In chapter 118 of Petronius' Satiricon the poetaster Eumolpus gives his views on amateur poets and the demands of epic; he chooses as an example the task of writing a civil war, belli civilis ingens opus, and illustrates his poetics by almost three hundred lines of his own, covering the opening phase of the civil war adapted by Lucan in the first quarter of book 1. Many scholars still believe that both the criticism and the sample are aimed at Lucan, but it is far from clear that Eumolpus' poem should be called parody of Lucan's verse; hence a variant interpretation makes the excerpt a sample (or parody) of how a traditional follower of Virgilian epic would have approached Lucan's material.

A third school, best represented by Peter George, ‘Petronius and Lucan de Bello Civili’ C.Q. 24 (1974), stresses the chronological difficulties in attributing to Petronius knowledge of a poem only partly recited or published shortly before Petronius' enforced suicide. George argues that the diction and rhetorical form of the excerpt share with Lucan only their common inheritance from Virgil, and could be intended to reflect on any of the lost epic poets writing since the death of Virgil. Since the critical views and composition of Eumolpus certainly represent ideas current in Lucan's day, they can be used either as foil or as background to our understanding.