Quantum mutati! Hector, Pompey, and the Fortune of a Mut(il)ation

Abstract This article collects various passages of the Pharsalia in which Lucan alludes to the apparition of Hector’s mutilated shade, portrayed by Aeneas in Aeneid 2 as deeply changed from the relentless hero of the Iliad , and uses it as a model for the tragic fall from glory that republican Rome and Pompey have undergone throughout the civil war. Following up on metapoetic interpretations of Aeneas’ dream, it is then argued that in the Pharsalia , too, Hector’s ghost functions as an intertextual marker flagging up the Virgilian model, and symbolises the transition from a type of epic aimed at celebrating the winners to Lucan’s epic of the losers.