does not compare with Homer as a
poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in
either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in
itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself
compelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--to
do by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the
_Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure
in this does not matter much in comparison with his technical success
otherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate to
the epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic than
Homer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stock
epithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they are
characteristics of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient technique.
But epic poetry cannot be written as Homer composed it; whereas it must
be written something as Virgil wrote it; yes, if epic poetry is to be
_written_, Virgil must show how that is to be done. The superb Virgilian
economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the
scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of
the whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of
this fashion:

Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.[11]

Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so far
as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of
political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;
and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he
made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more
real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction,
supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was
fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and
memorable lines:

Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]

which would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could be
invented. The _Pharsalia_ could not be anything more than an interesting
but unsuccessful attempt; it was not on these lines that epic poetry was
to develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing very
remark