Chapter VI · STATIUS

Statius and his father—Dates of publication—Lost works—Friends—His times—The Thebaid and its twelve books—Mythology—Sources—Influence of Antimachus and Virgil—Achilleid—His epic fame—Siluae—Qualities of his occasional poems—Style—Artificiality and conceits—Compounds and Similes—Metre.

P. Papinius Statius,⁠[1369] a Neapolitan whose miscellaneous poems reflect many aspects of Rome in the Flavian age, is, even if judged solely by his posthumous influence, a considerable figure in the annals of epic. For his life our main source of information lies in his own Siluae. The date of his birth is a matter of inference, and the tendency is now to place it earlier than once was common. A passage formerly taken to mean that he was on the threshold of life at his father’s death does not really bear that sense,⁠[1370] and, while a reference to his own old age (senium)⁠[1371] in the Siluae need not be literally pressed, it is most likely that these poems were written in mature years. For several reasons his birth-date cannot be put later than A.D. 45. His native town was Naples (mea Parthenope, Silv. I. ii. 260-261), a meeting-place of Greek and Roman culture, where his father, a man of good family, was a celebrated teacher. The lament (epicedion) on his death (Silv. V. iii.) tells how his father possessed poetic skill, had won victorious contests in poetry, kept a popular school, turned out pupils successful in after life, trained his son’s taste, and encouraged the epic on Thebes. The elder Statius’s affection for his wife, the poet’s mother, was only one of many endearing qualities which explain the depth of the younger man’s grief in bereavement. Before his father’s death Statius had begun to make a mark. He had won the prize for poetry at the Neapolitan Augustalia. At Rome he made money by such a libretto as that on Agaue supplied to the actor Paris,⁠[1372] and his recitationes from his works attracted good audiences.⁠[1373] Statius senior certainly did not die till after the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, because a passage in the Siluae (V. iii. 205) shows that he contemplated a poem on it, as he had already celebrated the destruction in 69 of the temples on the Capitol. The passage reads as if he did not long survive the eruption; and yet, since he encouraged his son’s work on the Thebaid (Silv. V. iii. 233), he must have lived an appreciable time beyond its inception in A.D. 80. However that may be, he was no longer alive at the time of Statius’s memorable triumph in the Alban competition instituted by Domitian, and the earliest date assignable to this success with a poem on the emperor’s exploits is 89.

Meanwhile (apart from recitations) none of Statius’s extant work had been published; but he had long been elaborating his epic on the seven champions against Thebes. That poem, the Thebaid, was issued in twelve books shortly before⁠[1374] the publication of the first book of the Siluae, which can be dated A.D. 92. Certain passages,⁠[1375] it is true, in the Siluae refer to the author as still at work on the Thebaid; but they must be assumed to have been written, though not published, before 92. The poet’s farewell to a task of twelve years bears interesting testimony to his speculation on its claim to lasting renown, his complimentary attitude to Domitian, his knowledge that his own writings were being already studied, and above all his worshipful reverence for Virgil, the inspirer of his epic style:

Attracted from the subject of Thebes to “the tale of Troy divine,” he was yet to attempt another epic; but, for an interval, he was free to collect some of his miscellaneous poems, and the first book of the Siluae was issued in the same year, as is inferred from its prefatory reference to the death of Rutilius Gallicus, prefect of Rome, whose recovery from illness is the theme of the fourth poem. This book, dedicated to the poet Stella, whose marriage is celebrated in the second poem, was followed during the poet’s lifetime by II, III and IV, all addressed to different friends. Book IV can be definitely dated, as its opening piece celebrates Domitian’s seventeenth consulate: the book is assigned to the summer of A.D. 95. It is a fair surmise that Book II had been published in 93 and Book III in 94. Book V may have been posthumously issued; for its preface to Abascantus bears solely on the first poem, and the fifth is incomplete.

Statius writes as if his attempted epic on Achilles had to yield place to the idea of an Italian subject—the wars of Domitian.⁠[1377] He had begun his Achilleid in 95,⁠[1378] and although it had not gone far beyond a single book, he gave public readings from it.⁠[1379] But the final interruption came with his death. The presumption is that Statius did not outlive Domitian, whose assassination occurred in 96.

The lost works of Statius are the pantomime Agaue from the tragic Theban story of Pentheus; the epic on the German campaign of Domitian, of which four hexameters survive;⁠[1380] and an epistle concerning the Thebaid sent to Vibius Maximus, the recipient of Statius’s Sapphics (Silv. IV. vii.), and an epitomator of Livy.⁠[1381] From the ode to him and the allusion in the preface of Siluae, Book IV, we realize that Statius admired his literary power and felt gratitude for his inspiring encouragement while the Thebaid was being written.

Statius’s love for his native Naples is obvious in his works. It was thither that he repaired towards the end of his life, mortified by his defeat in the Capitoline contest of 94, though sustained by the sympathy of his wife Claudia. But he had lived much in Rome and at the Alban villa which he owed to the emperor. His circle of friends was representative of the age. It included Domitian himself, whom he flattered far more than was justified by the grant of a special water-supply or by invitations to dinner. It included also men prominent in public life like the prefect Rutilius, imperial secretaries like Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, or men who combined literary tastes with national service, like the poet Arruntius Stella who rose to the consulship, and the historian Vibius Maximus who under Trajan became governor of Egypt. It is plain that Statius and Martial belonged to the same social grade; for Etruscus, Stella, and Lucan’s widow Polla appear in the works of both; and among other friends in common were Atedius Melior and Novius Vindex. But neither poet names the other, and the silence may be due to dislike.

The age was a tranquil one, favourable to aesthetic refinement rather than powerful creation; and Statius is its perfect counterpart in his quiet learning, power of polished expression, appreciation of beautiful scenes and beautiful works of art. We can discern his warmth of heart in the love he bears his father and his wife, and in his sorrow over the death of the little boy whom he adopted; for his marriage to Claudia, a widow with a daughter, proved childless. Very appropriately he contrasts a busy man of affairs with himself, a poet idly touching his lyre, but filled with a scholar’s veneration for Virgil:

We may rest assured that, while courtier-like he felt compelled to feign a celestial rapture in being a guest at Domitian’s table⁠[1383] and to suggest that it outshone the Homeric banquet of King Alcinous or the Virgilian banquet of Queen Dido, still his secret preference must have been for some such feast of reason and flow of soul as he was safe to find when he dined with his poet-friend Vindex.⁠[1384] At the board of that cultured connoisseur, gifted with unerring judgement of art-treasures, the menu—unlike that of Trimalchio in Petronius—did not consist of freakish whets to the appetite (ludibria uentris), but was in keeping with the literary talk and cheery jests which made a midwinter night fly⁠[1385]⁠—a night to mark with pearls (nox et Erythraeae Thetidos signanda lapillis). In these social surroundings we can best understand the personality of Statius.

One might feel a temptation to dismiss the Thebaid with a summary as brief as the twelve bald hexameters in the Codex Toletanus; but that would convey a beggarly impression of a narrative nearly 10,000⁠[1386] lines long, in which, despite dull tracts, there are vigorous incidents and great moments. If Statius had studied the construction and proportions of his story more exactly, if he had condensed some and rigidly excised others of his episodes, the Thebaid would have gained in unity and attractiveness, while his readers and his reputation might have been increased by the reappearance as separate poems of the best among the banished portions. The following analysis may serve to confirm this.

Book I. Statius makes a dull start with frigid professions of ignorance as to where in the Theban story he should begin, and with equally frigid flattery of Domitian. The requisite note of gloom is struck in the fiendish prayer of the self-blinded Oedipus to the Fury Tisiphone that she should estrange his sons Eteocles and Polynices, and ensure discord through Eteocles’s refusal to keep his promise of letting his brother reign for a year in his stead at Thebes. Sharing none of Lucan’s objections to divine interference in epic action, the poet describes a council of Gods attended by Demigods, Rivers and Winds at which ruinous war between Thebes and Argos is ordained. Polynices, the prince exiled from Thebes, reaches Argos and during a terrific storm fights with another stranger to the land, Tydeus, for shelter by the palace door. The two combatants are received by King Adrastus, become fast friends, and are recognized by their host as the Lion (Polynices) and the Boar (Tydeus), destined to be his sons-in-law. At a royal banquet they see the two princesses, their future brides:

The king’s tale of the dealings of Apollo with Argos owing to the death of the God’s child is a digression.

Book II. The woes of an accursed house work even beyond the grave. The ghost of Laius, father of Oedipus, escapes—to the envy of the other dead—from the lower world for the purpose of hardening Eteocles against his brother. Meanwhile at Argos there are wedding festivities, but also bad omens, when Argia is married to Polynices and Deipyle to Tydeus. The story of the fatal necklace of Harmonia worn by Argia is told incidentally. After twelve days of rejoicing, Polynices turns to his claims on Thebes:

Tydeus undertakes a mission to Thebes to require from Eteocles observance of his pact; but Eteocles refuses and plots to waylay the envoy on his way back by ordering an ambush of fifty men to await him. Tydeus’s fight against his foes in the pass is one of the most spirited and saga-like passages of the Thebaid. His challenge to the lurking assassins is given in ringing tones:

At the stone of the Sphinx he baffles their onset, slaying one after another:

One survivor is spared to take back the tidings to the treacherous king.

Book III. At the news there is sorrow in Thebes. To stir up Argos, Jupiter despatches Mars and overawes the gods into compliance with his will. The hush produced by his threats is likened to a windless calm in summer-time:

Exultant in his chariot, Mars is met and reproached by Venus in vain. Tydeus, battle-worn and wounded, presents himself at the council of King Adrastus in Argos and relates his adventure. The debate is “war or no war?” The seer Amphiaraus, when consulted, foresees disaster, and, though reluctant to reveal the worst, opposes the impetuosity of Capaneus. The seer’s speech when induced to break his silence is a forcible effort. Argia pleads for hostilities. Her speech has an effective close in human feeling: she would have her royal father consent to the war which is the heart’s desire of her husband; but she knows that, when the parting comes and the bugles sound for the men who march away, she would wish it otherwise.

Book IV. King Adrastus decides on war in the third spring after Polynices left Thebes. The leaders are Adrastus, Polynices, Tydeus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, Amphiaraus and Parthenopaeus. The description of the forces of these seven warriors against Thebes forms a dull catalogue of blended geography and mythology. At Thebes the dejected king consults the prophet Teiresias, who advocates recourse to the oracles of the dead in a forest of gloom comparable to Lucan’s eerie forest near Massilia. Statius conveys an appropriate sense of weirdness in his description:

From the sadness of the Argolic ghosts whom he evokes Teiresias infers an ultimate Theban victory. Bacchus, aiding Thebes, hinders the Argives’ march by a miraculous drought:

And amidst this anguish of the solstice they are guided to the one spring remaining in the land by Hypsipyle, once of Lemnos and now a nurse to a king’s child Opheltes or Archemorus. Suspecting no danger, she leaves the child, in order to show them the water more quickly.

Book V. King Adrastus is desirous of knowing who this benefactress is, and nearly 500 lines are devoted to the fortunes, past and present, of Hypsipyle. She relates the crime of the Lemnian women in murdering their menfolk, the consequences to herself of having surreptitiously saved her father, and the visit of Jason in the Argo. Statius here trespasses on the subject of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica; and it may be noted that while in the Thebaid Hypsipyle states that she was forced into a union with Jason, Valerius represents her as attracted into an amour by Jason’s looks.

The child Archemorus has been all this time left unattended, and another digression describes the venomous serpent which attacks him. Cries “like half-completed words in dreams” (qualia non totas peragunt insomnia uoces) are heard, and on her return the errant nurse finds the child dead. Against the furious anger of its father she is protected by the grateful Argives.

Book VI. The epic interest is considerably less in a book concerned first with the building of a funeral pyre and cremation of the child, and then with an elaborate account of the games in its honour—chariot-race, foot-race (“running,” remarks the poet, “is a useful accomplishment in war, if success fails one!”) quoits, boxing and wrestling.

Book VII. Jupiter is vexed that the Argives should delay the war by holding games—and readers may sympathize with Jupiter’s feeling in mid-epic. A further intervention is made by Mars and Bacchus. Eteocles hears of the Argive advance, and there follows a catalogue of the host, as pointed out by old Phorbas to Antigone, sister of the arch-opponents, while they look forth from a tower in Thebes. Jocasta, mother of Polynices, comes forth

to carry the olive branch (ramum oleae) into her son’s camp and make an appeal for peace. Polynices is touched; but, while he is wavering, Tydeus intervenes, bitterly recalling the treachery to which he had been subjected by Eteocles. The overtures fail: the Fury rouses the old passion for blood: fighting begins. A Theban warrior longs to slay Amphiaraus, counting other victims trivial in comparison. But another doom was appointed for him: Apollo diverts the fatal weapon to his charioteer, and takes the dead driver’s place, spreading death everywhere as the chariot careers on its dread path among bleeding corpses and dying men. Then by a solemn intuition Amphiaraus realizes the presence of Apollo and his own nearness to the brink of the other world:

Then came the mysterious passing, as the ground opened beneath the doomed man:

Book VIII. Excitement reigns in the lower world over the sudden descent of Amphiaraus; and the querulous utterances of Pluto, almost Lucianesque in their scoffing spirit, have a wholly different ring from the consistent solemnity of Virgil in Aeneid VI. The Argives are inwardly shaken and fall back: so there is joy in Thebes. Adrastus summons a council to choose a successor to the prophet. The battle is renewed on the Theban side by a sally, and a narrative of wounds and death ensues. The daughters of Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene, a pair of contrasting characters (par aliud morum), lament the sorrows of their house with divided sympathies in the conflict:

Real pathos marks the end of Ismene’s lover, Atys, the warrior brought home dying, with her name the only word on his chill lips.⁠[1398] Tydeus works havoc among the enemy, and sends whirling through the air helmets with heads inside (galeasque rotat per nubila plenas, 699). He and Melanippus mortally wound each other, and the book closes with the horrible spectacle of Tydeus gnawing the head of his adversary.

Book IX is mainly concerned with the valiancy of two heroes, Hippomedon and the young Arcadian Parthenopaeus, whose parting from his mother Atalanta formed a brief episode in Book IV. Stoutly defending the dead Tydeus, Hippomedon is tempted away by Tisiphone’s lying message that Adrastus is taken prisoner, and on returning discovers that the foe have secured his friend’s body. During Hippomedon’s subsequent deeds of prowess, he is opposed by the River-god Ismenus and is saved from drowning only to succumb on the bank under a rain of darts. Parthenopaeus signalizes himself by feats of archery. He is in the end, at the instigation of Mars, slain by Dryas, who is in turn slain by an invisible hand, deemed to be that of Diana herself. The book concludes with the dying behests of Parthenopaeus.

Book X. Theban troops, inspirited by Eteocles’s harangue, plan to surround the Argives and prevent a retreat; but are themselves overcome by a divinely contrived sleep and surprised by the Argives, who break their lines and do much slaughter. At daybreak a fierce attack is delivered on Thebes, when Creon’s son Menoeceus devotes himself for his city, plunging to death from a rampart-tower. Capaneus, defiantly scaling the town walls, is struck dead by Jupiter’s thunderbolt.

Book XI. Goaded by Tisiphone, Polynices challenges Eteocles to single combat, and the latter, over-persuaded by Creon to face his brother, will not listen to the entreaties of his mother Jocasta. Polynices similarly rejects his sister Antigone’s appeals. Heaven, earth and hell are revolted by this detestably unnatural duel. The horrified Adrastus endeavours in vain to part the brothers and retires to Argos. The agonized intervention of Pietas descending from the skies is foiled by the malignant Fury.

Thus, at last, half-way through the eleventh book, Statius makes the two protagonists meet, with the result that the compression of the last eleven hundred lines produces a much balder effect than that of the more spacious books which precede. Both combatants die, Polynices being mortally wounded, as he stoops to strip his rival. Creon, assuming the crown, decrees that no invader is to be buried. Led by Antigone, Oedipus laments over the bodies of his sons, and meditates suicide, which his daughter prevents. Jocasta stabs herself, and is tended by Ismene. Then Antigone’s intercession obtains a mitigation of Creon’s arrogant sentence of exile launched at Oedipus. The remnants of the invading army disperse to Adrastus’s dominions.

Book XII opens with funeral honours for the Theban dead. A report of Creon’s decree withholding burial from his fallen foes is brought to the wives of the six slain leaders on their way from Argos to recover the bodies of their dead. Except Argia, Polynices’s widow, all the women go to implore aid from Theseus, King of Athens. Argia, arriving outside Thebes, burns the body of her husband on Eteocles’s pyre, where there are signs to show that fratricidal hatred had survived death; she is met and helped by Antigone. The two are detected, haled before Creon, proudly own their act and are sentenced to death. Athens meanwhile consents to help the Argive war-widows. Very significantly the altar of mercy in Athens is described, as a symbolic contrast to the harshness of Creon at Thebes. The passage is remarkable for the colour it gave to the notion of after times that the poet was a Christian:

So the Athenians approach Thebes and win the victory, Creon dying at the hands of Theseus. The obsequies of the fallen and the envoi (already translated) complete the work.

To appreciate an allusive epic like the Thebaid the reader needs equipment in the myths of Thebes: he must know more than the story of Oedipus, the fated king, his house, and the “Seven Against Thebes”: he must remember the outlines of legends about Amphion, about Cadmus, son of Agenor, about Dirce, and he must be expert enough to grasp why Statius calls Thebes by varying epithets like “Aonian” (I. 34), “Echionian” (I. 169, II. 90), “Ogygian” (I. 173, 328, II. 85), or “Sidonian” (III. 656), and why Polynices is the “Ismenian hero” (I. 673), and why the Argives are Inacha pubes (I. 619). The well-springs of all such mythological lore lay far back in the ancient Greek Cyclic story of Thebes; in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides;⁠[1400] and in Statius’s main source for material, Antimachus, who, before the days of the Alexandrian poets, but anticipating their erudition, composed a massive epic in his Thebais. He wrote rather for the leisured and the learned than for the ordinary reader. Alexandrian critics put him second among epic authors: and Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Homer. But he used his spacious limits unrestrained by any canons of unity. Not content to end the forbidding tale of fratricidal strife on the more human, more really tragic note of Antigone’s devotion to her slain brother, he involved himself in two additional sequels, the war with Athens and the revenge of Argos. Statius showed more wisdom in writing fewer books on the theme, in condensing the war with Athens, and in omitting the triumphant return during the next generation of the Argive avengers, the Epigoni. When he is criticized, as he deserves to be, for his digressions, it is fair to remember the almost overpowering literary legacy which he inherited. There are signs that he also consulted Seneca’s Phoenissae and Oedipus; but in Latin his master was Virgil, although Ovid and Lucan⁠[1401] also went to his making. Nor was Horace forgotten.⁠[1402] The Virgilian influence is manifest both in his language and in the construction of his incidents. Sometimes actual phrases are copied as in magnanimosque duces (Th. III. 65); procumbunt piceae (Th. VI. 100, to remind readers, as if by a traditional phrase, that the whole passage is based on the felling of the wood in Aen. VI. 179 sqq.); pede pes (Th. VIII. 399, repeating the Ennian words borrowed by Furius of Antium as well as by Virgil, Aen. X. 361, and in structure going back to Homer himself). The Siluae present the same features in phrases like urbis opus (Silv. II. ii. 31) and qualis eras! (II. vi. 34). Or, again, a different turn may be given to the original expression, as Virgil’s Quis fallere possit amantem? becomes nil transit amantes (Th. II. 335), or his forsan et haec meminisse iuuabit is elaborated into

Elsewhere Statius gives us a blend of verbal and material reminiscence, as when he implores his father’s spirit to revisit and counsel him in dreams issuing from “the Gate of Horn” rather than from “The Ivory Gate” (Silv. V. iii. sub fin.; Aen. VI., sub fin.). His debt to Virgil for incident is also heavy—too heavy, in truth, for genuine originality. It was not merely that he took over through Virgil the convention of supernatural interferences, as also of copious decorative similes, and outdid all his predecessors in these: he went further and allowed his imitation to become too obsequious in a parallelism of incidents. Because Evander told the story of Hercules and Cacus in the Aeneid, we must, before the first book of the Thebaid is completed, have Adrastus’s digressive tale about Coroebus’s resolve to rid his country of a punitive monster sent by Apollo; because there were funeral games in Virgil, we must have almost a whole book devoted to the rites and contests in memory of the child Archemorus; and because Aeneid IX celebrated the bold night-raid by Nisus and Euryalus, we must have a corresponding pair, Hopleus and Dymas, in the tenth book of the Thebaid, intercepted during their quest for the bodies of Tydeus and Parthenopaeus.

The other epic effort by Statius was his Achilleid, cut short by death when little over 1100 lines were written. What dimensions this tale of Troy might have reached we can only guess: it certainly was to cover a wider field than a “Wrath of Achilles”; for the author, immediately after his invocation, declares that his design is to relate more than the Iliad contains—not to end with the fate of Hector, as Homer did, but to escort the young hero throughout the Trojan war.⁠[1403] This then, is a second laurel wreath which he asks Apollo to plait for him, inasmuch as he announces himself no stranger to the Muses but known for his poem on Thebes.⁠[1404] True to his more extended view of Achilles’s life, Statius begins early in it with the fears of the hero’s mother Thetis that danger threatens her son from the elopement of Helen with Paris. So, with the purpose of transferring Achilles to a safe hiding-place, she visits the cave of the Centaur Chiron under Mount Pelion where the youth is being brought up. Her son is absent: Chiron tells his mother he has remarked a change in him:

Just at that moment, radiant after an adventure on which he has killed a lioness, he returns,

She decides that he must be concealed in the island of Scyros, and a pleasant picture of mingled nature and fancy is given us of his half-miraculous transference thither. Achilles, sunk in the profound sleep that falls on the young (qui pueris sopor), is borne by his goddess-mother down to the quiet seashore (iussa tacere litora). The way lies clear in a moonlit world. Their escort, the Centaur, seeks to hide his moist eyes (udaque celat lumina), when suddenly a dolphin team hurries mother and son off across the waters, and he can with effort (erecto prospectat equo!) just see them pass from sight where the white foam lingers behind their course. Then gloom descends on Thessaly; for the heights of Pholoë lament the youth that will never return, and cloud-capt Othrys sighs, and the river Spercheos wastes with pining—a frigid sort of “pathetic fallacy” like the legendary sorrow of nature for Balder dead. It is a more natural touch to say that the cave where the old Centaur taught Achilles music is now mute, or even to fancy that the woodland Fauns miss his boyish melodies, but the grotesque is reached in the mourning of the nymphs for the lost opportunity of marrying Achilles! This and the too matter-of-fact reference to the Centaur on his hind legs (erecto equo) are among the not infrequent instances where mythology betrayed Statius into absurdity. Nearly all the rest of the existing fragment, which might borrow Mr. Robert Bridges’ title “Achilles in Scyros,” relates his reception in women’s attire at court there, his passion for one of the princesses, the detection of his disguise by Ulysses, and his departure for Troy.

The Achilleid has much the same qualities as the Thebaid. There are still echoes of Virgil, mythological erudition, and ornamental similes. The subject, however, is a more attractive one than that of the Thebaid, and it is unfortunate that the incompleteness of the Achilleid makes elaborate comparison between them nugatory.

Probably Statius and his contemporaries felt that his fame would be founded on his epic work, and it was for his Thebaid that he was valued in the Middle Ages. In Dante he plays an elevated part, and is often quoted. Chaucer, who mentions him with enthusiasm several times, calls him “Stace of Thebes” in The Knightes Tale, and in the Hous of Fame, repeating Dante’s confusion⁠[1405] of him with a rhetorician of Toulouse,

Here, then, as in Troilus and Criseyde, where he tells his “litel book” to go

it is among the great narrative poets that Chaucer places Statius. His hold upon the Middle Ages⁠[1406] is not altogether easy to explain. Was it the tradition that he became a Christian which threw a halo round him in the eyes of medieval Catholicism, and did that tradition in turn grow out of his worshipful attitude to Virgil and the tenderness of feeling which found one of its most remarkable expressions in his description of the Shrine of Mercy at Athens? Modern criticism, however, is not likely to forget that he was also the author of the miscellaneous Siluae, which after centuries of oblivion were restored to notice, when Poggio on his travels in 1417 or 1418 found them in a manuscript along with Manilius and Silius and had a copy made to be sent back to Italy.⁠[1407]⁠

The thirty-two poems in the five books of the miscellany entitled the Siluae are mostly in hexameter verse, though there are four in hendecasyllables⁠[1408] and one set each of Alcaics and Sapphics.⁠[1409] The number of lines in each book is between 700 and 800. In the fifth book, the longest poem of all, 293 lines on the poet’s father, is in juxtaposition to the shortest, the 19 lines to Sleep. The variety of the poems is the outcome of their origin: they fit some passing event; pay a compliment to the emperor or a friend; describe a country house or work of art; frame an elegy on the poet’s father, a slave, a lion or a parrot; indite an invocation to Sleep; or celebrate the dead poet Lucan’s birthday. In other words, they are occasional verses, being, the author tells us in one of his five prefaces,⁠[1410] rapidly composed, so that they illustrate Quintilian’s description of what is meant by a silua in literature.⁠[1411] Statius had long hesitated about issuing in collected form poems which were composed separately, but considered that the author of the Thebaid might be pardoned for this venture, on the analogy of great poets who wrote light verses as Virgil did the Culex.⁠[1412] All students of the archaeology and social history of the Flavian age have reason to applaud the poet’s decision to give them to the world; and as literature there is nothing quite like them in Latin. They are not to be judged as claiming high inspiration, but as pieces in which the recurrent artificiality is time after time illuminated by the play of a pretty fancy and the grace of clever expression. Nor is the artificiality wholly inconsistent with sincerity of feeling. A survey of the poems may illustrate their qualities.

Book I. Statius is not at his best in the opening poem, on the equestrian statue of Domitian, where he strikes an exaggerated note in suggesting that the work has come down complete from heaven, that the rider is a greater than Julius, and that the burden of divinity makes Earth pant beneath the statue. The long epithalamium which follows, on Stella’s marriage to Violentilla, who was a Neapolitan like Statius, is pleasanter, though modern taste wearies of its Venus, Cupids, Apollo and Bacchus. More concrete and engaging is the third poem, on a visit to Vopiscus’s cool retreat at Tivoli where the natural beauty of the scenery makes a genuine impression on the poet,⁠[1413] and compensates for the attendant artificialities. Then the recovery of Rutilius Gallicus is celebrated in polished lines, which, however they suited the first century, read rather frigidly when they introduce a rescue by Apollo and Aesculapius. Statius holds us more in describing his friend’s considerate conduct as a judge⁠[1414] and his premature breakdown owing to the strain of official duty. The lines appear to argue in their author maturity of years, and bear on the question of his birth-date: to him in this poem sixty is not old age:

In the fifth poem his sportive theme is the decoration of Claudius Etruscus’s baths and his task to celebrate not Greek springs but the Latin waters of the aqueducts Virgo and Marcia. Having struck this Roman note, however, he returns to Greek mythology: it is our Lady of Cythera, Venus and her husband, the Fire-God, who with the aid of the Loves’ torches are responsible for heating the bath furnaces! Everything there is costly (nil ibi plebeium); for Statius had aristocratic tastes: the water is fit to be Cytherea’s birthplace, Narcissus’s mirror, Diana’s bath! And after these mythological conceits comes the prosaic assurance that not even a visitor from the seaside would despise those bathing facilities.⁠[1416] The book closes with the praises of the emperor’s carnival, memorable for a fair-weather rain of delicacies and fruits, a lavish bounty surpassing the Golden Age, Domitian’s condescension in sharing the feast, spectacular features like women combatants and dwarf warriors, and the cosmopolitan crowd at the theatre—buxom Lydian damsels clapping their hands, the jingling musicians of Cadiz, noisy Syrians, and those who barter common sulphur for broken glass.

The consolatory poem sent to Melior on the death of a slave-boy adopted by him has touches of real feeling, and is less overloaded with mythology. Closeness of blood, he argues in excuse for the adoptive father’s frantic grief, does not always make the strongest tie:

But there is comfort in regarding death as freedom from anxiety:

The poem on the mansion of Pollius and Polla at Sorrento shows how the effects of nature and of art compete in the poet’s mind. To adjudicate between the charms of a crescent bay outside and the architectural amenities of the villa itself is embarrassing.⁠[1419] Characteristically he divides his praises among aesthetic treasures and the view from different rooms, with his eye now on Naples in the distance, now on the variety of marbles around him. He draws from nature in his picture of the seaside villa in the gloaming,

or he indulges in a purely fanciful picture:

Three short pieces follow, each touching on a possession of Atedius Melior—his plane-tree by the garden pool concerning which Statius daintily relates the legend of a nymph’s escape from Pan; his parrot for whose sudden death a train of mourning birds is invited to chaunt a dirge; and his tame lion slain in the amphitheatre to the just indignation of his fellow-lions, but with the consolation of having roused the emotion of people, senate and emperor! Of the dead slave of Flavius Ursus, commemorated in the next poem, he affirms that his fine qualities of soul justify the free display of grief which Statius in such consolations takes pains to emphasize. The book closes with the Genethliacon Lucani, whose neat hendecasyllabics congratulate Spain, land of the west, on its gift of Lucan to the world, and extravagantly claim that Homer and Virgil are outrivalled by him. But we are grateful for the light thrown by the Muse’s prophecy on the subjects of Lucan’s writings. Nor are the exclamatory lines on a young life cut short unnatural:

Book III opens with a record of the dedication of a temple to Hercules by Pollius Felix at Sorrento on a spot where the old narrow shrine once gave shelter to a picnic party surprised on a hot summer day by tempest. The poet thinks the spacious building has improved what was

The second piece is a send-off (propempticon) to the author’s patron Maecius Celer about to sail for Egypt, where, the poem reminds us, the grain ships come from. Echoing Horace, Statius says his patron takes with him the better half of his soul (animae partem ... maiorem), and he dwells on the pain of parting. The gradually disappearing vessel is pictured:

His self-recrimination over failure to go abroad with his patron scarcely rings true, especially when supported with mythological instances; but the imagined reunion on the traveller’s return and the anticipation of the story of intervening years make a natural conclusion. The third poem is another consolation: it is addressed to Claudius Etruscus on his father’s death. The poet too, he says, had mourned a father.⁠[1425] The dead Etruscus, though of servile origin, was ennobled by service, and obedience is a law of nature. The sketch of his career is interesting. Freed by Tiberius, he attended Caligula as a keeper might a wild beast; he had high responsibilities under Claudius and Nero; and his preferment in the civil service to the treasury was a tribute to his ability in dealing with estimates. All this is cleverly told in well-turned verses; and a pleasant account is given of his married life. Unfortunately, artificiality is not absent. The conceit of fluttering Cupids dropping wing-feathers on a funeral pyre or supplying discarded arrow-cases to make fuel for the cremation is supremely ridiculous; and when the grief of Etruscus for the loss of his father is compared with the grief of Theseus in like case, we feel the mythological parallel detracts from the simplicity befitting a deep sorrow. The fourth poem, one of the least pleasing, turns on the dedication to Aesculapius of the locks of Earinus, one of the emperor’s eunuchs. The fifth, on the other hand, has charm in its playful remonstrance with his wife on her alleged reluctance to accompany her husband when he has decided to quit Rome for the Bay of Naples. Could she refuse, after sharing loyally his hours of triumph and defeat, after full knowledge of his literary toil on the Thebaid, after nursing him back from the point of death? Facetiously he assures her that her daughter can find suitors elsewhere than in Rome: the district of his choice has not been completely devastated by the fires of Vesuvius! This home to which he invites her is “his own, his native land” (natale solum), blest with temperate climate and with peace. He ends this persiflage with a reminder of the legendary and literary associations of the Bay of Naples.

The first three poems of Book IV are overburdened with the praises of Domitian, and celebrate respectively his Majesty’s seventeenth consulship, his hospitality in the banqueting-hall, and his greatness as a road-maker. There follows a poetical epistle counselling a busy friend to take a holiday:

The one Alcaic lyric of the Siluae is a spring-ode to Septimius Severus, a native of North Africa. After it stands the hexametric poem which proves the value attached by Statius to the literary and artistic accompaniments of a dinner-party. Then Sapphics are addressed to Vibius Maximus abroad:

But there is a child at home to greet Vibius: let the child learn from his father the historical skill wherewith he traces the antiquity of the world, recalling the style of terse Sallust and of “the nurseling of Timavus” (Livy). The eighth poem conveys congratulations to Julius Menecrates on the birth of a third child, so that, as the poet is quick to point out, the emperor’s previous concession of the ius trium liberorum had merely anticipated Lucina’s actual gift. The final piece, addressed in a bantering spirit to a friend on his return-present of a mouldy old book, submits a humorous list of possible cheap things to give away.

Book V begins with the commemorative poem consoling Abascantus in his continued grief over the loss of his wife Priscilla, a dear friend of Statius’s wife. Their loyal union is beautifully drawn and makes one of several engaging pictures in Statius of married happiness. Priscilla felt rapturous joy over her husband’s attainment to high office in the state, but the raptures did not turn her head:

She attended to her careworn husband’s wants with the regularity, solicitude, and simplicity to be found in a rural home:

The doom that assailed this favoured home is the prevailing theme in the second half of the poem. The succeeding piece is on a youth of sixteen, Crispinus, going out to face the work of the world, with the inspiring memory of a father’s distinguished services. The next, a long “In Memoriam” on Statius’s own father, has been extensively drawn upon in connexion with his life. Like prose Consolationes, such an epicedion shows conventional features in structure and thought. It is followed by the briefest and most poetic of the Siluae. Dr. Mackail says, “one might almost call it a sonnet,”⁠[1430] and, if certain mythological lines are dropped, it can be reduced to the requisite proportions:

In the final poem of the miscellany is a lament on the death of the poet’s adopted son which marks the tenderness of his heart. “I,” he says, “who once could offer balm to the bereaved now crave the healing hand: and who art thou that censurest my lament?”

There are some books—and shall we not include the Siluae or still more the Thebaid?—of which the reader feels that it were best not too earnestly to plod through them, but when one chances upon the wearisome to leave it as one found it, perhaps preferring my Lord of Montaigne’s method “of running over by divers glances, sodaine glimpses and reiterated reprisings.” To come from a simple and direct kind of poetry to Statius is like passing out of the open breeze into a conservatory of flowers, where many are beautiful but many raise the conviction that they are forced. He had inherited the Alexandrian and Catullian fondness for picture-drawing; and it is a natural result that descriptions emanating from an art-admirer like Statius should be influenced by his recollection of paintings and statues. At the same time this influence removed him one degree further from nature and led to that over-elaboration, which, by leaving little to the reader’s imagination, loses the charm of vague suggestiveness.⁠[1433] It is a learned and allusive style, apt to be far-fetched in fancy and excessive in eulogy. The Siluae, in particular, have the elegance of the eighteenth century. They imply a cultured leisure fertile in refined improvisations. The elegance bears a resemblance to that of Pope and Thomson, and the scenery to that of Watteau’s Fêtes Champêtres. Some of the missives have a tone that would have suited the boudoir of a French marquise or the library of a noble patron of letters in the time of Queen Anne or the early Georges. Nor is it surprising that the Thebaid should have made an appeal, if only a transient one, to Gray, whose works contain a fragment of his early translation into heroic couplets of part of its sixth book.

Statius’s artificiality is largely apparent in his enslavement to an unreal mythology, but partly also in his liking for literary conceits, which may or may not be mythological. Modern readers are mildly amused at the feather-dropping Cupids (Silv. III. iii.), or at Leander’s fire of love fit to warm the sea but not equal to Stella’s love for Violentilla (I. ii.), or at the descent from the sky of Domitian’s celestial kindred to embrace his equestrian statue:

In great part the artificiality was traditional. Thus, when Statius addresses elegiac poets as “Ye who defraud the renowned verse of its final stride,” he is intentionally aping Ovid’s conceit of making Cupid responsible for the change of the heroic hexameter to the pentameter.⁠[1434] Often the attempt to make a myth realistic merely succeeds (as with Lucan) in achieving the grotesque: e.g. when the ghost of Laius mortally wounded years before is imagined to drop blood on the sleeping Eteocles in Thebaid II, or when the deaths of Niobe’s fourteen children is arithmetically related to the seven gates of Thebes:

Sometimes the artificiality lies more in the phrasing. It is fairly obvious that “the bridler of fiery footed steeds”⁠[1436] must be the Sun-god; that, if Hercules is “soaked plentifully with his brother,” the reference is to the grape juice of Bacchus;⁠[1437] and that, when in years a boy “equalled the sum of Hercules’s labours,” he ought to be twelve.⁠[1438] Rather more remote is the epithet “Ledaean” applied to a swan-plume because of Jove’s amour with Leda, or the author’s mode of suggesting that a cool mansion is free from the scorching summer sun of the Olympic games:

Again, the artificiality may depend on no allusion, but on a curiously strained form of expression. “He slants (obliquat) his entreaties” is used of entreaties addressed to bystanders; “they hold exchange of breasts” means embracing; “she reduced the glades to peace with her horn” means that Atalanta, when hunting, killed the wild beasts therein; and “the liquid fodder of eastern mid-winter” is a Statian expression for rains that feed the Nile.⁠[1440] It is easy to laugh at such lapses from the straightforward and to complain of Statius’s artificiality and prolixity: it is easier still, and perhaps commoner, to decry him without reading him. But neither carping nor neglect is the right attitude towards a great influence in literature. More profit is derivable from remembering that he can show, as an epic writer, vigour in narrative and speech, and, as an occasional poet, a real taste for landscape and colour,⁠[1441] besides letting his fancy at times go free. Nor should strained compliments, strained consolations, strained mythology wholly obliterate that depth of affection which is nowhere more manifest than in the last book of the Siluae.

If he is more Virgilian than Lucan, Statius is less obtrusively rhetorical. There is less of the sententia, less epigram, less antithesis, and more of a quiet scholarly elaboration of the traditional epic manner. Thus it is rarer to find in him than in Lucan semi-proverbial phrases of a quotable cast, like “Panic believes everything” (nil falsum trepidis, Th. VII. 131), or “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (spes anxia mentem extrahit et longo consumit gaudia uoto, Th. I. 322: cf. II. 320-321). His elaboration tends to war against pithiness, but some phrases and lines are readily recalled: e.g. Cur oculis sordet uicina uoluptas? (Silv. I. iii. 98, virtually “why does distance lend enchantment to the view?”); calcabam necopinus opes (Silv. I. iii. 53, “I trod on wealth and knew it not”) of a rich mosaic floor; or, from the simile of Pluto’s entrance upon his sovereignty over the lower world, words that would fit Milton’s Satan, palluit amisso ueniens in Tartara caelo (Th. XI. 446, “blenched as he came to Hell when Heaven was lost.”).

What we must expect in a style so elaborate is an avoidance of the more simple and concrete modes of expressing ideas and a preference for abstractions, personifications, metaphors, as well as erudition. The lion that, even when mortally wounded, dies fighting to the last is referred to in these abstract terms: “as he fell, his valour returns from the midst of death and not at once did all his threats present their backs,” i.e. turn to flight.⁠[1442] Statius makes great use of compound adjectives (e.g. uuifer, oliuifer, rorifer, laborifer, fumifer, flammiger, saetiger, noctiuagus, montiuagus, fluctiuagus, anguicomus), also of one of the traditional decorations in epic—the simile. There are well over thirty similes in Thebaid, Book VI, in connexion with the games, and well over twenty in many of the other books. They are elaborated often to the extent of six lines, sometimes to eight, and show considerable variety. Many that illustrate violent action introduce such animals as lions, tigresses, wolves, bears, boars, bulls; others picture birds in flight like cranes, or twittering like swallows: a snowstorm, a hunter, a passing ship, a ruined nest, a Spanish gold miner underground, an avalanche (which the old Delphin edition illustrates from Rhaetia), or a cow grieving for a lost calf (a passage that recalls a similar situation in Lucretius). King Adrastus is likened to a victorious bull, and Hippomedon to a Centaur; runners are compared cumulatively to race-horses, arrows, and stags escaping from a lion; and a falling quoit to the moon brought down from heaven by magic.

The hexameters of Statius exhibit less monotony than do those of Ovid, Lucan or Valerius Flaccus. He secures this greater variety by dexterity in the use of pauses. His metrical movements are composed with skill, and often are felicitously appropriate to the sense, as in the passage on Night and Sleep in Thebaid I, where he brings into juxtaposition a line with five spondees and one with five dactyls, then has a quick line of four dactyls, returns to a slow movement of five spondees, and closes on one where the feet are exactly balanced:

Computations⁠[1443] have been made which show that, while Statius is more dactylic than Virgil, he is less so than Ovid and Valerius. He has fewer elisions than Virgil. Altogether his line falls short of supreme epic dignity. In the Siluae his hendecasyllabics, unlike Catullus’s but like Martial’s, regularly begin with a spondee. His two imitations of Horatian lyric metres display small inspiration. But in the Siluae his hexameters appear to most advantage, attaining a facility suitable to the lighter and more sportive subjects in the collection. Here, then, Statius is in matter and form most truly himself. He portrays in the main the surface of life, and is acquainted with its amenities and even its pathos; but he does not penetrate into its meaning.