How did Lucan work? On possible authorial variants in the Bellum civile

That authorial variants survive in the transmission of the works of Lucan is a hypothesis legitimated by some objective data, yet the problem has been given very little attention in research since the important discussion by Fraenkel (1926). The present paper offers an analysis of the question that starts from the cases already identified and discussed by Fraenkel, adding some examples newly identified here. In particular, the goal is not to discuss single cases evaluated separately, but rather to examine the distribution of suspected variants in coherent macro-systems, the shared ratio of which could offer a plausible way of establishing an authorial intervention. In their turn, the systems of variants proposed and discussed here allow us to advance hypotheses about Lucan's compositional method.