Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

STATIUS
no less many-sided are its artistic splendours: yet it is Augustan in the same
sense as Spenser's The Faerie Queene is Elizabethan. The Thebaid is Flavian
more in the fashion that Paradise Lost is linked to the England of Cromwell.
Lucan, writing under Nero, could hardly have shared Virgilian values or have
revivified the defunct ideals of the Restored Republic. His mind was at once
more dogmatic and more superficial than Virgil's: doctrines and words were
not so much his tools as his shackles. The suave urbanity of Ovid and the
sententious brevity of Seneca had an instantaneous appeal for Lucan. His
uncle reinforced style with Stoicism; the nexus was irresistible. Virgil's serene
and flawless majesty must dim Lucan's pyrotechnics, however scintillating.
Statius 1 verses glitter and coruscate — but they are still sharp and sudden like
Lucan's, not constant and diffused like Virgil's.
The obsession with logodaedaly was initiated by Ovid. His successors in
the first generation were Seneca and Lucan; the next heir was Statius. From
Senecan tragedy and the Bellum civile he also borrowed a world-view for his
epic. The Thebaid is a panorama in which cosmos and destiny, god and man,
piety and sin, corruption and redemption are displayed within the compass of
a single history. Seneca had written dramas — including an Oedipus and a
Phoenissae — in which plots passed to him from the tragedians of Athens were
reinterpreted to reveal — and to debate — the tenets of his own brand of
Stoicism. Lucan narrated the war between Caesar and Pompey; the historical
confrontation is universalized and defined in terms of philosophical absolutes.
Though Statius eschewed the Stoic evangelism of the Bellum civile, he adopted
its cosmic outlook and its psychological approach. Lucan's theme had led him
into rash polemic: the Theban legend was safer, but no less amenable to setting
forth the horrors of passion, ambition and tyranny.
The destruction, in successive generations, of an accursed house (deuota
domus) was a favoured topic of Senecan tragedy. In the descendants of Tantalus
and of Laius, madness — in Stoic view the ineluctable concomitant of passion
(i'ra) — continually broke out afresh. Violence follows violence, crimes worsen
and multiply. It is a bleak and anguished world, its savagery scarcely leavened
by hope or goodness. The same dark miasma enwraps Lucan's epic. Caesar's
tyrannical frenzy causes the dissolution of Roman liberty, of ordered society.
Even Cato, the Stoic saint, is presented as a grim and forbidding figure. In the
Thebaid, Statius recounts the horrendous chronicle of a doomed dynasty. Before
him were Seneca's Theban dramas, his Thyestes and Agamemnon. Statius' Thebes
is a diseased realm, ruled by a corrupt and insane tyrant. The prologue epitomizes
the grimness of his theme:
fraternas acies alternaque regna profanis
decertata odiis sontesque euoluere Thebas
Pierius mend calor incidit. (1.1-3)
573
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008