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Landscape architecture on pastoral topography in Lucan’s Bellum Civile

The influence of Vergil’s pastoral world on Lucan has never been firmly acknowledged and systematically studied. The present paper aspires to stir up a discussion that might generate greater interest in the subject. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part begins by defining pastoral poetry as a composition of three major elements, the so-called ‘locus amoenus’, the shepherds who inhabit this ‘locus amoenus’, and the herd that justifies the professional status of the shepherds. In Vergil’s Eclogues, these elements are parts of larger thematic units of distinct political character. The interrelation of politics and the pastoral becomes elaborate and multifaceted in the Aeneid. This I outline next by focusing on the episode of Aeneas’ visit to Pallanteum, a site that is both decidedly political and conspicuously pastoral. In the second part of the paper, I explore the interplay of the Vergilian pastoral and contemporary politics in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Through comparative examination with passages from the Aeneid, wherein pastoral motifs were initially imported and transformed in order to serve the objectives of epic ideology, I aspire to show that Lucan’s treatment of select Vergilian pastoral motifs advances the leading role of the themes of distortion and decomposition in an epic that mirrors the political culture of Nero’s era.