Thunder and Lament is the first book-length study of Lucan's engagement with the Homeric poems and the works of early Latin epic. By focusing on Lucan's effort to "surpass the poets of old" - a phrase the poet Statius would use of his achievement - this study deepens our appreciation of Lucan's poetic accomplishment and of the tensions between beginning and ending that lie at the heart of the epic genre. Statius also read Lucan as a poet who both "thunders" and "laments", and Joseph argues that Lucan closes off epic's beginnings through gestures of thundering poetic violence and also through a transformation and completion of the conventional epic mode of lament. Equipped with these two registers of closure, each engaging and taking aim at epic's primal texts, Lucan positions the Pharsalia as epic's final song.