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Happy Birthday, Dead Lucan: (P)Raising the Dead in Silvae 2.7

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Martha A. Malamud
Martha A. Malamud*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

In the conclusion to his ground-breaking study of the relationship between Latin literature and politics in the age of Nero, J.P. Sullivan looked forward to the literature of the Flavian period, offering a broad survey of the leading writers and their political and literary affiliations. His portrait of Statius, written with his typical wit, is distinctly unappealing:

But it is to Statius' Silvae and to ten books of Martial's epigrams that the fastidiously curious turn to discover the sort of praise that the latest and last heir of the Flavian house, though not the modern reader, would find congenial. The longest piece of this kind is Statius' ecphrastic poem on the great equestrian statue of Domitian erected in the Forum Romanum. It was, like the statue, a commissioned piece and was dashed off in less than fortyeight hours …. This poem and the Eucharisticon (Silv. 4.2) on the great splendour of Domitian's lavish feast to which the poet was invited are adequate illustrations of how far poets were prepared to go in their presumably acceptable adulation. G.W.E. Russell once remarked to Matthew Arnold, ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’ Statius seems to have anticipated the advice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , 1995 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1995

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References

1. Sullivan, J.P., Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero (Ithaca 1985), 188f.Google Scholar

2. Sullivan (n.l above), 192. Sullivan, however, had moved from this position by 1991: see his comments (with A.J. Boyle) in the ‘General Introduction’ to Boyle, A.J. and Sullivan, J.P. (eds.), Roman Poets of the Early Empire (Harmondsworth 1991), xixGoogle Scholar: ‘Valerius Flaccus and, even more, Papinius Statius took the themes of the Quest for the Golden Fleece and the Seven Against Thebes to analyse the nature of leadership, ambition, the vagaries of romantic love and the corruptions of power.’

3. For formal analysis, see Buchheit, Vinzenz, ‘Statius’ Geburtstagsgedicht zu Ehren Lucans’, Hermes 88 (1960), 231–49Google Scholar, and Cairns’s, Francis discussion of the genethliakon in Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh 1972)Google Scholar. ,van Dam, H.J., P. Papinius Statius, Silvae Book Il: A Commentary (Leiden 1984)Google Scholar, and Vollmer, Friedrich (ed. and comm.), Publius Papinius Statius: Silvarum Libri (Hildesheim 1898, repr. 1971)Google Scholar, both comment on the question of genre. For the Siluae in general, see Hardie, Alex, Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman World (Liverpool 1983)Google Scholar, and Newmyer, S.T., The Silvae of Statius: Structure and Theme (Leiden 1979)Google Scholar. On ritual celebrations of birthdays in Roman cult, see Argetsinger, Kathryn, ‘Birthday Rituals: Friends and Patrons in Roman Poetry and Cult’, ClAnt 11 (1992), 174–94.Google Scholar

4. Nisbet, R.G.M., ‘Felicitas at Surrentum (Statius, Silvae II.2)’, JRS 68 (1978), 1–11Google Scholar, discusses Polla as patron, and argues for the identification of Pollius’ wife Polla with Lucan’s widow.

5. van Dam (n.3 above), 464, objects strongly to taking the Muses as the subject of fauete linguis, and would translate the second fauete as ‘be propitious’. While the latter translation is possible, the notion that the Muses are not the subject is not—even if, as van Dam would have it, we take the imaginary participants at the feast as the subject of fauete linguis, we are left with the same problem, for the Muses are among those participants.

6. Masters, Jamie, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile (Cambridge 1992), 223 and 226.Google Scholar

7. Cf. Nisbet (n.4 above), 11: ‘They present a striking series of contrasts: Stoics and Epicureans, Bellum Civile and Bellum Germanicum, precocious maturity and premature elderliness, brash Corduba and effete Naples.’

8. Henderson, J.G.W., ‘Statius’ Thebaid: Form Remade’ in Boyle, A.J. (ed.), Roman Epic (London 1993), 169.Google Scholar

9. Vessey, D.W.T., ‘Transience Preserved: Style and Theme in Statius’ Silvae’, ANRW II.32.5 (1986), 2754–801, at 2770f.Google Scholar

10. See Masters (n.6 above), Chapter 5.

11. This is not an innovation on Statius’ part. Persius plays with the landscape of inspiration in the programmatic preface to his Satires, where he conflates Parnassus and Helicon and conflates Hesiod’s ‘real’ vision of the Muses on Helicon with the dreams of Callimachus and Propertius that they were on Helicon, as part of his rejection of the notion of divine inspiration.

12. Frederick M. Ahl, ‘Form Empowered: Lucan’s Pharsalia’, in Boyle (n.8 above), 141: ‘But the dissociation of truth from fact, of ideals from history, is a grand illusion capable of changing fact.’ I differ here from Ahl in finding this dissociation and illusion to be troubling, both to Lucan and to Statius.

13. Note that Statius, in invoking Aonian groves and streams, personifies two elements of the landscape, rivers and groves, that are common images for poetry and that Lucan himself uses dramatically to convey the violently anti-traditional qualities of his poem and his disgust with his own project. See Masters’s (n.6 above) discussion of rivers and of the cutting of the sacred grove at Massilia.

14. Like the Muse, Martha Davis stresses the importance of Statius’ inclusion of Cato as a figure of equal importance to Caesar, and Pompey, in ‘Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’, BMCR 4.3.25 (1993)Google Scholar. Compare Petronius’ reduction of Cato in his parody of Lucan (Petronius Sat. 119 vv.45f.), discussed by Sullivan (n.l above), 166f.

15. Aeneid 2.557f.: iacet ingens litore truncus/auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus (‘a huge trunk lies on the shore, a head ripped from the shoulders, a body without a name’).

16. It should be noted here that the concern with disposing of the bodies of dead political figures was not a purely poetic fantasy. Funerals and funeral monuments, like wills, were important vehicles of propaganda. Cicero in De Legibus 2.22.56f. cites the example of Sulla, who dismembered his opponent Marius’ body and had it scattered in the river Anio; it was to forestall a similar fate, opines Cicero, that he broke with family tradition and left orders that his own body be cremated.

17. Cf. van Dam (n.3 above), 490: ‘The thoughts, examples, and formulas are trite, but there is formal variation…’

18. As van Dam (n.3 above), 492, notes, this imagery is surely an adaptation of Lucan 10.34f.

19. Note that Lucan here defers to the Latin Muses, while Statius rigorously specifies not only Greek but Theban Muses at the opening of 2.7.

20. See Boyle in Boyle and Sullivan (n.2 above), 155: ‘Lucan’s poem is…a poetic representation of civil war’s disintegration of social and moral order, cultural values, freedom and language.’

21. O‘Higgins, Dolores, ‘Lucan ‘as Vales’, ClAnt 7 (1988), 214.Google Scholar

22. Masters (n.6 above), 148.

23. Henderson, J.G.W., ‘Lucan/The Word at War’, in Boyle, A.J. (ed.), The Imperial Muse: To Juvenal through Ovid (Berwick Vic. 1988), 134Google Scholar. See also Boyle in Boyle and Sullivan (n.2 above), 154–56, on Lucan’s ‘dismembered style’.

24. Hardie, P., The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge 1993), 42f.Google Scholar

25. See van Dam (n.3 above), 499, who argues against the emendation. Nero reported seeing visions of his mother pursuing him in the guise of a Fury: Suetonius Nero 34. See Hardie’s (n.23 above) discussion of Furies in post-Vergilian epic, 40–48.

26. See Feeney, Denis, ‘“Stat magni nominis umbra”: Lucan on the Greatness of Pompeius Magnus’, CQ 36 (1986), 239–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. A striking parallel occurs in 5.1, also involving a husband, a wife and a golden statue. With her last breath the dying Priscilla urges her husband Abascantus to erect a golden statue of Domitian to commemorate her love for the emperor; Abascantus goes mad with grief at her death and passionately kisses the corpse: nunc ore ligato/incubat amissae mersumque in corde dolorem/saeuus agit (‘now he throws himself on the lost one binding his mouth to hers, and savagely rouses the pain buried in his heart’, Silu. 5.1.200–02). Priscilla too has a strange afterlife, or afterlives: Abascantus refuses to bury her, instead embalming her body, surrounding her with attendants, and keeping a perpetual banquet at her tomb. Unlike Polla and Laodamia, he is not content with making one image of Priscilla, but instead commissions multiple statues of goddesses with her features.

28. Another textual dispute shows the peculiarity of Statius' ’imagery here. Some editors would emend incubat to excubat to avoid the unpleasant connotations of incubare.

29. Here another instructive textual dispute arises—all the manuscripts of the Siluae have a full stop after somno, but almost all editors agree with Gronovius in deleting this and punctuating after securae, taking it to refer to Polla. Buchheit (n.3 above) argued against this on formal grounds, but his suggestion has not been taken up on the grounds that, although the parallels he cites are apt, ‘securae…Mortes can have no meaning’ (van Dam [n.3 above] ad loc., echoing Nisbet [n.4 above, 10]). I would agree with Buchheit and restore the unanimous reading of the MSS, for securae…Mortes in this context has a great deal of meaning.

30. Henderson (n.8 above), 185.

31. Henderson (n.8 above), 185. This demands some qualification—I do not wish to suggest that Statius represents his own views through the voices of the women in his text, nor that they necessarily represent a privileged set of values in opposition to an epic norm, which may be what Henderson is getting at here.

32. A difficulty summed up in Theb. 1.3f.: unde iubetis ire, deae? (‘where do you bid me go from, goddesses?’). Frederick Ahl, M. has much to say on this question in his three important articles on Statius: ‘Lucan and Statius’, in Luce, T.J. (ed.), Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome (New York 1982)Google Scholar; ‘The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius’, ANRW II.32.1 (1984), 40–124Google Scholar; and ‘Statius’ Thebaid: A Reconsideration’, ANRW II.32.5 (1986), 2803–912.Google Scholar

33. Henderson (n.8 above), 165: ‘Statius’ readers would need no explicit mandate to explore ways in which his poem was declaring to them at one and the same moment both that the Thebaid was not “about” their world and that it was not not about their world, too.’

34. Here I differ somewhat from the view expressed by Dominik, W., ‘Monarchal Power and Politics in Statius’ Thebaid'’, in Boyle, A.J. (ed.), The Imperial Muse: Flavian Epicist to Claudian (Bendigo 1990), 93Google Scholar: ‘Given the political climate of the age, there was little that Statius could do except vent his feelings of frustration and helplessness through the ambiguity and obscurity afforded by the prototypic myth of internecine civil war…to raise his voice in direct protest against the iniquities of imperial rule was tantamount to signing his own death warrant.’ While I fully agree with Dominik’s thesis that much of the Thebaid is devoted to an analysis of power relations, I am not convinced that Statius uses myth primarily as a form of self-protection in an attempt to obscure the political message of his text.

35. Henderson (n.8 above), 188.

36. Cf. Tristia 1.1 and 3.1. Combining the narrative stance of the self-assertive epilogue of the Metamorphoses with that of the voice of the exile poems is itself a curious gesture on Statius’ part, suggesting again that epic, even mythological epic, has political consequences. Neither the address to the book nor the epilogue is, of course, solely Ovidian. Ovid alone of Statius’ extant Latin epic predecessors concludes his poem with an epilogue, but Apollonius of Rhodes ends with a closing address to his heroes that is in some ways analogous to the epilogues of Ovid and Statius, though far briefer, and Horace too addresses his book in Epist. 1.20.

37. BC 7.552–26; see p. 15 above.

38. Aeneid 6.625–27: non, mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum,/ferrea uox, omnis scelerum comprendere formas,/omnia poenarum percurrere nomina possim (‘not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths and a voice of iron, would I be able to run through all the forms of crimes, all the categories of punishments’). Cf. Georgics 2.43f., Iliad 2.488f., and Ennius Ann. 561 f.

39. I would like to thank Frederick M. Ahl, Anthony J. Boyle, and the participants in the 1993 Pacific Rim Roman Literary Seminar (happily displaced from the Pacific Rim to Cornell University for this meeting) for their suggestions and response when this paper was first presented. Particular thanks as well to Donald T. McGuire, jr., and Alan Heinrich for their improving comments on the draft version of this paper.