Statius (Mozley 1928) v1/Introduction

Publius Papinius Statius was born at Naples, probably about A.D. 40.^[1] His father was a native of Velia on the Lucanian coast, but had moved to Naples, where as “grammaticus” he conducted a school to which pupils came from all parts of Italy. Here he taught literature, which in the secondary school of the time meant poetry, with exposition of grammar, style, and antiquities; he also instructed his pupils in augury and the various rites of the Roman state religion. He was himself a poet, and had won prizes in the Grecian contests, at Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus; he had written a poem on the civil war of A.D. 69, and was planning another on the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, when he died. He was buried on an estate that he possessed near Alba.

The younger Statius owed to his father’s personal care and instruction all his education and poetical training, a debt which he acknowledges in terms of the warmest gratitude; he soon gained fame as a poet himself, and won prizes at the local competitions in Naples, held at the festival of the Augustalia. Probably after his father’s death he left Naples and ​went to Rome, where he lived till the year 94, writing poetry and declaiming extracts from his Thebaid before crowded audiences. He was awarded a prize in the annual poetical contest held by Domitian in honour of Minerva at his residence near Alba, but to his great disappointment, when he competed at the important Capitoline “Agon” in Rome, he met with failure. In Rome he married his wife Claudia, a widow with one daughter. The poet himself was childless, and adopted a slave-boy born in his own house, whose early death he mourns with real sorrow in his last, unfinished poem. About 94 he returned in broken health to Naples, where he died, probably in 95 or 96.

Although one may take Juvenal’s word for it that Statius, in spite of the large crowds his recitations drew, made no money out of poetry, one need not assume that he lived in poverty and was forced to write libretti for the stage in order to make a living;^[2] there is nothing in his own writings that implies it, while from the mention of his father’s estate at Alba one would gather that he was .at least moderately well off. The poet, at any rate, seems to have lived on terms of familiarity with the wealthy Pollius Felix and others, and his wife was the personal friend of Priscilla, whose husband Abascantus was secretary of state. It seems doubtful whether he formed part of any circle or group of poets; his patrons were those of Martial, Atedius Melior, for instance, and Pollius Felix, but neither writer ever mentions the other, whence some have thought that there was a coolness between the two. This is not unlikely, for from what we know of the two men we should conclude that they ​were extremely uncongenial to each other. Juvenal indeed, is the only Latin writer before Sidonius Apollinaris who does mention Statius, though his influence upon later poets was strong.

His relations with the Court were those of the humble aspirant to Imperial favour; his poems upon the colossal equestrian statue of Domitian, the Emperor’s 17th Consulship, the tresses of his favourite Earinus, and the banquet to which the Emperor invited him, are all marked by the flattery that the subservience of the times was eager to bestow; Domitian affected to be a patron of letters, even a poet himself: it was one of the stock compliments of the time to wonder whether he were more brilliant a poet or a commander.^[3] Statius frequently mentions his campaigns, and follows the convention of pretending to be planning a great work on the Emperor’s wars, to which the actual epics are only preliminary.^[4]

Statius flourished in the middle of the Silver Age of Latin literature, coming after Seneca and Lucan (though born about the same time as the latter), before Juvenal, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, and contemporary with Martial, Valerius Flaccus, and Quintilian. The later part of his life was thus spent under the Flavian dynasty, which in spite of its faults did really encourage letters. He also lived at a time when the practice of recitation had become a popular rage; his pleasant voice.^[5] his poetry, with its subtle ​effects of alliteration and assonance, its brilliant passages, startling tricks of style and language, its avoidance of the obvious and occasional touches of the pathetic and the horrible, all this combined to tickle the ears and feelings of the popular audiences of the day.^[6] Or again, with an Italian’s gift of rapid improvisation, he would delight a patron by dashing off a description of his villa in marvellously smooth hexameters, or oblige him with occasional verse on any subject, serious or trivial.

The poetry of Statius shows many of the characteristics of the Silver Age. (i.) The rhetorical influence is evident, frequency of hyperbole, straining after epigram and point, superficiality and obedience to text-book models. (ii.) There is a tendency to realism which shows itself now in the petty, now in the horrible, as for instance in many of the battle-scenes of the Thebaid. (iii.) There is a general diminution of scale, characteristic perhaps of Silver periods of literature, when the great subjects are exhausted and poets descend to more trivial themes; or, if the grand themes are still attempted, the treatment is unequal to them, and lack of proportion is the inevitable result. The search for new matter takes the form of describing things that the great poets would not have thought worth describing, or not suitable to poetry. The Description, indeed, as such, the ἔκφρασις, becomes a recognized literary form. (iv.) Another note of the age is the conscious learning which obtrudes itself into many a passage; poets could draw on learned compilations of mythological matter and general information, on treatises dealing ​with anything from astronomy to horse-breeding, while audiences probably relished such compliments to their culture.

These are a collection of occasional poems, many of which were written hastily to order or just as the fancy seized the poet; some, on the other hand, like the lament for his father (v. 3), are more carefully constructed. Six of them are Poems of Consolation,^[8] for the loss of a father, a wife or a favourite slave; this was a type of composition of which the Romans were very fond, in prose as well as in poetry. They cannot be said to be the most successful examples of Statius’s verse; to our taste, at any rate, they appear artificial and exaggerated in tone, and lacking in real sentiment,^[9] also for the most part much too long. It should be said, however, that he was following the rules laid down for that type of poem by the schools of rhetoric and obeyed by the poets. This applies also to other literary forms, for example, the ​Epithalamion (i. 2), a much more pleasing composition, the Propempticon, or Farewell-piece (iii. 2), the Description (Ἔκφρασις, i. 3, i. 5, ii. 2, iv. 6), the Genethliacon (ii. 7), a name more commonly given to a poem written for the birthday of a living person, while here the occasion is the anniversary of the birthday of the poet Lucan, who has been dead some years.

More attractive again are such pieces as that on Atedius Melior’s Tree (ii. 3), where Statius’s lightness of touch and fancy appears at its best, or the account of the entertainment given to the people by the Emperor on the Kalends of December (i. 6). The two imitations of Horatian lyric (iv. 5 and 7) are feeble, but the hendecasyllables of iv. 9 are spirited, and in the Lucan ode Statius succeeds in rising above the conventional, and there is real feeling in Calliope’s lament for her favourite poet. The piece which he addresses to his wife Claudia is also marked by sincerity, and so are the two poems on the deaths of members of his own family, his father (v. 3) and his adopted son (v. 5); this latter poem is left unfinished, but it seems to have been planned with the same elaboration that we find in the case of the former. Best known of all the Silvae, probably, is the little sonnet-like poem addressed to the god Sleep (v. 4).

Statius’s chief merit in this class of poetry consists perhaps, in his descriptive power, and to it we owe much of our knowledge of Roman society in the Flavian era. The scenes are varied, and include a state banquet given by the Emperor (iv. 2), a fashionable wedding (i. 2), country-seats of patrons of literature (i. 3, ii. 2), funeral scenes (ii. 1, ii. 6, etc.), the new road along the coast of Campania recently opened ​(iv. 3), an entertainment in the Amphitheatre (i. 6). Among the personages introduced are the poet’s own friend and patron Pollius Felix, wealthy and cultured, the literary Epicurean Manlius Vopiscus, the soldier Rutilius Gallicus, of noble birth and distinguished career, the young Maecius Celer, just off to the Syrian front, the art-collector Novius Vindex, the freedman Claudius Etruscus, who had risen from slavery to the position of secretary of finance to the Emperor Nero, one of the three great secretaryships of the early Empire.

By far the greater number of these pieces are written in hexameters, a metre first applied by Statius, so far as we know, to the composition of genre poems of this kind, and employed with marvellous facility and ease; the lines run smoothly, though without the extreme elaboration that we sometimes find in the Thebaid, and without great attention to variation of pause, or subtlety of alliterative effect. He displays wonderful skill in expression and choice of phrase; when describing, for instance, the water flowing in its silver channels in the Baths of Claudius Etruscus, he says (i. 5. 48):

and, of the stream outside:

In his address to his wife, again, speaking of the peacefulness of Naples, he says (iii. 5. 87):

​As a poet who depicts the society of his time, Statius compares very favourably with Martial in avoiding the coarseness that was so prominent a feature of it, and his poetry reflects the sensitiveness of his character.

To be the author of a great epic poem is to count as one of the few great poets of the world, and it need hardly be said that Statius can make no claim to that honour. He stands with Apollonius, Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus in the second rank. Yet the Thebaid received high praise from the elder Scaliger and the post-Renaissance critics, and the tendency to-day is, if anything, to underrate its merits. It is, indeed, somewhat lacking in unity of theme, yet it must be remembered that much depends on the story chosen, and that of the Seven against Thebes is a difficult one to handle owing to the double interest: the Argive and the Theban strands are hard to combine satisfactorily; in fact, the unity of the plot is a duality, i.e. the conflicting fortunes of the two brothers, and the real interest consists in the gradual approach and closer interweaving of the two “subjects,” until, as in the stretto of a fugue, the climax is reached in the great duel of Bk. XI. Here, it is true, Statius might have stopped, with the Aeneid as his model, but the Theban legend is fruitful in incident, and it might be justly urged that the burial of the Argives, with the appeal of Theseus that it involves, together with the striking episode of the “strife of flames upon the funeral pyre” of the two rivals, formed a real part of the story; it must be admitted, however, that the ​Thebaid does not end satisfactorily: that Statius was worried over it we may gather from a hint in the Silvae (iii. 2. 143). H.W. Garrod has defended the Thebaid as an “episodic” epic, and that is probably its most conspicuous feature; at the same time, though Statius had every right to make his poem episodic if he wished, it would be wrong to overlook the unity that it does possess, even if it is less obvious than in a story like the Argonautica, for example, or the Aeneid.

The same critic has spoken of the poet’s “tenderness, mysticism, and piety—in short, his Christianity”; it is true that the tenderness at times becomes sentimentality, at times a morbid emphasizing of the horrible, yet, generally speaking, Statius responds sympathetically to the tender emotions: Argia as wife and daughter, Hypsipyle in the anguish caused by the loss of the babe Opheltes, Antigone as sister, are faithfully drawn, and the relations of mother and son seem to have had a particular attraction for Statius, e.g. Atalanta and Parthenopaeus, Ismenis and Crenaeus in the Thebaid (notice, too, how many times he refers to Ino and Palaemon), Thetis and Achilles in the Achilleid.^[10]

With regard to the gods, Jupiter and Nature are both referred to by Statius as supreme, quite apart from Fate or Destiny;^[11] he does not actually identify them, but we may see here a tendency to ​syncretism, or the regarding of different deities as so many manifestations of one ultimate Power, characteristic of the time.^[12] This probably originated with Stoicism, and Stoicism had become the religion of educated Romans, so far as they had one. “Dieu, c’est-à-dire Jupiter, et la Nature ne sont qu’un. Et cette raison divine, cette loi universelle, c’est le Fatum qui ne fait aussi qu’un avec la Nature et avec Dieu” (Legras, La Thébaïde, p.160). Another apparent inconsistency has been laid to the poet’s account, in making Jupiter first announce his decision to embroil Argos and Thebes, and then attempt to deter the Argives on their march by hostile omens; in this, however, he is doing no more than ancient writers commonly do in accepting both divine warning by omen and divine irrevocable will without attempting to reconcile them. That Statius was not unaware of the difficulty can be gathered from his discussions of divination and of omens (iii. 551, vi. 934).

The divine personages who make up the supernatural machinery of the Thebaid are treated in the familiar, realistic manner of traditional epic; certain personifications take their place among them, such as Sleep, Virtue, Piety; the latter, in her well-meant effort to stop the duel of the brothers, is treated very unceremoniously by Tisiphone, and hustled off the battle-ground whence she flees complaining to the Thunderer (xi. 457 sq.). Yet occasionally the poet strikes a higher note; one of the best known passages of the Thebaid is the description of the altar and grove of Clementia at Athens, in which the poet gives beautiful expression to the old Athenian ideal ​of humanity, lines that breathe the spirit of a purer religion than any known to the ancient world, and may well have given rise to Dante’s belief that Statius was a Christian.

We may now consider briefly some further characteristics of the Thebaid. (I.) Statius revels in description: in the first book we have the storm that Polynices encounters on his way to Argos, in Bk. II. the exciting narrative of the ambush set for Tydeus on his return from Thebes, in Bk. III. the auspice-taking, in Bk. IV. the necromancy. The games in Bk. VI. are well done, Statius, no doubt, owing several details to his own close observation in the Roman Circus, as, for example, in the boxing and wrestling matches and the discus-throwing. In Bks. VII. and X. we have two set pieces, the abode of Mars and of Sleep respectively. Battle-pieces since Homer have, as a rule, been failures, in painting as well as in poetry; those of the Silver Latin poets suggest the large canvases of third-rate Italian painters, depicting, for example, the capture of Constantinople by the Latins for the adornment of a ducal palace; the same grim detail, the same hectic fury marks the battle-scenes of Statius. It is in description that his love of hyperbole becomes most manifest: the mountain in ii. 32 sq. is so high that the stars rest upon it, the serpent in v. 550 covers several acres, the Centaur plunging down from the mountain dams a whole river with his bulk, iv. 144, etc.

(II.) Passages of this kind, and also similes, are in many cases borrowed from previous poets, Virgil, Ovid, or Lucan. Statius in borrowing often adds details to fill out the picture, or elaborates the ​language: often, too, he introduces a sentimental touch, i.e. he either attributes feeling to inanimate objects, or looks at the scene from the point of view of some living person: in ix. 90 the sea-resisting rock “feels no fear,” or in the simile of the snake renewing its skin (iv. 93 sq.) a countryman is introduced (“a! miser agrestum,” etc.) Some of his similes are worthy of notice, for example, that which compares the calm produced by the majesty of Jove’s utterance to that of lakes and streams under the tranquil influence of summer (iii. 253), or that of Pluto coming into his inheritance of the underworld (xi. 443). But we get rather tired of the endless bulls and boars to which his heroes are compared.

(III.) Of Statius’s inequality as a poet it is hardly necessary to speak; he suffers from lack of judgement, rising now to the wildest heights of exaggeration and bombast, and now sinking to trivial and absurd detail, as when persons are described kissing each other through closed visors (“galeis iuvat oscula clausis inserere,” iv. 20), or when Mercury’s hat gets wet in the rainstorms of Thrace (vii. 39). At the same time there are lines of great poetic beauty: i. 336–341, a beautiful description of the rising moon, “her airy chariot hung with pearly dew” (Pope’s transl.), and of Sleep’s mysterious influence; or the moonbeams glinting on the bronze armour of the ambuscade (ii. 532), or a picture of sunrise on the fields in winter (iii. 468–9), or the last breeze dying away on drooping sails (i. 479–481); again, in i. 264–5, we seem to hear the beating of the gongs and the wailing of votaries by some sacred river of the East, while the mysterious figure of the Lydian Bacchus, the spirit of the golden river, appears dimly in “aut Hermi de ​fontibus aureus exis” (iv. 389). There is an effective touch in the duel of the brothers, when the ghosts of Thebans are permitted by Pluto to throng the hills around and watch the combat; in the journey of Argia, too, in Bk. XII. there are some romantic scenes (xii. 228 sq., 250–54, 267–77).

(IV.) His love of epigram and point has already been mentioned; here we may notice that it is frequently seen at the ends of paragraphs, sometimes producing an effect of overstrain, even of obscurity. Examples may be found in i. 335, i. 547 (see note), i. 623, iii. 323, 498, v. 485, 533, vi. 795, x. 570.

(V.) Statius has great skill in versification, which shows itself not perhaps so much in the art of varying the pauses and the rhythm of his lines, though in this respect he has learnt more from Virgil than either Ovid or Lucan, as in his use of assonance and alliteration. The latter especially repays study, both in the single line, e.g. i. 123, ii. 89, v. 14, v. 615, and in passages of two or three lines, in which usually one or two consonant or vowel sounds predominate, with others as subordinate, e.g. ii. 118–19 (“f”), ii. 538 sq. (“e,” “t,” with “f,” “v,” “h”) or even in longer passages, e.g. i. 342–54). There is also sometimes remarkable symmetry in words, see the simile in iv. 93 sq., where the verb “erigitur” connects two groups, each consisting of two sub-groups, in each of which again noun and adjective are arranged in a chiasmus, and he often brackets his phrase between noun and adjective or participle, as in ii. 252–3, 718–9. It was, no doubt, technique of this kind, combined with the pointed phrases, the appearance of familiar similes and descriptions in more elaborate form, and ​the sprinkling of recondite mythological allusion that made Statius a popular poet with the audiences of Flavian Rome.

(VI.) Statius takes great liberties with the Latin language. There are phrases which it is impossible to make sense of, if taken grammatically and literally. Legras is reduced to despair by some, as by v. 115 “vel iustos cuius pulsantia menses vota tument?” he says “c’est, si on l’ose dire, un pur charabia^[13]”; so too “raptus ab omni sole dies” (v. 364), where the scholiast is compelled to exclaim “nove dictum!” and, perhaps the most untranslatable of all, “viderat Inachias rapidum glomerare cohortes Bacchus iter” (vii. 45). It is impossible, in translating, to do more than give the general sense; the poet is here a pure “impressionist.” Postgate has made a similar comment on the style of Propertius (Select Elegies, Introduction, p. lx), “The outlines of his pictures lack sharpness and precision, and the colours and even forms on his canvas tend to blend imperceptibly with each other. Thus it is the general impression that fascinates us in his poems, not the proportion and perfection of the details.” Again, speaking of Propertius’ excessive subtlety of construction, he says “sometimes the sentence must be read as a whole, as it is almost impossible to give it a detailed construction. . . . Cf. i. 20. 24, where I have compared the tendency of the Greek tragedians to spread the meaning through a sentence rather than apportion it among the words.” This very well expresses the character of the Statian phrase, and in this respect Statius is the successor of Propertius. Both poets perhaps were led to write in this way by an attempt ​to avoid the hard glitter of Latin, so suitable to the clear-cut phrase of Horace or the snap and polish of Ovid or Martial, and a longing for occasional half-tones, for lack of precision. Possibly it is due to Virgilian influence, for part of Virgil’s genius consists in being able to give a soft, mysterious effect without any sense of unnaturalness. Statius aims at a like effect, but fails to avoid unnaturalness.

(VII.) Psychologically, he is not conspicuous for remarkable insight; it may be said, however, in his defence that the epic does not demand refinement in character drawing, which is rather the business of the drama. In the Thebaid, as, indeed, in the Aeneid, the treatment of character is broad: Amphiaraus the seer, Eteocles the fierce tyrant, Capaneus the scorner of the gods, Hippomedon the stalwart warrior, Parthenopaeus the gallant youth, are all true to type;^[14] more carefully drawn are Adrastus and his son-in-law Polynices; the former is depicted as an elderly monarch, grave, kindly, diplomatic, and perhaps somewhat lacking in decision, while the latter is shown as not altogether easy in mind, even diffident, about the undertaking, and ready to lapse into utter despair and to contemplate suicide when things go badly; at the same time he is not quite ingenuous (see iii. 381–2), and on comparing him with his brother one feels there is not much to choose. Tydeus is vigorously drawn, especially in the episode of the embassy; he becomes the mere warrior in Bk. X., and his memory is stained by the inhuman gnawing of his enemy’s skull with which the book, and his career, closes.

​A few touches show some degree of insight: the people of Crotopus, king of Argos (in Adrastus’ narrative), have just been saved from the awful pestilence sent on them by Apollo: “stupet Inacha pubes, magnaque post lacrimas etiamnunc gaudia pallent” (i. 619), “the Inachian youth stand appalled and their joy, though great now sorrow is ended, even yet is pale and dim.” Capaneus is said to be “largus animae modo suaserit ira” (iii. 603), “lavish of his life, should wrath but urge him,” a development of the Horatian “animaeque magnae prodigum Paullum.” The Argive leaders who have taken the place of those slain in the fight are “haud laeti seque huc crevisse dolentes” (x. 181), “feeling no joy, but grief that they are raised so high.” Thetis, urging the boy Achilles to don the girlish clothes, adds “nesciet hoc Chiron” (Ach. i. 274), “Chiron will not know of it.”

The plot of the Thebaid was probably modelled on the vast Epic of Antimachus (fl. c. 400 B.C.), which Cicero calls “magnum illud volumen,” and of which Porphyrio tells us that the author had completed twenty-four books before the Argive host had been brought to Thebes. Statius, though he took only six books in doing it, has been criticized for unnecessary delay in arriving at Thebes, but he was probably wise. as twelve books of battle-scenes would have rendered his work as unreadable as the seventeen books of Silius Italicus’ Punica.

The following is a summary of the chief events of the Thebaid: i. 1–45, Invocation of the Emperor. 45–311, Oedipus, who has blinded himself, invokes Tisiphone and curses his sons: she hears him and hurries to Thebes; the brothers, full of mutual hate, agree to reign alternately; the lot falls on Eteocles, ​and Polynices reluctantly departs. Jupiter announces his decision to set Argos against Thebes. 312–720, Polynices’ journey to Argos and his experiences there. ii. 1–33, Apparition of the shade of Laius to Eteocles. 134–305, Wedding celebrations of Polynices and Tydeus at Argos. 306–743, and. iii. 1–439, Tydeus goes on embassy to Thebes, the ambush set for him, his victory and return. 440–721, Auspice-taking; war is decided on at Argos. iv. 1–344, Catalogue of the Argive host. 345–645, Plight of Thebes: necromancy. 646–842 and v. 1–16, Bacchus causes the Argives to be delayed by thirst: they are saved by Hypsipyle, nurse of Opheltes, infant son of Lycurgus, king of Nemea. 17–498, Narrative of Hypsipyle. 499–753, Death of Opheltes. vi. 1–248, Funeral rites of Opheltes. 249–946, Funeral games. vii. 1–397, Catalogue of the Thebans. 398–823, The fighting begins: disappearance of the augur Amphiaraus. viii. 1–342, Amphiaraus’s reception in the underworld; his successor is appointed. 342–766, Exploits and Death of Tydeus. ix. 1–569, Exploits and Death of Hippomedon. 570–907, Fears of Atalanta for Parthenopaeus: his death. x. 1–261, Intervention of Juno. 262–448, Night-raid and devotion of Hopleus and Dymas. 449–826, Devotion of Menoeceus. 827–936, Death of Capaneus. xi. 1–314, Preparations for the duel between the brothers. 315–761, The duel. Exile of Oedipus, and end of the war. xii. 1–463, Funeral rites of the Thebans. Devotion of Antigone and Argia. 464–809, Intervention of Theseus, after supplication of Argive women at Athens.

In the concluding lines of the poem Statius exhorts his Thebaid to follow far behind the divine Aeneid ​and to reverence its footsteps;^[15] from them we may gather that he was humble enough not to think of himself as a rival of Virgil, though acknowledging that poet as the chief inspirer of his work. In fact, the plan and chief incidents of the Aeneid seem to be reproduced with an astonishing scrupulousness in the Thebaid. Virgil, however, was not the only poet whom Statius laid under contribution; an analysis of the Thebaid shows that Ovid and Lucan, and in a lesser degree Seneca and Valerius Flaccus, have incidents, or at any rate, details borrowed from them by our author.^[16] In versification he is, on the whole, Ovidian; there is no trace of Virgil’s gravity, or of Lucan’s heaviness, but the hexameter is predominantly the smooth, unelided line of Ovid, though the hephthemimeral pause and caesura, characteristic of Silver Latin verse, is frequent.

As for the authorities on whom Statius drew for the actual story of the Seven, we have already referred to the Thebaid of Antimachus; its fragments, how​ever, are so scanty that any estimate of his debt to it must be purely conjectural, and the same applies to the Oedipodeia and Thebais of the Epic Cycle. Of extant authors, Aeschylus and Sophocles appear to have contributed comparatively little, for, to take one or two instances, the character of Eteocles is quite different in Aeschylus’s Septem, and in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus leaves the city immediately after the discovery, while in the Thebaid they are both there all the time. On the other hand the Phoenissae of Euripides is closely followed (probably also the Hypsipyle^[17]) and Seneca’s Phoenissae. For the narrative of Hypsipyle both Statius and Valerius Flaccus elaborate considerably on the simpler account of Apollonius of Rhodes.

There is, in fact, little if anything to show that Statius has done more than work on the traditional epic material in a manner that seemed to him best suited to the requirements of his audience; that he was successful and enjoyed considerable popularity as a poet we may gather both from the passage of Juvenal quoted above and from the closing lines of the poem itself (xii. 812–15):

“Of a truth already present Fame hath of her bounty paved thy way, and begun to hold thee up, young as thou art, to future ages. Already great-hearted ​Caesar deigns to know thee, and the youth of Italy eagerly learns and recounts thy verse.”

The fame that Statius so anxiously yearned for was his throughout the Middle Ages. His epic, though of the ancient world, seems to herald the new age: Amphiaraus is almost the warrior bishop, Chaucer, indeed, calls him “the bisshop Amphiorax”; dragons, sorcerers, enchanted woods, maidens waving to their lovers from high turrets, and other romantic features fill the pages of his poem, while its actual influence can be traced in medieval literature.^[18] All readers of Dante remember the meeting of Statius and Virgil in Purgatory (Cantos 21, 22), and the touching lines in which the poet narrates the recognition of Virgil by his humble and admiring follower. Dante’s belief that Statius was a Christian was due, according to Comparetti,^[19] to the latter’s reverence for Virgil, whom the Middle Ages accepted as prophet of Christ on the strength of the Fourth Eclogue. Mr. P. H. Wicksteed thinks that the words of xii. 496 “ignotae tantum felicibus arae” (“the altar is unknown only to the prosperous”) may have led to an identification with the altar to the Unknown God, “ignoto Deo,” seen at Athens by St. Paul (Acts xvii. 23).^[20] See also A. W. Verrall’s ​ingenious suggestions in “The Altar of Mercy” (Collected Literary Essays, 1913). Besides this there isa conjecture of Prof. Slater: Statius, as we know from Silv. iv. 4. 53, was in the habit of frequenting the tomb of Virgil outside Naples; he suggests that this fact, together with the well-known tradition of St. Paul’s visit to that spot, may have given rise to a story of the meeting of the two, and of Statius’s conversion to Christianity as the result.^[21]

It is quite possible, however, that Dante originated the idea for his own purposes; this was the opinion of Benvenuto, the commentator on Dante (quoted by Vernon, Readings on the Purgatorio, ii. 188), and there seems to be no earlier tradition, When Dante and Virgil meet Statius, he is in the Circle of Avarice, where he has been 500 years, having previously spent 300 in the Ante-Purgatory, and 400 in the Circle of Sloth. The latter punishment was due, as he explains, to his unreadiness to declare himself a Christian, the former to his prodigality (by which, apparently, Dante accounts for his poverty, see Juvenal vii. 82). Statius enlightens Dante on two matters, first, the natural causes of winds and earthquakes (C. 21, cf. Theb. vii. 809 sq.), and second, the nature of the soul when separated from the body (C. 25). This latter knowledge depended to some extent on revealed truth, for which Statius needs to be a Christian. If it be asked why Statius was chosen, the answer may be (i.) that he was highly esteemed in the Middle Ages, (ii.) that his Epic contains similar discussions, though certainly none so long (augury, iii. 482, 551, ​physiology of horses, vi. 333, omens, vi. 934, earthquakes, vii. 809).

Owing to the poet’s ill-health and comparatively early death no more than 1127 lines of this epic appear to have ever been written. In them we have the visit of Thetis, anxious for her son at the outbreak of the Trojan War, to Chiron, under whose charge he is; she conveys the youthful Achilles to Scyros, disguises him as a girl and entrusts him to the care of King Lycomedes; then come the deception of Deidamia, the discovery of Achilles by Ulysses and Diomede, and his departure for Troy. There the fragment ends.

The poet’s style is simpler and less artificial than in the Thebaid, and the narrative flows more evenly. The most successful part of it is undoubtedly the discovery of Achilles, i. 675–920, while the story of his introduction to and courtship of Deidamia is also well told.

The only MS. that deserves separate notice is the fifteenth-century MS. at Madrid (hence known as Matritensis), from which it has been proved that all other existing MSS. are derived (see Klotz, Introduction to the Silvae, Teubner edition). Besides this MS., designated M, there are a certain number of emendations entered by Politian in a copy of the first edition in the Corsinian library at Rome; some of these he ​expressly describes as taken from an old MS. he has recently discovered (1494), which MS. he says is that which Poggio, the Renaissance scholar, brought into Italy from Gaul. He also says that from this MS. all other MSS. are derived, but although we can say the same of M we cannot identity it with Poggio’s MS., for (i.) Politian states that the line Silv. i. 4. 86a, which is in M and subsequent MSS., was not in Poggio’s. (ii.) Some of the excerpts from the latter differ from M. (iii.) He would not have called a fifteenth-century MS. “vetustus.”^[22] This MS. of Poggio is usually identified with the one that Poggio says he sent to Florence in 1416 or i417, from Constance or St. Gall, which was probably a copy of a much older one that he found there. It is quite possible, however, that it was the original that he sent to Florence, and not a copy, and Politian’s description of Poggio’s MS. as “vetustus” would help this identification. See the Classical Review, Nos. 15–17, 20, 26, 27, 32.^[23]

The MSS. of the Thebaid, and in a lesser degree, of the Achilleid are extremely numerous, the former epic especially having been very popular in the Middle Ages. They fall into two well-defined groups, of which one has only one representative, the so-called Puteanus, at Paris, written at the end of the ninth century, and the other consists of a number of MSS. of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the offspring of a MS. now lost, but dating from nearly a century before Puteanus. These, following the Teubner and Oxford editions,^[24] I have designated P and ω respectively. When any particular one of the latter class is quoted, ω, of course, signifies the other members of the group. Later MSS. may be ignored.

There are remarkable differences between the two groups: the most striking will be found at iv. 555, x. 135, xi. 490, but on frequent occasions the difference is one that can hardly be accounted for on grounds of ordinary textual error.^[25] H. W. Garrod in his Introduction to the Thebaid and Achilleid ​suggests that the double tradition may be due to a revised edition made by the poet himself.^[26]

On the whole the readings of P are to be preferred, and they deserve careful consideration even when they seem most difficult; but in many cases it is only judgement that can decide what Statius could or could not have written. Though the MSS. that form the ω-group hang very much together, D and N have perhaps more individuality than the others, see Garrod, Introd. pp. ix, x.

The Achilleid is found in P and in a number of the ω-group; also in a MS. denoted E, in the College Library at Eton.

Books 1–5 of the Thebaid were translated into English verse by T. Stephens in 1648, the Achilleid by Sir R. Howard in 1660; Book I. of the Thebaid by Pope in 1703; extracts from Book VI. by Gray in 1736; and all the Thebaid by W. L. Lewis in 1766. A prose translation of the Silvae by Prof. D. A. Slater was published by the Oxford Press in 1908. The only modern edition of the Silvae is that of Vollmer, Leipzig, 1898. There is no modern edition of the Thebaid or Achilleid.

For criticism, etc., see chapters in Butler’s Post-Augustan Poetry, Oxford, 1909; Summers’ Silver Age of Latin Literature, Methuen, 1920; B. A. Wise, The Influence of Statius on Chaucer, 1911; T. S. Dunean, The Influence of Art on Description in the Poetry of Statius, 1914; J. M. Nisard, Poètes latins de la Décadence, 1849; L. Legras, La Thébaïde de Stace, Paris, 1905.

No Index has been made to the poems of Statius. The names that occur in them, and the adjectives formed from names, are so numerous that no good purpose would be served by including them all. The chief characters of the Thebaid and the books in which they occur will be found in the Summary of Events (Introduction, pp. xxii, xxiii), while in the case of the Silvae the individuals to whom the different poems are addressed or those whom they commemorate will be found in the list of Contents of Vol. I (pp. v. vi).