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Updated: June 12, 2025
At length a great final battle had been fought at Pharsalia. Pompey had been totally defeated. He had fled to the sea-shore, and there, with a few ships and a small number of followers, he had pushed out upon the Mediterranean, not knowing whither to fly, and overwhelmed with wretchedness and despair. Caesar followed him in eager pursuit.
Wherefore, since one portion of my work has been brought down to its end from the former book; and since this book has already run to a great length, what remains shall be discussed in subsequent books. This work was composed by Cicero soon after the battle of Pharsalia, and it was intended by him to contain the plan of what he himself considered to be the most perfect style of eloquence.
Pompeius before Pharsalia, Harold before Hastings, Napoleon before Waterloo, might afford some striking contrasts to the immediate catastrophe of their fortunes.
Cicero is the second great figure in the history of the time. He has obtained the immortality which he so much desired, and we are, therefore, entitled and obliged to scrutinize his conduct with a niceness which would be ungracious and unnecessary in the case of a less distinguished man. After Pharsalia he had concluded that the continuance of the war would be unjustifiable.
"Ah, do you think so? At all events, you interrupt my peroration. For we have fought, you and I, a battle which is over, so far as I am concerned. And the other side has won. Well! Pompey was reckoned a very pretty fellow in his day, but he took to his heels at Pharsalia, for all that; and Hannibal, I have heard, did not have matters entirely his own way at Zama.
Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Cæsar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature.
It is situate on two rivers, the Orontes and the Phaspar, not far from the Mediterranean; refuses to admit the fugitives after the battle of Pharsalia, C. iii. 102 The etymology of the name given to these mountains must be traced to the Celtic, and appears to combine two terms of that language nearly synonymous, Alp, or Ap, "a high mountain," and Penn, "a summit"
But Cassius had saved Syria from being overrun by the Parthians after the death of Crassus; and the service to the State outweighed the injury to himself. So he pardoned and advanced Marcus Brutus, his friend Servilia's son, who had fought against him at Pharsalia, and had been saved from death there by his special orders.
But the Pharsalia, the only large work which Lucan left complete, or all but complete, among a number of essays in different styles of poetry, and the only work of his which has been preserved, is a poem which, in spite of its immaturity and bad taste, compels admiration by its elevation of thought and sustained brilliance of execution.
The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon's time, of Austria, Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or from Caesar's victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.
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