(Re)producing the Egyptian: arboricultural cultivation of the Roman State in Lucan's Civil War

This article examines the changing relationship between Rome and Egypt in Lucan’s Civil War. It applies philological and ideological analyses to the epic’s destabilisation and restabilisation of the body politic of the Roman state as discernible from two interrelated sets of imagery: firstly, the language of arboriculture and propagation as evoked by Virgil’s Georgics and Theocritus’s 17th Idyll; and, secondly, the mortuary treatments applied to Pompey’s body parts. Key to the restabilisation of the res publica is Caesar’s interpretation of Pompey’s remains, which reproduces Egypt as “Other” in relation to Rome while acknowledging its now enduring presence within the empire.