[Usyd_Classics_Events] CAH Seminar 11th May Slingsby / Harris

[Tamara Neal]

Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History,

We are delighted to invite you to the next lecture in our Semester 1, 2026 Classics and Ancient History research seminar series. This will be a special double act focusing on Lucan’s Bellum Civile.


Monday 11th May 2026 12.15pm

V. Gordon Childe Boardroom, Madsen Building Level 2.

Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/89574510422

Chair Assoc. Prof. Bob Cowan

Presenters Elisabeth Slingsby and Kimberly Harris  (University of Sydney)

Elisabeth will be speaking on Wars More than Civil? Pompey’s Foreign Allies and the Boundaries of Bellum Civile.

Abstract:
In the third book of De Bello Civili, Lucan's list of the foreign peoples in the army of Cn. Pompeius Magnus culminates with the bleak observation: vincendum pariter Pharsalia praestitit orbem, Pharsalia presented Caesar the whole world to conquer at once. Lucan is here alluding to the scale of C. Julius Caesar's impending victory at the Battle of Pharsalus, in which he will vanquish Pompey and his multinational army. From the opening line of De Bello Civili, the violence between Caesar and Pompey is consistently framed as war between kin, but the nature of the clash between Caesar and Pompey's non-Roman allies is less definitive. Is Caesar's conquest of the rest of the world an extension of his civil war with Pompey, or a kind of external war inextricably bound up with it?

My proposed answer to this question rests on an examination of Pompey's non-Roman troops. I contend that Lucan portrays these troops as embroiled in an external war with Rome, by giving the impression that allying with Pompey forced them to relive battles where they had fought against their own foreign foes. To demonstrate this, I will analyse allusions to prior conflicts in the catalogue of Pompey's troops in Book Three and the prelude to the Battle of Pharsalus in Book Seven. By establishing the ways in which Lucan insinuates that the horrors of the past have returned to plague Pompey's foreign troops, I will argue that, to Lucan, the war between Caesar and Pompey was not only 'more than civil' because they were members of the same extended family. This designation was also appropriate because they were fighting an external war where the adversary, and the prize, was the entire world.


Bio: Elisabeth is a sessional lecturer in the Discipline of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and in the National School of Arts and Humanities at the Australian Catholic University. Her research focusses on the representation of warfare in Latin and Greek literature. In particular, she is interested in the roles of exemplarity and emotion in the memorialisation of combatants and commanders.

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Kim will be speaking on Pompey as failed autocrat: Rethinking the metaphor of Pompey’s beheading in De bello civili.

Abstract:

Pompey’s mutilated corpse in De bello civili has often been read as symbolic of the death of the Roman Republic. More recently, Julia Mebane has analysed Pompey’s beheading in De bello civili 8 as a metaphor for a mutiny of the Roman body politic. She has argued that Lucan employed this metaphor to call into question the legitimacy of autocracy as a political system and argues for a rehabilitation of Pompey as a Republican hero after his death. This paper is situated within the existing scholarship on the symbolism of Pompey’s assassination and extends Mebane’s argument by examining Pompey as a model for weak/failed autocratic leadership. It is my contention that an alternate figurative meaning of Pompey’s beheading can be understood by reading Pompey as an aspiring autocrat. This paper will examine the contest between Pompey and Caesar for regnum and make some suggestions about the metaphorical potential of Pompey’s beheading as a criticism of sole rule.

Bio: Dr. Kim Harris is a casual academic at University of Sydney and University of New South Wales. She completed her PhD last year at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Prof. Paul Roche and Dr. Elly Cowan. Her research interests include political thought and rhetoric in the late Republic and early imperial period and political expression under tyranny and autocracy.



We look forward to seeing you.

Tamara


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DR TAMARA NEAL FHEA | Lecturer in Ancient Greek (Education Focused) | Academic Advisor
Classics & Ancient History | School of Philosophical & Historical Inquiry | Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
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