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

FLAVIAN EPIC
The Muses' fire pervades my mind, bidding it to expound war between brothers,
a kingdom apportioned to their alternate rule and fought for with sacrilegious hate,
Thebes the guilty.
Family strife, war, hatred, depravity, guilt: the respondence with Seneca and
Lucan is immediate and revealing. The opening words of the Thebaid echo
Bellum civile 1.4 (cognatasque acies). Like the conflict between Caesar and
Pompey, the war between Eteocles and Polynices is worse than civil (bella. . .
plus quam ciuilia, Bell. Civ. 1.1). Fraternal discord had been exposed in all its
horror in Seneca's Thyestes and Phoenissae. In the subsequent lines of his proem,
Statius summarizes the long catalogue of madness and disaster that had afflicted
the royal line of Thebes (5—16). He fixes the limits of his epic in the 'disturbed
house of Oedipus' (Oedipodae confusa domus, 17): the last and worst act in
a seemingly unending chain of doom and devastation.
Commentators have often written of Statius' pessimism. Its roots are palpable.
Disillusion with the principate and the Stoic Weltanschauung had provided
a double impetus to Seneca and Lucan in the days of Nero. Statius,
admiring their style, took over profounder aspects of their work. No more
tonally and symbolically fitting an introduction to the narrative could have
been devised by Statius than 46S. Oedipus, blind and vengeful, calls down a
fearful curse upon his sons; his imprecation raises from hell the Fury Tisiphone
who is afterwards a controlling force in the epic. Verbal echoes, as well as
psychological similarities, link Statius' Oedipus with Seneca's. Tisiphone in
the Thebaid, though related to Virgil's Allecto (Aeneid 7.32311".), stands closer
to the Fury who appears at the beginning of Seneca's Thyestes. Statius creates
an infernal being who is ajigura of hatred and madness. She owes her dominance
in the rest of the epic principally to the irreversible effects of Oedipus' curse
once it has been uttered — and confirmed by Jupiter, the executor of Fate
(i.2i2ff.). Tisiphone is, in fact, nothing other than an objectified personification
of the congenital evil that afflicts, and so destroys, the descendants of Laius: for
it is Statius' custom to treat divine beings as allegories of abstract forces and
ideas, in accordance with Stoic preconceptions. It follows that Tisiphone
experiences no difficulty in inflaming Polynices and Eteocles with a legion of
ruinous passions (1.12 5—30). They are members of a deuota domus, a gens
prqfana, and so, by reason of their birth, predisposed to demonic possession.
Seneca had examined the theme in depth; Statius made it a logical dynamic.
And yet he tempered and moderated the harsh philosophy that he had assumed.
Rays of light are allowed to illumine the gloom. Though the fatal results of
furor occupy much of the Thebaid and though bestiality, insensate and uncontrolled,
is almost omnipresent, piety and virtue are also given an exemplary
role. Coroebus, Maeon, Amphiaraus, Menoeceus, Hypsipyle, Jocasta, Argia
and Antigone all, in varying ways, figure forth a nobler vision of mankind.
574
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008