Though the Roman civil wars had taken place a century before Lucan’s time, they were hardly politically neutral, as Lucan himself understood. The characters who loomed large in his story—the assassins Brutus and Cassius; Cato, the Stoic suicide; and Julius Caesar himself—had by Nero’s day become potent ideological symbols. The birthdays of Brutus and Cassius were observed every year by stiff-necked Thrasea Paetus, in ceremonies that celebrated senatorial autonomy. Cato, too, was widely revered in contemporary writings, as has been seen. Lucan was going to have to walk a thin line in writing
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