Also in contrast to Virgil, Statius extends the motivation for the war beyond the underworld to Jupiter’s anger and his design to punish mankind. Virgil makes Jupiter a figure of serenity whose purpose is not to provoke strife but to mirror the justness of Aeneas, which contrasts with the angry passions of Dido, just as Jupiter contrasts with his wife. As A. J. Gossage argues, when comparing Virgil and Statius, Virgil’s figures of Jupiter and Aeneas represent the
Roman genius for organization and order over the forces of destruction, war and civil conflict. The Jupiter of the Thebaid who punishes men for their crimes is a moral castigator far removed, despite his basic serenity, from Virgil’s Jupiter; moreover, since he too is angry, there is no great contrast with Juno, who, in any case, is not a powerful enough character to make a balance or contrast possible. The inner tension of the Thebaid is a more complex matter. Angry passions appear in both Argos and Thebes; the main conflict is between two men who, with their supporters, are both driven on by furor. Besides this there is an effective contrast between the uncontrolled violence of men like Polynices, Tydeus and Capaneus and the efforts of Adrastus and Amphiaraus to calm them; this contrast is emphasized and typified by the clash between Tisiphone and Pietas. The pattern of human relationships in the Thebaid, therefore, is not, as in the Aeneid, simply and clearly reflected in the relationships of the gods. (p. 81)
If Statius altered Jupiter, he also developed ideas that made readers like Dante believe that Virgil, who died in 19 b.c., was a Christian before the fact. Like Virgil, as Gossage points out, Statius describes the terrors of approaching war, families searching for dead relatives on the battlefield, and mothers lamenting lost sons. He understood the sufferings of the innocent involved in the conflicts of their rulers and, as usual, expanded what Virgil touched. The expedition of Hopleus and Dymas to recover the bodies of their leaders, Tydeus and Parthanopaeus, imitates Virgil’s story of Nisus and Euryalus, and Statius adds other examples of pietas, which Gos-sage defines as “the close ties of duty and affection among members of a family,” including the self-sacrifice of Menoeceus to save Thebes and the “mission of the Argive women, and in particular Argia, the widow of Polynices, to recover the bodies of their menfolk slain at Thebes and give them burial” (p. 73).
In another alteration of Virgil, Statius expands the death of Lausus, known for his personal beauty, into a lengthy portrait of Parthenopaeus, the youngest of the Argive captains. He shows him running nude in the funeral games of book 6 (itself an imitation of Aeneid 5); gives him, like Lausus, a tunic woven for him by his mother; and has his enemies accuse him of attempting deeds beyond his strength. Michael C. J. Putnam has argued that by killing Lausus, who dies protecting his father Mezentius, Aeneas fails to respond to the virtue of pietas, supposedly his personal strength, when he sees it in others. In the Thebaid, Parthenopaeus is killed not so much by a single warrior as by an accumulation of obstacles. Here, too, Statius expands a single element in Virgil’s poem, projecting Aeneas’s moral failing onto the entire Argive cause.
Sometimes Statius pays homage to Virgil by successfully giving prominence to his predecessor’s details. He moves Virgil’s opening sea storm into the mountains and forests of Greece; both scenes show, as Gossage notes, an exile in distress, the mirroring of human frenzy in the agitations of nature, and deceptive calm when the storms end. Later in the poem Hypsipyle’s narration of the Lemnian massacre begins with lines that recall Aeneas’s beginning of his tale of the fall of Troy. Both narrators recoil in horror from what they have to say: “Although the main details of the story are quite different, there are other Virgilian reminiscences, such as the approach of the fleet, the false security before the massacre, Hypsipyle’s sudden alarm for the safety of her father, and the escape itself, through the unfrequented places of the city” (p. 85). The story of Coroebus and the monster in the Thebaid derives from Evander’s account of Cacus and Hercules in Virgil’s seventh book, as both are “introduced during an entertainment as an explanation for religious observances” (pp. 86–87). Finally, Adrastus is based on Virgil’s Latinus, the leader of a community whose peace is interrupted. Both men try to calm the ardor of younger heroes and flee when their efforts fail.
The Influence of the Thebaid
Statius’s envoy tells us that even before its completion his Thebaid was taught in Italy’s schoolrooms and the young memorized verses. It was the last successful epic written in Rome. Like other literary works, its survival depended on the senatorial class, which paid for the copying and editing of texts. The Roman families that maintained polytheism until the fifth century would likely have seen their values mirrored in the exploits of Statius’s great heroes. But the frank unfairness of the gods, particularly Apollo, would also have played into the interests of the new church as it sought to overcome the beliefs of the rural populations, irrespective of the gentry.
The allegorist’s task of explaining away the rude husk of the poem fell to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, who may have lived in the fifth or sixth century or as late as the twelfth. He turns the war against Thebes into a spiritual war for the soul of man. His imaginative reading is worth reviewing as an antidote to the dismissal of Statius that occupied the antiallegorical interval of criticism that lasted from roughly the English Civil War to World War II (1640–1940). During this period Statius was condemned because he did not leap through the neoclassical hoop of the unities. Critics said the Thebaid lost track of its narrative line. It repeated figurative devices, usually animal similes. Its moralizing was thought to be sometimes sincere but sometimes perfunctory. Most agreed that Statius was less than Virgil. Alexander Pope condemned Statius’s catalogs of armies as merely imitative and said that Statius destroyed the unity of his action by including funeral games for Archemorus. Others regarded Statius’s gods as pale imitations of Homer’s originals. The result was that Statius’s message was lost for several centuries.
Fulgentius believed that Statius’s story of Thebes taught people how to develop sound habits of life. This allegorical reading is no more extraordinary than Fulgentius’s analysis of the Aeneid, which discovers the progress of a human’s life in Virgil’s first six books, from the pangs of childbirth in the storm that blows Aeneas into Dido’s kingdom to the figuration of death in Aeneas’s descent to the underworld. In Fulgentius’s commentary, Thebes is the soul inhabited by virtues and ruled by Laius, or sacred light, and Jocasta, or Joy. Oedipus, or licentiousness, extinguishes the light, and his birth defiles the purity of Joy. The chorus in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes says Eteocles means “full of glory” and Polynices’ name means “full of strife.” For Fulgentius, by contrast, the sons of Oedipus are greed and lust. Greed destroys morals (ethos) and lust is the conqueror (nichos) of many. Eteocles rules Thebes because greed easily suppresses the lustful man, who goes in exile to the Greeks, just as licentious men, who waste their wealth, flee to worldly wisdom.
Although Fulgentius is guilty of false etymologies (his ability to comprehend Greek does not withstand scrutiny), he has alertly and with some sensitivity read the poem he explicates. He is wrong to claim that Adrastus derives his name from adrios, Greek for profunditas, but he is correct about the suitability of that theme to the king of Argos. In a similar way Fulgentius identifies Adrastus’s daughter Argia with foreknowledge, since argeosin Greek is providentia, as in the name Argus, the monster with a hundred eyes. Fulgentius is wrong again, but the allegory he derives is cleverly constructed. In this scheme of things, Polynices marries foreknowledge, the daughter of philosophy, and at the end of a year, emboldened by worldly wisdom, he seeks to regain the rule of Thebes from his brother. When Eteocles refuses, seven kings pledge to support Polynices. They are the seven liberal arts, for they guide and support all branches of learning, and they are subject to Adrastus because he represents philosophy. (Fulgentius forgets that Adrastus is one of Statius’s seven against Thebes, but then, Greek authors were never exact. Aeschylus lists an Eteoclus instead of Adrastus amon
g the seven. Homer mentions the expedition of the seven against Thebes as an adventure that occurs in the generation before the events of the Iliad, but neither he nor Greek tragedy offers a consistent account of the heroes’ personalities or deaths.)
Writing from a Christian perspective Fulgentius explains that the Argives grow thirsty because they lack the wellspring of faith: to drink of worldly knowledge does not lessen thirst but increases it. Hypsipyle is the love of Isis, the chief goddess of Egypt—that is, Idolatry, which leads to its stream all who strain after worldly knowledge. A serpent kills Archemorus because the foster child of idolatry is death. Naturally the serpent is the devil. It is appropriate that the Greeks console Lycurgus, the child’s father, because worldly knowledge consoles those who die in their sins. They bury Archemorus with honor because, says Fulgentius, “the followers of idolatry, who as they sleep in death are enveloped in the praise of men and the vainglory of earth, are at least in the vulgar view buried with pomp and circumstance” (p. 242).
Fulgentius had a ready eye for details and for questions raised by the text. The story proceeds as those who grasp at philosophy fight against greed, but unsuccessfully, because men choose what is worthless or they esteem vain knowledge. Adrastus survives because philosophy may lead others to ruin but does not die itself. The poem ends when the royal widows, who represent human feelings, make their appeal to Theseus, or God, who liberates Thebes, the soul, by overcoming pride with humility. Although Fulgentius comments that the rest of the story is worthless, he developed a powerful reading of the poem that helps explain the despair that characterizes Statius’s representation of human affairs.
Fulgentius did not leave a strong textual tradition from which we might deduce his influence, although his method of reading, which can be found in Macrobius, was common enough. By contrast the comments of Lactantius Placidus (who cites and therefore postdates Boethius) are fairly unimaginative but offered grammatical and mythological guidance, if not to the Middle Ages, from which only four manuscripts derive, then to Renaissance readers who benefited from more than twenty editions of the Thebaidthat included Lactantius’s extensive sets of glosses.
Statius became popular in the early Middle Ages as the role of the classics grew in medieval education. In 1086 Americo di Gâlinaux listed Statius in his Ars lectoria along with Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Sallust, Lucan, Juvenal, and Persius. An eleventh-century anthology that once belonged to Saint Augustine in Canterbury includes the laments of Eurydice for her dead son Opheltes. Twelfth-century monastic libraries list 61 Thebaids, compared with 80 Aeneids, 34 Metamorphoses, and 113 copies of Lucan’s epic.
Sometime in the later twelfth century the Thebaid was translated into French octosyllabics and turned into a chivalric romance, probably for an audience of nobles and clerics, perhaps for the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The story begins with the history of Oedipus, turns the ancient Greeks into jousting knights, and includes a final episode featuring an attempt to betray Thebes. The extended version of the Oedipus story blurs Statius’s theme of fraternal strife, while the theme of betrayal illustrates the obsession with loyalty that characterizes early French epics, including Le chanson de Roland, whose author probably knew Statius. Written by a Christian, the French version of Statius’s poem omits the gods and so excludes Apollo’s vengeance and Adrastus’s prayer.
Le roman de Thèbes is really a story of a social order gone awry, where sons disobey their fathers and women do not know their place. Furious at his brother’s marriage, Eteocles would rather let himself be hanged than hand over his kingdom. Eight days before his term is due, he holds a private council where he reveals a treacherous plot to kill his brother. Tydeus, when ambushed, fights “like Roland.” The Argive heroes join Adrastus because of the treacherous attack on Tydeus, not from any sense of a civil war or fraternal strife. Eteocles had wronged each of them in some way.
Oblivious to the theme of fate, the translator can find no excuse for what even modern readers might feel is a flaw in Statius’s story, the way Hypsipyle leaves behind Lycurgus’s baby when she leads the Argives to water in book 4. Driven not by destiny but by the ethos of a French nobleman, Eteocles offers Polynices a fief, to be held from him. The Argives reject this proposal as an insult. The author then has them hold a tournament near Thebes to replace the funeral games in Statius’s poem. He turns the augur Amphiaraus into an archbishop and decorates the chariot that carries him to the underworld with symbols of the liberal arts, such as rhetoric, music, and astronomy. The translator, who may have been Anglo-Norman, also gives Eteocles a set of exotic associates: a girlfriend named Galatea, whom he abandons; a Jewish adviser named Salaciel; and an English supporter named Goodrich. Theseus intervenes in the end, not to maintain the custom of burial or relieve the suffering of the Argive widows, but because Creon breaks his word by failing to acknowledge his lordship and pay tribute.
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Le roman de Thèbes was redacted into prose (Roman de Edipus and Hystoire de Thebes) and later into verse. As Robert R. Edwards notes in his edition of John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes, universal histories like the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (ca. 1208–13), which begin with the creation of the world and connect pagan, Jewish, and Christian history, take the story of Thebes as a warning against cyclic violence. Lydgate himself was a Lancastrian propagandist for Henry V, who died in 1421 or 1422, soon after Lydgate composed The Siege of Thebes. The Monk of Bury, as Lydgate is known, makes Tydeus a model of knightly virtues, perhaps even a portrait of the famous victor of Agincourt. Tydeus does not eat anyone in Lydgate’s version, and he is less passionate than Statius’s creation, at one point refusing to seduce the daughter of Lycurgus, who nurses him back to health in her father’s garden. When Shakespeare dramatized the strife between Henry V’s surviving brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and John, duke of Bedford, he gave the short but powerful limbs of Tydeus to Talbot, England’s fiercest warrior (1 Henry VI 2.3.22).
Statius’s influence on Renaissance English literature is most vividly felt in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where each book is composed of twelve cantos on the model Statius first copied from Virgil. A Cambridge graduate and educated in the classics, Spenser must have regarded Statius as a master of horror. At the end of the first canto of the Faerie Queene,Archimago rouses a false dream from hell to give Red Crosse a nightmare, just as the shade of Laius infects the sleep of Eteocles (Thebaid 2.94–119). It is a very odd way to start an epic, unless the model is not the abstract ideal of an action that should begin in the middle of things, but the actual practice of a master like Statius (whose own inspiration was probably Agamemnon’s dream at the beginning of book 3 of the Iliad). As Archimago works his magic—”A bold bad man, that dar’d to call by name / Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night, / At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight” (Fairie Queene 1.1.37)—he invokes the same infernal power that Tiresias dares not name in the fourth book of the Thebaid. (A scribal error in the commentary of Lactantius turned the unnamed demiurge into Demogorgon, an overseer of demons and fairies who appears in Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods, Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato [2.13.26–29], and then Spenser’s romance epic.)
Spenser knew Statius directly, but he also knew the romance traditions Statius inspired, including the work of Ariosto and Tasso. The brawl between Britomart and other knights in a pigsty outside the house of Malbecco (Fairie Queene 2.9) ultimately derives from Statius’s description of Polynices battling Tydeus for shelter on Adrastus’s porch (Thebaid 1.408–27). Their brawl, I would argue, gave rise to the custom of the castle motif in medieval French and Renaissance Italian romances, since the two Greeks fight for lodging in a context that raises fundamental questions of justice, as later knights will do (see my Custom of the Castle from Malory to Macbeth [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997]).
There is no evidence that Shakespeare read the Thebaid, but like Spenser he knew the traditi
ons it spawned. The Gloucester subplot of Shakespeare’s King Lear derives from Statius by way of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia(1590), which includes a story about two rival brothers and their blinded father (bk. 2, chap. 10). In the Defense of Poetry Sidney says that the story of Polynices and Eteocles is about ambition, a word he may have gleaned from Euripides’ Phoenician Women. In that play Jocasta asks Eteocles why he pursues Ambition, the worst of gods, instead of Equality. George Gascoigne, whom Sidney knew, translated Euripides’ play from an Italian version by Ludovico Dolce, but we may suspect that Sidney read Statius directly because a soldier who works for one of the rival brothers is named Tydeus.
Whether or not Shakespeare read Statius, at least some in his audience associated the Gloucester subplot with the story of Thebes. John Webster’s The White Devil, first performed in 1612, openly imitates King Lear and also recalls Polynices and Eteocles. Bracciano raves madly in his bed and seeks to dispute with the devil, just as Lear wants to talk philosophy with mad Tom. Webster’s Flamineo, like Shakespeare’s Edgar, counsels patience. Marcello then compares Flamineo and himself with “the two slaughtered sons of Oedipus, / The very flames of our affection / Shall turn two ways” (5.1.198). The details of the battling flames and Oedipal madness indicate that Webster had Statius in mind, not Greek drama.
Shakespeare also knew the reputation of Theseus, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he consciously set the Athenian leader in a Thebaid-like context of conflicting customs and fraternal strife. Classical Greek drama had already made Theseus a figure of redemption who resolved the nightmare of social disorder that ancient Athenians projected onto Thebes. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Adrastus (not Argia) appeals to Theseus. The Athenian leader berates the Argive king for arrogance and for stupidly marrying his daughters to foreigners, thereby muddying the clear waters of his house. He also accuses Adrastus of ignoring the prophecies that predicted doom for his expedition against Thebes and for being led astray by young men who want war without realizing its consequences because they want to lead armies, acquire power, or win wealth. Although Theseus at first refuses to help, blaming Adrastus for his poor judgment, eventually he yields to the entreaties of the Chorus in order to uphold his reputation as a punisher of wrongdoing. He believes that all Greece is affected by Creon’s violation of the custom of burial, whose purpose, he believes, is to encourage men to go to war.
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