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.2.801–3.776.Pharian: After Pharos, the lighthouse island in Alexandria’s harbor.BOOK THREE3.Ionian: The sea south of the Adriatic, fanning out to southern Italy and Sicily in the west and Greece in the east.11.Julia’s sorrowful head: Daughter of Caesar, b.73 BC, married to Pompey in 59 BC to seal a political alliance; she miscarried and died in 54 BC.Behind her are other famous female ghosts in epic, Creusa in Aen.2.771–94 and Dido in Aen.5.1–6; elegy also gave models, Propertius’ dead Cynthia (4.7).13–20.Elysian…Parcae: A miniture atlas of underworld geography.The Elysian Fields are the Fields of the Blessed, where the greatest heroes go after death.The gods swore by the waters of the river Styx.The Eumenides are the three Furies (by the euphemistic name “the Kindly Ones”), in charge of avenging bloodguilt, especially familial and so most appropriate to civil wars.The Acheron is the underworld river across which souls are first ferried by the boatman Charon.Tartarus is the pit where underworld punishments are meted out.The “three sisters” are the Parcae, the Fates (Clotho, “Spins”; Lachesis, “Apportions”; and Atropos, “the Unbending,” cuts the threads of fate).22.triumphs: Not true; Pompey’s third triumph was in 62 BC, before they married.24.mistress Cornelia: Julia jealously does not recognize Pompey’s new wife.Cornelia was the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio who married Publius Licinius Crassus (son of Crassus the triumvir) in 55 BC.When he was killed with his father at Carrhae in 53, she married Pompey in 52.31.Lethe’s banks: The underworld river of forgetfulness, of which souls drink before passing back into the world to be reincarnated.39.embrace: Vain attempts to embrace the dead soul of a loved one are standard in epic: Odysseus’ three attempts to embrace the soul of his mother, Anticleia (Od.11.205–8); Aeneas’ attempts to embrace Creusa (Aen.2.792–3) and his father, Anchises (Aen.6.700–702).The frustrated embrace also recalls Ovid’s story of Ceyx and Alcyone, which this scene inverts.King Ceyx died in a shipwreck at sea and then appears to Alcyone in a dream (11.410ff.; cf.esp.lines 674–76); they turn into seabirds and give rise to the “halcyon days.” The opposite outcome here will be the violence of civil war.42–44.empty image…death itself is nothing: Epicurean reasonings about the emptiness of death, rendered into epic by Lucretius (cf.De R.N.3).This opposition, slightly obscure for its succinctness, may be understood as leaving unstated the idea that death is nothing if the soul has feeling as it does in life.Discussion and treatment of the nature of death are as common to classical epic as to philosophy.The Gallic Druids’ belief in reincarnation was mentioned at 1.478–95 (see note), and Cato will give reasons why death is not to be feared at 9.566ff.64.Curio: Gaius Scribonius Curio, the tribune, is dispatched to secure the grain supplies from Sicily, Sardinia, and Libya (cf.Caesar, BC 1.30–1).He will reappear in Book Four.74.torrid zone: The earth was divided into five zones: the frozen poles, two temperate and habitable zones between them, and the torrid equatorial zone, often associated with Africa as a whole.81.What chains: The image suggests the representations, displayed in triumphs, of rivers and seas in chains to symbolize the conquest of a region and its peoples, here the Rhine and Ocean for conquests in Germany and Britain.89–92.Anxur…Alba’s heights: Anxur or Tarracina is modern Terracina, at the southern end of the malarial Pomptine Marshes, 100 kilometers south of Rome on the Via Appia.Farther along the Via Appia was the famous grove of Diana Nemorensis at Aricia.Nearby were Alba Longa and the Alban Mount, where the consuls presided over the Latin Festival (referenced again at 5.400–402), about 20 kilometers from Rome.99–100.Sarmatians…Dacians: Peoples living around the middle and lower Danube, whom the Romans fought and subdued throughout the first century.110 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]