author
Lucan
39–65
A brilliant young Roman poet who turned civil war into one of Latin literature’s fiercest epics. Best known for the Pharsalia, he wrote with unusual intensity and a sharp distrust of tyranny.
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About the author
Born in Corduba in Roman Spain in AD 39, Lucan—more fully Marcus Annaeus Lucanus—came from a notable family and was the nephew of Seneca the Younger. He rose quickly in Nero’s Rome and became known for his remarkable literary talent while still very young.
His great work is the epic Bellum civile, better known as the Pharsalia, an unfinished poem on the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Unlike many earlier epics, it leaves the gods in the background and focuses instead on human ambition, violence, and political collapse, which gives it a strikingly tense, modern feel.
Lucan’s life was short. After falling out with Nero and becoming linked to the Pisonian conspiracy, he was forced to die in AD 65 at about twenty-five years old. Even with so brief a career, he became one of the defining poets of the Silver Age of Latin literature.