This book is a lively and provocative reading of the Roman poet Lucan (A.D. 39–65) which casts new light on the Pharsalia, his epic poem and only surviving work. The distinguished classicist W. R. Johnson demonstrates both the need to understand Lucan's epic on its own terms and the injustice of dismissing it as an inferior version of the Aeneid.

Johnson looks closely at Lucan's treatment of the central figures of the epic, focusing on Lucan's sardonic style and fascination with horror. He concentrates on four larger-than-life figures—Erichtho, Cato, Pompey, and Caesar—whom he regards as central to Lucan's vision of the fall of the Republic; through them, he addresses the poem's themes and techniques. Placing special emphasis on the black farce characteristic of the poem, Johnson also deals with the grotesque aspects (for example, the snakes and the witch) that other critics have tended to ignore or to underplay as mere rhetoric.

W. R. Johnson is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. His books include Lucretius and the Modern World; Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style; Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"; and, also in the series Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in "Epistles" 1.

Momentary Monsters is entertaining, bristling with good humor and insight, and properly skeptical about the vagaries of the current literary establishment, both classical and modern.