Abstract

In Lucan′s second book, an old man looks back to the atrocities perpetrated in the civil strife of the eighties, chiefly on the return of Marius and Cinna to Rome in late 87 and on that of Sulla in 82 . The episodes that Lucan briefly refers to are all otherwise known, and there seems no particular reason to assume that he is not drawing on Livy as his principal source, as he does for the events of his main narrative, the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. The scholia to the passage may be a different matter