“Read Lucan. You must read Lucan. His poem breaks rules, inflicts pain and suffering...” (John Henderson ‘Lucan/The Word at War’). Lucan’s epic poem The Civil War was written during the rule of Nero and describes the civil wars of the previous century. The work is a powerful condemnation of civil war and the ensuing anarchy and disintegration of society. This module takes Lucan’s nihilistic and hyper-violent poem as its starting point for a) an examination of the developing genre of Roman epic and b) an exploration of Roman culture, ideology, philosophy and literature during the Neronian period. Reading Lucan’s poems alongside the works of both his epic predecessors (especially Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and literary contemporaries such as Persius, Petronius and his uncle Seneca will enable us to address broader issues such as: the relationship between works of literature and the political culture in which they are composed; the ways texts draw on and rework literary traditions in order to reflect or resist dominant ideologies; the question of how far, in a society in which free speech can prove fatal, political argument is displaced to the literary sphere.