Violentilla Victa

This paper explores how in Silvae 1.2 Statius provided an important precedent for later epithalamia by expanding the genre's rhetoric with epic topoi, creating a novel epithalamium of epic scope. Violentilla is bound to be tamed under the yoke of Rome, just as the power of Aphrodite brings Medea to live among civilized Greeks in Apollonius's Argonautica. Violentilla is transformed from recalcitrant widow into a subdued and Romanized bride. As friend and fellow poet, the poem's recipient Stella would appreciate the wit of his association with one of myth's most glamorous if dangerous couples.