" This book is a well-researched discussion of Lucan' s extremely challenging poem on the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey. Working from a fine-grained analysis of one formal aspect of the poem, Lucan' s use of the literary trope of apostrophe, the author goes on to investigate what the use of apostrophe might indicate about the philosophical outlook of Lucan' s dark picture of the Civil War and the Empire that grew out of it." -- Catherine Connors, University of Washington