; structure, building; (geography of) a region. All of these meanings coalesce in the formulaic 'here lies...' of hic situs est. This hic situs is thereby both everywhere and nowhere, as further elucidated by Lucan a few lines later when he apostrophizes:
... temerariadextra, cur obicisMagno tumulummanesqueuagantis includis?situs est qua terra extremarefuso
37 Paradoxicallyfor Pompey, his only 'success' at Rome in Lucan's text is his dream vision (uana imago 7.8) - the night before Pharsalus - of himself, watching Rome, watching (and cheering for) him, in his theatre (7.7-24). 38 This meaning of antrumremains available, despite the more 'straightforward'sense of 'burial vault' (see TLL 2.192.28-30). Cf. Caesar's visit to Alexander's antrum (10.22-3), and Augustus' later trip.

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pendet in Oceano;Romanum nomen et omne imperiumMagno tumuli est modus:obruesaxa crimineplena deum. ... rash hand, why do you impose a tomb on Magnus and imprison a spirit that wanders free? His grave/monument/neglected corpse/domainencompasses the furthest land that rests on the encircling Ocean; the Roman name and entire empire are the only limit to Magnus' tomb: cast down [bury] that stone, fully charged with accusation against heaven. Lucan, B.C. 8.795-800

These two deployments of situs encapsulate Lucan's ambivalence about the role of Pompey in his poem, and furthermore, situs represents the putrefying spread of (dead) hero worship that has led to Caesar's Trojan fantasies, and Julian mythography.39Lucan's intense interest in Pompey's grave might also recall another feature of Roman landscaping that would have been highly familiar to contemporary Romans, and might perhaps have acquired renewed significance in the wake of this passage's defamiliarizing funerary technique: the grave gardens that fringed Rome's outskirts near the grove of Libitina. These 'gardens' (cepotaphia) provided a space in which the living could meet, rest, work, and think, with the dead as their notional companions.40 Can a Roman, buried in Egypt, remain Roman? Can there ever be any expectation that Pompey's Egyptian grave will achieve the topographical apotheosis that an Italian grave-garden could have allowed him? These epitaph-lines on Pompey's grave also go some way towards expressing similar cognitive anxieties to those that Walter Benjamin describes when he depicts his memory as studded with 'isolated words [that] have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters'.41 Here, the inscription that flows out from Pompey's monument also retains its oblique isolation. Quis capit haec tumulus? ('What tomb can
39 Gideon Nisbet kindly drew my attention to the wide-ranging implications of the meanings of

situs. 40 On Rome's gardentombs, see Purcell (n. 2), 188 and n. 4, and A. R. Littlewood,in
MacDougall (n. 2), 12-13 (and briefly, Grimal [n. 26], 322-3). These 'gardens' should be read also in terms of Augustus' landscaped Mausoleum. J. H. Miller's exploration of the simultaneously aporetic, placeless, and foundational natures of 'the crypt' (after Derrida) offers one more way of thinking about the grave as a locus for both containment and indefinability (Topographies [Stanford, 1995], 301-11). On Lucan's 'heroization' of Pompey in this section, see e.g. R. Mayer, Lucan: Civil War VIII (Warminster, 1981), 187, 188. Pompey's 'stoic' apotheosis, of course, is given at 9.1-18. With Julio-Claudian hindsight, its futility is total. 41 Benjamin (n. 14), 303. Cf. J. Derrida, 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', in Writing and trans. A. Bass (London, 1978), 196-231. Difference,

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hold allthese?')(8.816), demandsLucanof the resgestae(achievements) that Pompey'stomb would need to recount - but no adequatestone exists (8.798-804). Lucan's vision of the grave-siteas a place of collision between myth, politics, and mercantilereality leaves Romans with little else to do other than act the acquisitivetourist in Caesar's wake (8.820-1, 851-8). This activitywill eventuallybecome part of a process of devastationand ruin (8.865-72) in which attemptsto find traces of and tell stories about the tomb will fail. The ambivalenceof these two versionsof sightseeing(at Troy and Pompey'stomb) highlight Lucan'sauthorialdilemma.By turningisolatedwords and ruins into a 'story', an author colludes in a process hijackedby Caesars, but by of Pompey'stomb ensures foretellinga worldin which the obliteration that myths are robbed of their power, Lucan can offer a prospectof a world in which Pompey's death has itself disappeared (8.867-9). then, the meagrenessof Pompey'stomb both precludes Paradoxically, the prospectof another mythicTroyin some distantfuture,whilstensurRome remainsdrenchedin sepulchral significance. ing that Caesarian One final allusion sharpens our focus on the interconnexionof Pompey and Troy. Inevitably,I think, Pompey'sfuneral scene recalls Catullus' impassioned denunciation of Troy-as-tomb (68.89-104). Asiae Catullus contrasts the role of Troy as communesepulcrum
Europaeque- 'common tomb of Asia and Europe' (68.89) with the nota sepulcra- 'familiar graves' (68.97) on Roman soil amongst which

his brother ought to rest. The bitter joke is that it is to Troy, not Yet CatullanTroy Rome where one must go to see the nota sepulcra.42 Roman identity-in the possibilityof a distinctively still acknowledges death at least, his brother'sbody is recognizablyforeign at Troy-an option that Lucan closes down when Caesar visits the site. Furthermore,Lucan's dispersalof Pompey's remains throughoutthe whole worldmarksa starkcontrastwith Troy'sposthumousimprisonment of Catullus'brother:
sed Troiaobscena, Troiainfelicesepultum detinetextremoterra aliena solo. but buried at unmentionable Troy, unhappy Troy a foreign land keeps you in its most far flung ground. Catullus 68.99-100
42 Elena for Lucan'sTroy.Nota reminded me of the usefulnessof Catullus Theodorakopoulos of its in the widercontextof poem 68's emphasison the name(lessness) heremust be significant dedicatee(68.50, 151).

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In contrast to Pompey's interment, Catullus' brother is firmly buried at Troy, and becomes part of its ruinous landscape, and a Trojan grave will put him firmly on all subsequent sightseers' itineraries. Similarly, whilst the sepulchral words that do not quite root Pompey in the Egyptian sand indicate catastrophe, their susceptibility to erosion and invisibility also suggests a potential inconclusivity that offers at least a morsel of hope. This picks up on book 2's hope that Fortuna will ensure that Pompey is buried in a far-flung corner of the world (2.732-6), though of course we, as readers, know that Egypt, like Troy, is now 'Rome', and Pompey's grave is the whole world. Lucan closes this book with a programmatic statement that returns us to the paradox of stasis and decay that collapsing realities at Troy set up: no age will be happy (or at least felicior) until we have allowed Pompey (and the rest) to pass from history into myth, yet in Nero's Rome, how can we tell one from the other? Domesticating the city43 Cleopatra's palace offers a strong counterpoint to Pompey's grave, and draws out the palimpsestic aspect of architecture through the incremental nature of its developing identity; speculatively, it also evokes the continuing sprawl of successive emperors' remodelling of Rome. This all, I think, makes Lucan's Alexandria and his focus on the palace particularly pertinent. Read alongside the transformations taking place in the imperial residences at Rome, we find that the royal quarter (including the museum) at Alexandria sprawled over about a quarter of the city space, and it was an agglomeration of palace buildings, built up and developed over the years.44This palace epitomizes the breaking of normative boundaries, and also reminds us of the susceptibility of cities to redefinition as domestic prospects and landscapes for their rulers. Its incorporation of layers of royal construction and design makes the palace at Alexandria re-connect directly with both Ptolemy I and the city's legendary founder, Alexander the Great. When Lucan chooses to describe the palace (as Caesar sees it) first of all in terms of Alexander-Pellaea aula ('Pellaean hall': 10.55), then Emathia tecta ('Emathian roof': 10.58) - we are immediately sensitized to his selection of terminology. These descriptors make it hard to tell where Alexander's
43 For Nero as Rome's colonizer, and Rome as imperial domus,see Tacitus, Annals 15.37. 44 See Grimal (n. 26), 85 and Strabo 17.1.8. Tacitus suggests that Nero uses the ruins of his patria to redefine the city as rural parkland (Annals 15.42).

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tomb ends, and the royal palace begins. Regia ('palace/court') appears only at 10.442, 486, and 527, but in the wake of Virgil's Cacus and his connexions with Polyphemus, it might not be too far-fetched to recall the regia in which monstrous and unhuman Cacus lurks (Aeneid 8.242).45 As Hardie comments ([n. 30], 115), the significance of Vergil's remodelling of the story of Hercules and Cacus is in his insistence that Cacus' defeat involves focusing the battle on Cacus' home. His extraction from it marks the destruction of both. Here in Lucan's Alexandria, Caesar enters the regia, but is himself a function of its corruption; this regiais not a confining space, it is a place where boundaries and barriers are transgressed. At first (10.14-24) Alexandria appears to offer a step back to Troy, as we hear that Caesar has reverted to tourist mode and gone sightseeing for tombs; here the antrum is Alexander's (10.17-19). This sepulchral visit, right at the beginning of his and our Alexandrian trip, contaminates the city and models our responses to its glamour. Lucan's description of the palace/city focuses on its role as a set for a spectacular piece of dinner-theatre, and he chooses to turn the venue for this piece of grandstanding into a temple, specifically, a temple which could have no reality in such a corruptioraetas - 'degraded era' (10.111). And to ram this message home just a little more thoroughly, aetas is followed as a lineend by aurum, two lines down (10.113). This palace is also, in its detail, startlingly reminiscent of accounts of the Domus Aurea, suggesting that accounts of Nero's palace were tapping a well-known and popular set of descriptors for perverted luxury and decadence. It is a perversion of a sacred space (perhaps reminding the audience of Nero's divine aspirations and urban appropriations); ceiling, rafters, walls, all are encrusted with a thick veneer of ostentation. Gold, marble, semi-precious stones, ebony, ivory, alabaster, tortoise-shell, jewels; a rainbow of colours, which is matched in the ethnic diversity of the servants and the ostentation of Cleopatra's appearance
(10.111-46).46
45 Regia might initially appear to be the most culturally loaded term that Lucan could have chosen (and therefore his sparse use of it could be both emphatic and intriguing), but as A. Winterling, Aula Caesaris:Studien zur Institutionalisierung des romischenKaiserhofesin der Zeit von Augustusbis Commodus(31 v.Chr.- 192 n.Chr) (Munich, 1999) suggests, aula tends to function as a portmanteau for the whole imperial package - space and lifestyle - and in the first century CEat least, had negative connotations. Lucan uses aula on four further occasions (10.73, 115, 422, 440), and then uses domus (house) to stand for both the Ptolemaic dynasty (10.98, 414) and the palace (10.119, 335, 443, 460, 479, 481). 46 Cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.42 and Suetonius, Nero 31.1-2 on the Domus Aurea. Tacitus specifically comments that the Domus Aurea was a function of Rome's ruin (ruina). Edwards' important

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The abrupt ending of book 10, and its relative brevity, have led to suggestions that it remains unfinished, and might suggest that this was Lucan's last work-in-progress. In fact, the dysfunctional end seems to fit neatly into Lucan's scheme, and of course the text's denial of closure allows us to take compositional context as far as possible and to read-in Nero's Roman architectonics in the wake of the great fire.47 The fire that ravages Alexandria is preceded by a gala performance of sensuous theatricality (10.56-8, 82-5) that continues in the display feast that Caesar then luxuriates in (10.111-71). This really is a banquet of the gods and Egypt's deities consume and are consumed by the menu (10.158-9). The menu itself gives us another hint at the universality of the empire of corruption that this scene represents when we are told that the food encompassed earth, air, sea, and Nile: the spoils of the whole world (toto ... in orbe: 10.132), whilst Rome's global imperialism allows (or even forces) us to read 'Rome' for Alexandria.48 As Lucan's configuration of Pompey's grave (8.795800) suggests, Egypt is increasingly central, relegating the rest of the world, including Rome, to the periphery (modus: 8.799). And we find that in this seismic meeting of old and new versions of empire, politics is banished from the agenda. Instead, the experience is wholly focused on pleasure, sensuality, and personal gratification.
Postquamepulis Bacchoquemodum lassata uoluptas imposuit,longis Caesar producerenoctem inchoat adloquiis, When wearied pleasure set a limit to feasting and carousing, Caesar set about prolonging the night with lengthy discourse, Lucan, B.C. 10.172-4

discussion of architecture and luxury rightly notes that Roman texts are unusually concerned with structural ethics (n. 11), 137-72. A grand and luxurious home could bring prestige, honouring guests through the display of wealth (and power) that was opened up to them, whilst at the same time this house might allow political opponents to raise charges of unwarranted ambitio against its owner (cf. Cicero, Pro Murena 76). As Edwards comments on Vitruvius, De Architectura 6.5.1-2, the terms regalia and basilica suggest anti-republican political aspirations (ibid.), 153, perhaps hinting at the crimen regni suggested by Vedius Pollio's Palatine house in Ovid's Fasti (6.643). Seneca's discussion of luxurious bath-houses (Ep. 86.6.7) highlights a sense of anxiety about ostentatious wealth without status, and his unease locates him in similar territory to Lucan's narrative voice here. By indulging in 'Alexandrian' luxury, Caesar divorces himself from republican auctoritasand thereby from acceptable public display. 47 On Lucan and closure, see J. Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile (Cambridge, 1992), 216-59. 48 On food, luxury, and identity, see E. Gowers, The Loaded Table: of Food in Representations Roman Literature(Oxford, 1993), 18-22; cf. 198-202 on Juvenal.

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Lucan's use of modushere could recall the dramatic shift in topographic narratology that Pompey's grave provokes, foreshadowing the temporal and cosmographical deformation that Caesar sets in motion. Lying, sated after the feast, Caesar's control over time (or, we might argue, the distortion of time that his presence provokes) is foregrounded as he appears to make the passing hours grind to a halt. His request to Acoreus demands an encyclopedic response, detailing the origins of Egypt, its religious beliefs and customs, but he retrenches, and focuses his enquiry on the calendar, heavens, and source of the Nile. What he gets from Acoreus demonstrates the cultural permeability of the world in which Caesar operates. Acoreus' account commences with thoroughly Romanized heavens (10.194-218) before concluding with an account of the Nile that locates Caesar in a long tradition of world leaders who became obsessed by it (10.268-83).49 Similarly, long service in Egypt has brought oblivion and loss of identity to Romans in the army there (10.403-5). Perhaps these are the very same 'tourists' whom Lucan envisages at Pompey's burial site when he elegantly foreshadows Caesar's visit to Troy:
haud procul est ima Pompei nomen harena depressumtumulo,quod non legat aduena rectus, quod nisi monstratumRomanus transeathospes. Pompey's name is scarcely above the lowly sand, set low upon the grave, so that a standing passer-by would not read it, and unless it were pointed out, a Roman visitor would pass it by. Lucan B.C. 8.820-2

Through loss of identity and dalliance on the banks of the Nile (10.41213) all these Romans (Caesar and those who besiege him) play out the effects of a process of spatial destabilization on the peoples of the empire, with the palace, jutting out over the water and blurring the divide between land and sea, as a focal point.50 The destruction that
49 Hardie's reading of Vergil's 'Cacus' story in Aeneid 8 as a kind of 'Roman cosmogony, func-

tioning as a grand and universalizing prelude to the themes of human history that ensue' (n. 30), 117, becomes important for Lucan's focus on temporal distortion. Perhaps here we are seeing a

kind of pervertedcosmogonywherebyCaesar'sEgyptianreverieusurps 'Roman' (or at least

Vergilian) mythic consciousness. Cacus' regia might mimic the Underworld, as Hardie notes (ibid.), 112; Cleopatra's regia might, given the nature of Acoreus' Nilo-centric historiography, invoke Anchises' explication of the parade of future Rome's heroes at the river Lethe/ Forgetfulness (Vergil, Aeneid 6.752-885). Cf. Wheeler (n. 23), 372-8, on Lucan's cosmological (if fragmentary) dialogue with Ovid. 50 Nec non et ratibus temptaturregia, qua se I protulit in medios audaci marginefluctus I luxuriosa domus. ('And the palace was also under attack by ships, at the point where I this magnificent house projected out over the waves I with a daring aspect.') (10.486-8). Lucan's use of fluctus

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Alexandria spreads across the Roman world is finally matched with a fire (10.491-505) which must surely suggest Rome's counterpoint as Trojan ruin, the great fire whose effects were still a key feature of the city's heart. Alexandria's flames evoke the regum cineresof B.C. 8.695 whilst also recalling the cognatos ... cineres - 'familiar ashes' from which Troy keeps Catullus' brother (68.98) and the acerba cinis 'bitter ash', that characterizes Troy itself (68.90).

No end in sight
New (Roman) Troy demonstrates how the stultifying effect of the past continues to contaminate the nature of the present, but through Lucan's description of Alexandria we see how this mini-Grand Tour requires us to rethink the intellectual and cultural effects of a scenario in which there can be no possibility for radical change. This civil-war world is one in which ruined Troy is symptomatic of the detrimental effect of mythic history on perceptual reality. Troy is simultaneously subsumed into the natural landscape (9.964-9) and a semblance of a Romantic locus amoenus which Caesar, inscius, struggles to interpret (our narrator has no such difficulties, the stories trip from his pen: 9.973, 980-1). Here, the weeds that choke what was once Trojan space offer a tacit commentary on Troy's potential to suffocate Roman achievement. This suggests that Rome, like Troy, will eventually only be a series of competing narratives,pastiches, and increasingly solipsistic allusions to stories to which we grant a greater vitality than our own (narrative) present. But as Lucan ominously suggests, the sun will never set on our (Caesar's and Lucan's? Lucan's and his audience's?) Pharsalia (9.985-6). If History has ended, 'we' are left without the option of differentiating ourselves from the world Caesar creates. This trope of persistence is important for the second kind of paradoxical 'ruin' that Lucan presents: ruin-as-end of history, and this is focused on Pompey's grave (8.842-72) and Alexandria. With Pompey dead, Caesar loses the conquistadorial dynamism that temporarily displaces the new kind of 'ruin' that Rome will experience. The complacent, destructive corruption of Alexandria in book 10
blurs the definition of the kind of water, linking this building to a literary tradition of boundarydefying, corrupting edifices. E.g. Horace, Odes 2.18.15-22; cf. Pliny, N.H. 36.2-3. We could also read this back into Lucan's conceptualization of Pompey's grave in similar terms (8.795-9, 802-5, 838-40), which in turn evokes the widespread semina belli set out in book 1: 1.158-82, and particularly, non auro tectisuemodus ('there was no limit either to wealth or homes') (1.163).

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mirrors the decadence that empire brought for Rome (1.158-82), but whereas that city was corrupted only by military success, Alexandria stands for an ancient narrativeof corruption with no republican idealism at its heart. If Troy offers a primary contaminatory model (ruin-as-ruin) for the world that Caesar's dangerous brilliance makes inevitable, then the version that Lucan presents for us at Alexandria represents the moral and ethical ruin-that-follows-success, familiar, as Mario Labate (n. 13), 168-71, notes, even in Sallust's version of Roman decline (Bell. Cat. 2.6-13) and forcefully expressed in Horace, Epode 16. Lucan's inclusion of Sulla's Rome, half a century before Caesar's clash with Pompey, offers a mass grave from which a new Rome could grow (2.98-232) whereas the alternative Rome represented by Alexandria remains a luxurious sepulchre (8.692-700, 729-872; 10.9-52) forever implicated in 'orientalist' decadence and perversion (10.53171). In conclusion, I suggest that reading these touristic segments redefines Lucan's civil-war landscape as a paradoxical story of the way in which opening up the present to the past can result in a closing down of opportunities for progression and change. Troy and Egypt, together with the Caesars who define them, corrupt the possibility of critical and intellectual engagement with the past. Fascination with the sights of the Mediterranean sets the stage for the ordered chaos of a series of mytho-historical theme-parks, stage-managed and instantly recognizable back-drops for Lucan's voluble tableaux.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS LYNDA MCNEIL: Instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. STUART LAWRENCE: Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. JOHN WHITEHORNE: Reader in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland, Australia. ARMAND D'ANGOUR: Fellow and Tutor in Classical Languages and Literature, Jesus College, Oxford. CHRISTINE LUZ: Assistant in Greek Philology, Institute for Classical Philology, Bern, Switzerland. DIANA SPENCER: Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham. JOHN CURRAN: Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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