Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid (review)

Erratum [03.09.23]

On page 123, "The epic elicits from first century readers" should read "The epic elicits from twenty-first century readers".

The MUSE HTML version of the article has been corrected.

A revival of interest in the interpretation of Statius' grim first century C.E. epic, the Thebaid, which recounts the civil strife at Thebes and the internecine conflict between the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, both sons of the ill-fated, incestuous, and now politically impotent Oedipus, is entirely justified. The epic elicits from twenty-first century readers, as it did from those in its own day, a gruesome fascination combined with disgust. As witnesses to the unfolding of a certain disaster, which they only partly hope to see prevented, readers also want to see the ominous curses and dire prophecies of Oedipus and Laius fulfilled, and they are glad to see other potentially preemptive warnings, such as those of the seers Amphiaraus and Melampus, go unheeded or be suppressed or misinterpreted. Readers are eager to behold the inevitable destruction. The poem engages readers through its style—what Ganiban terms its "poetics of nefas"—to become complicit with the desire for final and total destruction as the poem moves slowly but deliberately to its (delayed) climax, and as the heroic figures are killed off one by one, often in quite wondrous and terrific fashion. Ganiban helps readers to appreciate the way in which the Thebaid of Statius belongs to a genre that moves beyond the depiction of mere crudelitas and that can justly be termed horror, springing not only from the disturbing subversion of both Virgilian poetic models and Augustan political ideals (69), but also from the pervasive sense that in this world "morality is no longer a divine concern" (229).

For Ganiban, of primary interest is the abstract moral war of pietas with nefas for the title of organizing, or disorganizing, principle of political affairs and of the universe, a conflict that raises the stakes of Statius' epic to the highest level of human and cosmic significance. In the end, pietas is routed, and nefas, with only the uncertain possibility of clementia to temper it, is left as ruler of the world. Statius' epic poem, under the capable critical eye of Ganiban, is thus shown to be much more than a simple variation on a by then well-worn, but even now unfortunately not at all obsolete, theme, that of civil war and dynastic strife, along with the terrible political turmoil and personal loss that result from these. The Thebaid is revealed also as a careful, sophisticated, and prolonged critical response to the Aeneid, that towering eminence of Virgil which had consolidated in its magisterial and imposing verses Rome's myths of origin; and which had advocated in its ideology for pietas as a ruling cosmic principle and for a return to order under a form of pax guaranteed chiefly by Roman power, but also by the imperial virtue of clementia, the sparing of the vanquished—although there is detectable ambivalence in Virgil on this point, since this latter virtue is famously problematized by the ira and furor to which pius Aeneas yields in his slaying of Turnus at the unsettling close of the Aeneid. Finally, the Thebaid is exposed as both a serious critique of the politics of imperialism and a troubling meditation on the question of the governing principle of earthly and cosmic affairs.

Ganiban's book is sensibly organized for making its argument, and for guiding readers who are new to Statius on a journey through the nuances and perplexities of the text. It opens with an introduction that announces and lays out the thesis, justly placing it in the context of Statian and Virgilian scholarship, and engaging in an analysis of the Coroebus narrative, in which a "political dialogue about monarchs" (17) is taking place and in which pietas is shown to be an "irrelevant concept" (13) in...