Cursed Fields: how Pharsalus and Sekigahara remember the dead | Media.com

“… let Pharsalia's fields swell with curses, Hannibal's shade glut on blood—"&nbsp;(Lucan, Civil War 1.38-9 tr. M. Fox)Unlike other epic poems that praise heroes and how wonderful they are, Lucan's Civil War starts with all doom and gloom. I was particularly struck by this description for Pharsalus, where Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great had fought an epic battle in 48 BCE. The phrase was so ominous that I looked up the Latin in Loeb Classical Library.In the Latin, the emphasis feels even heavier:… diros Pharsalia camposInpleat et Poeni saturentur sanguine manes;(Loeb Classical Library 220)diros is a masculine accusative plural adjective of dirus, meaning fearful, awful or horrible. Simply saying “awful Pharsalian fields” does not quite do justice here. I love the choice of Fox’s translation “swell with curses”. The fields are contaminated with the blood of the civil war. This, in turn, pleases Poeni manes “the ghosts of the Carthaginians”, who are described as being “saturated with blood”. &nbsp;Lucan thus invokes the image of Rome’s former enemies taking grim pleasure in Romans slaughtering one another. Hannibal himself is not mentioned in the Latin, but Fox may have chosen to name the most famous Carthaginian for modern readers, or perhaps simply because “Hannibal” sounded better in the verse. Nonetheless, when I read the Latin, I imagined thousands of ghostly faces hovering over Pharsalus.The image of a battlefield filled with curses led my thoughts to another battlefield: Sekigahara. The battle of Sekigahara in 1600 was a seismic event every Japanese person knows about. It brought an end to the Sengoku, or “Warring States”, period, and marked the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate, which would rule Japan for over two and a half centuries. Tens of thousands of people are said to have been killed in a single day in the battle. Today, the battlefield is preserved as a historical heritage site. Yet history does not fully contain the violence that unfolded there. Due to the sheer number of casualties, Sekigahara is also surrounded by countless stories of supernatural experiences, as if the spirits of the dead still linger on the plain. Like Pharsalus in Lucan’s imagination, Sekigahara is not merely a place where people once died, it is a landscape saturated with memory.Lucan did not describe Pharsalus as glorious or heroic. He imagined it cursed, swollen with blood, pleasing even Rome’s ancient enemies, and he did not praise Julius Caesar for winning the civil war. Sekigahara carries a similar unease. The battle may have unified Japan, but the land itself seems unwilling to forget the price of that unity. In this sense, Lucan’s Pharsalus and Japan’s Sekigahara speak the same language: the language of places where history ends, and memory begins.&nbsp;References:Lucan. Civil War. Penguin Classics, 2012. ISBN: 9780143106234Lucan. The Civil War (Pharsalia). Loeb Classical Library 220, 1928. ISBN: 9780674992429

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