Lucus horridus - Emotional responses to 'northern' holy groves in Lucan and Tacitus (original) (raw)

The intertextual links between Lucan’s and Tacitus’ impressive ekphraseis of certain imagined northern groves have been recognised for a long time and discussed as evidence for the literary connections between different genres in the Late Julio-Claudian and Flavian contexts. Yet a hitherto unexplored aspect of these fascinating and rich passages is the emotional charge that is clearly present in each of them, though subtly manipulated by the writers to serve their more particular points in each context. Holy groves were also a longstanding part of the Roman religion, but during the troubled mid-first century CE, the sacred sites of northern peoples – located at least in the realms of imagination in wooded surroundings – the groves of Gauls (in the case of Lucan) and those among the Germani and Britons (in Tacitus) tend to emerge as compellingly (and perhaps compulsively) elaborated loci horridi. Reading the Lucanic (Bell. civ. 3.399-425) and Tacitean (Germ. 39; Ann. 1.61; 14.30) passages on Gallic and Germanic holy groves and bringing them into conversation not only with other relevant passages by the same authors but also with the modern theories of the ‘history of emotions’, I hope to cast new light on the role that natural loci horridi of the northern ritual space played in shaping Roman collective anxieties. These, I will argue, had much to do with the imperial power’s anxieties about the loyalties of their northern subjects and ostensible allies, as well as about the capacity of certain types of imagined landscapes to symbolise atavistic religion and resistance to Roman domination. ‘Fear’ is certainly one of the emotions evoked by these landscapes, but I hope to show that this blanket category covers a remarkable emotional range in these passages.