And yet, blacken his character as he may, he feels that greatness. From the moment of his brilliant characterization of Caesar in the first book[273] we feel we have a man who knows what he desires and will shrink from nothing to attain his ends; he 'thinks naught yet done while aught remains to do',[274] he 'strikes fear into men's hearts because he knows not the meaning of fear',[275] and through all the melodramatic rhetoric with which he addresses his soldiers, there shines clear the spirit of a great leader of men. Whoever was intended by the poet for his hero, the fact remains that Caesar dominates the poem as none save the hero should do. He is the hero of the _Pharsalia_ as Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_.[276] It is through him above all that Lucan retains our interest. The result is fatal for the proper proportion of the plot. Lucan does not actually alienate our sympathies from the republic, but, whatever our moral judgement on the conflict may be, our interest centres on Caesar, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the true tragedy of the epic would have come with his death. The _Pharsalia_ fails of its object as a republican epic; its success comes largely from an unintended quarter. What the exact scale of the poem was meant to be it is hard to say. Vergil had set the precedent for an epic of twelve books, and it is not improbable that Lucan would have followed his example. On the other hand, if Cato and Caesar had both to be killed in the last two books, great compression would have been necessary. In view of the diffuseness of Lucan's rhetoric, and the rambling nature of his narrative, it is more than probable that the epic would have exceeded the limit of twelve books and been a formidable rival in bulk to the _Punica_ of Silius Italicus. On the other hand, the last seven books of the existing poem are unrevised, and may have been destined for abridgement. There is so much that is irrelevant that the task would have been easy. But it is not for the plot that Lucan's epic is read. It has won immortality by the brilliance of its rhetoric, its unsurpassed epigrams, its clear-cut summaries of character, its biting satire, and its outbursts of lofty political enthusiasm. These features stand out pre-eminent and atone for its astounding errors of taste, its strained hyperbole, its foolish digression. Lucan fails to make his actors live as they move through his pages; their actions and their speeches are alike theatrical; he has no dramatic power. But he can sum up their characters in burning lines that live through all time and have few parallels in literature. And these pictures are in all essentials surprisingly just and accurate. His affection for Pompey and the demands of his plot presented strong temptations to exalt his character at the expense of historical truth. Yet what can be more just than the famous lines of the first book, where his character is set against Caesar's? (129):