When Lucan set out to write an epic account of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, he had a number of textual predecessors to draw on, including Caesar’s own account of that very war. And yet despite the numerous points of convergence between the two texts and despite Lucan’s own demonstrable fascination with Caesar as historical actor and historical author, the question of Lucan’s reception of Caesar remains a crucial gap in modern scholarship. But this was not always the case. In the Renaissance, for example it seems to have been unthinkable to examine the work of one without recourse to the other; and even more suggestively, many scholars of that time seem to have found within Lucan’s stridently antityrannical epic a Caesarist voice. My project explores this long-standing question and, in doing so, I argue that Lucan both presupposes a reader intimately familiar with his predecessor’s account and marks Caesar’s text as a significant site of memory for the empire. My overarching goals are: (1) to reframe the way we approach the question by looking at Caesar’s Civil Wars not only as a historical source but also as a literary model model; and (2) to free such analysis of the assumption that Lucan’s reception of Caesar must be purely combative or antagonistic.