Is Lucan's epic "Civil War" an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that desparingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers an answer to this split debate on the Roman poet's magnum opus. Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman Republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49BC, Lucan (writing during the reign of Nero) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than...