In the flourishing revival of commentaries on Lucan's Bellum Civile over the last two decades, Book VIII had not yet received an interest commensurate with its decisive importance in the overall structure of the poem: until now, the only comprehensive exegetical tools available to scholars remained those of J. P. Postgate (1917) and R. Mayer (1981), now inevitably dated.

This new commentary, accompanied by an extensive introduction, a critically revised text and a 'service' translation conceived as a first interpretive approach, aims to fill this gap not only by taking due account of the renewed scholarly debate on numerous aspects of Lucan's poem, but also by making the minute analysis of the text an opportunity to reconsider in a new light some traditional themes of Lucan's bibliography, from the relationship with historical sources to that with the practice of declamation, from the poet's political positions to his technical-scientific skills.

For these reasons, the volume is an opportunity for comparison and in-depth study not only for those who deal with Latin epics or the literature of the Neronian age, but also for historians and scholars of rhetoric.