Statius

• 1. Introduction

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  Publius Papinius Statius, a Latin poet who lived from about 45 to about 96 CE, three times received a golden crown directly from an emperor's hand. The emperor was Domitian, and the prize was handed out at the Alban Festival.

  Statius left behind a twelve-book epic, a large collection of occasional verse, and a second epic he never finished. His poems were recited to audiences, backed by wealthy patrons, and mocked by a satirist. Later readers could not agree on whether he flattered his rulers or quietly condemned them.

  This documentary asks how a poet raised in the Greek-flavored world of Naples built a career under an emperor. It asks what his sprawling poems actually contain. And it asks why Dante, more than a thousand years later, chose Statius as a companion on the mountain of Purgatory.

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• 2. A Naples Childhood

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  Statius's father, whose name has not survived, came from Velia and settled in Naples after teaching in Rome with marked success. From boyhood into adulthood he kept winning the poetry contests of Naples, including the Augustalia and the Nemean, Pythian and Isthmian games. These festivals were major stages for displaying poetic skill in the early empire.

  At Naples the father taught Greek and Roman literature, and many of his pupils were headed for religious offices in Rome. He held the rank of Roman eques, though money troubles may have cost him that standing. In a lament written for him in the Silvae, Statius declares that his father could have met any literary task, whether in prose or in verse. The father died in 79.

  The son grew up in the Greek cultural world of the Bay of Naples, and that education gave his ornamental verse a sophisticated polish. He too won several contests at Naples from boyhood on.

  A curious detail comes from the Letters of Pliny the Younger. From them, scholars have recently deduced that Statius also wrote under the pseudonym Propertius.

  About a decade after his father's death, Statius is thought to have left Naples for the capital.

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• 3. Rome and Return

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  Around the year 90, Statius is thought to have settled in Rome. In the capital he seems to have made many friends among the aristocracy and at court, and he was probably supported by their patronage.

  For the Alban Festival he composed a poem on Domitian's campaigns against the Germans and the Dacians. Juvenal lampoons it in his seventh satire. Only a four-line fragment survives, preserved in ancient commentary on Juvenal and known as the De Bello Germanico. Statius is also recorded as the author of a mime called Agave, which is now lost.

  In 93 the first three books of the Silvae appeared. They sketch his patrons and acquaintances in these years and mention that he attended one of Domitian's Saturnalia banquets.

  Then came the Capitoline competition, held in a year nobody knows, though 94 has been suggested. Statius failed to win the coveted prize, and he took the loss very hard. Around 94 he went back to Naples, the home of his youth, and addressed a poem to his wife, Claudia. She was the widow of a famous singer and had a musically gifted daughter from that marriage.

  Back in Naples, Statius met some criticism of the first Silvae. He answered with a fourth book, published in 95. He kept up his ties to the court and earned another invitation to a palace banquet.

  He took an interest in his stepdaughter's marriage and career. Having no children of his own, he also looked after a young slave boy, who died around 95. Statius himself died that same year. A fifth book of the Silvae was published after his death, around 96.

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• 4. The Thebaid

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  Statius was around 35 when he began the Thebaid, and by his own account he worked on it between about 80 and 92. The poem is thought to have appeared in 91 or 92. It has twelve books, in imitation of Virgil's Aeneid, and it is written in dactylic hexameter. In the Silvae he describes the labor of polishing and revising it, along with his public recitations. He followed Virgil closely but also drew on a wide range of other sources for his meter and his episodes.

  The subject is the myth of the Seven against Thebes. Oedipus, disgraced, opens the poem by cursing his sons Eteocles and Polyneices. The brothers have agreed to share the throne of Thebes by alternating years, one ruling while the other lives in exile. Jupiter plans a war between Thebes and Argos, although Juno begs him not to start it. In exile, Polyneices fights with another exile, Tydeus, at the palace of Adrastus. The king entertains them both and they marry his daughters.

  Tydeus travels to Eteocles and demands that he yield the throne. Eteocles refuses and sets an ambush, but Tydeus slaughters the Thebans and escapes to Argos. Adrastus and Polyneices then declare war. Seven champions lead the Argive army: Adrastus, Polyneices, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Parthenopaeus, Hippomedon and Tydeus.

  At Nemea, Bacchus sends a drought. The army meets Hypsipyle, who shows them a spring and tells the story of the Women of Lemnos. While she speaks, her ward Opheltes is killed by a snake. The Argives hold games for the dead child and so found the Nemean Games, the same festival where Statius's father had once competed.

  When battle breaks out, the earth swallows Amphiaraus. Tydeus, wounded and dying, kills Melanippus and eats his head. A fight over his body kills Hippomedon and Parthenopaeus. Juno puts the Thebans to sleep, and the Argives slaughter many of them in their camp. Menoeceus sacrifices himself to save Thebes, and Jupiter strikes down the wicked Capaneus with a thunderbolt.

  The brothers meet in single combat and kill each other. Jocasta takes her own life, and Creon seizes power and forbids burial of the Argive dead. The Argive widows go to Athens to beg Theseus for help. Meanwhile Antigone, Polyneices's sister, and Argia, his wife, secretly burn his body. Theseus raises an army and kills Creon.

  In the epilogue, Statius prays that his poem will succeed and warns it not to compete with the Aeneid. He hopes that his fame will outlast him.

  Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics often read the Thebaid as elaborate flattery that justified the regime of Domitian. More recent scholars see a subversive work that attacks the authoritarianism and violence of the Flavians through its extreme brutality and social chaos. Older critics also called the poem episodic, while current scholars admire the skill with which Statius controls narrative and description. His allegory and his abstract treatment of the gods are seen as innovations that ushered in medieval conventions.

  Scholars keep returning to madness, which the Latin calls furor, as a force running through the whole poem.

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• 5. The Silvae

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  Thirty-two poems in five books make up the Silvae, almost every one addressed to a named dedicatee, and each book opens with a dedicatory letter. The collection was probably composed between 89 and 96. Its title means "forest" or "raw material." It echoes the term for a poet's rough draft, written in a burst of inspiration and later revised into polished verse. The poems were probably composed within a few days each.

  Of the nearly four thousand lines, more than five-sixths are hexameters. Four pieces are in hendecasyllables, and there is one Alcaic ode and one Sapphic ode.

  Five poems are devoted to the emperor and his favorites. One describes Domitian's equestrian statue in the Forum, and another praises his building of the Via Domitiana. A third marks the dedication of the hair of Earinus, a eunuch favorite of Domitian, at a shrine of Aesculapius.

  Six poems are laments or consolations. The most personal mourn Statius's father and his foster-son. Others console survivors after the deaths of wives. The collection also stops to mourn a favorite parrot and a lion killed in the arena.

  Another group describes the villas, gardens and artworks of the poet's friends. These pieces give a more vivid picture than anywhere else of the surroundings of Roman aristocrats in the country. They include a temple to Hercules built by Pollius, a famous tree at the villa of Atedius, an antique statue of Heracles by Lysippus, and Pollius's villa at Surrentum.

  Because of his closeness to Domitian and the court, Statius fell out of favor with critics and readers. In recent times scholars have rehabilitated the Silvae. The content was largely dictated by the needs of his patrons, many of them wealthy landowners and politicians. Some scholars read the collection as a subtle criticism of Domitian and the aristocracy. Others prefer to treat each poem as a response to its own occasion.

  The remaining poems are congratulations and special-occasion pieces. They include a wedding poem for Stella and Violentilla and a poem marking the birthday of the poet Lucan. The set closes with a joking note to Plotius Grypus about a Saturnalia gift.

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• 6. The Unfinished Achilleid

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  Only one book and a few hundred lines of a second survive from the Achilleid, Statius's epic on the life of Achilles. Based on a reference in the fourth book of the Silvae, what was completed was written between 94 and 95. Statius records that recitations of it took place. His death is thought to be the reason the poem was left unfinished.

  In the first book, the sea goddess Thetis knows that her son will die in the Trojan War. She tries to hide him on the island of Scyros by dressing him as a girl. There Achilles falls in love with Deidamia. Ulysses arrives to recruit him for the war and reveals who he is.

  In the second book, Ulysses and Achilles sail away, and Achilles describes his early life and his schooling under the centaur Chiron. The poem breaks off at the end of that speech.

  Scholars have noticed that the tone is very different from the Thebaid. It is closer to the style of Ovid than to that of Virgil. Some also stress the prominence of feminine themes and feminine power in the fragment, and read it as a study of gender relations.

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• 7. Praise and Afterlife

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  In Satire 4, Juvenal tells a story about a giant turbot presented to Domitian, and he is thought to be mocking the court poetry that Statius wrote. Yet in Satire 7 the same satirist admits that Statius's recitations drew immense crowds. Some other critics apparently objected to his off-the-cuff style.

  In late antiquity, when the Thebaid was already a classic, a man named Lactantius Placidus wrote a commentary on it. Through the Middle Ages the poem stayed popular. It inspired a French romance in the 12th century, along with works by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Statius's handling of allegory helped establish that technique in medieval poetry.

  In the Renaissance, the scholar Poliziano took up the Silvae. Thanks to him, the collection helped inspire a whole genre of miscellaneous occasional poetry called Sylvae. It stayed popular throughout the period and shaped work by Hugo Grotius and John Dryden.

  Dante, in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia, names Statius alongside Ovid, Virgil and Lucan as one of the four regulati poetae, the poets who followed rule. Dante did more than rank him, because in the Divine Comedy he gave Statius a role of his own.

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• 8. Statius in Purgatory

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  Dante and Virgil meet Statius as they leave the fifth terrace of Purgatorio, where the avaricious and the prodigal are cleansed, and climb toward the sixth, reserved for the gluttonous. In Purgatorio 20 the whole mountain trembles and the penitent souls cry out the hymn "Gloria in excelsis Deo." That is the sign of Statius's release. In Purgatorio 21 he joins the two travelers and climbs the mountain with them. After Virgil returns to Limbo, Statius stays with Dante in the Earthly Paradise at the summit. He is last mentioned in Purgatorio 33.

  Statius tells Virgil that he owes him everything: "through you I was a poet, through you a Christian" (per te poeta fui, per te cristiano). A passage of the Aeneid condemning prodigality saved him from that vice. A passage from Virgil's fourth Eclogue gave him a reason to convert. He calls the Aeneid "my mama and my nurse." When Dante reveals who Virgil is, Statius tries to embrace him and fails. The scene echoes Aeneas's failed attempt to embrace the shade of his father Anchises.

  Scholars compare Statius's arrival in Purgatorio 20 to the appearance of Jesus to his disciples after the Resurrection, in Luke 24. They also compare Virgil and Statius to John the Baptist and Jesus. This highlights the tragedy of Virgil, who can lead others toward salvation but cannot reach it himself.

  Dante invents details of Statius's life to suit the story. Statius says he hid his Christianity because Christians were persecuted in his time. For that, he spent four centuries cleansing the vice of sloth. This makes him a "negative exemplum" for Dante, who writes openly about his faith. Statius also asks Virgil where the poets Terence, Caecilius, Plautus and Lucius Varius now are, a curiosity Dante shares. In the end, Statius works as a mirror for Dante himself, since both are rescued through Virgil.

  Characters from Statius's own poems also turn up in the Comedy. Dante places Argia, wife of Polyneices, among the virtuous pagans in Limbo. He puts Capaneus in the third ring of the seventh circle, where those who committed violence against God are punished. Statius's Capaneus is a heroic figure. Dante's Capaneus has only brute strength and a refusal to accept divine power.

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