This is the first full-scale English edition of Lucan, De Bello Ciuili Book I in nearly seventy years. This volume includes a full introduction which places the book and the poem in their most important contexts. Introductory discussions include the political milieu of the poem and its production, the overall structure of De Bello Ciuili, its relationship to earlier and contemporary literature, its reworking of its historical subject matter, its interaction with Latin historiography, stoic elements in the first book, the influence of rhetoric, and Lucan's language and style. The commentary places particular emphasis upon several aspects of Lucan's poem: the interaction of images, word, and phrases in the book with the overall themes of the poem and their relevance to Lucan's language and epic technique; Lucan's engagement with earlier literature, examined not only for the contextual light this sheds on his aims as a poet and his style as a Latin author, but for the interpretative possibilities arising out of this intertextual programme; Lucan's engagement with near-contemporary literature, particularly Senecan tragedy' and the poem's influence upon Flavian epic. Book jacket.