I speak of the Aeneid; when I wrote
verse, it was mother to me, it was nurse;
my work, without it, would not weigh an ounce.¹

So says Statius about the Aeneid ’s influence on him. These words, however, come not from his verse but from The Divine Comedy. When the character Statius encounters Dante and Virgil in Purgatory 21, he praises Virgil’s work and explains its religious importance for him. When living, Statius had secretly converted to Christianity because of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, which he took to foretell the birth of Christ.² As a result, Virgil was not only a defining poetic influence but a significant religious one as well: “Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian.”³

   Dante’s reinterpretations of Virgil’s Eclogue and of Statius’ religious life are of course anachronistic: Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue could not have foreseen the birth of Christ,⁴ nor was Statius a Christian convert.⁵ If, however, we set aside these ahistorical elements, the passage articulates ideas about poetic influence that are important for the study of the Thebaid. First, the encounter in the Purgatory dramatizes the influence that Virgil in fact had on Statius.⁶ Second, it exemplifies how poems can offer reinterpretations of earlier works. And finally, it illustrates how poets can engage in artistic rivalry even as they praise their predecessors and models.

   In this book, I will explore the relationship between the epics of Statius and Virgil, and argue that Statius’ Thebaid offers a critical reinterpretation of the politics and moral virtues of kingship in the Aeneid. The Thebaid uses the literary resources Virgil provides to examine the inadequacy of his presentation of one-man rule, as idealized in the figures of Aeneas and Augustus, the first princeps of Rome.

THE THEBAID AND THE AENEID

We do not have to rely on Dante for evidence that the Aeneid influenced
Statius deeply. The epilogue of the Thebaid provides explicit testimony:10⁷

   durabisne procul dominoque legere superstes,
o mihi bissenos multum uigilata per annos
Thebai? iam certe praesens tibi Fama benignum
strauit iter coepitque nouam monstrare futuris.
iam te magnanimus dignatur noscere Caesar,
Itala iam studio discit memoratque iuuentus.
uiue, precor; nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta,
sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora.
mox, tibi si quis adhuc praetendit nubila liuor,
occidet, et meriti post me referentur honores.⁸

                                                   (12.810–19)

Will you endure far off in the future and, having survived your master, will you be read, my Thebaid, on whom I have toiled through the night for twelve years? Surely attendant Fame has already laid a welcoming path for you and begun to show you, though young, to future generations. Already great-hearted Caesar deigns to know you; already Italian youth eagerly learn and recite you. Live on, I pray, and do not compete with the divine Aeneid. Rather follow at a distance and always revere its footprints. Soon, if any envy still spreads clouds in front of you, it will die, and deserved honors will be conferred after I am gone.

In this “perhaps the most explicit intertextual reference in Latin epic,”⁹ Statius likens his poem to Virgil’s: both were composed in twelve years’ time; both are somehow connected to the emperor.¹⁰ The image of the Thebaid trailing the Aeneid contains echoes of Virgil’s Eurydice following Orpheus out of the underworld (Georgics 4) and of Creusa following Aeneas out of Troy (Aeneid 2).¹¹ The seeming power of and reverence for the Aeneid, however, should not blind us to the ambitions that are also expressed.¹² Statius acknowledges the acclaim the Thebaid has already received, and he expects the epic to achieve its own well-deserved fame. In this assertion, he conveys something of the bravado that Ovid voices in the epilogue of the Metamorphoses, where he predicts his own immortality as a result of his epic.¹³

   This is not the only passage where Statius places his poem next to the Aeneid. His epitaph on the fallen warriors Hopleus and Dymas challenges us even more directly to evaluate his epic against Virgil’s. In book 10, the two men cross enemy lines at night to recover the bodies of their princes. The story is modeled particularly on the Nisus and Euryalus episode of Aeneid 9.¹⁴ In addition to their thematic and structural similarities, Statius points to the Virgilian background of his tale:

   uos quoque sacrati, quamuis mea carmina surgant
inferiore lyra, memores superabitis annos.
forsitan et comites non aspernabitur umbras
Euryalus Phrygiique admittet gloria Nisi.

                                    (10.445–8)

You too will be revered and outlive the years that remember, although my poems rise from an inferior lyre. And perhaps Euryalus will not scorn your shades as comrades, and the glory of Phrygian Nisus will welcome you.

   Not surprisingly, Statian scholarship has always been concerned with the Thebaid’s relationship to the Aeneid.¹⁶ Over the past twenty years, however, the nature of this interest has evolved. While earlier research concentrated on identifying Statius’ sources,¹⁷ often as a way to learn more about the structure and style of his poetry, more recent studies explore how the Thebaid engages in a creative dialogue with the Aeneid and other predecessor texts.¹⁸ Gordon Williams, for example, described this dynamic interaction as follows:

In a curious way [Statius’] communication with the reader is not mediated at the level of the text; instead the poet is somehow in direct contact with the reader, above the head, as it were, of the text. Poet and reader are in a mutually agreed-on conspiracy concerning the text which exists, for this purpose, at the same level as a series of similar texts. The process of aemulatio demands this constant extraction of the reader from the imaginative world created in the text so that he can notice the manner of its creation and evaluate that manner against a series of predecessor texts.

   Though Williams downplays the significance of this relationship for the poem’s meaning, scholars such as Denis Feeney and Philip Hardie have shown the interpretive possibilities that an intertextual dialogue offers for our understanding of the Thebaid.²¹ Hardie’s Epic Successors of Virgil, in particular, demonstrates that we must see epicists after Virgil as post-Virgilian, not just in their use of poetic elements from Virgil but in their dialogue with, their criticism of, and their reaction to the Aeneid:²²

The successors to Virgil, at once respectful and rebellious, constructed a space for themselves through a “creative imitation” that exploited the energies and tensions called up but not finally expended or resolved in the Aeneid.²³

   Indeed the interaction between the two epics has also affected the way that modern critics approach the Thebaid. Just as readings of the Aeneid so often depend on how we understand Aeneas’ slaying of Turnus, so readings of the Thebaid rest on how we view Theseus’ slaughter of Creon, as Susanna Braund has shown.²⁴ Two poles of Statian interpretation have resulted that mirror those of Virgilian scholarship:²⁵ one (“pessimism”) sees Theseus as a disturbing character, and the Thebaid as commenting negatively on contemporary political issues. Dominik and McGuire provide the strongest articulations of this position.²⁶ The other pole (“optimism”) reads Theseus at the end of the Thebaid as a positive force and often associates him to some extent with the emperor Domitian or the Flavian restoration of peace after the civil wars of 69 CE. This second view is dominant now, particularly in the major book-length studies of Vessey, Ripoll, Franchet d’Espèrey, and Delarue.²⁷ The last three represent an apparent trend in French criticism of the Thebaid that views the end of the epic as a return to morality, an adaptation of Virgilian pietas to a Flavian world, where humanitas is the defining ideal.

   Both sides of the debate have compelling arguments, but neither is fully satisfying. In part, this is because they are predicated, implicitly or explicitly, on Statius’ attitude toward Domitian’s reign or that of the Flavians.²⁸ Dominik, for example, argues from a “pessimistic” stance that the Thebaid offers a withering critique of Domitian the tyrant.²⁹ But to do so, he downplays the potentially positive ramifications of Theseus’ actions and reads the seemingly laudatory statements about Domitian in Statius’ Silvae and Thebaid as heavily ironic.³⁰ Conversely the “optimistic” interpretation views the Flavian restoration after the civil wars of 68–9 CE as such a great achievement that, despite any of Domitian’s shortcomings, Statius would support the emperor to safeguard Flavian peace. They thus minimize the seemingly troubling aspects of Theseus, Jupiter, and the ending of the Thebaid, and offer what amounts to a positive Flavian interpretation.³¹ There is of course a range of readings between these poles, represented by Ahl, Feeney, Hardie, Henderson, and others.³² The meaning of the poem is therefore still contested.

   Interpretation of the Thebaid is thus centrally concerned with the epic’s engagement with the Aeneid,³³ yet there is no consensus on what that engagement means.³⁴ It is my contention that the need to understand the Thebaid as a reflection (either positive or negative) of Domitian detracts from a more fundamental dialogue. There is a significant political component to the Thebaid. It lies, however, not in the immediate context of Statius’ irretrievable historical attitude toward Domitian and the Flavians, but in the Thebaid’s interaction with the presentation of kingship and the Principate at the heart of the Aeneid. I will show that the Thebaid offers a critique of the Aeneid, one that is based on the moral virtues so important in the “optimistic” readings of the poem, yet also deeply implicated in the political dialogue about monarchic power, which is central to the “pessimistic” line of interpretation. The debates about virtue and power are inextricably entwined.

STATIAN INTERTEXTUALITY

To make such an argument requires certain assumptions about how one poem interacts with another – that is, about its allusive or intertextual quality. In interpreting this well-demonstrated aspect of the Thebaid,³⁵ I start from the position that to make sense of allusions or intertexts,³⁶ it is not necessary to discover Statius’ intentions,³⁷ which are ultimately irretrievable and thus cannot be used to endorse one understanding of an intertext over another. Rather the reader identifies intertexts and then ponders how they affect the meaning of the primary (or “target”) text. The heightened role of the reader that results does not mean that any interpretation can thus be validated, since interpretation is still limited by its ability to convince. When reading the Thebaid, we have at least one crucial guideline: if we are to search for intertexts, we must be centrally concerned with the Aeneid. This is the work that the passages in Thebaid 10 and 12 point us to, and this is the text that had the greatest impact on early Imperial epic.

   We might conceive of the relationship between Statius and Virgil as comparable to that between Virgil and Homer. Just as Homer’s epics had a defining influence on the nature, structure, and theme of Virgil’s, so the Aeneid had a similar effect on Statius’ poem. Joseph Farrell has described the intertextuality of the Aeneid in terms that could be transferred profitably to the Thebaid:

Vergil sets in motion a process whereby he actively enlists the reader’s cooperation in creating, or better, discovering intertextual relationships between the texts in question. He will not have foreseen them all himself, but he will have “deliberately” set in motion a process that extends his imitation of Homer well beyond his conscious design and will by implication have given his authorial approval to whatever the reader may perceive. The reader still has the burden of making sense out of whatever s/he notices, and this can be done well or badly, and other readers may accept or deny what s/he comes up with. But the apparent fact that Vergil’s poetry encourages the perception of intertextual phenomena seems to me the factor that liberates the reader from concern with nothing but what s/he can feel the poet “intended” his allusion to accomplish, or even whether he intended all of them at all.⁴⁰

   To be sure, the Thebaid is an immensely erudite poem that has many other important intertexts, most notably Homeric epic, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s De Bello Civili, and Greek and Senecan tragedy.⁴¹ These works will contribute to any intertextual reading of the poem, and their influence could be fruitfully pursued on their own. But while I will consider these and other texts, they will be brought to bear on the larger question of how the “meaning” of the Thebaid is affected when it is read primarily against the Aeneid with its moral and political concerns.

   In arguing for such an intertextual interpretation of the Thebaid, I am by necessity assuming a reading of Virgil’s epic to which Statius’ poem reacts. But which Aeneid – the optimistic or pessimistic? Or one somewhere in between? This question is particularly pressing because of the intense debate over the meaning of Virgil’s epic that has been conducted over the past forty years.

   There can be no doubt that the Aeneid has an “Augustan”⁴² (“optimistic” or “public”) voice.⁴³ It offers an ordered and teleological view of the world, in which Jupiter provides control over the cosmos, Rome rises to world domination, and Augustus represents an idealized ruler. This reading has clearly dominated the poem’s reception since antiquity. And even if the poem was written during (and thus only witnessed) the beginning of Augustus’ reign, it was generally taken by posterity to idealize the entire Augustan age.

   But there are elements in the Aeneid that seem to work against this Augustan voice, leading to “ambivalent” (or “pessimistic”)⁴⁴ interpretations. Parry saw a “private” voice, Lyne “further voices.”⁴⁵ Such readings challenge the stability of the Augustan voice, and are especially interested in the workings of passions such as furor, in subversive figures such as Juno and Allecto, and in events that question fate, Jupiter’s control, and the moral ideals of the Augustan voice.

   Whether Statius read the Aeneid ambivalently or as an Augustan poem, we simply cannot know. What is clear, however, is that the Thebaid explores and expands those troubling elements that challenge the Aeneid ’s Augustan voice (which I will often, for convenience, refer to as the “Augustan Aeneid ”). I will argue in this book that the Thebaid shows the problems of this Augustan voice and its moral presentation of kingship, and it does so by exploiting troubles adumbrated in the Aeneid itself.

   In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine the story of Coroebus from book 1. It provides an interesting entry point into my interpretation, and I will argue that it functions as a programmatic passage that reveals some important ways that the Thebaid engages the Augustan Aeneid.

THE COROEBUS NARRATIVE

Near the end of book 1, the Argive king Adrastus explains to his newly arrived guests Polynices and Tydeus why the Argives annually celebrate the god Apollo. He tells the following tale (1.557–668): long ago when Apollo came to Argos to seek expiation for his slaying of the Python, he raped the king’s daughter.⁴⁶ She gave birth to a son in secret and handed him over to shepherds to raise. When she learned that the baby was killed by a pack of dogs, she was so overwhelmed with grief and guilt that she confessed the illegitimate child to her father (the king) and was subsequently executed. In mourning,⁴⁷ Apollo sent a vicious child-eating monster to terrorize Argos. A heroic youth named Coroebus killed the monster. Apollo was enraged, cast a plague upon the city and demanded the monster’s killer. Coroebus dutifully presented himself to Apollo, offering his life in return for the safety of his people. Apollo was stunned. He drove the plague from Argos but decided to spare the youth. As a result, the Argives instituted an annual festival for Apollo.

   It is a horrifying tale whose meaning has generated much debate.⁴⁸ Though earlier critics objected to its presence as a digressive impertinence,⁴⁹ it has more recently been taken as foregrounding important events of the epic as a whole.⁵⁰ Interpreters of the Coroebus episode have read the story as a demonstration of the immorality of Apollo and the gods,⁵¹ as an exhibition of the power of pietas,⁵² and as a message to Adrastus and the Argives that they should not participate in the Theban war.⁵³

   While this tale certainly has important ramifications for the narrative, and while there are many connections between it and the Thebaid as a whole,⁵⁴ these interpretations leave an important question largely unaddressed: Why do the Argives so proudly celebrate Apollo as their protector (1.552–5, 694–5) when, in Adrastus’ inset narrative, the god is depicted as exceedingly violent and thoroughly indifferent to the suffering of the Argives? I will argue that the answer to this question has important implications for the role of pietas throughout the Thebaid because the Coroebus tale signals the irrelevance of pietas in this post-Virgilian epic world.⁵⁵ Moreover, through its intertextual dialogue with Virgil (that focuses especially on the ambivalent potential of Aeneas’ slaying of Turnus), the episode offers a critique of the Aeneid ’s representation of Aeneas and of kingship.

Pietas and Nefas

Pietas, the quintessential Roman virtue meaning “duty to one’s family, state, and gods,” lies at the heart of Adrastus’ narrative. Psamathe, the woman raped by Apollo, is introduced as a character closely associated with this virtue: pios seruabat . . . penates (“she maintained a pious home,” 1.572),⁵⁶ and Coroebus’ slaughter of Apollo’s monstrum is described as an act of pietas by the narrator Adrastus (non tu pia degener arma/ occulis, “you do not disgracefully hide your pious weapons,” 1.639–40). Moreover, Coroebus lays special claim to pietas at the climax of the episode (1.644).⁵⁷