Lucan

Dante saw Lucan as a great epic writer, second only to Virgil. He recalls the author of the Pharsalia in the Vita nuova, acknowledges him as a poetic model in De vulgari, II 6 7, describes him as grande poeta in Conv., IV 28 13 and, finally, refers to him throughout the Commedia, where he is placed in Limbo, together with Homer, Horace, Ovid and Virgil. The many references found in the 3 cantiche document Dante’s thorough knowledge of the Pharsalia, although he read Lucan’s work through the filter of commentaries and accessus that circulated widely, which helps to understand the relationship between the two authors. Lucanian references in the Commedia frequently have the role of creating sheer dramatic emphasis, and are more readily found where there are troubling presences, such as Erichtho the sorceress (Phar., VI 507 sgg. and Inf., IX 23-24), Aruns the soothsayer (Phar., I 584 sgg. and Inf., XX 46-51), and the giant Antaeus (Phar., IV 589 sgg. and Inf., XXXI 100 sgg.). Cantos XXIV-XXV of Inferno are also modelled on famous passages in the Pharsalia, where Lucan describes the monstrous serpents of Lybia. Dante’s depiction of the thieves’ dreadful metamorphosis is explicitly derived from the pathological physical changes in Sabellus and Nasidius when they are bitten by serpents, as recounted in Book IX of the Pharsalia. Here, however, imitation becomes emulation: Dante in fact recognized that he had surpassed Lucan and Ovid (Inf., 94-102), not only on the level of poetry, but also in the metamorphosis itself, which is no longer an extraordinary event of nature as in Lucan, or a mythological invention as in Ovid, but a miracle of God, a genuine transformatio supernaturalis. The figure of Cato is also derived from Lucan: in spite of Cato’s suicide, he is the guardian of Purgatorio, on the strength, perhaps, not only of Lucan’s depiction in Pharsalia, but owing much to the medieval glosses, in which Cato is seen in hypostatic union with the cardinal virtues, equated with the divine.