Lucan's Cato, the defeat of victory, the triumph of memory

TL;DRAbstract

This dissertation provides a new examination of the figure of Cato within Lucan’s epic poem Bellum Civile by focusing on the theme of memory within the epic and its interaction with Cato’s character specifically. It argues that one may read the epic as possessing the rhetorical function of a literary funeral monumentum, the purpose of which is to retell the death of Rome in the Roman Civil War, mourn its passing, and yet in so doing simultaneously preserve its memory so that future generations may remember the liberty Rome once possessed and may be influenced by that memory to action. In this reading, the epic itself—like Cato within the epic—offers a counter-memory of what the civil wars meant to Rome in competition with that promoted by Caesar and his descendants. The study centers upon the speech of Cato found in Book 2 in which Cato states his two major goals for participation in the civil war: successfully commemorate a perishing Roma et Libertas and transform his own defeat into

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