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language he writes in, is as pure Roman as any that was writ in Nero's time. As he grew up, his parents educated him with a care that became a promising genius, and the rank of his family. His masters were Rhemmius Polæmon, the grammarian; then Flavius Virginius, the rhetorician; and lastly, Cornutus, the Stoic philosopher; to which sect he ever after addicted himself.

It was in the course of these studies he contracted an intimate friendship with Aulus Persius, the satirist. It is no wonder that two men, whose geniuses were so much alike, should unite and become agreeable to one another; for if we consider Lucan critically, we shall find in him a strong bent towards satire. His manner, it is true, is more declamatory and diffuse than Persius: but satire is still in his view, and the whole Pharsalia appears to me a continued invective against ambition and unbounded power.

The progress he made in all parts of learning must needs have been very great, considering the pregnancy of his genius, and the nice care that was taken in cultivating it by a suitable education: nor is it to be questioned, but besides the masters I have named, he had likewise the example and instructions of his uncle Seneca, the most conspicuous man then of Rome for learning, wit, and morals. Thus he sat out in the world with the greatest advantages possible, a noble birth, an opulent fortune, great relations, and withal, the friendship and protection of an uncle, who, besides his other preferments in the empire, was favourite, as well as tutor, to the emperor. But rhetoric seems to have been the art he excelled most in, and valued himself most upon; for all writers agree, he declaimed in public when but fourteen years old, both in Greek and Latin, with universal applause. To this purpose it is observable, that he has interspersed a great many orations in the Pharsalia, and these are acknowledged by all to be very shining parts of the poem. Whence it is that Quintilian, the best judge in these matters, reckons . him among the rhetoricians, rather than the poets, though he was certainly master of both these arts in a high degree.

His uncle Seneca being then in great favour with Nero, and having the care of that prince's education committed to him, it is probable he introduced his nephew to the court and acquaintance of the emperor: and it appears from an old fragment of his life, that he sent for him from Athens, where he was at his studies, to Rome for that purpose. Every one knows that Nero, for the five first years of his reign, either really was, or pretended to be, endowed with all the amiable qualities that became an emperor and a philosopher. It must have been in this stage of Nero's life, that Lucan has offered up to him that poetical incense we find in the first book of the Pharsalia; for it is not to be imagined, that a man of Lucan's temper would flatter Nero in so gross a manner, if he had then thrown off the mask of virtue, and appeared in such bloody colours as he afterwards did. No! Lucan's soul seems to have been cast in another mould and he that durst, throughout the whole Pharsalia, espouse the party of Pompey, and the cause of Rome against Cæsar, could never have stooped so vilely low, as to celebrate a tyrant and a monster in such an open manner. I know some commentators have judged that compliment to Nero to be meant ironically; but it seems to me plain to be in the greatest earnest and it is more than probable, that if Nero had been as wicked at that time as he became afterwards, Lucan's life had paid for his irony. Now it is agreed on by all writers, that he continued for some time in the highest favour and friendship with Nero; and it was to that favour, as well as his merit, that he owed his being made quæstor, and admitted into the college of Augurs, before he attained the age required for these offices: in the first of which posts he exhibited to the people of Rome a show of gladiators at a vast expense. It was in this sunshine of life Lucan married Polla Argentaria, the daughter of Pollius Argentarius, a Roman senator; a lady of noble birth, great fortune, and famed beauty; who, to add to her other excellencies, was accomplished in all parts of learning; insomuch, that the three first books of the Pharsalia are said to have been revised and corrected by her in his life-time.

How he came to decline in Nero's favour, we have no account that I know of in history; and it is agreed by all that he lost it gradually, till he became his utter aversion. No doubt, Lucan's virtue, and his principles of liberty, must make him hated by a man of Nero's temper. But there appears to have been a great deal of envy in the case, blended with his other prejudices against him, upon the account of his poetry.

Though the spirit and height of the Roman poetry was somewhat declined from what it had

been in the time of Augustus, yet it was still an art beloved and cultivated. Nero himself was not only fond of it to the highest degree, but, as most bad poets are, was vain and conceited of his performances in that kind. He valued himself more upon his skill in that art, and in music, than on the purple he wore; and bore it better to be thought a bad emperor, than a bad poet or musician. Now Lucan, though then in favour, was too honest and too open to applaud the bombast stuff that Nero was every day repeating in public. Lucan appears to have been much of the temper of Philoxenus, the philosopher; who, for not approving the verses of Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, was by his order condemned to the mines. Upon the promise of amendment, the philosopher was set at liberty; but Dionysius repeating to him some of his wretched performances in full expectation of having them approved, "Enough," cries out Philoxenus, "carry me back to the mines." But Lucan carried this point further, and had the imprudence to dispute the prize of eloquence with Nero in a solemn public assembly. The judges in that trial were so just and bold as to adjudge the reward to Lucan, which was fame and a wreath of laurel; but in return he lost for ever the favour of his competitor. He soon felt the effects of the emperor's resentment, for the next day he had an order sent him, never more to plead at the bar, nor repeat any of his performances in public, as all the eminent orators and poets were used to do. It is no wonder that a young man, an admirable poet, and one conscious enough of a superior genius, should be stung to the quick by this barbarous treatment. In revenge, he omitted no occasion to treat Nero's verses with the utmost contempt, and expose them and their author to ridicule.

In this behaviour towards Nero, he was seconded by his friend Persius; and no doubt, they diverted themselves often alone at the emperor's expense. Persius went so far, that he dared to attack openly some of Nero's verses in his first satire, where he brings in his friend and himself repeating them. I believe a sample of them may not be unacceptable to the reader, as translated thus by Mr. Dryden:

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A nobler verse? "Arms and the man I sing."

PERSIUS. Why name you Virgil with such fops as these?
He's truly great, and must for ever please;

Not fierce, but awful in his manly page,

Bold in his strength, but sober in his rage.

FRIEND. What poems think you soft? and to be read
With languishing regards, and bending head?
PERSIUS. "Their crooked horns the Mimallonian crew
With blasts inspir'd: and Bassaris, who slew
The scornful calf, with sword advanc'd on high,
Made from his neck his haughty head to fly.
And Mænas, when with ivy bridles bound,

She led the spotted lynx, then Evion rung around,

Evion from woods and floods repairing echoes sound."

The verses marked with commas are Nero's, and it is no wonder that men of so delicate a taste as Lucan and Persius could not digest them, though made by an emperor.

About this time the world was grown weary of Nero, for a thousand monstrous cruelties of his life, and the continued abuse of the imperial power. Rome had groaned long under the weight of

them, till at length several of the first rank, headed by Piso, formed a conspiracy to rid the world of that abandoned wretch. Lucan hated him upon a double score; as his country's enemy and his own, and went heartily into the design. When it was just ripe for execution, it came to be discovered by some of the accomplices, and Lucan was found among the first of the conspirators. They were condemned to die, and Lucan had the choice of the manner of his death. Upon this occasion some authors have taxed him with an action, which, if true, had been an eternal stain upon his name, that, to save his life, he informed against his mother. This story seems to me to be a mere calumny, and invented only to detract from his fame. It is certainly the most unlikely thing in the world, considering the whole conduct of his life, and that noble scheme of philosophy and morals he had imbibed from his infancy, and which shines in every page of his Pharsalia. It is probable Nero himself, or some of his flatterers, might invent the story, to blacken his rival to posterity; and some unwary authors have afterwards taken it up on trust, without examining into the truth of it. We have several fragments of his life, where this particular is not to be found; and which makes it still the more improbable to me, the writers that mention it have tacked to it another calumny yet more improbable, that he accused her unjustly. As this accusation contradicts the whole tenour of his life, so it does the manner of his death. It is universally agreed, that having chose to have the arteries of his arms and legs opened in a hot bath, he supped cheerfully with his friends, and then, taking leave of them with the greatest tranquillity of mind and the highest contempt of death, went into the bath, and submitted to the operation. When he found the extremities of his body growing cold, and death's last alarm in every part, he called to mind a passage of his own in the IXth book of the Pharsalia, which he repeated to the standers-by, with the same grace and accent, with which he used to declaim in public, and immediately expired, in the 27th year of his age, and tenth of Nero. The passage was that where he describes a soldier of Cato's dying, much after the same manner, being bit by a serpent, and is thus translated by Mr. Rowe:

So the warm blood at once from every part

Ran purple poison down, and drain'd the fainting heart.

Blood falls for tears, and o'er his mournful face

The ruddy drops their tainted passage trace.

Where'er the liquid juices find a way,

There streams of blood, there crimson rivers stray.

His mouth and gushing nostrils pour a flood,

And e'en the pores ouse out the trickling blood;

In the red deluge all the parts lie drown'd,

And the whole body seems one bleeding wound.

He was buried in his garden at Rome; and there was lately to be seen, in the church of Santo Paulo, an ancient marble with the following inscription:

MARCO ANNAEO LVCANO CORDVBENSI POETAE, BENEFICIO NERONIS, FAMA SERVATA.

This inscription, if done by Nero's order, shows that, even in spite of himself, he paid a secret homage to Lucan's genius and virtue, and would have atoned in some measure for the injuries and the death he gave him. But he needed no marble or inscription to perpetuate his memory; his Pharsalia will out-live all these.

Lucan wrote several books, that have perished by the injury of time, and of which nothing remains but the titles. The first we are told he wrote, was a poem on the combat between Achilles and Hector, and Priam's redeeming his son's body, which, it is said, he wrote before he had attained eleven years of age. The rest were, the descent of Orpheus into Hell; the burning of Rome, in which he is said not to have spared Nero that set it on fire; and a poem in praise of his wife Polla Argentaria. He wrote likewise several books of Saturnalia; ten books of Silvæ; an imperfect tragedy of Medea; a poem upon the burning of Troy, and the fate of Priam; to which some have added the panegyric to Calphurnius Piso, yet extant, which I can hardly believe is his, but of a later age. But the book he staked his fame on was his Pharsalia; the only one that now remains, and which Nero's cruelty has left us imperfect in respect of what it would have been, if he bad lived to finish it.

Statius in his Sylvæ gives us the catalogue of Lucan's works in an elegant manner, introducing the Muse Calliope accosting him to this purpose: "When thou art scarce past the age of childhood (says Calliope to Lucan) thou shalt play with the valour of Achilles, and Hector's skill in driving of a chariot. Thou shalt draw Priam at the feet of his unrelenting conqueror, begging the dead body of his darling son. Thou shalt set open the gates of Hell for Eurydice, and thy Orpheus shall have the preference in a full theatre, in spite of Nero's envy;" alluding to the dispute for the prize between him and Nero, where the piece exhibited by Lucan was Orpheus's descent into Hell. "Thou shalt relate (continues Calliope) that flare which the execrable tyrant kindled, to lay in ashes the mistress of the world; nor shalt thou be silent in the praises that are justly due to thy beloved wife; and when thou hast attained to riper years, thou shalt sing, in a lofty strain, the fatal fields of Philippi, white with Roman bones, the dreadful battle of Pharsalia, and the thundering wars of that great captain, who, by the renown of his arms, merited to be enrolled among the gods. In that work (continues Calliope) thou shalt paint, in never-fading colours, the austere virtues of Cato, who scorned to out-live the liberties of his country; and the fate of Pompey, once the darling of Rome. Thou shalt, ike a true Roman, weep over the crime of the young tyrant Ptolemy; and shalt raise to Pompey, by the power of thy eloquence, a higher monument than the Egyptian pyramids. The poetry of Ennius (adds Calliope) and the learned fire of Lucretius, the one that conducted the Argonauts through such vast seas to the conquest of the golden fleece, the other that could strike an infinite number of forms from the first atoms of matter, both of them shall give place to thee without the least envy, and even the divine Æneid shall pay thee a just respect."

Thus far Statius concerning Lucan's works; and even Lucan in two places of the Pharsalia has promised himself immortality to his poem. The first is in the seventh book, which I beg leave to give in prose, though Mr. Rowe has done it a thousand times better in verse. "One day (says he) when these wars shall be spoken of in ages yet to come, and among nations far remote from this clime, whether from the voice of fame alone, or the real value I have given them by this my history, those that read it shall alternately hope and fear for the great events therein contained. In vain (continnes he) shall they offer up their vows for the righteous cause, and stand thunderstruck at so many various turns of fortune; nor shall they read them as things that are already past, but with that concern as if they were yet to come, and shall range themselves, O Pompey, on thy side."

The other passage, which is in the ninth book, may be translated thus: "Oh! Cæsar, profane thou not through envy the funeral monuments of these great patriots, that fell here sacrifices to thy ambition. If there may be any renown allowed to a Roman Muse, while Homer's verses shall be thought worthy of praise, they that shall live after us, shall read his and mine together: my Pharsalia shall live, and no time nor age shall consign it to oblivion."

This is all that I can trace from the ancients, or himself, concerning Lucan's life and writings; and indeed there is scarce any one author, either ancient or modern, that mentions him but with the greatest respect and the bighest encomiums, of which it would be tedious to give more instances. I design not to enter into any criticism on the Pharsalia, though I had ever so much leisure or ability for it. I hate to oblige a certain set of men, that read the ancients only to find fault with them, and seem to live only on the excrements of authors. I beg leave to tell these gentlemen, that Lucan is not to be tried by those rules of an epic poem, which they have drawn from the Iliad or Æneid; for if they allow him not the honour to be on the same foot with Homer or Virgil, they must do him the justice at least, as not to try him by laws founded on their model. The Pharsalia is properly an historical heroic poem, because the subject is a known true story. Now with our late critics, truth is an unnecessary trifle for an epic poem, and ought to be thrown aside as a curb to invention. To have every part a mere web of their own brain, is with them a distinguishing mark of a mighty genius in the epic way. Hence it is, these critics observe, that the favourite poems of that kind do always produce in the mind of the reader the highest wonder and surprise; and the more improbable the story is, still the more wonderful and surprising. Much good may this notion of theirs do them; but, to my taste, a fact very extraordinary in its kind, that is attended with surprising circumstances, big with the highest events, and conducted with all the arts of the most consummate wisdom, does not strike the less strong, but leaves a more lasting impression on my mind, for being true,

If Lucan therefore wants these ornaments, he might have borrowed from Helicon, or his own invention; he has made us more than ample amends, by the great and true events that fall within the compass of his story. I am of opinion, that, in his first design of writing this poem of the civil wars, he resolved to treat the subject fairly and plainly, and that fable and invention were to have had no share in the work: but the force of custom, and the design he had to induce the generality of readers to fall in love with liberty, and abhor slavery, the principal design of the poem, induced him to embellish it with some fables, that without them his books would not be so universally read: so much was fable the delight of the Roman people.

If any shall object to his privilege of being examined and tried as an historian, that he has given in to the poetical province of invention and fiction, in the sixth book, where Sixtus inquires of the Thessalian witch Erictho the event of the civil war, and the fate of Rome; it may be answered, that perhaps the story was true, or at least it was commonly believed to be so in his time, which is a sufficient excuse for Lucan to have inserted it. It is true, no other author mentions it. But it is usual to find some one passage in one historian, that is not mentioned in any other, though they treat of the same subject. Nor though I am fully persuaded that all these oracles and responses, so famous in the pagan world, were the mere cheats of priests; yet the belief of them, and of magic and witchcraft, was universally received at that time. Therefore Lucan may very well be excused for falling in with a popular errour, whether he himself believed it or no, especially when it served to enliven and embellish his story. If it be an errour, it is an errour all the ancients have fallen into, both Greek and Roman: and Livy, the prince of the Latin historians, abounds in such relations. That it is not below the dignity and veracity of an historian to mention such things, we have a late instance in a noble author of our time, who has likewise wrote the civil wars of his country, and intermixt in it the story of the ghost of the duke of Buckingham's father.

In general, all the actions that Lucan relates in the course of his history are true; nor is it any impeachment of his veracity, that sometimes he differs in place, manner, or circumstances of actions, from other writers, any more than it is an imputation on them, that they differ from him. We ourselves have seen, in the course of the late two famous wars, how differently almost every battle and siege has been represented, and sometimes by those of the same side, when at the same time there be a thousand living witnesses, ready to contradict any falsehood, that partiality should impose upon the world. This I may affirm, the most important events, and the whole thread of action in Lucan, are agreeable to the universal consent of all authors, that have treated of the civil wars of Rome. If now and then he differs from them in lesser incidents or circumstances, let the critics in history decide the question: for my part, I am willing to take them for anecdotes first discovered and published by Lucan, which may at least conciliate to him the favour of our late admirers of secret history,

After all I have said on this head, I cannot but in some measure call in question some parts of Cæsar's character as drawn by Lucan; which seem to me not altogether agreeable to truth, nor to the universal consent of history. I I wish I could vindicate him in some of his personal representations of men, and Cæsar in particular, as I can do in the narration of the principal events and series of his story. He is not content only to deliver him down to posterity, as the subverter of the laws and liberties of his country, which he truly was, and than which, no greater infamy can possibly be cast upon any name: but he describes him as pursuing that abominable end, by the most execrable methods, and some that were not in Cæsar's nature to be guilty of. Cæsar was certainly a man far from revenge, or delight in blood; and he made appear, in the exercise of the supreme power, a noble and generous inclination to clemency on all occasions: even Lucan, though never so much his enemy, has not omitted his generous usage of Domitius at Corfinium, or of Afranius and Petreius, when they were his prisoners in Spain. What can be then said for Lucan, when he represents him riding in triumph over the field of Pharsalia, the day after the battle, taking delight in that horrid landscape of slaughter and blood, and forbidding the bodies of so many brave Romans to be either buried or burnt? Not any one passage of Cæsar's life gives countenance to a story like this: and how commendable soever the zeal of a writer may be, against the oppressor of his country, it ought not to have transported him to such a degree of malevolence, as to paint the most merciful conqueror that ever was, in colours proper only for the most savage natures. But the effects of prejudice and partiality are unaccountable; and there is not a day of life, in which even the best of men are not guilty of them in some degree or other. How many instances have we in

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