The Crazy Gang-Watching Caesar’s Centurions

This chapter extends the investigation of Lucan’s distanced and perhaps comic or burlesque modes of narration centred on the concepts of spectacle and spectatorship. In particular, it examines Lucan’s reflection of the theme in Caesar’s Commentaries of the deep loyalty of the centurions to their general and of their desire to fight in his sight. In Lucan, it is argued, this ambition is indicative not just of loyalty but of a closed and insane community, at one in its perversion of traditional military values. This perversion is most evident in the distortion of inherited attitudes to the body, to the proper stance of the warrior, and to honour and dishonour in wounding. It is finally exemplified in Scaeva’s reproduction of a second traditional mode of spectacular display-and one closely associated with the Marian tradition Caesar inherited-that is, the display of scars and wounds to the breast. In this display, it is possible to measure the distance at which Caesar’s men stand from Roman tradition, and the alienation which such a stance must provoke.

Aesthetics · Art · Burlesque · Comics · Honour · Literature · Narrative · Perversion · Psychoanalysis · Spectacle · Theme (computing) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Psychology