INTRODUCTION

In Statius’ Thebaid and Silius’ Punica (produced in the Flavian era of the first century AD), gender ambiguity is a striking and defining trait of divine Virtus, which bears much hidden significance. First, it flags gender as a key point of interest in both depictions of the allegory. Personified allegories are traditionally gendered as female (with the exception of Somnus in Metamorphoses 11), so the gender instability which seems to characterise Flavian depictions of Virtus would make it less controllable in terms of unity of meaning. Second, such a feature brings these two Flavian texts together in a way that compels us to read one alongside the other. In this chapter, I would like to indulge in some ‘experimental’ reading by looking at one passage through the other, since it is not clear which passage takes historical precedence (though Statius most probably does), and see how the notion of gender is being used, articulated and manipulated in order to reconfigure the meaning of epic virtus for the Flavians.

This reading practice implies, to borrow Stephen Hinds’ words (1998: 10), a ‘shift [in] the balance of power away from the poet and towards the reader’ since ‘poetic meaning is always, in practice, something (re)constructed by the reader at the point of reception’. If there is a period in Roman literary history where this type of reading can be exercised without risking the charge of going ‘off track‘ or being ‘far-fetched’, it is the Flavian period – even more so in the context of the literary relationship between Statius and Silius. As contemporaries, it is not inconceivable that Statius may have edited a particular passage in reaction to Silius, or vice versa (on recent scholarship discussing Statius and Silius’ literary relationship, see Manuwald and Voigt 2013; Ripoll 2015). And, concomitantly, as discussed in the introduction to this volume, newly posited or renewed enquiries into gender representations in classical media also contribute to the opening of (potentially) new interpretations which may have eluded our attention so far. Here, both notions of gender and poetic influence are coterminous and enhance the analysis of one through the other, as we shall see.