Shakespeare turns the figure whom Fulgentius said represented God, the man who delivers mercy to the Argive women and ensures the proper burial of the dead, into an overly cerebral observer of young lovers. At first he sternly upholds the custom of Athens that Hermia must marry according to her father’s wishes. Eventually he comes to his senses and lets the dreams of the young lovers come true. Often at odds, Demetrius and Lysander and Hermia and Helena are latter-day versions of Oedipus’s sons. Their love stories trace back to Boccaccio’s Teseida, the fourteenth-century romance that turned Statius’s story of two brothers who compete for a kingdom into a medieval tale of two knights who joust for the affections of a lady.
Like Shakespeare, Chaucer seems to have read Statius for the most part indirectly. He based his Knight’s Tale on the Teseida, where he would have read Boccaccio’s chiodi, or keys, to the poem, which retell Statius’s epic. Chaucer invokes the fury Tisiphone in the first and fourth books of the Troilus, but makes the fury sad herself, not the source of terror in others as she is in the Thebaid. He also shows Cressida reading the story of Thebes, but she seems to read the French romance version, not the Latin original in twelve books. Nonetheless critics have suggested a deep affinity between the poets. Some argue that Chaucer found a model for Cressida’s suffering as a woman among the widows depicted in the Thebaid. Others point out that Pandarus may raise the issue of what text Cressida reads to make her feel uneducated and vulnerable. He wants to remind his niece of her lack of education and so make her susceptible to his suggestions that she take Troilus as a lover and protector. Among those who detect a strong Statian influence Lee Patterson argues that Thebes represents cyclic disorder in The Knight’s Tale. He contrasts the recursive violence that Chaucer associated with Theban myths (as when the incest of Oedipus replays the fate of Cadmus’s earthborn soldiers) with the linear but limited plot of Christian causality, which obscures the role of chance and is ultimately grounded in human will. According to Patterson, Chaucer responded to the way Statius asserts the value of virtue and piety and the hints he gives of a happier afterlife. Nonetheless Chaucer’s reading of Statius seems not to have been as direct as Dante’s.
Statius’s presence in English literature has always been more precarious than in Italy. In his Convivium Dante exalts Argia and Deipyle as models of virtue, and he included all of Statius’s major figures in his Divine Comedy. The first great elaboration of an episode from Statius’s poem occurs when Dante recalls Capaneus in Inferno 14, where he empties him of heroism and makes him a figure of impiety. Later he puts Tiresias’s daughter Manto among the seers of the fourth bolgia (Inferno 20.52). Dante encounters Statius in Purgatory on the fifth terrace, among the avaricious and the prodigal, almost as part of a divine plan. He watches Statius approach Virgil as Statius himself might expect a future poet, steeped in his works, to meet and admire his own shade (Purgatorio 21). Less clear is why, in Purgatorio 25, Statius explains the reason that souls survive the body after death. The early commentator Pietro di Dante suggested that where Dante saw Virgil as the model of rational philosophy, he regarded Statius as someone suitable for giving examples from moral philosophy.
In general the role of Statius expresses Dante’s view that Latin poetry provided a providential vision to guide the might of the Roman Empire toward Christianity (cf. the words of Justinian in Paradiso 6.92–93). The figure of Statius passes through the flames at the entrance of the Earthly Paradise with Dante and Virgil and is present when Dante awakens (Purgatorio 27.47, 114). For a similar reason Dante turns to Statius and Virgil after listening to Matilda (28.145–46); then, after a long silence, we see Statius follow Beatrice’s chariot, accompanied by Matilda and the pilgrim (32.29). At Purgatorio 33.134–35 Beatrice invites Statius to accompany her procession. Statius then accompanies Dante until the end of the canticle, and by the beginning of the Paradiso he has been assumed into heaven on his own account and dwells among the blessed.
Given the way Dante promoted Statius, it is not surprising that the Thebaid continued to exert an influence on later Italian writers. Giovanni Boccaccio owned a twelfth-century manuscript (Biblioteca MediceaLaurenziana, MS Plut. 38.6) and sought out Lactantius’s commentary and another copy of the poem. Matteo Maria Boiardo knew the first printed edition of the Teseida (1475), which included a commentary by Pier Andrea dei Bassi. Boiardo reprises Boccaccio’s theme in his Orlando innamorato,where the cousins Rinaldo and Orlando vie for the love of Angelica. In contrast to Dante, for whom Statius is a deeply meaningful figure, Boiardo, fully aware of how Boccaccio rewrote the Thebaid, catches Statius’s lightness, sense of humor, and ironic distance from his subject. For example, Boiardo’s Algerian warrior Rodamonte makes fun of fortunetellers just as Capaneus does in the Thebaid. In Boiardo’s epic the ancient king of Garamanta warns against war, thereby provoking the skepticism of Rodamonte:
Laughing his hardest, Rodamonte
heard the old man’s prophetic words.
But when he saw him mute and silent,
in a loud, booming voice he said,
“It is all right while we are here to prophesy all you desire.
“But after we have crossed the sea
and ruined France with sword and fire,
don’t come to me to make predictions—
I’ll be the prophet over there!
To these men you can threaten harm
but not to me; I don’t believe you.
Your foolish brain and lots of wine
make you hear Allah in your mind!”
Many men laughed, who gladly heard
that haughty cavalier’s response.
(Orlando innamorato 2.1.60–61)
In the Thebaid, Boiardo’s source, the narrator addresses Amphiaraus, then Capaneus similarly mocks the augur for predicting disaster for the Argives.
He stood before your gates, Amphiaraus,
among the mob of rabble and its leaders,
and yelled, “What kind of cowardice is this,
o Argives, and you blood-related Greeks?
Do we, so many people armed in iron,
hang here before a common person’s doorway,
a single citizen’s, when we are ready
and willing? I won’t wait while some pale virgin
utters her warning riddles for Apollo—
if he exists, if he is not a rumor
or something for the timid to believe—
secluded deep within his crazy cavern,
beneath the hollow peak of Cirrha, moaning!
My god is my own strength, this sword I hold!
Now let that timid priest, that fraud, emerge—
or I will demonstrate the power of birds!”
The rabble howled with joy . . . (3.606–18)
Like Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, the most popular poet of Renaissance Italy, borrowed several motifs from Statius’s epic and, at the same time, learned how Statius absorbed his precursors. In his Orlando furioso (1516), Doralice complains that Mandricardo fights Ruggiero over a trivial item, the insignia of an eagle, not because he loves her but because he is naturally ferocious and always looking for an excuse to fight (3.34). Her complaint is based on Argia’s attempt to delay Polynices from leaving for Thebes (Thebaid 2.332–63), which in turn recalls a bedroom conversation between Amata and Turnus (Aeneid 12.54) and its Homeric source, the conversational exchange between Andromache and Hector in the Iliad, which this translation mimics through the filter of Shakespeare’s version (Troilus and Cressida 5.3.1).
In the absence of much academic commentary, poets who admired Statius have often been his best critics. For example, Ariosto responded to Statius’s sympathy for suffering. He based the Cretan women of the Guido Selvaggio episode (Orlando furioso 20.5–61) on the women of Lemnos in Statius, and the prayers and laments of women during the siege of Paris recall the way the Argive women pray to Juno (Thebaid 10.49), a scene, Ariosto knew, that Boiardo also drew on (Orlando innamorato 1.7.4). From Statius later writers
learned to put passion into their allegorical personifications. Ariosto’s Saint Michael is sent to find Silence and Discord, and the source is in the pagan epic, a mixture of Iris and Mercury, messengers of Juno and Jupiter respectively. Iris visits the cave of Sleep in the Ovid’s Metamorphoses (11.585) and, more important for Ariosto, in the Thebaid(10.80), where the Italian poet found abstractions like Laziness and Silence who inhabit the court; moreover the mission is similar, to put a band of soldiers to sleep and make them helpless victims. Michael’s second visit to Discord (Orlando furioso 27.35) derives from Mercury’s trip to the house of Mars (Thebaid 7.5). Ariosto would have been aware that Virgil’s Juno gives one of the Erynnis, Aletto, a similar mission (Aeneid 7.339).
The death of Parthanopaeus was a model for that of Ariosto’s Dardinello, Almonte’s young son, whom Rinaldo kills; the simile at Orlando furioso 18.151 comes from Thebaid 7.670–74. Night quickly ends the siege of Paris in Orlando furioso 18.161, just as Jupiter accelerates evening after the death of Parthenopaeus (Thebaid. 10.1–4). The Christians remain outside Paris and besiege the besiegers, just as the Thebans do. (Contrast Iliad7.435–41.)
Ariosto’s most extensive borrowing comes in the episode of Cloridano and Medoro (Orlando furioso 18.165–19.15), a version of Statius’s Hopleus and Dymas, which Statius in turn openly modeled on Virgil’s Nisus and Euryalus (Aeneid 9.300–597). But where Virgil tells the story of two men who lose themselves and each other as they slaughter sleeping enemies at night, Ariosto and Statius tell a story of two very close friends who wander through the aftermath of battle in search of the bodies of their commanders. Ariosto must have noticed how Statius set up a comparison between two soldiers who search for their lords’ bodies (10.347–448) and Antigone and Argia, who later look for Polynices (12.111–463). Medoro’s prayer to the moon comes from Statius. Ariosto’s Dymas, like Statius’s Argia, also prays to the moon.
Over the centuries scores of poets modeled compositions on the Aeneidand tried to compete with Virgil. Statius was the best of these myriad competitors in the epic vein, on a par with Lucan, Tasso, and Milton. He is sometimes baroque, as when he makes Neptune’s horses behave like waves in book 2 (“First their hooves/scrape up the sand, but then they disappear/ into the sea, like fish,” Thebaid 2.46–47), but he is often movingly spiritual. Such poetry flourished in the seventeenth century. Milton’s deepest debt to Statius was similar to Dante’s. His religious verses, such as the heartfelt prayers of Adam and Eve or the narrator’s meditation on his blindness and circumstances, evoke Statius at his most hymnal, as when Adrastus prays to Apollo, Tydeus praises Athena, Tiresias evokes the spirits of hell, the earth swallows Amphiaraus, or the Argive women flock to the altar of Clemency in Athens.
For English readers Milton may be the best witness to Statius’s powers of poetry. Paradise Lost directly borrows two images from Statius’s book of gloom, the visible darkness of hell’s “livid flames” (1.182; cf. Styx livida, Thebaid 1.57) and Adam’s reaction to Eve’s having eaten the forbidden fruit. In the Thebaid Bacchus drops his garlands when he sees the Argive army threaten his home city of Thebes: “his hand released his thyrsis;/his garlands and his curls fell out of place; /his horn of plenty dropped unblemished grapes” (Thebaid 7.58). Adam is similarly stunned:
On th’ other side, Adam, soon as he heard
The fatal Trespass done by Eve, amaz’d,
Astonied stood and Blank, while horror chill
Ran through his veins, and all his joints relax’d;
From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve
Down dropp’d, and all the faded Roses shed:
Speechless he stood and pale . . .
(Paradise Lost 9.888–95)
Milton also would have known that one of Statius’s favorite tropes is the uncertainty topos. Milton adopts the topos at the beginning of Paradise Lost,when, uncertain where the Holy Ghost of inspiration may dwell, he invokes him “on the secret top/of Oreb, or of Sinai . . . Sion Hill . . . and Siloa’s Brook” (1.7–11). Statius also uses it to offer possible explanations for things he cannot know, such as why the flights of birds foretell the future:
What is
the cause that makes the miracle? What gives
winged birds this power? Is it that the founder
of heaven’s upper halls weaves wondrous patterns
throughout vast Chaos? or because winged birds
have been transformed from human origins
by metamorphoses? or is the truth
more easily obtained because birds fly
in heaven’s purer air, removed from sin,
and rarely land on earth? (3.482–88)
Another version of the uncertainty topos occurs when Adrastus invokes Apollo on “Lycia’s/snow-covered mountains or Patara’s thorns” or Castalia or Thymbra or on Mount Cynthus (Thebaid 1.696–702).
Statius and His Poem
Statius was a recognized role model for poets, and his story of the Theban war taught a moral lesson, despite its horrors. Paolo Orosius, a fifth-century Christian historian, regarded the mutual murder of Polynices and Eteocles as a revolting crime. The husk of the story hid a kernel of truth, however, for the medieval commentator Fulgentius, who interpreted the Theban war as an allegorical battle for the soul of man. In the Purgatory Dante not only has Statius express his admiration for the Aeneid, which he often imitates, but the later Roman poet claims to have learned Christian doctrine from Virgil’s earlier poem. For such commentators Statius’s subject matter illustrated the failings of the pagan world, yet beneath the poem’s sordid exterior readers could detect a glimmer of truth. Nor were early readers far wrong, for Statius seems to have recognized the implications and complexities of his theme.
The Thebaid explores fraternal strife in ways that go beyond a simple battle between two brothers for political power. Statius’s epic delays until late in book 11 the final confrontation of Polynices and Eteocles. It then continues beyond the death of the brothers, as the twelfth book tells how Theseus leads an Athenian army against Creon. Before this resolution, however, the poem provides a rich cast of characters whose relations allusively comment on the meaning of brotherhood and the sources of strife. The Argive, Theban, and Lemnian women, the Furies, the deaths of the great heroes that culminate several books, the epigrammatic demise of incidental characters, the blackening of Apollo’s reputation, the flights of birds, the incest of Oedipus, the interference of the gods, and echoes of Virgil contribute to a broad exploration of the poem’s central theme.
Statius redefines the problem of warring brothers even as he begins his poem with the words fraternas acies. According to Quintillian’s Instituto Oratorio 10.1.48, the first words of an epic poem should state its main theme as concisely as possible. Homer starts with the wrath of Achilles, Virgil with the man forced to fight (arma virumque). A translation should probably start with Statius’s precise words, but this one does not because of the difficulty of presenting to a modern audience an allusion to the fountain of Pierus and a call to the muses, which follows a few lines later. They sound artificial. Even to Statius they were probably archaic, rhetorical devices. To make them work, a translation must give life to deadened tropes. Pierus is a mountain sacred to the muses. Creative heat, Pierian heat, Statius says, cuts into his thoughts. English usage allows us to say that something fires us, that someone or something takes fire. Therefore a modern translation may well begin with an image of the poet and then move to the epic theme. “My mind takes Pierian fire. Fraternal strife/ unfolds.”
Statius immediately lists all the elements of fraternal strife that account for the Theban war. The first cause is hatred, a human emotion that bedevils the best efforts of society to control it. The second, more specific cause is political, an agreement between the sons of Oedipus to alternate reigns once they find their mutual hatred makes it impossible to rule Thebes together. They plan to alternate their time in office, each one to take over in successive years. The final cause of strif
e is neither the human condition nor a misguided pact, but a curse on Thebes that makes bad things inevitable. In a few lines Statius creates the narrative persona of a man in despair and establishes the moral turpitude (sontes) of Thebes that grips the sons of Oedipus.
My mind takes Pierian fire. Fraternal strife
unfolds: unholy hatred, alternating reigns,
the criminality of Thebes. (1.1–3)
For Statius, the causes of war go beyond human agency. Thebes cannot escape its history, most of which was familiar to Roman readers from the second, third, and fourth books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sexual violence and paternal tyranny characterize the Theban story from the beginning. Jove, disguised as a white bull, carried Europa away from her native country of Sidon, near Tyre (hence Sidonian and Tyrian are synonyms for Theban). Europa’s father, Agenor, commanded his son Cadmus to recover Europa or not come home. Cadmus’s mission was doomed to failure, since a mortal could not hope to uncover the secrets of the gods. Instructed by Apollo’s oracle, Cadmus settles where he is led by an unyoked heifer. The land is named Boeotia (from the word for cow). But Apollo’s guidance proves duplicitous, and Cadmus’s founding of Thebes is flawed when he slays a serpent sacred to Mars. He sows the dragon’s teeth, and armed soldiers grow from the soil. These warriors then murder each other and are reabsorbed by the earth. The meaning of the myth is that Thebes is founded in civil war and cursed with violence. Eventually Mars punishes Cadmus and his wife by turning them into serpents.
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