"No reasonable judgment can rank Lucan among the world's great epic poets. He does not tell his story well: the successive episodes are neither skilfully connected nor well proportioned. His frequent digressions are often irrelevant and much too long. His geographical descriptions are obscure and wearisome. His account of military operations is hard to follow: he is concise where detail is needed and dwells at length on trivial or irrelevant matters. To him the narrative is of secondary importance: his interest lies elsewhere; the words said matter more in his view than the things done. His power and force are undeniable; but he lacks the chief gifts that a great epic poet must possess. He ventured on one innovation which seemed bold to his contemporaries. He discarded all that supernatural machinery which Virgil had taken over from Homer. The gods play no part in the action; Venus never comes down from Olympus to protect Caesar, her descendant. The later epic poets did not follow Lucan's example in this matter; but there is no doubt that he was right. He was dealing with Roman history and with fairly recent events; and the introduction of the gods as actors must have been grotesque. [...] The truth is, that Lucan is not a poet in the sense in which Lucretius and Virgil are poets; he is read, not for any poetical quality but for his rhetorical invective and his pungent epigrams. His diction and rhythm are monotonous: he makes no attempt to imitate the elaborate harmonies of Virgil. It appears that his purpose is less to charm his readers than to startle them and make their flesh creep; and with this object he has constant recourse to extravagant exaggeration or repulsive detail. Whether he would have written better if he had lived longer we cannot tell; but, for all his faults, he won a high reputation among his own countrymen; and Statius and Martial, writing long after his death, do not scruple to name him as the writer of Latin epic poetry who comes nearest to Virgil."