Thebes was founded in dissension, but the ruling family nonetheless gloried in its past, which is why Statius mentions that Amphion, a king of Thebes, built the city’s walls by the sound of his lyre (Thebaid 1.9–10). The lyre’s tune represents the harmony, or central authority, that overcomes dissension. Five earthborn men survived the founding civil war and became the ancestors of the noble families of Thebes. Cadmus had to recognize them because he had no male heirs. To highlight the problems of power sharing and succession that will be the theme of his story of the sons of Oedipus, Statius often refers to the four daughters of Cadmus in his poem.
Two daughters are mentioned in the opening lines of the Thebaid as Statius gives us a glimpse of the troubled royal history of Thebes. One of them, Semele, died when Jove appeared to her in his full glory, but not before she gave birth to Bacchus. Later Pentheus—son of Echion, one of the Sparti, or sown men—resisted the attempt of Bacchus to bring his revels into the city, as in Euripides’ Bacchae (“What was the source/of Bacchus’ hostile rage against his homeland?” Thebaid 1.11). At Juno’s request, the fury Tisiphone poisoned the minds of Athamas and his wife Ino, another daughter of Cadmus. Athamas killed their son while hunting (“What did fierce Juno do? At whom did maddened/Athamas bend his bow?” 1.12–13). Ino leaped into the sea with her child Melicerto, and Neptune transformed them into deities, Leucothea (spelled Leucothoë elsewhere) and Palaemon (“Why did the mighty/Ionian not terrify the mother/who leaped into that ocean with Palaemon?” 1.13–14). The curse on Thebes continued through the life of Oedipus, but Statius properly limits himself to a single topic:
But here, at present, now I will permit
the groans of Cadmus to elapse, with his
prosperity. I will set my song this limit:
the horrors of the house of Oedipus.
(1.15–17)
In the repeating structure of the myth, the incest of Oedipus with Jocasta reenacts the return of the dragon warriors to mother earth. Oedipus is unable to escape this pattern of reversion. He kills his father and curses his sons, as his own father exiled him.
Polynices and Eteocles are born into this endless cycle of illicit eroticism and violence, but their struggles may also be seen as part of a divine plan. Brothers acting in concord can combine to overcome their father and all he represents. The Bible has various expressions for a son’s desire to replace his father: a yearning to build heavenward, for a blessing or a mantle, to enter the presence of God, or to be God. The Old Testament deity scatters nations that would imitate him by aspiring to heaven in the story of the Tower of Babel. Since brothers must be divided, Cain slays Abel; Noah’s sons contend, as do Jacob’s. The Thebaid similarly sustains patriarchy. Both Oedipus and Creon outlive their sons, and the sole survivor among the Argives is King Adrastus, the oldest.
In the Theban story the gathering of heroes who support Polynices never bickers among itself, making its members all the more dangerous, not only to Thebes but to the divinities who refuse to allow Thebes to be defeated. Capaneus openly scorns auguries, and all of the heroes vie to be godlike. They exhibit pride, not just in the feats of arms that characterize their Homeric aristeiai (episodes in which a lone hero performs outstanding deeds), but in their superhuman prowess. Amphiaraus, who shows outstanding foreknowledge, must be sent away from heaven, to the underworld. Tydeus reveals exceptional anger: his cannibalism offends even his patron goddess. Hippomedon has an unusual relationship with the elements. Parthenopaeus, blessed with youthful beauty, seems dangerously unaware of his physical limitations. Each of these personalities threatens Olympus and must be thwarted. Apollo buries Amphiaraus; Minerva abandons Tydeus; a river god destroys Hippomedon; Jupiter hurls a lightning bolt at Capaneus as he scales the towers of Thebes; and Diana allows Parthenopaeus, the son of her follower Atalanta, to overreach his powers. Whereas Lucan, who was only five years older than Statius, rejected the aristeia as well as the Homeric gods when he wrote his epic of civil war (cognatas acies), Statius used the clash between human heroes and the deities to broaden the import of the similar but more mythic theme of fraternal strife.
Statius’s style and ability to transcend his subject matter help explain why Dante could characterize Statius as a Christian. The twin flames of Ulysses and Diomedes (Inferno 26) derive from the funeral pyre of Polynices and Eteocles, where contending flames show that the brothers’ hatred continues even after death (Thebaid 12.429–46). The Roman epic also provided rare thrills, such as the pure horror of Tisiphone’s head full of hissing snakes or the circling landscape that surrounds hell’s flaming rivers at the beginning of book 2, where an unknown Dantean ghost steps forth to voice his envy that a soul is allowed to leave the underworld. The very tercet-like character of Statius’s lines may have influenced Dante’s choice of a three-line verse form. Statius’s basic unit is not the verse paragraph, as in Milton, or Virgilian hemistiches, but frequently sections of four or five lines, roughly the equivalent of two three-line sections of terza rima.
Reflecting the times in which he wrote, Statius weakened the Homeric gods, whose imaginative vitality is usurped in his poem by allegorical figures such as Piety, Clemency, Virtue, and Nature. As C. S. Lewis argued, Mars is no longer a mythic figure of varied passions but merely an accident in a substance. He raves and nothing more. Minerva represents the mind of Tydeus. Apollo is practically degenerate. In an inset story typical of the digressions that Statius uses to delay his plot, King Adrastus tells his visitors why the Argives worship this troubled deity. The god once raped a woman. Her father, feeling her shame, cast her out, and she died. To avenge the woman whom he himself had violated, Apollo created a baby-eating monster that spun out of control until a hero named Coroebus killed it. (This murderous underwater monster that walks the earth might have influenced the author of Beowulf .) As the first book ends Adrastus praises Apollo in one of the most religiously inspired paeans in all of poetry, but he seems not to recognize that the god he hymns is a cruel tyrant. By contrast, the allegorical figure of Virtue operates like grace in Menoeceus, whose sacrifice is required to save Thebes. The final crusade of Theseus, prompted by the Argive widows, is a holy war under the banner of Nature to restore Pietas. For such reasons, Dante could persuade his readers to accept the otherwise implausible notion that the Silver Age Roman poet had converted.
Statius’s story of fraternal strife includes two other elements suited to a monotheistic myth. If the core of biblical monotheism is the protection of the Hebrew father, its motive is often scarcity. Polynices and Eteocles do not battle for wealth, Statius comments. Instead “they fought to win a kingdom that had nothing” (1.151). Roland Barthes noticed in his analysis of a similar theme in Racine’s work that even where nothing is at stake, brothers are “always enemies because they are quarreling over the inheritance of a father who is not quite dead and who returns to punish them.” Eteocles clings to his kingdom in part because he is jealous that Polynices marries well; he enlists a home guard of loyal retainers to sustain his local identity. The Thebans several times recite the history of their founding because group members tell stories about themselves to exclude others. The truth Statius elicits is that memories are constructions. We never know which brother, if either, has right on his side. Polynices flees Thebes in storm and paranoia, turning the innocent eyes and noises of forest creatures into awful threats. Eteocles dreams that he wakes bathed in blood from his grandfather’s slit throat. It is not clear that either brother recovers his equilibrium. Even Jupiter claims he cannot control Fate. He is said to be the weaver of the stars (sator astrorum, Thebaid 3.218), a figure who encompasses the expanses of heavens toward which Statius several times gestures in the poem. But Jupiter also presides over a Theban world of scarcity and disordered memory. The Thebaid hints at monotheism not only because Statius may have glimpsed divine truth, as the Middle Ages believed, but because of what is implied when a father weakens the power of his sons by setting them at odds.
Gender and Sexualit
y in the Thebaid
On the surface Statius’s epic is remarkably abstemious about sex. The Thebaid seems suspicious of physical love, even in marriage. There are no explicitly erotic scenes, or even much of a love story. Statius follows Virgil in punishing deviations from heterosexual dominance, including amorous passion or anything that interferes with the paternal mission of empire. In the earlier poem Aeneas leaves Dido, who kills herself; the female warrior Camilla does not survive in battle; the intense friendship of Nisus and Euryalus dooms them to die. Statius has no female warriors. His only equivalent for the love story of Dido is the Lemnos episode, where women rise up and slaughter their men, only to be subdued by the Argonauts. And Statius seems to recognize that his Hopleus and Dymas, whom he assigns to retrieve the bodies of their captains, never achieve the suggestive sexuality of the pair of friends whose ruthless but passionate midnight raid in the Aeneid shapes up as a shared, private adventure. In the Thebaid and also in the Orlando furioso, where Ariosto follows Statius more closely than he does Virgil, two men raid at night as a tactical necessity for the public good, not from their own passion.
Cleaving closely to the theme of fraternal strife, Statius is more interested in images of concord and discord than passing moral judgments on sexual behavior. He is no more prurient about men in love than he is overly obsessed with women. His acceptance of human nature allows him to reflect his theme of fraternal strife in multiple images of brothers, sisters, and twins. Some of this work was inherent in the myths he inherited. Thus the first man Polynices meets in exile is Tydeus, who has slain his own brother. The two men then marry sisters, Argia and Deipyle. Oedipus has two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, as well as the two sons (who are also his half brothers). The key to Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, one of Statius’s sources, is a soldier’s horror at the thought that Eteocles will face Polynices, since brother-murdering pollutes the ground and will not fade. But Statius does not introduce this superstition into his work. Nor does he replay the pairing of champions at each of the seven gates of Thebes. In Euripides’ Phoenician Women Polynices briefly recounts how he met Tydeus and their coming to blows over a bed, but Statius’s expansion is original. In the Thebaid the two men pummel each other as if such physical contact necessarily precedes friendship. Their progress from two men who fight for a doorway to loyal comrades illustrates Barthes’s point that love is hard to distinguish from hate because both emotions are openly physical. When Tydeus dies, Polynices laments him as his real brother who has replaced false Eteocles. But their brotherhood is deadly too, because Tydeus refuses to allow Polynices to accept Jocasta’s offer to arrange a reconciliation with Eteocles (17.470–563). Fate also contributes, which may explain why Polynices strangely abandons Tydeus body (9.73–85), leaving Hippo-medon to defend it against a band of Thebans led by Eteocles.
Throughout the poem images of twins highlight the perils of fraternity. In a passage that deserves to be far more famous than it is, Statius portrays two brothers who die together when Tydeus defends himself against an ambush of fifty soldiers. As the sons of Thespius die, one cradles the drooping neck of his brother in his left hand and upholds his side and body with his right (2.629–43). The romantic poet Robert Southey, in the preface to his epic poem Joan of Arc (1798), said that although Statius’s subject matter was ill chosen, his poetic images are strongly conceived and clearly painted. The pietà the two brothers form is precisely the kind of image we would expect to find in a text that Dante could read as Christian, a piety that contrasts with the hatred of the sons of Oedipus.
Like this image of concordant but dying brothers, Statius’s women express the emergence of a new religious ethos and morality in first-century Rome. Just as the Greek pantheon yields to Statius’s allegorical but genuinely felt virtues, Aristotle’s aristocratic disdain for men who could feel temptation turns into Argia’s learning to live with a man who finds it impossible to be good. At first the blushing bride is appalled by Polynices’ dreams of war and, like Andromache or even Kate Hotspur, she tries to deflect her husband’s need to fight. Eventually she yields and asks her father to support her husband’s cause. The years that pass between the end of book 3 and the beginning of book 4 reinforce the gravity of Argia’s new position. She is a good person, but she yields to temptation.
Perhaps the most obvious image of an immoral woman is Eriphyle. Again Statius blurs the outlines of a story he inherited, how in exchange for a beautiful but cursed necklace that Argia owns the wife of Amphiaraus convinces her husband to join a war he knows is doomed. The Thebaidmerely hints at this betrayal, when the narrator tells the origin and fatal effects of the necklace (Thebaid 2.267–305), and when Amphiaraus, once the earth swallows him, asks the god of the underworld to save a place for his wife (Thebaid 8.120–22). By leaving the role of Eriphyle uncertain, Statius creates a connection between her and Argia, who encourages the war in Thebes despite herself. Both women send their husbands to die, although Eriphyle takes money and knows the expedition is doomed. The role of the women is allegorically figured by the goddess Bellona, who arms Argos at the beginning of book 4, a section of the poem that lingers over the influence of women.
Countering events that conspire to produce war, women tend to derail the progress of the armies. They weep and dispirit the men. In the Theban myth Bacchus, the god of wine, gives women the freedom to dance in the hills under his influence. He reflects the interests of those who are threatened by war. To protect them and his native city, Bacchus dries up the rivers and streams of the Nemean plain, which the Argives must cross. And so the epic catalog of Argive troops that occupies the first portion of book 4 gives way to renewed delay. The resulting digression lasts through books 5 and 6 not because Statius loses track of his poem’s unity of action, but because he focuses on the way war disrupts life. Hypsipyle eventually gives the Argives the drink that they crave, but whatever spiritual good water stands for is undercut when a serpent crushes the baby she leaves lying on the plain as she guides the Argives to the hidden stream of Langia. As part of this digression in medias res, the Lemnos episode and the funeral games for Opheltes prepare for the end of the poem, where Argia and Antigone enlist the Athenians to ensure the burial of the Argives. Here and elsewhere Statius’s concern is not so much for the dead soldiers but for the suffering of the women who survive them. Burial provides closure for the living.
The Lemnos episode enforces the view that women are most vulnerable to war. Love (that is, Venus) leaves the island because the men are obsessed with attacking Thrace (the home of Mars). Filled with Bacchic frenzy, a woman named Polyxo descends from the hills to encourage the women to murder their husbands when they return from war. Even their own valor does the women no good, however, as they are soon forced to accept the rule of the Argonauts, who sail into the island as representatives of an older world of heroes. Women may introduce delay, but they cannot cheat fate. After the funeral games, the Theban war resumes. The later attempts of Jocasta in book 7 and Antigone in book 11 to persuade the brothers to negotiate come to nothing.
Translating Statius
Perhaps because of the uncontrollable violence that dominates Statius’s epic, many manuscripts of the Thebaid survive from the Middle Ages, and the poem was still popular when printing was invented. Thirteen editions were issued between 1471 and 1500, and then another seven during the sixteenth century, including translations into Italian (1503) and French (1558). During the period of religious war and strife in Europe that covered the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, more than twenty editions were printed. Jean Racine, one of France’s greatest poets, based his first play, Les frères ennemis, on the story of Thebes. England’s Civil War period saw an English translation of the first five books (1648). Statius’s reputation was still alive when Alexander Pope was a boy. As a child prodigy he translated the first book into heroic couplets (1712). William L. Lewis achieved the first complete English translation in 1766. During the nineteenth century the Latin text of Sta
tius’s work was edited and annotated six times. The Loeb Classical Library published J. L. Mozley’s prose translation in 1928 and kept it in print until 2003, when the series switched to a new prose version by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Oxford University Press published A. D. Melville’s verse translation of the Thebaid in 1990.
Like its predecessors, the present translation not only seeks to keep alive an ancient classic but to let readers and listeners understand and experience Statius’s art. I have tried to find a smooth modern syntax to render the high style, since Statius valued oration and pathos. A diligent reviser of his verses, he was a surprisingly clever writer of epigrams, a talent he uses to enliven his catalogs of troops and the several battles in the poem. He may cut through the chaos of war by writing a series of vignettes:
Dircean Amyntas aimed an arrow at
Phaedimus, son of Iäsus. Alas,
how swift is Fate! for Phaedimus hit ground
even before Amyntas’ bow was silent.
Agreus, the Calidonian, removed
Phegeus’ now useless right arm from his shoulder:
it gripped his sword and grappled in the dirt.
Acoetas stabbed that arm through scattered weapons:
it terrified him, even unattached.
Dark Acamas struck Iphis, fearsome Hypseus
Argus, and Pheres carved through Abas—these
lay moaning from their different wounds: the rider
Iphis, footsoldier Argus, driver Abas. (8.438–47)
Statius’s aim in writing poetry was to impress readers and listeners with his eloquence. Although the Renaissance theorist Giraldi Cinthio said that Statius’s work is very rough and far from natural in its verses, Cinthio admitted that Statius had assumed authority over the course of a thousand years. Renaissance Latin poets like Pontano and Sannazaro often borrowed Statius’s grammatical constructions and numbers.
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