1 All translations of texts are the author's own. Editions of texts used are: Amat, J. (ed.), Calpurnius Siculus, Bucoliques, Pseudo-Calpurnius, Eloge de Pison (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar; Anderson, W. S. (ed.), Ovidius, Metamorphoses (Leipzig, 1977)Google Scholar; Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (ed.), Horatius, Opera (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1991)Google Scholar; and Annaei Lucani, M., De Bello Civili (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1997)Google Scholar; Schuster, M. (ed.), Catulli Veronensis Liber (Leipzig, 1954)Google Scholar. Thanks in general go to John Henderson and Gideon Nisbet for helpful suggestions.

2 Leach, E. W., Ramus 2 (1973), 84 Google Scholar. N. Purcell, in E. B. MacDougall (ed.), Ancient Roman Villa Gardens, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 10 (Washington DC, 1987), 201, highlights the continuity between Nero's ‘fantasy park’ and the staged spectaculars (which themselves deployed ‘rural’ spectacle for Rome's delight, as Purcell also notices) that succeeded it in the Colosseum. As he also suggests, landscape(d) tableaux were increasingly a feature of Roman intellectualization and experience of their world (ibid.). Cf. E. Harwood's comparison of Disney's reinventions of ‘reality’ with the kinds of cultural appropriation on offer in eighteenth-century landscape artifices, in T. Young and R. Riley (eds.), Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 20 (Washington DC, 2002), 49-68. J. D. Hunt's chapter on ‘Classical ground and classical gardens’ provides a striking example of how appropriation of art in Renaissance gardens mimicked Pliny's version of Nero's Domus Aurea (N.H. 34.84) as documents of imperialism. In many ways, Renaissance (re) appropriation of classical Rome echoes Rome's reinvention of Greece-as-cultural-wallpaper. See Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600-1750 (Philadelphia, 1996), 13.

3 T. Habinek's discussion ‘Pannonia domanda est: The Construction of the Imperial Subject through Ovid's Poetry from Exile’, in The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 1998), 165, suggests that nostalgia, lamentation, and sentimentality are part of a ‘comfortable pose’ in Latin poetry. Both Calpurnius Siculus, here, and Lucan take on a key tenet of nostalgia (the nostalgic voice's enforced distance from its object of desire), demonstrating the extent to which Rome is ‘now’ being denned by its peripheries (cf. Habinek, ibid.,152).

4 Suetonius, Nero 38.2 describes the costumed emperor singing of the sack of Ilium whilst fire-gazing.

5 F. Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992) takes on a Hegelian/Marxist conceptualization of an end-stopped historical process. Although Fukuyama is by now rather passé (even something of a straw man within historiographical discourse) some of his ideas do offer an interesting angle on history and memory in Lucan. For Fukuyama, the struggle to achieve (and impose) ‘liberal’ democracy constitutes a ‘Universal History of mankind’ (ibid.), xiv, marching towards an essentially optimistic conclusion. Lucan's nihilism, in these terms, is to assert the pointlessness of struggle or resistance as a method of restarting history (contra Fukuyama, ibid., 334). J. Cropsey's humane deconstruction of this position in Melzer, A. M., Weinberger, J. and Zinman, M. R. (eds.), History and the Idea of Progress (Ithaca, 1995), 97–116 Google Scholar, offers a thoughtful response to Fukuyama's polemic that could locate Lucan's story as a call-to-arms for a society in which such a Panglossian ‘best-of-all-possible-worlds’ seems to have become impossible. Fenves, P. in Burns, T. (ed.), After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics (London, 1994), 217-37Google Scholar, addresses the semantic difficulties of a mono-cultural interpretation of ‘liberal democracy’ that offers an interesting angle on post factum nostalgia for a rose-tinted res publica.

6 This reading of Lucan draws on P. Ricoeur's ‘tragic/ironic’ view of history whereby: ‘As soon as a story is well known, to follow the story is not so much to enclose its surprises or discoveries within our recognition of the meaning attached to the story, as to apprehend the episodes which are themselves well known as leading to this end. …In reading the ending in the beginning and the beginning in the ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences.’ (Time and Narrative, 3 vols trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer [Chicago 1984/5], vol 1 67-8). Lucan, of course, does not attempt to limit himself (or us) to a diachronic version of (literary) history.

7 King, N., Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh, 2000), 11–32 Google Scholar, draws together some of the ways in which I use ‘memory’ in this article, particularly the idea that narrative memory necessitates a kind of forgetting (or at least a process of editing). Cf. Spence, D. P., Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1982), 28 Google Scholar. Spence also argues that when telling a story of the past, ‘the new description becomes the early memory’, ibid., 280. This is particularly significant in view of J.-F. Lyotard's attempt to configure a narratology in which the excluded memory-fragments become an indelible narrative in themselves. (Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. A. Michel and M. S. Roberts [Minneapolis, 1988], 26). Hence, Calpurnius’ amphitheatre forces its audience to confront the process and the results of memory's editorial effects on Rome.

8 Cf. Horace, Ep. 2.1.38, 1.17.21; Odes 3.27.57; Ovid, Her. 7.48. Horace's comments are particularly interesting because they form part of his send-up of the evaluation of antiquity as a key cultural benchmark of quality: Scriptor abhinc annos centum qui decidit, inter | perfectos ueteresque referri debet an inter | uilis atque nouos? (‘A writer who bit the dust a hundred years ago, is he to be counted among | the perfect and the ancient, or the squalid and modern?’) Ep. 2.1.36-8. This juxtaposition of death and modernity is striking within its own context (see D. Spencer, MD 51 [2003]), but also reminds us of the culturally loaded relationship between literature and (im) mortality that Nero's (famous) last words send up so magnificently (Suetonius, Nero 49.1); cf. C. Connors in Eisner, J. and Masters, J. (eds.), Reflections of Nero: culture, history and representation (London, 1994), 225-35Google Scholar.

9 Levi, P., The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Rosenthal, R. (London, 1988), 11–12.Google Scholar

10 F. Yates explores this three-dimensionality of late republican memory in The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 32-41. On the Ad Herennium she comments that: ‘one has to envisage “places” extending one might almost say for miles within the memory, “places” past which one moves in reciting, drawing from them the mnemonic cues.’ ibid., 30. Cf. Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.17-26. See also Bergman, B., The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 225-56Google Scholar. As Small, J. P., Wax Tablets of the Mind: cognitive studies of memory and literacy in classical antiquity (London, 1997), 101-5, 107-8Google Scholar, notes, studies of the psychology of memory bear out the Ad Herennium's insistence on a direct relationship between the visual/spatial rules of memory-loci and those which constrain ‘reality’. Quintilian, Inst. Or. 11.2.18-21, focuses on the memory-house, but as Small argues, late republican landscape perspectives meant that houses and gardens were intimately connected as part of the same visual system (ibid.), 107-9, 115-16. E. W. Leach's sophisticated study: The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton, 1988), particularly 73-143, offers a thought-provoking reading of landscape art in texts, and vice versa; more recently, see also Kellum, B., The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), 211-24Google Scholar. Looking ahead to the later Italian Renaissance, as Hunt (n. 2), 68 suggests: ‘If a garden recalled the world, then its imagery functioned as a device to remind visitors of that plenitude beyond its grounds.’ The iconographical programmes of renaissance gardens (such as the Villa D'Este) were designed, he notes, ‘to trigger certain responses in visitors, release specific ideas and themes stored previously in their memory.’

11 Cf. Harwood (n. 2), 66-7 on miniaturization and liminality, and N. Stanley's discussion of China's ‘Window on the World’ theme park, where rescaled tourist destinations are displayed, in Young and Riley (n. 2), 284-7. We could also compare this with some of Piranesi's multi-layered images of Rome's various identities, e.g. ‘Scenographia’ from Il Campo Marzio dell’ Antica Roma (1762) and ‘Plan of Rome’ from Antichità Romane de’ Tempi della Repubblica e de’ Primi Imperatori (1748), both in Edwards, C., Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city (Cambridge, 1996), plates 2 and 3Google Scholar.

12 Freud, S., ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. Strachey, J. (London, 1953-74), vol. 3, 198 Google Scholar; ‘Notes upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (‘The Rat Man’), in The Pelican Freud Library, trans, and ed. J. and A. Strachey (London, 1973-85), vol. 9, 57-8.

13 Cf. Res Gestae Divi Augusti 19-20 (on architectural restoration), 6, 8, 24 (on political and moral restoration); on Horace's pessimistic integration of ruin into Rome, see MacLeod, C. W., Collected Essays (Oxford, 1983), 218-19Google Scholar. On urban ‘ruin’ as a particularly Augustan concern, see Labate, M., Maia 43 (1991), 167-84Google Scholar.

14 Small (n. 10), 234. Cf. W. Benjamin's comparison of language to the earth which buries dead cities, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London, 1979 [1932]), 314. Benjamin draws on Freud's concept of memory-as-archaeology, but insists that to approach one's ‘buried past’ requires a willingness to keep working over the ‘ground’, repeatedly scattering the ‘soil’ evokes the complex cultural allusiveness that Lucan's text offers.

15 See Hunt (n. 2), 67-9. Cf. Hanson, J. A., Roman Theatre-Temples (Princeton, 1959)Google Scholar; Fagiolo, M. (ed.), La Città Effimera e l'Universo Artificiale del Giardino (Rome, 1980), 125-41Google Scholar. We could also compare these later versions to Pliny's comments on the naturally theatrical qualities of some landscapes (e.g. Pliny, Ep. 5.6).

16 Cf. Leach (n. 10), 138, on Lucretius D.R.N.

17 For ‘ruin’ in the B. C., see e.g. 1.496-8: Roma and ruo - ruin/devastation; 1.149-50: Caesar as a function of ruina; 2.731: Pompey's fate as ruina; and 1.81: greatness (magna) as agent of ruin/ruo.

18 Cf. Edwards (n. 11), 11 -12; P. Hardie, in Powell, A. (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol, 1992), 59–82 Google Scholar. But where Hardie suggests that Lucan's ‘Troy has fallen (60), Rome is falling’, I read this passage as even more claustrophobic - both collapses are locked into the present continuous. Labate (n. 13), explores in detail the role of Troy's destruction for reading urban Rome.

19 See also 1.381-7. Cf. Camillus'speech after the sack of Rome (Livy 5.51-4) and rumours of Rome's displacement by Alexandria that clustered around both Caesar and Antony.

20 This reading pushes Hardie's deconstruction of the potential problems of the Augustan urbs aeterna (n. 18), 60-1 rather hard. He argues that Lucan's historical programme is a direct challenge to Vergil, but I suggest we read it as mapping the insanity and decay that adopting the Aeneid's world makes inevitable. Cf. Figulus’ prophecy B.C. 1.668-72.

21 See e.g. Tissol, G., The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Princeton, 1997), 194-5.Google Scholar Cf. C. Segal's pessimistic reading of the relationship between man and nature in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Landscape in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol. Hermes Einzelschriften 23 (Wiesbaden, 1969), 88-9.

22 Or. Sib. 3.363-4, and see MacLeod (n. 13). Cf. Lucan B.C. 1.71-2. For Sibyls in Lucan, see 1.564-5, and the re-activation of Delphi (5.69-236).

23 B.C. 9.999. Wheeler, S., Arethusa 35 (2002), 361-80Google Scholar, makes a very persuasive case for reading Lucan's poem as a revisionary continuation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He develops the connexions between Ovid's Thebes and Lucan's Rome made in P. Hardie, CQ 40 (1990), 224-35.

24 A useful analogy for these ruinae is Benjamin's reading of monument-packed cities as ‘documents’ of ruin. His ruinous mapping of Naples makes it impossible to differentiate between construction, dilapidation, and pre-existing ruin (e.g. n. 14, 169-70). On the oddness of Caesar's touristic interlude, see Johnson, W. R., Momentary Monsters: Lucan and his Heroes (Ithaca, 1987), 118-19Google Scholar. Labate (n. 13), 180-3, traces the qualities of mimetic anxiety that inform attempts to ‘map’ Rome in the wake of Troy.

25 See Pliny, Ep. 8.8 on the gardens of the Temple of Clitumnus. On his own gardens, see Ep. 2.17.14-22, 5.6.16-40. Perhaps the best example of an eighteenth-century landscape-as-text can be found at Stowe (Buckinghamshire, UK), on which see J. D. Hunt's discussion: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA, 1994), 76-91. Hunt's reading of the emblematic significance of the ‘Elysian Fields’ and Temples of Ancient and Modern Virtues is particularly interesting. It is significant that William Kent's design for the Temple of Ancient Virtue makes it into an (Ionic) restoration of the ruined (Corinthian) temple at Tivoli, which is also echoed so vigorously in the Fountain of Rome at the Villa D'Este at Tivoli (which itself offers a reinvention of ‘classical’ Rome, available for comparison with the ‘modern’ city-scape visible from the Villa).

26 On nymphaea and ‘grottoes’ as architectural features, see P. Grimal, Les jardins romains (Fayard, 1984), 300-1, 306-8.

27 Beard, M. and Henderson, J., Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (Oxford, 2001), 74–82 Google Scholar, provide a detailed, illustrated reading of the grotto at Sperlonga and the diverse range of statue-groups found there. On Sperlonga, Baiae, and Rome, see Carey, S., G&R 49 (2002), 44–61 Google Scholar. Stewart, A. F., JRS 67 (1977), 76–90 Google Scholar, discusses grottoes and grotto-triclinia, and highlights the culturally modelling potential of ‘horror’ scenes as a baroque response to ‘republican’ Classicism.

28 Carey (n. 27), 55-6, 58.

29 Clare, R. J., in Atherton, C. (ed.), Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture, NCLS 6 (Ban, 1998), 1–17 Google Scholar, describes Homer's Polyphemus succinctly as a monster constantly expecting ‘the arrival of someone else’ (16). The blinding of Polyphemus and its dining context are, of course, delightfully ironic given the dangers associated with imperial dinner-parties (cf. Edwards [n. 11], 186-8, 199-204). Grimal (n. 26), 66-72, discusses the cultural omnipresence of Homeric (and Hellenistic) ‘gardens’ in Roman landscaping, and in his section on nymphaea and grottoes (306-10), he traces the grotto tradition back to Homer's Polyphemus (308-9). Other monster-killing ‘rooms’ provide a sense of the popularity of this kind of image (e.g. at Boscotrease, and the Odyssey landscapes from the Esquiline house at Rome). On James I's Whitehall ‘dinner’ grottoes, see Hunt (n. 2), 133. Cf. Strong, R., The Renaissance Garden in England (London, 1998), 138-9Google Scholar, and his description of the sixteenth-century garden-grottoes at Pratolino, near Florence (78-83).

30 Roman Polyphemus always has his eye on Theocritus’ Idyll 11. For Cacus, cf. Vergil, Aeneid 8.185-305; Ovid, Fasti 1.543-86; Propertius 4.9 (for Vergil's Polyphemus, see Aeneid 3.616-81). All of these ‘monsters’ play out a symbiosis of culture (the highly literate stories that contain them, the ‘classical’ landscapes they inhabit, the ‘civilizing’ forces they invoke) and barbarism (landscape that lacks stories - without their clashes with civilizing forces and containment within literary landscapes, these monsters do not exist). On Cacus, Hercules, Polyphemus, and gigantomachy in the Aeneid see P. Hardie, Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), 114-18, which also references key bibliography. As Hardie notes, the complexity of the allusions in this episode of the Aeneid marks out its significance for Rome, ibid., 115.

31 See Pliny, N.H. 35.116-17 on the interiority of Augustan landscape art. Leach (n. 10) addresses issues of the narratology of landscape art that underlie my reading of Lucan.

32 On the role of elevation in Roman landscaping, see Purcell (n. 2), 193-5. On ‘views’ and vista-control see Purcell, ibid., 195-7. Examples of raised and sunken buildings with particular Neronian significance are the cloud-sweeping ‘tower’ in the Gardens of Maecenas (Horace, Odes 3.29.10), possibly the vantage-point from which Suetonius makes Nero watch the fire of Rome, and the semi-subterranean dining-‘nymphaeum’, also in the Gardens, decorated with fantasy windows which seem to open onto an impossible underground garden. We could compare these with the subterranean trompe l'oeil ‘grotto’ from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, on which see Kellum (n. 10).

33 Grimal's comments (n. 26), 441 - 4 , are particularly useful here. He notes that the creation of gardens for pleasure, picking up on Hellenistic planting models, was a key element of Roman self-presentation as Hellenistic world leader (‘En les empruntant, Rome s'efforce de s'introduire dans la Communauté hellénistique et de prendre rang (le premier) parmi les capitales… Le jardin romain a donné un corps à un rêve grec.’ 442-3). In effect, he argues that Roman gardens act out and appropriate Greek mythic landscape and intellectual territory. For an introduction to contemporary approaches to theme-park landscapes, Young and Riley (n. 2) contains a number of important articles, particularly those by D. Lowenthal, E. Harwood, M. Treib, and B. J. Brown. Cf. Pompey's dream (B.C. 7.9-29), and on myth and spectacle, see e.g. K. Coleman, JRS 80 (1990), 44-73.

34 On Delphi, e.g. B.C. 5.84, 87, 95, 153, 159, 169, 192.

35 Serres, M., Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. McCarren, E (Stanford, 1991), 185 Google Scholar. N. Purcell, in Blagg, T. and Millett, M. (eds.), The Early Roman Empire in the West (Oxford, 1990), 7–29 Google Scholar, emphasizes the inherently ‘cellular’ nature of imperial topography until at least the third century CE. He suggests that this is an important feature in the radiant pattern of itinerary ‘spokes’ that branch out from Rome (ibid.), 24 n. 15. This located Rome at the epicentre of an empire that bridged two Oceans. His analysis of topographical change as inherently an expression of monarchical (or even divine) authority (16) makes imperial exploitation of the landscape as a function of personal magnificence inevitable (22). In this way, the superimposition of an artificial and hyperreal ‘nature’ (even if it replaces a ‘natural’ feature) tells a version of imperial appropriation of divine power. Cf. Strong (n. 29), 197, on renaissance identification of absolutist monarchy and gardening, and Hunt's development of these ideas (n. 2), 143-4.

36 This reading places us squarely within the territory set up by Vergil in Jupiter's prophecy of Rome's future extent (Aeneid 1.278-9), and echoed in e.g. Ovid, Fasti 1.85-6; 2.683-4; 4.832; 857-8.

37 Paradoxically for Pompey, his only ‘success’ at Rome in Lucan's text is his dream vision (uana imago 7.8) - the night before Pharsalus - of himself, watching Rome, watching (and cheering for) him, in his theatre (7.7-24).

38 This meaning of antrum remains available, despite the more ‘straightforward’ sense of ‘burial vault’ (see TLL 2.192.28-30). Cf. Caesar's visit to Alexander's antrum (10.22-3), and Augustus’ later trip.

39 Gideon Nisbet kindly drew my attention to the wide-ranging implications of the meanings of situs.

40 On Rome's garden tombs, see Purcell (n. 2), 188 and n. 4, and A. R. Littlewood, in MacDougall (n. 2), 12-13 (and briefly, Grimal [n. 26], 322-3). These ‘gardens’ should be read also in terms of Augustus’ landscaped Mausoleum. J. H. Miller's exploration of the simultaneously aporetic, placeless, and foundational natures of ‘the crypt’ (after Derrida) offers one more way of thinking about the grave as a bcus for both containment and indefinability (Topographies [Stanford, 1995], 301-11). On Lucan's ‘heroization’ of Pompey in this section, see e.g. R. Mayer, Lucan: Civil War VIII (Warminster, 1981), 187, 188. Pompey's ‘stoic’ apotheosis, of course, is given at 9.1-18. With Julio-Claudian hindsight, its futility is total.

41 Benjamin (n. 14), 303. Cf. J. Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing', in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London, 1978), 196-231.

42 Elena Theodorakopoulos reminded me of the usefulness of Catullus for Lucan's Troy. Nota here must be significant in the wider context of poem 68's emphasis on the name(lessness) of its dedicatee (68.50, 151).

43 For Nero as Rome's colonizer, and Rome as imperial domus, see Tacitus, Annals 15.37.

44 See Grimal (n. 26), 85 and Strabo 17.1.8. Tacitus suggests that Nero uses the ruins of his patria to redefine the city as rural parkland (Annals 15.42).

45 Regia might initially appear to be the most culturally loaded term that Lucan could have chosen (and therefore his sparse use of it could be both emphatic and intriguing), but as A. Winterling, Aula Caesaris: Studien zur Institutionalisierung des romischen Kaiserhofes in der Zeit von Augustus bis Commodus (31 v. Chr. - 192 n. Chr) (Munich, 1999) suggests, aula tends to function as a portmanteau for the whole imperial package - space and lifestyle - and in the first century CE at least, had negative connotations. Lucan uses aula on four further occasions (10.73, 115, 422, 440), and then uses domus (house) to stand for both the Ptolemaic dynasty (10.98, 414) and the palace (10.119, 335, 443, 460, 479, 481).

46 Cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.42 and Suetonius, Nero 31.1-2 on the Domus Aurea. Tacitus specifically comments that the Domus Aurea was a function of Rome's ruin ruind). Edwards’ important discussion of architecture and luxury rightly notes that Roman texts are unusually concerned with structural ethics (n. 11), 137-72. A grand and luxurious home could bring prestige, honouring guests through the display of wealth (and power) that was opened up to them, whilst at the same time this house might allow political opponents to raise charges of unwarranted ambitio against its owner (cf. Cicero, Pro Murena 76). As Edwards comments on Vitruvius, De Architectura 6.5.1-2, the terms regalia and basilica suggest anti-republican political aspirations (ibid.), 153, perhaps hinting at the crimen regni suggested by Vedius Pollio's Palatine house in Ovid's Fasti (6.643). Seneca's discussion of luxurious bath-houses (Ep. 86.6.7) highlights a sense of anxiety about ostentatious wealth without status, and his unease locates him in similar territory to Lucan's narrative voice here. By indulging in ‘Alexandrian’ luxury, Caesar divorces himself from republican auctoritas and thereby from acceptable public display.

47 On Lucan and closure, see Masters, J., Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile (Cambridge, 1992), 216-59Google Scholar.

48 On food, luxury, and identity, see Gowers, E., The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford, 1993), 18–22 Google Scholar; cf. 198-202 on Juvenal.

49 Hardie's reading of Vergil's ‘Cacus’ story in Aeneid 8 as a kind of ‘Roman cosmogony, functioning as a grand and universalizing prelude to the themes of human history that ensue’ (n. 30), 117, becomes important for Lucan's focus on temporal distortion. Perhaps here we are seeing a land of perverted cosmogony whereby Caesar's Egyptian reverie usurps ‘Roman’ (or at least Vergilian) mythic consciousness. Cacus’ regia might mimic the Underworld, as Hardie notes (ibid.), 112; Cleopatra's regia might, given the nature of Acoreus’ Nilo-centric historiography, invoke Anchises’ explication of the parade of future Rome's heroes at the river Lethe/Forgetfulness (Vergil, Aeneid 6.752-885). Cf. Wheeler (n. 23), 372-8, on Lucan's cosmological (if fragmentary) dialogue with Ovid.

50 Nee non et ratibus temptatur regia, qua se | protulit in medios audaci margine fluctus | luxuriosa domus. (‘And the palace was also under attack by ships, at the point where | this magnificent house projected out over the waves | with a daring aspect.’) (10.486-8). Lucan's use of fluctus blurs the definition of the kind of water, linking this building to a literary tradition of boundarydefying, corrupting edifices. E.g. Horace, Odes 2.18.15-22; cf. Pliny, N.H. 36.2-3. We could also read this back into Lucan's conceptualization of Pompey's grave in similar terms (8.795-9. 802-5, 838-40), which in turn evokes the widespread semina belli set out in book 1: 1.158-82, and particularly, non auro tectisue modus (‘there was no limit either to wealth or homes’) (1.163).