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Updated: May 12, 2025
Even numerous and fully-arrayed bodies of cavalry have been repeatedly broken, both in ancient and modern warfare, by resolute charges of infantry. For instance, it was by an attack of some picked cohorts that Caesar routed the Pompeian cavalry, which had previously defeated his own at Pharsalia. I have represented the battle of Marathon as beginning in the afternoon, and ending towards evening.
Unhappily the report of Pharsalia had flown before him, and the vane of sentiment had everywhere veered round. The Aegean islands begged him politely not to compromise them by his presence. He touched at Rhodes. Lentulus, flying from the battlefield, had tried Rhodes before him, and had been requested to pass on upon his way. Lentulus was said to be gone to Egypt.
Cicero had guessed shrewdly that Caesar's greatest difficulties would begin with his victory. He had not a man who was able to govern under him away from his immediate eye. Cassius Longinus, Trebonius, and Marcus Lepidus had been sent to Spain after the battle of Pharsalia. They had quarrelled among themselves. They had driven the legions into mutiny.
That struggle was neither a Pharsalia, in which two great men contended for supremacy in a republic, nor a Philippi, in which parties fought deliberately in support of certain principles, but an Actium; and the question to be decided was, With which of two energetic forms of force should the victory be?
On the field of Pharsalia, he called out to the soldiers "to spare their fellow-citizens," and afterwards gave permission to every man in his army to save an enemy. None of them, so far as appears, lost their lives but in battle, excepting only Afranius, Faustus, and young Lucius Caesar; and it is thought that even they were put to death without his consent.
John Selden entered the Inner Temple in the second year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary contemporaries, William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne, Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Cæsar, Thomas Heygate, Thomas May, dramatist and translator of Lucan's 'Pharsalia, William Rough and Rymer were members of Gray's Inn.
What was the state of Cæsar's army immediately before the battle of Pharsalia? What effect had the approaching event on the minds of men? What were the respective advantages of each army? On what did they principally build their hopes? Who was the first to offer battle? How did Cæsar act on this occasion? What followed? What effect had this intelligence on Cæsar's plan?
Cicero considered that the Civil War ought to have ended with Pharsalia; and in this opinion most reasonable men among the conservatives were agreed. They had fought one battle; and it had gone against them. To continue the struggle might tear the Empire to pieces, but could not retrieve a lost cause; and prudence and patriotism alike recommended submission to the verdict of fortune.
Nevertheless Lucan is of all Latin poets the most independent in relation to his predecessors. It needs a careful criticism to detect his knowledge and imitation of Virgil. As far as other poets go he might never have read their works. The impetuous course of the Pharsalia is interrupted by no literary reminiscences, no elaborate setting of antique gems.
He had been a follower of Pompey, and had fallen into Cæsar's hands shortly after the battle of Pharsalia. Though he owed his life to Cæsar, he was personally hostile to him, and his feelings were so strong that he formed a plot for his destruction, in which sixty or eighty persons were involved.
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