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The Site of the Battle of Pharsalia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
The long and heated controversy on the site of the great battle seems drawing to a conclusion. The disquisitions of Dr. Rice Holmes first in the Classical Quarterly ii (1908) pp. 271-292, and secondly, improved and strengthened, in the third volume of his ‘Roman Republic’ (1923) pp. 452-467, and the topographical researches and arguments of Mr. F. L. Lucas, Annual of the British School at Athens, no. xxiv, pp. 34-53, have shown, I think, beyond cavil that it was fought on the north side of the Enipeus and that the theories of Leake, Mommsen, Heuzey, Stoffel, Kromayer and other advocates of a site to its south may be dismissed again to the obscurity from which they never should have emerged. Of these the reconstruction of Colonel Stoffel 1887 (against which I vainly protested in 1896, as Dr. Holmes records), had the longest reign, as might have been expected from the imposing confidence of its author and the excellence of the plans and views in his atlas. Sir Wm. Napier in Long's Decline of the Roman Republic, v, 220 sq., General von Göler, 1880, and Mr. B. Perrin, 1885 (American Journal of Philology, vi, pp. 170-189) had maintained that the battle could not have been fought to the south of the river; but the self-sufficient French Colonel knew or cared nothing about their contentions. The schemes of the two experts were vitiated by the lack of trustworthy maps; but Mr. Perrin's presentation of his results ‘that the camps both of Pompey and Caesar were on the side of the Enipeus toward Larissa and that the camp of Pompey was on the southern-slope of the hills bounding the northern edge of the Pharsalian plain’ needed but a little precision in details to bring it into exact accord with the most recent investigations.
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- Copyright © J. P.Postgate1922. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
References
page 187 note 1 ‘As Col. Stoffel's theory must be rejected and as strategical reasons imperatively forbid the assumption of a site in the open south of the Little Tchinarli it only remains to suppose that Pompey's camp was somewhere on the range of hills to the north of the plain and that the battle was thus fought between them and the river.’ Historical Introduction to my edition of Lucan vii, p. xxxvii.
page 187 note 2 Op. cit. p. 183.
page 187 note 3 I shall assume that the two discussions with the maps accompanying them are accessible to my readers.
page 189 note 1 ‘In proxima alluuie.’ The ‘eluuie’ of many editors is without authority.
page 189 note 2 ‘A bad geographer’ Holmes, p. 456. ‘Geographically so disreputable,’ Lucas, p. 36.
page 189 note 3 Mr. Lucas names this place Palaiopharsalos, an innovation which is neither good Greek nor good Latin. The Greek is Παλαιφάρσαλος (or Παλαιὰ Φάρσαλος), like Παλαίβυβλος, Παλαιγράρος, Παλαίπαφος, Παλαίτυρος, etc. and the Latin Palaepharsalus, until we descend down to Eutropius in the fourth century A.D.
page 190 note 1 Similarly in ch. 84, 2, to which Dr. Holmes also refers, ‘ut progrederetur a cestris suis collibusque Pompeianis aciem subiceret.’